By Tim Higgins
LAS VEGAS--At a command center near the airport here, executives
from automotive supplier Aptiv PLC showed why deploying robot cars
will be far more complicated than many envisioned just a few years
ago.
With people in town for the annual CES tech show, Aptiv revealed
its new operations with more than 300 people, rows of computer
monitors and a 30-foot video screen. It's all to track and keep a
fleet of 75 autonomous cars operating. Thirty of those vehicles
make up the 20-hours-a-day operation for passengers on Lyft Inc.'s
app, taking riders across a 17-square-mile area around the Strip.
Those cars already have made about 30,000 Lyft trips.
"What was underappreciated by the industry is how long and how
difficult it would be to industrialize the technology," said Karl
Iagnemma, president of Aptiv's autonomous mobility. "Industrywide
that recognition has dawned."
The hype that has consumed the nascent driverless-car industry
over the past few years has moved into a new period of cautious
optimism following the fatal crash of an Uber Technologies Inc.
test autonomous vehicle last year and separate crashes involving
Tesla Inc.'s driver-assistance system.
At both the CES tech show here last week and this week's Detroit
auto show, straight talk about robot-vehicle safety and scaled-back
expectations replaced past years' boastful claims of fully
driverless cars flooding cities. The immediate future of autonomous
vehicles is more subdued: plodding shuttles that drive around the
block and cars that travel in confined, well-practiced routes with
not one but two safety operators inside.
The Uber crash was a wake-up call for the industry, said Gill
Pratt, head of Toyota Research Institute, which is developing
autonomous technology. "That caused everyone to understand that
there's not only a long way to go technologically but from a social
point of view there's liability and brand risk."
Autonomous-vehicle developers are generally struggling with a
multitude of basic scenarios, from making unprotected left-hand
turns to judging whether an idling car is double-parked. Often
these developers deal with the robot's confusion by having the
vehicles slow down or stop, which can then create more confusion as
other drivers grow impatient and illegally pass.
Mr. Pratt, who believes it will take decades for driverless cars
to significantly replace human drivers on roadways, is betting that
low-speed robot shuttles and taxis are the first ways the
technology will be deployed.
Toyota has invested in a company called May Mobility Inc., which
is running autonomous shuttles in Detroit and Columbus, Ohio, that
stick to fixed routes. Because the six-passenger electric vehicles
can only go up to 25 miles an hour, they aren't required to have
the same safety features as a normal car, meaning they could hit
the streets sooner and are cheaper because they have fewer
high-price sensors.
Some of the splashy goals laid out by autonomous-vehicle leaders
have yet to come true.
Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk in 2016 promised to demonstrate
a vehicle traveling in fully autonomous mode from Los Angeles to
New York by the end of 2017. It didn't happen. He told analysts in
February that Tesla technically could do the trip with a preplanned
route but wanted to wait until the car can be summoned from
anywhere.
A little more than a year ago, Waymo CEO John Krafcik gained
world-wide attention when he promised that, within months, the
company would allow the general public to begin riding in
driverless vehicles without anyone behind the wheel. "It's not
happening in 2020; it's happening today," he said in the November
2017 speech. "Fully self-driving cars are here."
However, when Waymo, a unit of Alphabet Inc., launched the
commercial service in suburban Phoenix last month, safety operators
remained behind the wheel. During a presentation at CES last week,
Mr. Krafcik said those operators act like concierges to answer
passenger questions.
On the event's sidelines, he said Waymo has driven many miles
without a human in the front seat but demurred when asked when the
safety operators would be pulled from the service. "We haven't had
any situations or incidents without any drivers in the front row,"
he said. "We're just proceeding as we should--very cautiously with
safety as the primary focal point."
Aptiv began offering rides to the public through the Lyft app a
year ago with two safety operators in the car and began charging
for those rides in May. During a demo ride last week, a safety
operator took control once during the trip and steered the car in
the parking lot.
Aptiv said it plans by midyear to begin testing a newly built
vehicle system with backup functions for braking, steering and
computing that can manage the car without a person at the wheel. By
next year, it hopes to deploy a fully driverless car.
The road to deployment will be costly. General Motors Co.'s
self-driving unit, GM Cruise, raised about $5 billion in committed
capital last year from SoftBank Group Corp. and Honda Motor Co. for
the development and deployment of its commercial taxi service.
Kyle Vogt, Cruise's chief technology officer, reiterated in an
interview in Las Vegas last week that the company is on track to
deploy the service without a human behind the wheel this year. But
he also called for more reasoned discussions about the technology.
He joined competitors at CES to mark the creation of an industry
group dubbed PAVE, or Partners for Automated Vehicle Education,
that aims to educate the public about the technology.
"I think 2019 will hopefully see the first signs of this
technology being real," he said. "I hope those initial launches
manage to reset expectations."
Write to Tim Higgins at Tim.Higgins@WSJ.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 17, 2019 10:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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