Autonomous cars are still as far as a decade away from general availability, despite the intense hype and USD $35bn invested globally so far in their development. Zhong Hua, Senior VP of Engineering at Chinese startup WeRide, says the biggest challenges in developing fully autonomous driving is accounting for human behaviour:
“Some people violate the traffic rules, or sometimes unusual objects are placed in the road…you don’t know all of these cases,” Zhong told the Nikkei Asian Review last month. “Autonomous driving is just very difficult. As we road test in China, we know well there are very difficult scenarios…we don’t think the technology will be able to handle that in a very short period of time.”
WeRide plan to expand their fleet of autonomous cars to 100 from the current 50 by the end of this year and to 500 by next year, though they have delayed plans to launch a first autonomous taxi service in July. Zhong says “Our vision is that in the near future, it is still going to be a hybrid model, as we try to have humans [driving] in some areas or some time period”. This could mean taxis could be fully autonomous at night when there is less traffic and transport goods rather than passengers, but require a human driver during the day.
The promise of self-driving technology has also drawn in massive amounts of money. There has been around $35bn worth of investment, or between $8bn and $10bn annually in recent years, according to Egil Juliussen, a director at IHS Markit:
“Level-4 autonomous vehicles are coming later than originally forecasted,” Juliussen said, predicting that they will only start to appear for personal use in the U.S., China, Europe and Japan in 2025. Level-5 driverless ride hailing and personal autonomous vehicles will appear around 2029 at the earliest, he added.
