A driverless future is coming — but it won’t start with self-driving cars
Technology and booming e-commerce means driverless trucks will beat cars onto the roads
Self-driving cars are coming.
Tesla is aiming to have a fully driverless car ready by 2018, and Uber recently kicked off a pilot in Pittsburgh where select users can hail a ride in a self-driving car. And many other companies have plans to roll out some form of self-driving cars by 2020.
But chances are, you’re more likely to see a driverless truck in practice before a self-driving car.
There’s two reasons for this, the first being the tech itself.
It’s a lot easier to build autonomous tech for highway driving than city maneuvering. On highways, there are fewer obstacles for the vehicles to worry about. Cities are a mess of pedestrians, cars, potholes, traffic cones — you get the point. All of those obstacles mean driverless cars have a lot to keep track of, and it can be easy to miss something.
We’ve already seen real world examples of this playing out. Uber’s self-driving cars still need a safety driver behind the wheel because urban driving is so difficult. There were actually several times the driver had to take over when we got a ride in one.