This is the year when promises of self-driving prowess began to come due, and when companies began to scramble to meet them, or seem to.
In November, Waymo’s pilot ride-hailing service in Arizona put the safety driver in the back seat, more or less fulfilling the promise of the company’s founding spirit, Alphabet’s Sergei Brin, who’d said true self-driving cars would hit the roads by 2017.
Earlier, Audi proclaimed that its soon-to-be-released A8 would offer Level 3 autonomy, meaning that it would let the person behind the wheel read the paper or sightsee, provided that he be prepared to take back the wheel after a warning. Cadillac—more careful with its terminology—characterized its new Cruise technology as Level 2; it allows the driver to keep hands off the wheel but uses internal cameras to ensure that he pays attention to the road.
