The self-driving future is running late
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Where are all the self-driving cars we were promised? Hi there, everyone. It's Jeff, and this is Plain English for Thursday, March 20th, 2025. Plain English is where you can upgrade your English by listening to stories about current events and trending topics.

Each Monday and Thursday, we have a new story. And today's story is all about the self-driving cars that are not driving around our city streets anymore.

Weren't we supposed to have that by now? Remember all the enthusiasm of 5, 10 years ago that we wouldn't have to drive ourselves anymore? Whatever happened to that? We'll talk about why the self-driving future keeps getting pushed farther and farther out into the future.

Well, every Plain English episode has a number. This one is number 759. And the reason it has a number is so you can find the story online. You find it by the episode number. Now, why would you want to find it online? Let me count the reasons. You can read the transcript.

You can see translations of many of the words in this episode into nine languages built right into the transcript. You can take a quiz, do some exercises, and even practice talking about the main topic. All that is online at plainenglish.com for every episode, and you can find all the content for this episode at

at plainenglish.com slash 759, plainenglish.com slash 759. Before we start today's story, I'd just like to remind you that the podcast is just one part of how we can help you upgrade your English skills.

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Sound good? Go to plainenglish.com to start your free 14-day trial today. Now, let's jump into today's story. It's the year 2025, and to judge by the statements futurists were making just a few years ago, we should be living in a paradise of self-driving cars.

In 2012, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, said we'd have full self-driving cars by 2017. In 2016, Elon Musk said we'd have millions of self-driving cars by 2020. General Motors said it would have a fleet of self-driving taxis by

By 2019, it was a nice dream, right? We'd be productive, checking our emails and organizing our calendars as we rode to work. We'd stretch out and watch movies on longer car trips with the computer taking the wheel. Or check that, the car wouldn't even have a steering wheel.

So what happened to the self-driving future we were promised? It got delayed. Four forces have combined to delay the self-driving future. They are technological, financial, legal, and emotional. The biggest hurdle is the technology.

Cars equipped with advanced cameras and sensors can do a pretty good job in ideal conditions, but they still struggle with edge cases, unusual circumstances that humans can easily process but which can confound computers.

Early self-driving systems were programmed with detailed instructions on how to handle a vast array of situations, from children chasing a ball to erratic behavior by other drivers. But there are just too many individual scenarios to be programmed into a central computer,

So now the systems rely on machine learning to behave how a human would behave. And here Tesla has an advantage. The company can hoover up visual data from the cameras already installed in its millions of cars.

And so Tesla can analyze that data and learn from how human drivers react to all the real world situations they encounter. But even the best systems still require accurate data from the external environment.

And the cameras and sensors are still not as good as humans are at reading a situation. Fog and glare can render cameras useless. Snow can confuse some sensors. The flashing lights on emergency vehicles can trigger, and this is a real thing,

they can trigger a digital epileptic seizure. And this is all not to mention construction zones, ice on the roads, detours, potholes, and more. Technology aside, though, there are also real business hurdles to self-driving cars. The first question is, who should invest in self-driving cars?

All the software, sensors, and data processing costs money. Who exactly should make that investment? Traditional car makers tried their hand at developing self-driving technology, but many have given up.

Ford and Volkswagen shut down a joint effort in 2022 after they determined the path to commercialization. That means the path to making money was just too long and uncertain. General Motors has an entire autonomous driving unit called Cruise.

The unit had been focused on developing a fleet of robo-taxis, but the company pivoted in late 2024. Now, the cruise unit is working more on driver assistance systems.

Rideshare companies have invested in self-driving technology. Uber planned to transition to an all-autonomous service at some point in the future. But like traditional car makers, Uber needed to focus on making money in the near term.

So Uber, too, abandoned its dreams of developing self-driving cars. Very well. What about technology companies? One of the worst-kept secrets in Silicon Valley was that Apple was working on a car. But the company scrapped those plans immediately.

Alphabet is the company that owns Google, and Alphabet also has Waymo, which makes self-driving systems that can be installed in other cars. Waymo has the backing of Google's parent, so it's under less pressure to become profitable immediately.

Now, Waymo installs systems on other cars and then operates a taxi service with those cars. But this is still in the early experimental phase.

