Hold Your Horsepower: For Mobility Industry, “Reality Is Sinking In”
Summary
Earlier this month, GM CEO Mary Barra told the crowd at a financial conference that her company was on track to unveil a ridesharing service in 2019 that would be powered by autonomous vehicles.Because there is no legal framework in place at either the state or federal level for fully autonomous vehicles to operate on the nation’s roads, there would presumably be human “safety attendants” on board in GM’s ridesharing fleet.“The vehicles can currently run safely at speeds of up to about 30 miles per hour, and the service will be limited to a small geographical area,” Barra said at the DealBook event, according to the New York Times .But as autonomous vehicle pilot programs grow, the industry is simultaneously pulling back from some of its early timeline hubris that had both auto and tech execs claiming that they’d have AVs out on the road, at least in fleet deployments, by 2021.But as the artificial intelligence technology underpinning them got more sophisticated and the projected profits grew, breathless prognosticators predicted that we could hand off many driving duties to robotic chauffeurs within the decade.