Self-driving industry could soon flourish, but roadblocks still remain

SAN DIEGO, California, USA — Self-driving technology has climbed to the peak of the hype cycle and fallen to the depths of disillusionment. Now comes the next chapter.

Hundreds of driverless vehicles are now deployed in commercial service, and more are likely coming in the months ahead.

But humbled by years of delays, high-profile crashes and technical setbacks, autonomous vehicle industry leaders recognize much work remains to prepare for their arrival.

"A future where autonomous vehicles are widely commercially deployed, saving lives every day, is not a given," said Steve Kenner, chief safety officer at General Motors subsidiary Cruise.

Kenner spoke in July at the Automated Road Transportation Symposium here, an annual gathering of business leaders, government officials and researchers involved in the self-driving industry.

Fifteen years into the modern-day push to develop self-driving vehicles, he and others identified formidable challenges still ahead: Standards and best practices are still under development, regulations are fuzzy and incomplete, and safety benchmarks do not exist.

And that is before taking into consideration labor opposition that makes self-driving vehicles a political football heading into the November elections, or that two-thirds of consumers fear AVs, according to a March survey from U.S. motoring club AAA.

"They may not understand the benefits or, frankly, they don't think AV companies are telling the truth about safety," Kenner said.

But the "biggest issue by far," said Jeff Farrah, CEO of the Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, "is making sure that the technology is ripe and ready for being deployed."

There is a critical mass of companies who believe their technology will be ready for that moment in the near term.

Alphabet subsidiary Waymo was the first to deploy self-driving vehicles in December 2018, when it started commercial service in Phoenix.

This month, Waymo launched an unprecedented expansion of its self-driving service, extending it beyond the borders of its existing San Francisco operations and into other parts of the Bay Area. Waymo has now reached a milestone, the company said, providing more than 100,000 rides per week across its operations.

Others are poised to follow. Amazon subsidiary Zoox anticipates starting commercial service in Las Vegas by the end of 2024. Elon Musk intends to unveil Tesla's much-ballyhooed and oft-delayed robotaxi on Oct. 10. He said on the company's second-quarter earnings call unsupervised rides could begin "possibly by the end of the year."

Cruise has now resumed autonomous testing with human safety drivers aboard in three cities following a self-imposed hiatus that came following a crash involving one of its vehicles in San Francisco last October. Bloomberg reported the company intends to restart commercial service in early 2025.

Meanwhile, three autonomous trucking companies — Kodiak Robotics, Aurora Innovation and Gatik Inc. — expect to begin commercial service without human safety drivers aboard by the end of the year.

"That would be a huge moment for the industry," Farrah said.

An orange triangle could forestall those plans.

Federal regulations mandate that truck drivers, should they pull off to the shoulder of the road, place warning triangles behind their trailers as a safety precaution.

With no humans aboard to perform that task, autonomous trucking companies have developed their own alternative — front- and rear-facing lights that flash and signal that a vehicle is parked.

Aurora Innovation and Waymo in January 2023 asked the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration to weigh whether those lights count as a suitable alternative. The agency has not responded to their request.

There is a similar holdup for robotaxis.

In July 2023, NHTSA proposed a new program that could speed the deployment of large numbers of vehicles that do not contain traditional controls like brake pedals and steering wheels. Officials expected to issue a notice of proposed rulemaking by last fall. But it has yet to materialize.

"It has been very frustrating for us to not see more action on this," Farrah said. "It's not stopping deployments of autonomous vehicles. But what it's stopping is the ability of the industry to reimagine what the vehicles look like."

Meanwhile, the Teamsters have sought to thwart AVs at the state level by backing laws that would require human operators aboard vehicles weighing more than 10,000 pounds. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed one such proposed law last year. Similar legislation, Senate Bill 2286, has been introduced this term, though experts believe it would meet the same fate should it reach the governor's desk.

At the same time, there are no standards or regulations that set firm safety benchmarks for AVs.

Given that vacuum, experts speaking at the Automated Road Transportation Symposium conference called on the fledgling self-driving industry to create safety management systems, organizationwide plans that offer a systemic way to assess risks and identify weaknesses.

It's a concept borrowed from the aviation industry, which has used such systems to drive down crash rates over several decades.

Aviation could provide a guidepost in other ways as well.

Mitre, a federally funded firm with decades of aviation and defense experience that brings together government, academic and industry interests to research and vet technologies, is starting a research collaborative focused on AVs.

The company will explore the role of operation centers and remote operations in managing fleets of AVs, Mitre said. Cruise is a founding member of the initiative.

Beyond that, experts said the industry needs to develop safety metrics and benchmarks that make it easy for the public to scrutinize the safety of AVs.

The absence of such metrics today contributes to a lack of public trust, according to Jeffrey Wishart, an Arizona State University professor and vice president of innovation at the Arizona Commerce Authority.

"Until we get those standards out there, I think larger deployments are tough," he said. "It'll happen, but it's challenging for all the stakeholders, including the general public."