The Self-Driving Car Promise Is Going Nowhere

Six years after companies started offering rides in what they’ve called autonomous cars and almost 20 years after the first self-driving demos, it’s rare to encounter an actual robo-taxi in the wild.

If you are lucky enough to spot one, it’d likely be in the Sun Belt, because they still can’t handle weather patterns trickier than Partly Cloudy. State-of-the-art robot cars also struggle with construction, animals, traffic cones, crossing guards, and what the industry calls “unprotected left turns,” which most of us would call “left turns.”

This, it seems, is the best the field can do after investors have bet something like $100 billion, according to a McKinsey & Co. report. While the industry’s biggest names continue to project optimism, the emerging consensus is that the world of robo-taxis isn’t just around the next unprotected left—that we might have to wait decades longer, or an eternity.