In march of 2018 when life was somewhat different to recent times amid the virus and such it was a breakthrough of driverless cars describing when they will be introduced which was 2020 . YES 2020 was the year driverless cars were supposed to go mainstream!
But what really happened?
Well their isn't a definitive answer however simulation of this is still taking place as we can predict however not make sure the future of driverless cars is safe for the people.
What’s the delay?
When the company was asked: “What do you see as the current timeline to get Waylom-directed vehicles widely released for autonomous operation in the northern U.S. and Canada maybe even England in the next few years.
It wouldn’t specify a timeline and instead said: “We’ll continue to learn, advance this offering, and make it available to more and more riders across both our early rider program and public service over time… From our decade of experience, we’ve learned that this technology will come to the world step by step, not in a flip the switch moment or at a definitive time.
“We think our gradual approach to introducing self-driving technology to the world is the safest and most responsible way to go.”
There are good reasons why the company might be reluctant to specify. Along with causing disappointment because the future may not be coming as quickly as we had hoped, the answer to that question has a direct bearing on the company’s market valuation.
How COVID 19 has affected it?
Well as we know Covid 19 has affected the economy more than anything else so it wouldn't be a smart move in the world of business as nobody would be buying driverless cars due to it becoming a depreciating asset. Before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, Voyage had already paused its consumer operations, which primarily serve seniors in retirement communities.
“We did that because, obviously, seniors are disproportionately impacted by this and it would be horrific for Voyage to be patient zero in the retirement community and this is something we were operating out of an abundance of caution,” says Cameron. “So we paused our operations from a consumer service perspective very early and we won’t open those up for quite some time. It’s tough to say at what particular point because it seems like the consensus is it will be a progressive opening up of the economy, meaning some populations will be fine to go back to work and there will be some that are significantly impacted, like seniors, that are effectively locked down for an extended period of time. So we’re not in a rush to get that back up and running until we hear from the community itself that it’s OK to do that.”
Despite the hiatus in operations, Voyage is still running simulations and using a variety of automated testing tools to determine if it is making progress. For example, Voyage uses automation to test for regressions in perception. A challenge in perception is false positives and false negatives — that is, seeing something that isn’t there or not seeing something that is there, Cameron explains.
“And we have this pretty cool tool that enables us to monitor with each perception release if we are seeing regressions based on perception performance in the past,” he says. “We don’t need to be there in the real world to see that. We can just tell instantaneously if that is the case.”
When do you think Driverless cars will be introduced to the public?
