Washington Post – Self-driving-car executives excited for Trump (and Musk) to take the wheel

See original article by Ian Duncan at the Washington Post

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Despite crashes and continued public fear, robotic vehicles are stars at an annual Las Vegas tech show.

LAS VEGAS — After years of hype and overpromises the message from tech industry leaders on the eve of Donald Trump’s return to the White House was clear this week: The robot drivers have arrived.

As tens of thousands of nerdsand assorted gearheads gathered to marvel at new technology at the annual CES show, huge billboard screens over the Las Vegas Strip heralded the recent deployment of Zoox’s strange-looking robotaxi — which doesn’t have a steering wheel or any other normal controls — proclaiming, “It’s not a car.”

On the conference stage, the co-founder of the autonomous trucking firm Aurora boasted of performance that was “superhuman.” Tekedra Mawakana, a co-chief executive of Waymo, said the company’s driverless taxi service was providing 150,000 rides a week by the end of last year, proof that the technology “definitely became real.”

With Trump’s inauguration approaching — and with Tesla chief executive Elon Musk at his side and betting his own company’s future on its robotaxi — the industry’s optimism also extends to Washington. Executives viewed officials in Trump’s first term as friendly. Now, with vehicles on the road carrying paying customers, the executives are excited by the prospect of Republicans using their new power to set standards that will help them expand from a handful of cities to communities across the nation.

The Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association, a trade group, this week called for creating common standards, an effort to build public confidence by setting a baseline for safety. It also proposed eliminating safety rules that require steering wheels and pedals in self-driving cars.

But while the push to replace human drivers is being sold on the promise that the robots will be far safer, the public remains deeply skeptical that autonomous vehicles can themselves be trusted. High-profile crashes — including a woman dragged by a Cruise autonomous vehicle in San Francisco — along with a string of less serious incidents have shaken faith in the industry as a whole.

A YouGov poll from late last year found that while attitudes had warmed slightly toward driverless cars since a 2023 survey, a majority of Americans said they would still feel unsafe riding in a driverless car or as a driver or pedestrian in a city where they operated and oppose a robotaxi service being launched in their community.

Stories of glitchy behavior are common, and federal officials have opened multiple safety investigations in recent years after crashes and other safety incidents. One probe targets Waymo after officials logged more than two dozen safety incidents that included ramming a gate and driving on the wrong side of the road. Even as it plans to launch its own autonomous vehicle, Tesla has faced scrutiny over its less-sophisticated driver assistance systems, including a new federal investigation this week into a feature designed to summon a vehicle to its driver.

The industry has not been immune to the consequences of safety lapses. In December, General Motors said it was shutting down its Cruise autonomous driving unit, after the company struggled to recover following the dragging incident.

A report by a panel of federal advisers issued this week underscored the gap between the hype and the reality, saying autonomous vehicles have driven a relatively “minuscule” number of miles under conditions that don’t necessarily reflect the country as a whole, making it all but impossible to draw broad conclusions about safety.

Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolinawho served on the panel, said regulators need much better data to understand how autonomous vehicles stack up against one another and with human drivers.

“We have really no idea what’s happening on our roads,” Smith said.

There’s some disagreement even within the industry on what standard the vehicles should be held to. Volvo Group chief executive Martin Lundstedttouted autonomous technology as part of his company’s mission to make its heavy trucks “100 percent safe.”

“If you don’t strive for perfection in an area like safety, what target should you have?” Lundstedt said in an interview. His company, which is separate from Volvo Cars, has teamed up with Aurora to run trucks in Texas that have been carrying freight with safety drivers on board.

Mawakana, in an interview on a dinner stage,pointed to recent analyses of her company’s performance suggesting that its system was at least 80 percent safer than human drivers by some measures.

“It’s not that they’re going to be perfect,” she said. “It’s that they’re going to be so much safer.”

Executives at the companies developing the robotic brains for autonomous vehicles recognize that industry has a history of overpromising, with predictions a decade ago that human drivers would rapidly be replaced. Some sought this week to tamp down expectations, saying that the transition will be slow but steady as autonomous vehicles take on more and more driving jobs. Others acknowledged that the industry will only succeed if it has the trust of the public.

“We believe we have to earn the right to do what we’re doing,” said Ron Thaniel, a government relations executive at Zoox. (Zoox is a subsidiary of Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post.)

But the excitement around the technology at the conference was clear. CES attracts tens of thousands of industry attendees, with thousands of companies exhibiting their latest gadgets in convention halls and hotels across Las Vegas. The event was once known primarily for consumer products like big TVs, but the auto industry has had a growing presence as technology has been ever more deeply embedded in modern vehicles.

Jensen Huang, a founder of the chipmaker Nvidia, said in a speech early in the event that he expects autonomous driving to be the first multitrillion-dollar robotics industry.

“One hundred million cars built each year, a billion cars, vehicles on the road all over the world, a trillion miles that are driven around the world each year, that’s all going to be either highly autonomous or fully autonomous,” Huang said.

At the Las Vegas Convention Center, a sprawling campus that is the heart of CES, an entire wing was devoted to the future of cars. Workers flitted around with feather dusters and cloths to ensure artfully lit cars, trucks, purpose-built taxis and delivery robots always looked their shiniest. Interactive displays sought to illustrate how the combination of cameras, radars and lasers that poke out of the vehicles help their computerized brains understand the world around them.

People gathered to snap photos and crowded knee-to-knee into futuristic vehicles with facing sets of seats. (What happens if the passenger before you had thrown up, one woman mused after stepping out of Zoox’s robotaxi.)

It’s how the vehicles perform on the road that matters, but the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the nation’s leading car safety agency, has struggled to develop an approach to autonomous vehicles. It does not have the power to review their design before they hit the roads. Instead, regulators have relied on their power to investigate potential safety flaws after they learn about crashes or other incidents.

In December, the Biden administration released a proposal that would allow developers to partner with the federal government to share data and undergo more stringent oversight, in exchange for the opportunity to deploy large numbers of next-generation vehicles without features needed by human drivers like steering wheels and pedals.

It is not clear precisely what approach a new team of officials might take. Musk, who is leading the “Department of Government Efficiency,” an outside panel aiming to slash the federal government, has said he would like to use his influence to push a federal framework for the approval of self-driving vehicles.

Todd Inman, a Republican member of the National Transportation Safety Board and a senior transportation official during Trump’s first term, told a small group of industry figures Wednesday that there was now an opportunity to educate Trump’s team and build a fresh case for how autonomous vehicles can boost safety.

“We are pulling for you,” Inman said. “So I hope you’re successful.”

The Biden administration recently rejected a request that autonomous trucks be allowed to use warning beacons in an emergency, rather than having a person get out and place warning triangles on the road, saying there wasn’t enough evidence that the beacons would be safe enough. The decision by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration makes if far more complicated for the companies to operate without anyone aboard their trucks.

Don Burnette, the founder of the autonomous trucking company Kodiak, said the decision was a problem for the industry but one that could readily be resolved as a new team takes over the truck safety agency under Trump and companies ask for a do-over.

“We’ll go back and we’ll reapply to the new administration,” Burnette said. “We’ll have conversations about this, so I don’t think this is a huge stumbling block.”

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See original article by Ian Duncan at the Washington Post