how unexpected…

A recent article on the status of self-driving cars in UK confirms a lot of what I have been writing here for a few years now. These are the main points.

A couple of years ago, the UK government even committed to having “fully self-driving cars, without a human safety operator”, on the country’s roads by 2021. The prize should be a £62 billion boost to the UK economy by 2030, and 420,000 jobs.

Today, “We thought connected cars deployment would be imminent, but it’s much slower than initially thought.”

The flagship project in UK is a self-driving bus service, “commercially carrying a large number of passengers,” that “will be up and running by 2021”.

In general, trials show that the technology is essentially “mature enough to be used”, BUT, [as an Oxford professor put it], “substantive roll out is much more distant.”

A huge piece missing in the puzzle is all the necessary frameworks to make sure autonomous cars can be deployed safely and at scale, that is “rules that will allow automated vehicles to be a responsible and accountable technology,” not to mention one safe from cyberattacks.

OK. Now…

Please compare all those assertions that the self-driving glass is half full to my observations, for almost three years now, that self-driving cars are:

• a marketing scam at different levels, a self-promoted field of dreams that may never happen
• something that cannot work without 5G networks that cannot work either
• (as the autonomous bus service project implicitly confirms), something that we need, and may actually use, much less than Shared On-demand Micro Trains or, if you prefer, smart pods

(This post was drafted in March 2020, but only put online in August, because… my coronavirus reports, of course