The path for robotaxis isn’t smooth

Deployments were delayed. De- velopers shifted toward delivery. Researchers expressed skepticism of business models.

Robotaxis encountered a rough road this year, one perhaps punctuated with a plunge to the bottom of the Trough of Disillusionment, the low point on the "Hype Cycle" report on new technologies maintained by global consulting firm Gartner.

But in the twilight days of a beleaguered year, robotaxis appear on more stable footing. One sign of at least incremental progress: a proliferation of operations that involved no human safety backups.

In mid-October, Waymo expanded the scope of its rider-only operations. In a matter of days, Cruise received a permit from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to go driverless, and then it did so in November. Early this month in China, AutoX began rider-only service in Shenzhen, and Baidu did so in Beijing. Russian tech company Yandex has nobody behind the wheel in its Ann Arbor, Mich., pilot project, and Voyage accomplished the milestone in December. Motional received a permit from Nevada authorities to kick-start driverless testing.

While these deployments are small, and experts caution significant progress is still needed on AV technology to make widespread use a reality, they signal a milepost in the industry's march toward a self-driving future.
Still, industry readiness is only part of the equation.

Consumers and regulators aren't yet along for the ride, and a multitude of questions on topics from infrastructure to liability to ethics remains unresolved. If robotaxis are progressing, the journey ahead remains complicated.

"Society is not ready," said Robbie Diamond, CEO and founder of Securing America's Future Energy, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit that advocates for deployment of transportation technology. "The regulatory environment is not at all ready. Neither is the liability environment. But we have to get ahead of it. ... We should be moving at the speed of technology with the right guideposts in place. But we aren't really doing that."

The industry has long complained about a patchwork of state-by-state laws governing self-driving vehicles that hinders deployments over the long term, and in 2020, efforts to address autonomous driving in Congress once again stalled.

But the regulatory environment is starting to thaw. In November, NHTSA published an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, the first step in what's likely a yearslong process to establish a framework for setting safety benchmarks for self-driving performance and competence.

Further, in November, the California Public Utilities Commission authorized two new programs, one of which allows mobility operators to charge for rides in driverless vehicles.

Consumer acceptance of driverless technology may be a more arduous challenge. Just 12 percent of respondents to a consumer survey conducted by AAA this year said they'd feel safe riding in a car that drives itself.

Marjory Blumenthal, senior policy researcher at RAND Corp., suggests the deployments underway will have a cascading effect on public opinion.

"We're getting there," she said. "The more people have actual exposure, the more comfortable they are. I'll say that surveys of public opinion that ask, 'How do you feel about AVs?' are often addressed by people who never have seen one in action. It means a lot to us to hear from people in local governments talking about the impact on residents who are actually seeing these deployments take place."

If consumers benefit from a closer glance at the underlying technology, one is also warranted on the technology itself and its fall into the Trough of Disillusionment on Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Connected Vehicles and Smart Mobility" report published in August.

Mike Ramsey, senior research director at Gartner, counters what he says is a popular misconception about that position. It's not an indication of fundamental weakness — it's a necessary pit stop on a curve that every emerging technology must follow. A milepost.

"Autonomy for people instead of cargo is kind of on the outs," he said in August. "It has nowhere near the energy than when we were at Peak Hype. That said, look at Waymo actually having real autonomous vehicles in operation. We're pretty darn close."

Another Gartner graph charts engineering progress on new technologies. An interesting quirk: When technologies reach the trough, Ramsey says, that's generally when the most engineering progress is being made. In that sense, AVs' arrival in the trough, he says, is "super exciting."

Given all that transpired in the months following the report's publication, those are words that ring prescient.