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An Automated Vehicle Expert Explains How Close We Are to Robotaxis
There’s Still Plenty of Work To Do
Humans are notoriously bad at estimating how long it will take to do something that hasn’t been done before, particularly when it comes to technology that doesn’t exist yet. Amara’s Law sums it up most succinctly: “We overestimate the effect of technology in the short-term and underestimate the effect in the long run.” The impact of automated driving systems (ADS) is a prime example. At some point, automated vehicles (AVs), including robotaxis, will likely become a primary means of transporting people and goods, but a lot has to happen between now and then.
AVs are an idea almost as old as electric and hybrid vehicles. Ferdinand Porsche built the first hybrid car, the 1901 Lohner-Porsche. But it took another century for the idea to become mainstream while the technologies matured. Even the power-split hybrid architecture popularized by Toyota with the Prius when it debuted in 1997 was patented nearly three decades earlier. Still, we lacked the electronic control systems and batteries to make it useful.
One of the earliest promotional examples of an AV was a 1956 General Motors film featuring the Firebird II concept. But conceiving an idea and making it commercially viable are very different things. It wasn’t until the DARPA Grand Challenge between 2003 and 2007 that anyone was able to demonstrate the first hints of truly workable AVs, and even those vehicles were very much science projects.
My first ride in an AV at the 2008 CES in Las Vegas was in the Carnegie Mellon University Chevrolet Tahoe that had won the Urban Challenge event a few months earlier. That vehicle successfully navigated a course set up in what was then a parking lot at the Las Vegas Convention Center.
Three years later, GM was back at CES, demonstrating the Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V) concepts that debuted at the Shanghai World Expo prior year. The mastermind behind the EN-V automated pods, Chris Borroni-Bird, PhD, projected that something like the EN-V could be in wide use by 2020. Over the past decade, we’ve…
