Tesla’s robo-taxi rush

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, made bold predictions last Monday about the automaker’s autonomous driving abilities: that Tesla would offer fully autonomous driving by the middle of 2020, and run a fleet of robo-taxis in the United States by the end of the same year. He also said the vehicles would theoretically be able to drive anywhere, in all weather conditions.

Mr. Musk is in a rush. The rest of the world may not comply. Here’s why.

First: the driving. “It’s a really hard problem,” said Ingmar Posner, an associate professor of information engineering at Oxford University and a co-founder of the university’s autonomous-driving spinoff, Oxbotica. He, like many other commentators, is skeptical of Tesla’s ability to offer full autonomy so quickly, and said driving on unseen roads in all weathers remained a big challenge for autonomous vehicles.

Second: society. Jack Stilgoe, a senior lecturer at University College London specializing in the governance of emerging technologies, pointed out that adoption could be hampered by concerns over unintended consequences of robo-taxis. The public also needs to be convinced that it wants to use the vehicles, and road users must learn how to interact with them. Then there are infrastructure and connectivity to build out. This all takes time.

Finally: regulation. Mr. Musk conceded that his cars wouldn’t receive universal regulatory approval initially. But Mark Fagan, a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, says Mr. Musk’s chutzpah — particularly the claim that future Teslas may allow drivers to dial up driving aggression to a point where there is a “slight chance of a fender bender” — could backfire. “If I were a regulator, I would find that troubling,” Mr. Fagan said. “I’d be burning the midnight oil to put a piece of regulation in place to protect the citizenry.”

Chris Urmson, previously the technical lead on Google’s self-driving car effort and now chief executive of the autonomous car start-up Aurora, recently told The Verge that we would “see small-scale deployments in the next five years, and then it’s going to phase in over the next 30 to 50 years.”

Those time scales would allow autonomous cars to be deployed safely and sustainably. But, Mr. Stilgoe said, “that’s inconvenient for technology developers who want an event horizon of years, not decades.”

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