The Post-Driverless World

On November 2nd 2019, I sent an email to the Voyage team on why we now live in a post-driverless world.

I sent this email because I couldn’t help but feel we should note the significance of an incredible moment: right now — this very moment — there are vehicles on US roads driving members of the public without a human at the wheel! It bears comparison with the great transportation innovations through time: the birth of flight, rail, the automobile, or the first crossing of the oceans.

Fully self-driving has been a dream that tens of thousands of ambitious engineers have been attempting to realize for almost four decades: from the Prometheus project in 1986, to ALVINN in 1989, to the DARPA Grand Challenges of 2004–2007 and beyond. It’s finally happened. This moment is an inflection point not only in the history of the self-driving car industry, but like flight and automobiles before it, an inflection point in the history of humanity’s progress.

Waymo’s Kitty Hawk Moment

In 2017, Waymo demonstrated their fully driverless capabilities. Ever since, fully driverless rides appear to have been limited and passengers have been held to non-disclosure agreements. Two recent events have demonstrated that Waymo’s fully self-driving technology is now ready to scale, and that the industry just had its Kitty Hawk moment.

First, Waymo announced to passengers that they are expanding fully driverless operations. Second, reflecting the confidence in their technology, Waymo invited a journalist, Ed Niedermeyer, to come along for a fully driverless ride. The vehicle Ed summoned drove at speeds up to 45MPH, handling complicated traffic maneuvers like unprotected left turns, all without a human in the front seat.

It is no surprise that Waymo is the first to achieve the historic feat of operating truly driverless cars. Waymo, formerly known as the Google Self-Driving Car project, was established in 2009. This was at least four years before any other self-driving program. Since then, the project has been a well-funded focus for Google. You have to admire Google’s vision and commitment, investing in their self-driving program for a decade. I know many companies would have given up. Not Google.

Ed chronicled this momentous moment in a piece for TechCrunch:

I’ve been riding in autonomous vehicles on public roads since late 2016. All of those rides had human safety drivers behind the wheel. Seeing an empty driver’s seat at 45 miles per hour, or a steering wheel spinning in empty space as it navigates suburban traffic, feels inescapably surreal. The sensation is akin to one of those dreams where everything is the picture of normalcy except for that one detail — the clock with a human face or the cat dressed in boots and walking with a cane.

Other than that niggling feeling that I might wake up at any moment, my 10-minute ride from a park to a coffee shop was very much like any other ride in a “self-driving” car. There were moments where the self-driving system’s driving impressed, like the way it caught an unprotected left turn just as the traffic signal turned yellow or how its acceleration matched surrounding traffic. The vehicle seemed to even have mastered the more human-like driving skill of crawling forward at a stop sign to signal its intent.

Only a few typical quirks, like moments of overly cautious traffic spacing and overactive path planning, betrayed the fact that a computer was in control. A more typical rider, specifically one who doesn’t regularly practice their version of the driving Turing Test, might not have even noticed them.

What Happens Now?

Now that the first truly driverless vehicles are on the road, bit by bit, 3 trillion miles of human driving will now transition to autonomous. Bit by bit, those who could not afford transportation will now be able to, and those who could not drive will now have a reliable way to move. Most importantly, bit by bit, 1.2 million deaths per year will begin to be prevented. The revolution begins in the suburbs of Phoenix, but it won’t be long until the revolution arrives within our communities, towns, cities, and highways. It’s a matter of where, not when, for the roll-out of fully self-driving vehicles.

The revolution won’t be limited to moving people. It will fundamentally impact economies all over the globe. Self-driving will impact commerce with autonomous delivery. It will impact freight with long-haul trucking. It will impact groceries, restaurants, entertainment, health-care, and much more. Self-driving technology will shape the world more dramatically than we can possibly predict today.

Staying the Course

The roll-out of self-driving vehicles will continue to feel slow. Reminiscent of another enabling technology, electricity took 30 years to roll-out to 70% of US households. Self-driving technology will be available to you only when it’s ready. But, even though you may not have access to self-driving vehicles today, it does not mean that the roll-out isn’t happening.

The roll-out of self-driving vehicles will continue to be controversial. Automation is a divisive topic, as demonstrated by US Presidential candidates making it a key focus of the 2020 election cycle. Like all significant transitions, there will be some that resist the roll-out of self-driving technology over the coming decades. This is a natural cycle that will one day pass, as self-driving technology moves from theoretical potential to proven benefit. Once we, the industry, prove we can prevent accidents, reduce costs, and increase access to transportation to those who don’t have it, the resistance will fall. Like seat-belts and airbags before it, fully self-driving technology is here to stay.

There will be stumbles along the way. Rightfully so, there will be increased media and regulatory scrutiny involving every incident or accident involving a self-driving vehicle. With a camera in every pocket, videos of any imperfection within this technology will be shared around the world in an instant. This is only to be expected for such a radical shift, and I know at Voyage we will embrace and thrive under this pressure. There will likely be companies who abuse their responsibility to deploy this technology responsibly, making short-term decisions that may compromise safety. As an industry, we must band together to reject this behavior.

Even with the coming storms, we must stay the course. Fully self-driving technology is right. Humans are not the right solution for driving multi-ton steel boxes. We get drunk, tired, angry, and distracted. Although there is an ever-increasing amount of safety technology integrated within modern vehicles today, the US road fatality rate is not decreasing with enough substance. I have a 5-year old daughter. No one should ever have to fear if their loved ones will return safely from a trip to dance class, yet today car crashes are the leading cause of death for US children. Fully self-driving technology is necessary.

The Post-Driverless Landscape

As I mentioned in my email to the Voyage team, the CA DMV has granted 64 permits to various self-driving car projects.

The transition to a post-driverless world is a natural filter for those 64 self-driving car projects. The projects which add tremendous value to the roll-out of self-driving technology, and aren’t many years away from achieving fully driverless, will survive and thrive in a post-driverless world. The projects which do not add anything unique to the roll-out, or have a me-too technology, will gradually disappear. I predict that fewer than 20% of the 64 programs will survive in this post-driverless world.

The most immediate impact of this filtering will be on fundraising, which will look very different in a post-driverless world. Waymo has now proven that this technology can be built, which will give venture capitalists faith that there is light at the end of the tunnel. However, now that we are at the dawn of commercialized self-driving technology, fundraising will no longer be driven by speculative R&D and pedigree of talent (the status quo for a decade), but by proven operational and technological capabilities to generate driverless revenue with healthy unit economics. Moving from R&D to commercialization is a natural transition many industries have gone through, and one we have been prepared for at Voyage since we founded the company three years ago.

Driverless is Here

Congratulations to Waymo for achieving what many thought to be impossible. Now that we know that a crucial subset of the self-driving problem can be solved, it’s clear that Waymo will not be alone in this endeavor for long. There are a number of self-driving startups (including Voyage) on the cusp of driverless operations which are solving meaningful problems.

Even with the inevitable bumps in the road, the coming years will be a blur of relentless forward progress. The driverless revolution is finally beginning!