Overcoming the technological speed bumps on the road to autonomous driving
Three years ago, fully autonomous vehicles (AVs) that could take passengers ‘anywhere’ were supposed to have arrived on the market — at least according (paywall) to a 2015 prediction from Elon Musk.
Musk was hardly alone. In the middle of the last decade, there was no shortage of predictions that by 2020, the era of the self-driving car would have arrived. From 2014 to 2017, the market pumped at least $80 billion into the quest for AVs, according to research by the Brookings Institution. And while those billions have yet to bear fruit in the form of widespread deployment of AVs, major players like Tesla, Google’s Waymo and even Apple remain hard at work to make the AV dream a reality.