Another False Dawn?
On the surface, the news sounds impressive. Qualcomm and BMW are rolling out a new autonomous driving system, the Snapdragon Ride Pilot. The clever bit, they say, is that they plan to license this technology to other car manufacturers. The idea is to create a standard, an off-the-shelf solution that could get more of these semi-autonomous cars on the road, faster. It sounds logical, a bit like how most computers ended up running the same handful of operating systems.
To me, however, this feels less like a revolution and more like a very sensible, but very slow, evolution. Creating a standard is one thing. Getting a dozen fiercely competitive, ego-driven car companies to agree on it is another entirely. And that’s before we even touch the real roadblocks, the tangled mess of global regulations and the simple fact that most people are, quite reasonably, terrified of handing control over to a computer.