Is Google Behind? Ride in an Uber, a Volvo, Soon a Ford

If you follow driverless news each day, you already know that Google invented something for its software that alerts its self-driving cute cars to yield to emergency vehicles. Here's a random article. There's also Volvo, which promoted with fanfare its assembly line roll-out of its driverless cars. Swedish drivers will be testing those. New York drivers would be better, but I say go for the lunatics on this one.

Back to Google: Is it only me who thinks this, someone who does not have a clue how to develop the simplest software and never looks under the hood of a car, or are the AI (artificial intelligence) folks are already past this one-small-situation-one-bandaid approach to driverless software? That's the whole point of AI isn't it? You teach it through accumulated experience. By way of analogy, by the time your kid is learning to drive, he or she does not need to be taught specifically what to do in every little situation. Part of what we want from driverless is what we want from humans - judgment in unusual circumstances. We also want the capacity to pay close attention in endlessly boring situations, something humans are not good at.

Where's the Google ride?

So I ask if Google has slipped? Why weren't they before Uber or all of these transit and taxipod pilots in introducing their cute pod cars to the general public? Has Google become a prudent, risk-averse, large, conventional corporation where innovation gets lip service but not real support? I don't know. I'd have to ask the 20-somethings I know who work there. 

Speaking of Uber, okay, yes, I'll be the 50th or 100th site to post one of the videos of giddy journalists who trekked to Pittsburgh taking a driverless Uber ride. Well, with a driver and an engineer and lots of explaining. I'm sure there's a million of these videos already. Here's the one from Wired. It's cute, but not on youtube.

Relax in the self-driving Uber backseat

Here's a six-minute video from the PBS NewsHour. (Yes, even years later, I still think of the show as the MacNeil-Lehrer Report. MacNeil co-wrote an entertaining history of the English language, by the way. Quite readable. There's a companion series that aired on, where else, PBS.)

Ford is there, but more prudent?

Ford is testing and showing off driverless rides to journalists and using testing grounds. 

Already with ride hailing (Uber, Lyft, etc.), micro-transit (Chariot, Brid), shared rides (UberPool, LyftLine, Via, Split), and even bikeshare, our larger cities beyond the five boroughs are changing into places where one does not need a car, or where going car-lite is entirely feasible.

But outside of the relatively few places where transit works well - usually with rail, a few with BRT (bus rapid transit) - will the driverless revolution be the last nail in the coffin for transit viability in places large and small where there is, using a technical term here, crappy transit? Ford thinks so; the company is buying Chariot, a San Francisco micro-transit operation.