The billions invested in the technology haven’t yet been able to drive better than a human in some situations. The technology could do impressive things but mastering all the situations we face as human drivers is tough. “Autonomous vehicles are able to acquire new skills faster than humans,” Salesky said in 2021.īut there was one problem. Why would anyone even own a car? Autonomous taxis would be even cheaper than walking, said one industry analyst. Urmson, while leading Google’s self-driving car project before founding Aurora, talked of his preteen son never needing to get a driver’s license. “$7 trillion as autonomous vehicles become mainstream,” claimed Intel. Investors swooned at the potential to make billions while saving millions of lives. More Americans have died in traffic crashes than fighting in all of its wars. Driving is the deadliest of the common forms of transportation, and a leading cause of death for many age groups. Proponents of self-driving believed they were onto something big. More than $10 billion was invested in self-driving cars since 2010, McKinsey estimated. Uber rushed to scoop up engineers from Salesky’s alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. Ford followed suit a year later with Argo AI. General Motors bought a self-driving company in 2016. (Uber launched its program in 2015 before selling it in 2020 following a costly lawsuit with Alphabet.)Ī Waymo robotaxi is shown in Arizona. Competitors like Uber jumped in, fearful that being left out of self-driving would destroy their business’s future. The team’s self-driving Chevrolet Tahoe caught the eye of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who went on to launch a self-driving car program in 2009, later dubbed Waymo, that ignited an industry. “We started out doing this stuff because it was cool and it was a neat idea, but we weren’t quite sure how it was going to be used,” Salesky said in a 2019 interview. Last week Ford and Volkswagen pulled the plug on their self-driving effort, Argo AI, the latest admission from a hype-fueled industry that building a good self-driving car that’s also a profitable business may not happen anytime soon.Īrgo AI CEO and co-founder Bryan Salesky was part of a famed Carnegie Mellon University team that developed a primitive self-driving vehicle that won a Pentagon race in 2007.įour students on the team went on to co-found self-driving companies, which have raised billions since: Salesky, who founded Argo Dave Ferguson at Nuro and Drew Bagnell and Chris Urmson at Uber-backed Aurora. Such vehicles would usher in an era of consumer safety and convenience, experts promised, and would be an immensely valuable product for carmakers.īut recently many of the main players in the autonomous vehicle game have been scaling back or outright abandoning their lofty ambitions. You may have to select a menu option or click a button.For over a decade, companies from Google to General Motors have poured billions of dollars into the pursuit of what was seen as the Holy Grail of driving technology: the fully self-driving car. Follow the instructions for disabling the ad blocker on the site you’re viewing.You may have more than one ad-blocker installed. You’ll usually find this icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. Click the icon of the ad-blocker extension installed on your browser.When it turns gray, click the refresh icon that has appeared next to it or click the button below to continue.Click on the large blue power icon at the top.Click the UBlock Origin icon in the browser extension area in the upper right-hand corner.It will turn gray and the text above will go from “ON” to “ OFF”. Click on the “ Ad-Blocking” button at the bottom.Click the Ghostery icon in the browser extension area in the upper right-hand corner.Switch off the toggle to turn it from “ Enabled on this site” to “ Disabled on this site”.Click the AdBlocker Ultimate icon in the browser extension area in the upper right-hand corner.
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