At the big CES tech show in Las Vegas, attendees can order a self-driving Uber, discover steering-less public transportation, and take a look at a whole range of sensors that are supposed to accompany the advent of the self-driving car, on a road still littered with pitfalls. .
The most enthusiastic have spent years promising the arrival of vehicles that can drive without humans and have spent billions on it. But the technicians progressed less quickly than expected.
Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company), has been offering paid self-drive rides to the general public since 2020 in Phoenix, Arizona, but on heavily marked roads. Cruise, a General Motors company, was the first to win permission in June to transport passengers for a fee aboard its robotaxis in San Francisco, a city with more difficult traffic, but initially only at night.
In Las Vegas, Motional, a joint venture between Hyundai and Aptiv, has been offering autonomous rides with Uber since December, but for now still with an operator in the vehicle, just in case.
“Any company that announces that it will remove drivers who are still around for safety reasons is a huge step forward,” said Bryant Walker Smith, a legal expert on autonomous driving at Stanford University. Several incidents with Cruise’s vehicles have been reported, in a left turn for example, and the United States Highway Traffic Safety Agency (NHTSA) has opened an investigation. But for several specialists interviewed by AFP, the software will gradually be perfected.
Distance profitability
“The big question is more how (these projects) can scale. How quickly can a company replicate this feat in a city like Los Angeles? Or Minneapolis, where it often snows?” Forward Bryant Walker Smith.
Many car manufacturers are working on autonomous driving or, failing that in the short term, on tools such as speed regulation, highway lane change or parking assistance. Ford, like Volkswagen, decided in October to end its stake in self-driving company Argo AI, preferring to prioritize less ambitious technologies.
Elon Musk regularly promises that his Teslas will be fully autonomous soon, but his company further clarifies that its driver assistance tools, including the so-called “fully autonomous driving capability,” are designed “to be used by an alert driver whose hands are at steering wheel”.
Developing an autonomous car, for a manufacturer or a carrier, represents “a huge cost without necessarily short-term profitability,” says Jordan Greene, co-founder of the company AEye, which has designed a laser sensor called Lidar that allows vehicles to sense their environment.
The emergence of autonomous driving no longer depends so much on technological progress as on the financial interest of companies, according to him. Automakers, for example, have a lot to gain by bringing to market a platform of driving assistance tools that motorists can regularly update remotely for a fee.
The road transport sector, in need of drivers, is also interested in developing autonomous driving solutions on the most frequent routes, and “other markets may emerge”, estimates Jordan Green. AEye, present at CES like many companies that manufacture sensors, offers, for example, to use its Lidar for traffic management or security on construction sites.
“Exaggerated Accidents”
Holon, brand of the Austrian equipment manufacturer Benteler, presented this Wednesday at CES an autonomous and electric shuttle for public transport, designed without steering wheel or pedals and capable of traveling up to 60 km/h. Production should start in 2025, initially in the United States.
For its director Marco Kollmeier, “the failures (of autonomous cars) are completely exaggerated”, like the media attention given to any Tesla accident. “Autonomous driving is not just about letting a driver fall asleep at the wheel,” he says. A transportation service like Holon’s can “redefine public transportation” by offering rides on demand or on fixed routes.
Zoox, a subsidiary of Amazon, is presenting a similar vehicle at the show. As for whether autonomous vehicles won’t face resistance from the general public, Jordan Greene isn’t overly concerned. “It’s a typical adoption curve,” he says. “When they told me I would pay to ride with a stranger in a car, I couldn’t believe it. Now I only take Ubers.”
Source: BFM TV
