Editorial: You’ll Be Dead Before Autonomous Cars Are Launched

"Mm, 2000. When I was a kid, we thought 2000 was gonna be like The Jetsons or somin'. It ain't even The Jeffersons!"-Chris Rock

Most major auto shows, barring the Geneva Auto Salon, having some substantial connection to the automotive world in some way. Detroit. New York. Los Angeles. Shanghai. Tokyo. Paris. Frankfurt. So how did Las Vegas end up with two car shows?

It used to be that the SEMA show was the only place you could catch an automotive exec pawing at a young woman one minute, introducing her as "my niece" the next. But now that the Consumer Electronics Show has morphed into a de facto auto show, you can see that twice in a row, as well as disgraced Gawker editors awkwardly trying to pick up booth babes.

CES, as the WSJ's Holman Jenkins notes, has become the "self-driving car show". Jenkins' piece takes the contrarian view on the self-driving car idea, which is that while the technology may exist, it's never going to happen. In his mind, the auto makers are merely doing it to keep pace with Google, which will likely shutter its own program as shareholders get antsy about its massive R&D spending in the face of slowing growth.

In my opinion, Occam's razor applies here. There are just too many obstacles to getting self-driving cars on the road, en masse, in our lifetime. Autonomous cars would require a near-complete overhaul of our roads, open up massively complex questions about liability and most of all, require a substantial shift in mindset by the American public, who, despite what the affluent, childless (not to mention just as provincial as any other American) Silicon Valley set may think may think, are not enamored with the idea of piloting self-driving electric vehicles that are shared on a fractional ownership basis or a setup similar to Zipcar.

The kind of disruption they dream about does not happen in a short time frame – and if they have the magic bullet, why haven't they gotten started developing it already? To riff on the above Chris Rock quote – we don't even have a decent network of alternative fuel stations (EV, hydrogen, natural gas, what have you). Tesla hasn't been able to mass produce an SUV, let alone a volume product. Ford is selling 60,000 F-150s per month. When you are placing bets against a century-old pillar of America's economy, and the way that the majority of Americans outside New York City and the Bay Area get around, you ought to remember who your counter-party is.

Nor is CES "the most important car show" either. Like every other auto show, the vast  majority of the automotive stories generated at CES remains within the walls of the automotive media, and auto makers are using it to get some free coverage and talk about incremental improvements to infotainment systems that continue to confound and frustrate a good many customers. But that's ok. That's how progress really happens. It's not sexy, nor disruptive, but it sure is effective.

 

The post Editorial: You'll Be Dead Before Autonomous Cars Are Launched appeared first on The Truth About Cars.

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