why the dream of driverless cars came to nothing

My goal is that my 11-year-old son doesn’t need a driver’s license,” Chris Urmson, head of Google’s autonomous vehicles division, said in 2015.

That child is almost 20 years old today and if he wants to move around his city, he will have to walk, use a bike, take public transportation… either betray his father’s dream and take out his driving license. Why aren’t the streets of the world flooded with self-driving cars?

In 2016, Business Insiderone of the most prestigious economic and technology sites, published that by 2020 it was expected that more than ten million autonomous vehicles in the main cities of the world.

The investors they believed in the promisesIt is estimated that since then more than 50 billion dollars have been used in different projects: none met their objectives.

For many, including myself, the future without human drivers was attractive, but terrifying. What would a world without human failures be like? Would these vehicles really be safe? Would taxi drivers and train drivers be things of the past? Above the ethical dilemmas hovered an irresistible promise: we would finally see what science fiction so often promised us.

But in the last two years Ford closed its autonomous vehicle division Argo.ai; General Motors took its model off the streets Cruise; the google company Waymo It’s in financial problems and not even the charisma of Elon Musk could make Tesla meet its goals.

Understand what happened to the broken promises of the future Driverless involves at least three reasons in the view of analyst Dimitri Kellari. First, achieving safe cars turned out to be more difficult than originally thought.

And as Driving tasks begin to be automated and moving from controlled tests to the real world, the possible scenarios are more complex and unpredictable.

This proved to be an obstacle to programming and the data needed to train the systems. This is how we arrived at the second reason: the development of these vehicles requires more effort than originally imagined.

Scaling in quantity is not just about producing more and expanding geographically. The behavior of vehicles and pedestrians, environmental conditions and road configurations They are different in San Francisco, Rome and Buenos Aires.

Finally, the costs do not appear to be sustainable in the medium term. When this technology was launched, many investors bought the model of the robotaxisto a large degree autonomous without the expense of a driver. But the numbers do not add up: such a taxi would cost so much that even running 24 hours it would not be able to recover it.

Are we, then, facing an impossible dream? The volatility of technology makes it impossible make confident futuristic forecasts. It is possible that progress will be made in cars with more autonomous functions. But they will not be massive or accessible to everyone.

We can not give many certainties to our children. The safe thing is to tell them that, if they want to have a car, they will have to learn to drive.