Not so long ago it felt like we were on the cusp of a transport revolution, as the promise of autonomous vehicles took hold. “You can count on one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this,” said wildly optimistic Google co-founder Sergey Brin in 2014, who after making his billions created the company’s X-Lab, which later spun out Waymo, to research autonomous technology.
And, of course, there was Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In 2015 he confidently predicted that within two years “full autonomy” would be achieved, and then a year later during a TED talk predicted that by the end of 2017, one of his company’s cars would be capable of driving across the United States without the driver once having to touch the steering wheel.
Look out of the window, however, and you’ll probably be there an awfully long time waiting for a self-driving car to pass by. The hyperbole has subsided
