Google's Waymo Risks Repeating Silicon Valley's Most Famous Blunder (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Everyone in Silicon Valley knows the story of Xerox inventing the modern personal computer in the 1970s and then failing to commercialize it effectively. Yet one of Silicon Valley's most successful companies, Google's Alphabet, appears to be repeating Xerox's mistake with its self-driving car program. Xerox launched its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970. By 1975, its researchers had invented a personal computer with a graphical user interface that was almost a decade ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the commercial version of this technology wasn't released until 1981 and proved to be an expensive flop. Two much younger companies -- Apple and Microsoft -- co-opted many of Xerox's ideas and wound up dominating the industry.

Google's self-driving car program, created in 2009, appears to be on a similar trajectory. By October 2015, Google was confident enough in its technology to put a blind man into one of its cars for a solo ride in Austin, Texas. But much like Xerox 40 years earlier, Google has struggled to bring its technology to market. The project was rechristened Waymo in 2016, and Waymo was supposed to launch a commercial driverless service by the end of 2018. But the service Waymo launched in December was not driverless and barely commercial. It had a safety driver in every vehicle, and it has only been made available to a few hundred customers.

Comments

Re:It doesn't always work that way.

[Penguinisto]

It's not necessarily the timing but a life safety issue. This needs government regulation and the governments are wary as are the insurance providers. Until someone can demonstrate that they cars won't cause accidents...

Well, until someone can demonstrate that self-driving cars operate accident-free at the same or better rate than human drivers. That's going to take a bit of time to gather data on and prove.

What happens when one kills someone like the Uber in Arizona? Is it the driver's fault? The Owners? The Software provider? The Car company? The Sensor company? Absolutely none of this has been decided.

What happens when a car you let your girlfriend borrow gets in a hit-and-run thanks to her actions? The cops chase the plate and as the owner, you're on-deck for liability first and foremost. Even if they arrest her (after you sufficiently prove that you weren't in the car at the time), the victim is still going to chase you and your insurance policy as the liable party.

I figure self-driving cars would work the same - the owner and/or the owner's insurance policy is financially liable no matter who is in it at the time. Whether or not you (as the owner) decide to chase the manufacturer in a lawsuit becomes your problem - same as whether or not the manufacturer chases the part(s) vendor(s) to recoup its costs.