news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

What's Next

This is the "Future Trends" series of MIT Technology Review, which spans various industries, trends, and technologies, giving you a sneak peek into the future. This is the "Future Trends" series of MIT Technology Review, which spans various industries, trends, and technologies, giving you a sneak peek into the future. Self-driving taxis have recently caused widespread discussion in China. How do Americans view this topic?

This article was published at the beginning of the year with the original title:

What's next for robotaxis in 2024。

In 2023, the promise of driverless taxis (robotaxis) seemed within reach. In San Francisco, summoning a robot taxi was as easy as ordering takeout through an app. However, that dream was shattered in October when a Cruise vehicle, one of the leading U.S. robotaxis, was involved in a serious accident in downtown San Francisco, casting a shadow over the future of the technology.

Another accident followed, leading California to suspend Cruise service indefinitely and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to investigate the company. Cruise has since pulled all of its vehicles and laid off 24% of its workforce.

Still, other driverless taxi companies are forging ahead. In some cities in the U.S. and China, fleets of driverless taxis from companies like Waymo and Baidu are still serving passengers willing to give it a try. Regulators in places like San Francisco, Phoenix, Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan now allow these vehicles to operate without human safety operators.

But other challenges remain. Self-driving taxi companies need to get a return on their huge investments. Until the cost of self-driving taxis drops, they can't effectively compete with traditional taxis and Uber. If these companies promote their business too quickly, they may repeat Cruise's mistakes. Another industry giant, Waymo, has taken a more cautious approach, but no company can completely avoid accidents.

“When an accident happens, it’s big news and it hurts the whole industry,” said Missy Cummings, a professor and director of the Mason Center for Autonomy and Robotics at George Mason University. “That’s been a big lesson learned this year. The whole industry is treading on thin ice.”

MIT Technology Review spoke to experts about how to understand the challenges facing the driverless taxi industry and how they expect the industry to change in 2024.

Funding, funding, and more funding

After years of road testing, companies have demonstrated that current versions of self-driving technology are ready for use, albeit with some severe limitations. They operate only in strictly pre-set geographic areas; while some vehicles no longer require a human operator in the driver's seat, a remote operator is still required to take over in an emergency; and they are limited to warm climates because snow can interfere with the vehicle's vision and sensor systems.

“Based on publicly disclosed information, these systems still rely on some level of remote human supervision to operate safely, so I would call them automated rather than autonomous,” said Ramanarayan Vasudevan, an associate professor of robotics and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.

The problem is that this version of automated driving costs much more than a traditional taxi. He said the cost of a self-driving taxi could be several orders of magnitude higher than what other taxi companies cost. "Unfortunately, I don't think the technology will change dramatically in the coming year to significantly reduce costs."

High prices will undoubtedly curb demand. If driverless taxis are to retain customers, beyond just the curious trying out their first ride, they will need to make the service cheaper than other modes of transportation.

Bryant Walker Smith, associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina, agreed: “These companies are competing with Uber drivers who make less than minimum wage and own a mid-range car and maintain it themselves.”

In contrast, self-driving taxis are expensive vehicles packed with cameras, sensors and advanced software systems that require constant human monitoring and assistance. At least until a large number of self-driving taxis are on the road, they will hardly be able to compete with ride-sharing services.

Smith also noted that as driverless taxi companies continue to burn through investor money, there are growing concerns that they are not getting enough returns on their huge outlays, meaning there must be more urgency to produce results while balancing potential gains against costs.

Obstacles to scale expansion

There are currently four cities in the United States where you can take a ride in a driverless taxi: San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.

Terms vary from city to city, with some requiring a wait list that could take months to get a spot, while others only operate vehicles in a small area.

Expanding driverless taxi services to new cities would require enormous upfront effort and cost: detailed mapping (which would need to be constantly updated) and additional vehicles to handle growth in demand.

