At CES, time to make cool stuff real stuff

LAS VEGAS — Yep, there was lots of talk and several demonstrations of self-driving cars at CES, but it was striking to notice which companies did not attend this massive consumer electronics extravaganza.

Waymo, considered by many to be the leader in self-driving technology, didn't have an exhibit. And General Motors waited until CES was over to drop the really big news of the week — that it is launching a public ride-hailing fleet full of cars without steering wheels and pedals in 2019.

At CES, Aptiv teamed with Lyft to offer self-driving rides for the general public to select locations around Las Vegas. But the variety of approaches to garnering attention suggests the industry has reached a key interval in the headlong rush to autonomous vehicles. Many companies are too hard at work to hold flashy media events, and others are still trying to prove their ideas have merit before investing millions in r&d.

"It's time to get the engineering done," said Kay Stepper, vice president of driver assistance and automated driving at Robert Bosch.

Indeed, some companies at CES said they were more focused on working on the tech behind the scenes than producing splashy, headline-grabbing events.

To some, product and development timeline promises are meaningless until there's a car on the road.

"There's a lot of statements, a lot of declarations; there's often a lot of delays," said Carlos Ghosn, chairman of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Alliance. "The only way to measure how advanced we are is to measure how many troops you have on the ground."

Many manufacturers have targeted 2021 for Level 4 self-driving, where a car can drive itself without human supervision in defined conditions.

When you're waiting for a brand-new technology to hit the market, there is little you can do to fill the waiting time with news. Announcements of new partnerships are OK, but not very enticing. And in the consumer electronics space, usually very little time passes between product announcement and market launch. For the much-hyped iPhone, typically two weeks pass between the announcement and sell date.

So suppliers are relying on demonstrations, even if they aren't supersexy, to keep consumers and future customers interested.

"Demonstrations are really important because they are concrete examples of how you would deploy automated vehicles," said Glen DeVos, chief technology officer at Aptiv, the tech-focused spinoff of supplier Delphi. "But these examples have to really quickly transition into commercial operations. If you don't maintain that momentum, then the hype curve dies."

On Friday, Jan. 12, GM announced plans to launch public ride-hailing services with autonomous vehicles that don't have manual controls such as steering wheels and pedals, starting in 2019 — several years ahead of other automakers and industry expectations.

The "Cruise AV" cars, pending federal approval, would be the beginning of a new future for GM and fundamentally change public transportation as it's been known for the last century.

GM says it has produced "a small number" of the autonomous cars without mechanical controls "for validation work" at its Orion Assembly plant. The metro Detroit facility last year became the only mass-production assembly plant to make such vehicles.

"We think the technology is going to have a huge impact on the world," GM President Dan Ammann said during a conference call. "Obviously, there will be an adoption curve where people get used to engaging with it and using it."

GM's aggressive approach to launching self-driving fleets is driven by its belief that being first to market will give it an enormous business advantage as it moves toward its overarching mission of a zero-emission, autonomous future without accidents.

The automaker is likely ready to launch these cars into the wild, said Michael Harley, managing editor for Autotrader and Kelley Blue Book.

"While shedding traditional human controls may sound terrifying to the uninitiated, it's a sound move backed by millions of miles of real and simulated testing," he said.

While GM was working on its real- world cars, Aptiv spent two months getting ready for its Lyft demonstration, outfitting traffic boxes with 47 vehicle-to-infrastructure receivers and generating map data in preparation for CES. Aptiv planned to continue the deployment after the conference ended.

With the shine of self-driving demos mostly fading — and an unexpected bout of rain hampering vehicles that weren't all-weather-ready — mobility press conferences were left to fill the time with partnership announcements, product timelines and discussions on the overarching concepts of mobility — leading to far fewer oohs and aahs from attendees.

Chipmaker Nvidia's nearly two-hour press conference detailed its production timeline for its automated driving platform and listed new automotive partners.

During his hourlong keynote, Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Hackett brought Harvard University ethicist Michael Sandel onstage to discuss the morality of new technology.

And Toyota flew in company President Akio Toyoda to announce its concept modular vehicle, e-Palette, which is like a self-driving food truck, delivery truck and mobile office all in one.

To move from supervised demos, where the cars run in closed or preplanned routes, to unsupervised rides in unpredictable traffic is a major leap in development, according to manufacturers.

"Here at CES, you can drive or not drive in many cars; you can check it out, and that is fantastic that you can experience what it is, but it's not an industrial solution," said Dennis Nobelius, CEO of Zenuity, an automated driving software company formed by Volvo Cars and Autoliv.

Nobelius said the company is focused on developing a Level 4 software for commercialization by 2021, but to reach that timeline, it must be able to validate the system, have extensive digital mapping and ensure the platform will work in edge cases, or unexpected events.

"You won't be seeing any cool demos from us this year," he said. "We're working on making it real."

In the meantime, some manufacturers are touting partially automated or connected services as a way to mark progress and begin to gain consumer acceptance.

Bosch is expanding its crowdsourced parking service to 20 more cities. In an interview, Bosch North America CEO Mike Mansuetti said the technology, and others like it, will help ease consumers into a more automated future.

"It's going to do a lot to create more awareness, help people understand the technology better, because many people really have a hard time understanding how all this works," Mansuetti said. "When we talk about autonomous driving, people jump to this 'Jetsons' future, and we all know there's limitations to that."

Ancillary technologies are also useful r&d tools. Toyota and Ford said at the show that they were developing automated delivery services as a way to expand business and study human interactions with driverless vehicles.

"We've learned customers want to access the vehicle differently than we thought," said Jim Farley, Ford's president of global markets. "These insights are incredibly powerful for us, and they're going to be at the heart as we design a unique, dedicated self-driving vehicle."

Michael Wayland contributed to this report.