Autonomous vehicle progress, which was cruising along at
highway speeds, hit a bump on March 18th, when a self-driving Uber
hit and killed a Tempe, Arizona pedestrian.
Although media and public reactions were swift and severe, the mishap
was not routine – per “Arizona Tragedy Will Not Slow Autonomous Vehicles” (Jon
Markman, Forbes, April 24th),
a police investigation “showed no fault by Uber,” and that the victim “emerged
abruptly from shadows behind a dimly lit center median” and then “pushed a
bicycle laden with plastic bags into oncoming traffic.” It was, though, as Daisuke Wakabayashi fairly
put it in “Self-Driving Uber Car Kills Pedestrian in Arizona, Where Robots
Roam” in the March 19th New
York Times, “the first pedestrian death associated with self-driving
technology” and “was a reminder that self-driving technology is still in the
experimental stage.”
Along with overreactions, stories such as “Uber’s
Self-Driving Cars Were Struggling Before Arizona Crash” (also Wakabayashi in
the Times, March 23rd) implied
that the tragedy was not a general driverless problem but more likely inherent
to that company, which over the past two years has shown irresponsibility in a
variety of other areas and in the autonomous realm was having its drivers
“being asked to do more” such as, unlike those working for others, “going on
solo runs.” Uber was also averaging 13
miles “before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer it out
of trouble,” compared with Waymo’s “nearly 5,600.” As well, according to “Uber Clarifies
Autonomous Vehicles’ Biggest Problem” (The Motley Fool in Fox Business, March 23rd), “consumer advocacy group
Consumer Watchdog” stated that “Uber simply cannot be trusted to use public
roads as private laboratories without meaningful safety standards and
regulations.” The headline of Alan Ohnsman’s March 24th Forbes “Waymo CEO On Uber Crash: Our Self-Driving Car Would Have Avoided
Pedestrian” gave one intra-industry reaction, which I am inclined to
believe. We may never know all the
circumstances, but the company in charge seems uncoincidental.
Even without the Uber connection, the state of the field was
well summarized by Andrew Krok in CNET’s Road
Show, as described by the story’s headline, “Fatal Uber crash in Arizona is
autonomy’s Apollo 1 moment,” and its ending of “how the developers of
autonomous vehicles act from here on out will make or break the idea of this
happening anytime remotely soon. Let’s
make sure we still get to the moon.”
Kevin Roose, in “The Self-Driving Car Industry’s Biggest Turning Point
Yet” in the March 30th New
York Times, said that his driverless rides had varied from “calm and
boring” to “terrifying white-knuckle,” that they are now heterogeneous in
safety, and that “as Uber’s autonomous driving program stalls out,” Waymo’s “is
shifting into overdrive.”
I end with another Motley
Fool effort, Chris Neiger’s April 13th “How to Make Money in
Self-Driving Cars.” That now seems
easier to assess in this industry headed for, per an Intel estimate, “a new
“passenger economy” that will be worth $7 trillion by 2050,” but, in what
became a gigantic market the last time around, the likes of Stutz and Hupmobile
once looked strong. Neiger echoed Roose
by saying “at this point there’s likely no stopping driverless cars from
becoming a major part of our transportation industry in the coming decades,”
and recommended Waymo parent company Alphabet and car-computer-maker NVIDIA,
with consideration also for General Motors, Ford, and Tesla and overall
guidance that “investors who are looking to benefit from the autonomous vehicle
market may want to consider hitching a ride now.” The technology is marching on, and, as has
been the case for since at least the beginning of last year, whether we like it
or not we must join it, work with it, and make sure our financial assets
reflect this reality. Those choices will
serve us best.