As some of you may have heard in the news lately, the autonomous car industry has been receiving some backlash after a person died in a self-driving Uber in Arizona. For as bad as it has been lately the industry got some promising news recently out of the company Waymo. Waymo is a part of the company Alphabet who also owns Google. Waymo announced that they will be purchasing a fleet of 20,000 electric cars from Jaguar Land Rover. This means along with there detailed timetable that says by 2020 these cars could be doing over a million trips per day that they have found a safe reliable way to build these cars. You may think that the progress in this industry is all the same but as Kevin Roose talks about in this article he has been in many autonomous vehicles some of which have been so bad that he felt he was in danger and others that he called boring because they felt so normal. An investment of 20,000 electric cars does not come unless you are confident it is going to pay off, that is why many experts think this is a huge breakthrough for the industry. If all goes well for Waymo they may be on to something that could change the entire level of robotics and technology in the United States and help prevent the more than 40,000 accidents that happen on a daily basis.
Personally, I think that it is going to take more than 2 years in order to have 20,000 self-driving cars on the road. However, I am not opposed to the idea of that happening because I think that if it is truly reliable it can help an extraordinary amount of people and change the way transportation works. Only time will tell and 2 years is a very short amount of time. Its crazy to think that this is even a possibility.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/30/technology/self-driving-cars.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftechnology&action=click&contentCollection=technology®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront