The Long Road Ahead

Picture a world full of cars zipping down roads without drivers behind the wheel. You might even catch a ride to school in a vehicle that uses artificial intelligence to steer through the streets.

Google unveiled its self-driving car prototype in 2014. Tech experts then predicted that fully functioning autonomous cars were just around the corner. But nearly a decade later, the future of these vehicles remains unclear even though billions of dollars have been spent on developing the technology.

Researchers did make advances during that time. But self-driving vehicles also resulted in some high-profile injuries and deaths. Experts say we have to wait to see if they will ever become a common sight on U.S. roads.

“This is one of the biggest technical challenges of our generation,” says Dave Ferguson. He is an engineer who worked on developing Google’s autonomous car prototype.

Part of the appeal of self-driving cars is that they might someday be safer than having a human behind the wheel. After all, autonomous cars do not get drowsy or distracted. Yet public confidence in the vehicles began to drop in 2018. That happened after one of Uber’s self-driving test cars hit and killed a woman. She had been walking a bicycle across a street in Tempe, Arizona.

Autonomous vehicles use cameras, artificial intelligence, and sensors to spot obstacles in roadways. The technology works fine under many conditions, experts report. But it is hard to prepare self-driving cars for the uncertainties of the real world. Examples include someone crossing the street against traffic or another car making an illegal turn. One research organization estimates that autonomous vehicles will need at least 11 billion miles of road testing before they can match the abilities of a human driver.

“You see all kinds of crazy things on the road,” says Bryan Salesky. He is the CEO of Argo AI. This company develops autonomous driving technology. “With radar and high-resolution cameras and all the computing power we have, we can detect and identify the objects on a street. The hard part is anticipating what they’re going to do next.”

Still, some companies have been able to put their autonomous vehicles into action. Waymo is the self-driving car unit of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. In October 2020, Waymo started the world’s first fully autonomous taxi service in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona.

“It’s a little bit jarring knowing that nobody else is in the car,” says Harsha Lakamsani, 21. He is an Arizona State University student who took a ride in a Waymo taxi. “It’s almost like a ghost operating it.”

Driverless taxis also snake through the streets of San Francisco, California. Waymo and Cruise have received permits to operate autonomous fleets there. (Cruise is the self-driving unit of General Motors.) Both companies plan to expand to more cities.

But the technology is still a work in progress. Cruise’s taxis, for example, are restricted to roads with speed limits under 30 miles per hour. And they do not operate in heavy rain, fog, or snow.

The future of roads with cars but no drivers may still be years away. Yet that does not mean it is not coming, experts say.

“Part of me feels that self-driving is impossible,” says John Leonard. He is a robotics expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “But things that I think are impossible are happening today.”

—additional reporting by Cade Metz and Neal E. Boudette of  The New York Times