The “death of self-driving cars” has been greatly exaggerated
Enlarge / The latest iteration of Waymo's self-driving technology is based on the Jaguar I-PACE. (credit: Waymo)
Seven years ago, hype about self-driving cars was off the charts. It wasn't just Tesla CEO Elon Musk-who has been making outlandish predictions about self-driving technology since 2015. In 2016, Ford set a goal to start selling cars without steering wheels by 2021. The same year, Lyft predicted that a majority of rides on its network would be autonomous by 2021.
None of that happened. Instead, the last few years have seen brutal consolidation. Uber sold off its self-driving project in 2020, and Lyft shut down its effort in 2021. Then, last October, Ford and Volkswagen announced they were shutting down their self-driving joint venture called Argo AI.
Today, a lot of people view self-driving technology as an expensive failure whose moment has passed. The Wall Street Journal's Chris Mims argued in 2021 that self-driving cars could be decades away." Last year, Bloomberg's Max Chafkin declared that self-driving cars are going nowhere."