Self-driving cars: slow but steady progress, at least outside Europe
The autonomous vehicle revolution continues quietly in the United States and China, with self-driving cars an increasingly regular site in some cities. But issues remain to do with regulation and the impact on employment.
In the United States, where self-driving cabs are widely available in Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Austin, and are already such an everyday part of the urban landscape that some couples have taken to using them for trysts, Waymo’s vehicles have just begun to circulate not only in downtown Phoenix, but since January now have permission, without a safety driver, to use the city’s main access roads out to the areas where many technology companies are based, as well as to the airport. For the time being, they will only transport company employees and outside peak hours, but it is a start that points more and more to their total normalization. The absurd violence we saw soe time ago is now a thing of the past.
In China, following the classification of autonomous vehicles by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Technology as a priority technology, regulatory barriers have fallen and obtaining licenses to operate robotaxis and robobuses has become much easier, leading to five major companies; Baidu’s Apollo Go, Pony.ai, WeRide, AutoX and SAIC Motor deploying fleets in no less…
