Home from the honeymoon, the self-driving car industry faces reality

AT THE BLOCKBUSTER plenary sessions, the chairs stretched so far back that even the most youthful Silicon Valley college dropouts-turned VC hoovers had to squint to see the action up in front. A handful of large projection screens hung between the ballroom’s chandeliers, displaying loop-de-looping flow charts on vehicle safety systems, sensor alignments, liability law.

Home from the honeymoon.

But despite the best efforts of the downtown San Francisco Hilton’s air conditioners, the air shared by the attendees of this year’s Automated Vehicles Symposium was thick with secrets and doubt. Eight years after Google first showed its self-driving car to The New York Times, the autonomous vehicle industry is still trying to figure out how to talk about itself.

Read the Aarian Marshall story from Wired - “Home from the honeymoon, the self-driving car industry faces reality.”

(Allowing our focus to fall upon the self-driving car is a mistake of ghastly proportions for the car industry and the many industries that support it are energy-rich and encourage a way of life no longer possible if we are to respond in any positive sense to the changes humanity is bringing to the world’s weather systems.

Rather than the privately owned and operated individual car, or personal transport, we need to be planning for and using our innovative nature to develop an intricate and sophisticated public transport/transit system that answers all our needs for movement, both public and personal.

It can be done! Try to imagine what exists today from a world dominated by the horse and cart - Robert McLean)