The self-driving car fulfills expectations
A number of announcements this week suggest that by 2020 or 2021 we will see self-driving cars on our roads: BMW has unveiled its futuristic looking iNext, which will be available by 2021 not just in Europe and North America, but also in the strategic Chinese market, thanks to its alliance with Intel and Mobileye.
At the same time, Ford says that by 2021 it will have a huge fleet of self-driving vehicles operating as taxis, operated by the company and by outfits like Uber and Lyft. That’s completely self-driving: no pedals, no steering wheel. The company has just announced a $150 million joint investment with Baidu into the Velodyne, with the aim of improving and lowering the cost of LiDAR, an essential part of self-driving technology, saying that fully autonomous cars will define the coming decade. It has also acquired an Israeli machine-learning and computer vision company, SAIPS, as well as announcing that it will be doubling the size of its workforce in Silicon Valley that works on these kinds of projects.
The Ford and BMW announcements coincide with strategies revealed by other competitors, as well as Google’s role in pioneering self-driving cars, although it seems to be having some problems with its team. Meanwhile, Tesla says it will have a completely self-driving car with a range of 1,200 kilometers by the year 2020. Google and Tesla are pursuing very different strategies: total autonomy from the beginning with no role for the driver, versus driving aids that will lead to a fully self-driving car. The former wants drivers out of the equation, pointing to human nature as a problem, while the second has found that drivers ignore safety warnings and their imprudence is generating doubts about the future of the project.
These companies are not alone: there is start up Five.ai, a London-based company that has just raised $2.7 million at a July financing round, and that says it could beat the pack and put a fully self-driving car on the road by 2019.
Meanwhile, in Helsinki, a fleet of fully autonomous electric city buses will begin operating in the Finnish capital, taking advantage of the country’s forward-thinking legislation and that promises to be very much a laboratory for these kinds of experiences.
Self-driving cars consume vast amounts of data: it is estimated that each one consumes the equivalent of 2,666 human internet use: that’s some 4,000 GB processed each day with data about all aspects of driving; by the way, reliable broadband plays an absolutely fundamental role in all this. If there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that within the next five years self-driving cars will be a familiar sight. As a result, those of us who do not want to own or drive a car will have abundant options.
(En español, aquí)
