– ‘Does the car choose?’ –
Baidu, meanwhile, says it will launch self-driving buses by 2018, which will operate on fixed routes in select cities in China.
Like Google, the Internet giant already owns detailed roadmaps and has experience in electronic security, and a company spokeswoman told AFP it had had “very positive feedback” from the government.
But analysts are more cautious, predicting slow-moving autonomous vehicles will not appear in towns until at least 2020.
Production costs were still too high to make a robot taxi fleet viable, BCG’s Mosquet said.
“There are still many questions to be resolved” before fully autonomous vehicles can be put into public use, said Jeremy Carlson, a senior analyst for IHS.
He pointed to “chaotic traffic situations” on roads shared with cyclists and pedestrians, and less-than-adequate infrastructure.
Technology will be the first to see solutions, he said, but that still left regulation and issues around liability and insurance to be addressed.
For some, there are moral dilemmas as well.
“If you have someone jumping out in front of an autonomous car, does the car have to choose between killing that person, or swerving and crashing and killing the passenger?” asked Robin Zhu, senior analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein.
“If your car could choose to kill you, would you get in it?”
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