Learn more

The autonomous vehicle industry has made lots of cheery projections: Robocars will increase efficiency and independence and greatly reduce traffic deaths, which occurred at the rate of about 100 a day for the past three years nationwide. But to deliver on those promises, the cars must work. Our reporting shows the technology remains riddled with problems.

There are flaws in how well cars can “see” and “hear,” and how smoothly they can filter conflicting information from different sensors and systems. But the biggest obstacle is that the vehicles struggle to predict how other drivers and pedestrians will behave among the fluid dynamics of daily traffic.

Like the kangaroo problem in Australia, new challenges pop up all the time. Street sweepers impose their own right-of-way, stopping to make giant circles and brush all four corners of an intersection no matter the traffic light. FedEx drivers jump on their carts and ride them like skateboards through blocked traffic.

What confounds the vehicles also complicates efforts to develop uniform standards among companies and establish regulations for safety, insurance rates, liability and traffic laws. For now, the Transportation Department, under Secretary Elaine Chao, is taking a hands-off approach on test programs.

That lack of federal regulation could “lead to disaster,” said Adam Scow, a senior advocate for Consumer Watchdog, a progressive nonprofit group in California.

“Safety and lives are at stake,” he said. “This is a no-brainer.”

While more than 40 states have issued some form of legislation or executive action related to self-driving cars since 2017, the regulations vary widely.

Some industry leaders now caution it may be decades before fully self-driving vehicles are on the road.

Gill Pratt, the head of the Toyota Research Institute, said in a speech earlier this year that it’s time to focus on explaining how hard it is to make a self-driving car work.

“How do we train a machine,” he asked, “about the social ballet required to navigate through an ever-changing environment as well as, or better than, a human driver?”

Credits

Methodology

To construct this interactive graphic story and simulate the challenges the industry faces developing autonomous cars, The Washington Post reviewed voluntary reports from AutoX, GM Cruise, Nvidia, Uber, Waymo, Nuro and other self-driving vehicle companies that describe their autonomous technology and safety standards; autonomous car research from the Congressional Research Service and the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute; and video lectures on self-driving technology.

The Post also reviewed more than a thousand pages of autonomous vehicle disengagement reports, filed to the California Department of Motor Vehicles from 2015 to 2018, as well as crash reports involving self-driving cars from the National Transportation Safety Board and guidelines on automated vehicles from the Transportation Department.

The Post interviewed individuals from autonomous vehicles companies, academics and other experts in the industry. The Post also participated in self-driving car tests in Chandler, Ariz., and San Jose, Calif. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao’s estimate on the number of autonomous vehicles in the United States came from her speech at an Uber Elevate Summit event earlier this year.

While autonomous vehicle makes and models, and the level of technological advancement, vary by company, the 3-D model of the car depicted in this graphic is based on a generic, four-door compact minivan and doesn’t represent a specific company’s vehicle. The representation comparing sensor capabilities with human vision is based on research from the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. The 3-D world doesn’t represent an exact location within the world. However, a one-way street to the airport — one that is unhindered by traffic jams, broken-down kangaroo trucks and other inconveniences — would be nice.

Related stories