Steve Wozniak: No Self-Driving Cars in My Lifetime

LAS VEGAS — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak believes in technology. But that doesn’t extend to believing autonomous driving is happening soon. Wozniak, now 69, says autonomous cars that don’t need a backup driver on board probably won’t happen “in my lifetime.” One culprit: Artificial intelligence probably isn’t intelligent or flexible enough to be better than even the worst drivers.

Wozniak was a keynote speaker at the first J.D. Power Auto Revolution conference, which the company set up to “fuel innovation and drive an auto revolution,” with a bit less emphasis on the how-to of selling and marketing cars than some other Power programs.

Research cited at the conference said consumers see many forms of self-driving happening in eight to nine years, while experts see a spread of roughly five to 15 years, with the most distant goal being full autonomy where the driver doesn’t need to be always ready to take over for the car. One takeaway might be that consumers just have no idea how close we are to full self-driving and make the same timeframe guess no matter what level of automation is being considered, where technologists and engineers see some autonomy being harder than other types.

Wozniak has been an early adopter of hybrids including the Toyota Prius, Tesla EVs, and more recently the Chevrolet Bolt EV. Woz said he loves the Bolt EV for driving around town, but it lacks the charging infrastructure for long trips. In comparison, Tesla’s Supercharger infrastructure has let him take multi-day family trips from California to national parks in the Rockies.

But as a long-time user of Teslas, he’s been disappointed by overblown claims for self-driving that Tesla couldn’t back up. “They sucked me in,” Wozniak said. He also pointed to Tesla initially offering free charging, then backing away. While home-charging (240 volts) costs him about one-third the cost of driving a gasoline-fueled car, the surcharges now at Tesla and public charging stations bring EV operating costs closer to what gas costs.

Regardless, Tesla is years ahead of other automakers, in Wozniak’s opinion. He believes Cadillac’s Super Cruise technology is good as well. General Motors prepared for Super Cruise by lidar-mapping every major limited-access highway in the US and Canada, allowing hands-off driving now on almost 200,000 miles of roadway.

Like many people, Woz sees limited access highways being the place where self-driving succeeds first. There are too many variables on local roads, he says, although he knows Aptiv self-driving technology has been able to negotiate Las Vegas Boulevard but not the nearby interstate. Other speakers at Auto Revolution echoed the idea that self-driving isn’t going to be as easy as believed five years ago.

Wozniak said,

I was totally sure we were going to have autonomous cars that would just go anywhere there is … and be able to do everything like a human does. And after enough time of seeing supposedly the next attempt that was really going to get us there, with Tesla, a lot of Tesla owners got disenfranchised, after a while saying, ‘[Look] how many mistakes [the car] makes. The dumbest human in the world would know how to do this, handle this.
There are too many unexpected things, it might even be a tire lying in the road in front of you, [it doesn’t know to] steer around it, center my car, or what, and a human would do this easily. I don’t see Tesla possibly doing that. There are so many many navigation system [errors] and cars run on navigation systems.
What we’ve done is mislead the public into thinking that this is going to be like a human brain, able to figure out new things, say, ‘I haven’t see this before but I know … here’s how to handle it.’ A human can do that easily.
We’ve got to have this machine learning, artificial intelligence we call it. It’s not really intelligent. AI is ‘alien influenza.’

Not all is gloomy. Wozniak likes the improvements in voice recognition systems in cars, saying, “I want them to become more and more like a human listening to me. Everything I do in a car I’d like to do by voice.”

Until self-driving becomes reality, the ubiquity of ride-hailing services has given people a form of autonomy. Once he landed in Vegas, “I took a Lyft.”

Wozniak, at a journalist roundtable at the Auto Revolution conference, was asked for the inside scoop on Project Titan, Apple’s reportedly on-again, off-again program to build an entire car. Woz said these days he’s an Apple employee in name only and Apple is a need-to-know company, so he doesn’t know. He adds, “I think there is still an Apple car program.”

Also unclear is if Apple still wants to build the entire car or provide an operating system and intelligence for many of the interactions between the car and drivers/passengers. Newcomers to the car biz, including Tesla, have found it’s not easy to make a factory run smoothly in just a few years. Years back, Tesla had sought out name automakers, including Daimler (Mercedes-Benz) and BMW, either as partners or as a contract manufacturer. That never came to fruition amid friction over who’d be calling the shots, Apple or the automaker, especially when all sides have big egos coming into an alliance.

Steve Wozniak: No Self-Driving Cars in My Lifetime

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