Two years ago, the race to develop self-driving vehicles was fast and furious, especially in the Pittsburgh area with Uber unleashing its self-driving Volvo CX90s to the ride-hailing market. Google, General Motors and Tesla, among others, were investing billions to perfect self-driving technology.
But industry experts at a conference called RoadTrip 2030 said Monday that the push to get the first fully self-driving vehicle on the road has slowed while experts perfect the technology and build public acceptance. The conference at the Energy Innovation Center, Downtown, was sponsored by Covestro, which produces materials for the interior of vehicles.
Raj Rajkumar, a professor who is co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Vehicular Information Technology Collaborative Research Lab, said the technology for completely self-driving vehicles is “almost there.”
Public acceptance, however, is running behind the technology, especially since a March fatality in which an Arizona pedestrian was killed because the Uber driver wasn’t paying attention, Mr. Rajkumar said. Additionally, engineers are still trying to allow for the human part of driving, such as the look one driver gives another that says it’s all right for the other to go first.
“Driving is a difficult task,” he said, calling it perhaps the most complicated thing many adults do every day. “[Perfecting technology] is not going to be fast, not going to be easy.”
Still, it’s “only a question of when” self-driving vehicles start appearing on roads across the country, he said, because computers won’t make nearly as many errors as humans, who are responsible for the vast majority of 40,000 traffic deaths each year.
Regardless of whether Uber develops all of the components itself, the ride-hailing firm is positioning itself to be “the transportation network platform for everything,” said Chris D’Eramo, industrial design lead for Uber Advanced Technologies Group. Once the technology is available, he said, the company wants to be a leader in self-driving vehicles for ride-hailing, fleet management and industrial uses.
“We don’t want to have to wait,” he said. “If somebody else figures it out, great.”
While those final steps are perfected, other ancillary industries are positioning themselves to take advantage of on-demand fleets that are expected to replace many personal vehicles and put millions of extra miles on the road. Representatives from Covestro (vehicle interiors), Bridgestone Americas (tires) and PPG Industries (coatings) all have forward-looking programs to supply materials for whatever the new vehicles look like.
Christian Crews, a futurist with consultant Kalypso, said businesses are wise to develop a strategy to meet the inevitable deployment of self-driving vehicles. Businesses need to position themselves for the change to industry supplying what individuals want rather than meeting the demands of the masses, a process he referred to as creating millions of markets of a few people each.
“Autonomous vehicles don’t have to be perfect,” he said. “They just have to be better than humans.”
Ed Blazina: eblazina@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1470 or on Twitter @EdBlazina.
First Published: December 4, 2018, 1:11 a.m.