In addition, a self-driving system optimized for a particular city (such as San Francisco) may have limited adaptability in other cities (such as Austin), and Professor Cummings is studying how to evaluate this adaptability. "If I look at this as a fundamental research question, it may mean that the company has not yet learned something important."

These factors together have triggered a new round of concerns about the profitability of driverless taxis. Even if Cruise withdraws its vehicles, Waymo, another major driverless taxi company in the United States, is not in a hurry to fill the gap. Because the cost of each driverless taxi service is currently higher than the revenue, large-scale expansion seems to be insufficient.

Global Development

The United States is not the only country researching, testing, and even deploying self-driving taxis.

China is currently the other leader in this space, with a timeline roughly in sync with the U.S. In 2023, several Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, received government approval to operate driverless taxis without safety operators. However, these vehicles can only operate in some small and relatively remote areas of the city, making the service inaccessible to most people.

With the help of Chinese and American companies, the Middle East is also rising rapidly in this field. Saudi Arabia invested $100 million in Chinese driverless taxi startup Pony.AI to introduce its vehicles into the future city of Neom under construction, which is said to be built with all the latest technology. At the same time, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are competing to become the first cities in the Middle East to pilot driverless cars on the road, which are manufactured by Cruise and Chinese company WeRide.

Chinese driverless taxi companies face the same core challenge as their American counterparts: proving profitability. In 2023, a commercialization trend emerged in the Chinese industry, with Chinese autonomous driving companies competing to sell their autonomous driving systems to other companies, and quickly monetize by repackaging the technology into more in-demand but less high-tech services (such as urban autonomous driving systems, which can be sold to automakers).

In contrast, Europe has been slower to develop driverless taxis, partly because European countries prefer to deploy autonomous driving technology in public transportation. Although Germany, the United Kingdom and France have all tested driverless taxis on the road, commercial operations are still a long way off.

Lessons from Cruise

Cruise’s tragic experience points to one of the main obstacles facing driverless taxis: They can still sometimes exhibit erratic behavior. In October 2023, a human driver (in a non-autonomous vehicle) struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and fled the scene, before a passing Cruise vehicle ran over the victim and dragged him 20 feet before stopping.

“We are deeply concerned that more lives will be lost, more first responders will be blocked, more sudden stops will occur,” said Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety in Washington, D.C. “We are not against self-driving cars, we are concerned about unsafe deployment and a rush to market at the expense of the public’s safety.”

She said the companies provide insufficient data to show how safe their vehicles are. While they must submit data to NHTSA, it is often heavily redacted before publication to protect trade secrets. Chase said some unsuccessful federal bills proposed in the past year could have even further eased those reporting requirements.

Cummings believes that this accident will force everyone to face the complexity and uncertainty of the operation of driverless taxis, and may prompt the industry to pay more attention to remote human supervision, which is what Cruise vehicles may lack in that accident. But increasing human intervention will undoubtedly exacerbate the profitability problem.

Meanwhile, the California Public Utilities Commission accused Cruise of misleading the public and regulators about liability in the accident.“If we can’t trust these companies, then they have no business operating on our roads,” Smith said.

A Cruise spokesperson told MIT Technology Review that the company has no new information to share, but referred to a blog post in November 2013, which revealed that it had hired a third-party law firm and technology consulting firm to review the accident and its response to regulation. In its settlement proposal to CP UC (California Public Utilities Commission), Cruise also proposed to share more data, including "crash reports and regular reports of incidents involving stopped autonomous vehicles."

Cruise's future is unclear, and its plans to launch operations in multiple cities soon have stalled. Meanwhile, Waymo is applying to expand its service in Los Angeles and bring its vehicles to freeways in Phoenix. Amazon's self-driving startup Zoox also appears to be preparing to launch services in several unspecified cities, suggesting that other players in the driverless taxi industry are continuing to explore and advance despite the challenges.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/01/23/1086936/whats-next-for-robotaxis-2024/