Tesla is also investing heavily in self-driving. Its vehicles already come with self-driving features, but if you listen to episode 435, you'll remember that I found Tesla's claims to be wildly exaggerated in my test drive, but still, Tesla continues to invest for a self-driving future.

So those are the business and technological challenges. There are also legal challenges. Anyone who wants to operate self-driving cars on public roadways needs a permit. In the U.S., those permits are given by individual states.

In Europe, self-driving cars are regulated at the EU and country level. Autonomous systems face a chicken-and-egg dilemma. To get better and safer, the systems need to learn from real-world miles driven on real roads. But they need to get safer before they're allowed on the road.

Some American states, like Arizona, have been friendly to self-driving vehicles. Germany, France, and the UK have allowed the most advanced testing in Europe. Singapore and Dubai are also relatively friendly to autonomous vehicles. But it's China that is leading the world toward a self-driving future.

The central government has outlined a roadmap to make the country a leader in artificial intelligence and fully driverless vehicles. Cities around China are competing to roll out pilot programs.

In Beijing, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, for example, local companies have received licenses to operate self-driving taxis. Some are allowed to operate without a human safety operator on board. Permission is only one part of the story. Another question mark is legal liability.

In a normal car accident, legal liability falls on the human driver at fault. That person, or more accurately, that person's insurance company, has to pay damages to anyone who is injured or whose property is damaged in the accident. But what if there is no human driver?

Who will be held financially responsible for property damage, injuries, or death? Would the carmaker be responsible for paying those damages? Or would it be the software developer? Or the operator of the taxi service if it's a third party like Waymo? There's a huge legal gray area.

And companies are wary about investing in self-driving cars today if there's a chance that their business will be wiped out by lawsuits later on. Now there's one other challenge to our blissful self-driving future.

And that challenge is our own emotions. Years of optimistic media coverage have raised the public's expectations about self-driving vehicles. But the real world has turned out to be quite different. Surveys consistently show a majority of people don't trust self-driving cars.

A survey from 2024 showed that only 9% of Americans were comfortable with the idea of a self-driving car, while two-thirds were afraid of autonomous vehicles. Can you blame them? A series of high-profile accidents has damaged public trust.

In one incident, a car with a human driver hit a pedestrian, but a self-driving car mistook the woman for an object and dragged her under the car for six meters.

Luckily, that woman survived. Not everyone has been so lucky. About 50 people have died in crashes where Tesla's autonomous modes were engaged. We humans are not perfect either. Over a million people die in road accidents around the world every year. But drivers are accustomed to human error.

Whether we think about it consciously or not, we accept the risk that we or another person will make a mistake on the road. What we have not yet come to accept is that a machine can be trusted with life and death decisions. I think one of the big dreams of self-driving cars is that individuals will not need to own a car in the future.

Personal transportation will just be a service you summon. And think about it. Hundreds of millions of people own a car, a personal car, a family car, and that vehicle might be in operation for two hours a day out of 24 hours.

And it costs a lot of money. And you have an asset getting less valuable every day just sitting there unused for 22 hours a day. So imagine you could just not need to own a car, not need to know how to drive, and still be able to get from one place to another.

That would shift a huge financial burden off the shoulders of individuals. But some company somewhere would have to own the cars, fill them up with gas, fix them when they break, replace them when they get too old, and park them overnight. And that's a business that doesn't exist right now.

Uber provides tons of rides, but they don't own the cars. Car makers make a lot of cars, but they don't touch them after they sell them to the dealers. Dealers sell new cars and service cars, but they don't give rides. So this would be a whole new type of business in the future.

Now, I will go on record as saying I never believed the hype. I never believed the predictions that we'd have full self-driving cars in 2019, 2020, 2022, whatever. This is too big of a change to happen so quickly. Maybe I'll see it in my lifetime, but honestly, maybe not.

That's all for today's Plain English. Remember, if you'd like to continue the fun with this topic, you can go to plainenglish.com slash 759 and read the transcript, do the exercises, and practice writing about this topic.

This was the second episode this month about cars. I've got one more for you. It's about the ethics behind self-driving cars. You might be wondering, what ethics? Just make the car drive safely on the road. Aha, that's not as easy as you might think. We'll talk about that on Monday. See you then.

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