Autonomous vehicles have long been pitched as the new dawn of transportation and the world's biggest tech companies have poured billions of dollars into being ready.
Cruise, a unit of General Motors, in June was the first to get approval to carry paying passengers in robo-taxis in San Francisco, a hilly city with more complicated traffic patterns, but initially only at night and within a limited zone. For experts, the software will be perfected over time and the ubiquity of driverless cars is only a matter of time.
US auto giant Ford decided in October to sell its stakes in the autonomous driving company Argo AI, saying it preferred to prioritise less ambitious technologies.Developing a driverless car is"a massive cost, without a quick path to profitability," said Jordan Greene, co-founder of the company AEye, which markets a sensor allowing vehicles to better perceive their environment.
For Greene, whose company will be present at CES, a number of potential markets will emerge, including for software that motorists remotely update regularly for a fee, much like operating systems for PCs or smartphones. For Marco Kollmeier, the venture's CEO, failures in the field"are totally overstated" with too much media attention given to the slightest self-driving mishap of a Tesla.