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The self-driving car it seems like an idea that is always a few years away from reality. But we may not be looking closely enough.
According to two women working on the commercialization of autonomous vehicles, the technology is well and really arrived – and although it may be limited to certain niches for now, they believe it could become much more widespread in the next few years.
Jody Kelman heads the autonomous driving division of travel sharing company Lyft, which has been testing self-driving taxis in Las Vegas since 2018.
Aubrey Donelan is the co-founder and chief operating officer of Bear Flag Robotics, which is modernizing tractors to make them autonomous.
Kelman and Donelan spoke with WIRED writer Arian Marshall at WIRED HQ at CES, a virtual event exploring the exclusive gadgets, technologies and ideas on display at the giant trade event.
“It’s already here – that’s good news,” Donelan said when asked when the self-driving vehicles will finally arrive. “We’ve been in the market for a few years.”
Open fields are less of a challenge for autonomous vehicles than busy roads, and so limited forms of autonomy have become a feature of tractors in recent years. Donelan says her company expects to make more tractors autonomous in the next few years.
Bear Flag was acquired by agricultural machinery giant John Deere in August. Deere has also announced its own fully autonomous CES tractor, which could encourage more farmers to introduce robots in their fields.
Lyft, which offers self-driving in Vegas in partnership with autonomous vehicle company Motional, has shown that autonomy works in limited scenarios, Kelman said. Lyft users can sometimes call up a standalone car using the same app they use for other trips. Kelman says the company has made more than 100,000 autonomous trips and plans to expand the offering with a special self-driving taxi service in 2023, as well as further deployment elsewhere.
“What we’re going to see is that it’s really starting to get serious next year,” Kelman said. But autonomy will not be available everywhere at once. “This will happen in pockets over time, in certain cities, in certain weather conditions, at certain times of the day.
Lyft said in April that it would sell its self-managed subsidiary Level 5 to Woven Planet, a subsidiary of Toyota, but the company still has a product team dedicated to supporting autonomous driving and continues to work on the technology with other companies.
The development of self-driving cars has been hampered by technical challenges caused by time and other factors, and some efforts to push technology forward have led to fatal accidents.
Both Kelman and Donelan say understanding how people interact with autonomy will be crucial to ensuring both security and successful adoption. “Companies that do what deserve salt, ironically, put man at the center of their robotic innovation,” says Donelan.
According to Kelman, companies working on self-driving cars can learn not only from successes in other industries such as agriculture, but also from each other. She points out that Motional shares data collected from autonomous driving with other companies. According to her, this approach, which is gaining momentum in Europe, could accelerate the development of technology.
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