From The Daily Impact
By Tom Lewis, January 23, 2020
Excerpt:
Eric Adams, writing about this subject on TheDrive.com, startled me the other day by pointing out that five years ago, nobody was talking about driverless cars. But then the huddled masses rose up as one and demanded universal driverless cars as a fundamental human right.
Um, no, that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Big Tech and Big Auto, seeing massive global declines in sales of, and interest in, their products, decided that the way to convince future consumers to go into debt for something they don’t really need was — ta-da! — the driverless car. They also concluded — and in this they were absolutely right — that any company that could create a little buzz about their prospects for making driverless cars would have firehoses of cash turned their way by wealth managers, hedge funds and the like.
By four years ago, tsunamis of money were washing over Tesla, Uber, Waymo (formerly of Google), Apple, and any business that could work the word “driverless” into a news release. A study by Business Insider released in April of 2016 predicted that there would be 10 million driverless cars on the road by, um, 2020. That would be, like, now.
(Good Deception Number One: the word “driverless” as used by these folks does not mean “without a driver.” I amuse myself these days by asking people to guesstimate h0w many driverless cars are on the road in the U.S. Responses usually range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. The correct answer? Zero. Read far enough into any news story about a new deployment of “driverless” cars and you will find a driver, and often an engineer as well, sitting at the controls. Here’s a good example.)
So how’s the driverless horseless carriage revolution coming along? Let’s review the state of play since last we checked:…SNIP
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