Either the world is not ready for self-driving cars, or self-driving cars are not ready for the world. After all the avoidable crashes and injuries in 2023 — some of which were fatal — I’m going to say that it’s the latter rather than the former. Autonomous vehicles are clearly not ready for use on public roads where other motorists and pedestrians present frequent and unique problems that AVs have shown they are unequipped to solve.
Self-driving cars, be they robotaxis from Waymo or Cruise, or personal vehicles fitted with such systems as Tesla’s Autopilot, have turned out to be woefully unprepared for the real world where nothing conforms to fixed parameters.
Yes, computers are smart. But self-driving vehicles prove how remarkably dumb computers can be; they are repositories of information that are good at indexing but suck at contextualizing. The poor things are unable to synthesize disparate data, which is how humans can differentiate between a kid and a traffic cone.
In other words, computers and the self-driving tech they’ve yielded can’t see the forest for the trees. All of that aside, I’ve never understood the appeal of a self-driving car. I love to drive. I want to drive. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be in a car at all. Different strokes, I suppose. Even if you are in favor of self-driving cars, the following reports of all the accidents and regulatory woes AVs were involved in throughout 2023 ought to give you pause.