newsA new article in the Guardian by Christian Wolmar, author of Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere, summarizes how the grand promises for the self-driving vehicles have fallen well short as lawsuits mount, cities impose restrictions, and the UK has gotten tough on overselling driving-assistance. Wolmar depicts the autonomous driving vehicle industry (save ever-stubborn Tesla) increasingly in reverse gear, with one time leader wannabe Uber having exited the business and GM (via its Cruise operation) floundering.
Wolmar provided a fine compact account, but one is still left wondering, how did such a not-ready-for-prime-time technology get so far? Much of the impetus resulted from the Silicon Valley attitude of “Move quickly and break things,” as demonstrated particularly with the deliberately mislabeled ride sharing companies Uber and Lyft. They rolled over local cab regulations and got little resistance, largely because taxis are local businesses, with not a lot of capital, and no meaningful constituency. Hubert Horan has chronicled in exhausting detail that the gig taxis never made any sense, that they had inherently higher costs than traditional cabs.
But self-driving cars, as in self-driving taxis, were a big part of the Uber/Lyft hype. Just imagine how great these companies’ economics would
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Read the full post at Naked Capitalism.
