Driverless continues driving nowhere
This should drive nuts everybody.
Driverless car companies promise to eliminate road fatalities, rush-hour traffic and parking lots.
<u><em><strong>CAPTION:</strong>
<a href="/tag/driverless-car/" target="_blank">Image Source: Let self-driving cars kill pedestrians. Or not?</a>
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Reality, as Blomberg recently recalled, is different. After spending around $100 billion, driverless vehicles:
- still struggle with annoyances a human driver would hardly consider as such, like “construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns."
- make fools of themselves, like those dozens of driverless SUVs who returned for weeks to make three-point turns for no reason in the same driveway, driving the owner nuts (for more stories like this, read the Blomberg piece)
In short, according to Blomberg, the emerging consensus around professionals who spent their lives studying this “market” is that:
“the world of robo-taxis isn’t just around the next unprotected left - that we might have to wait decades longer, or an eternity”.
“autonomous trucks for industrial sites, and… that’s about as much complexity as any driverless vehicle will be able to handle.
that is, the same conclusions I came to five years ago, and for which I found so many confirmations in the following years:
<u><em><strong>CAPTION:</strong>
<a href="/tag/driverless-car/" target="_blank">click to read many more proofs that driverless cars are way more hype than reality</a>
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Executive summary: Don’t put your money (or pension!) in driverless car stocks
Really. Just don’t.
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I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
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