If you needed another indication that fully-autonomous vehicles might not be ready by 2020, consider this — self-driving cars are confused by plenty of shabby United States' roads.
This was made more than evident during a Reuters feature piece, in which Volvo's North American CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, was frustrated by the company's semi-autonomous prototype's bewilderment in Los Angeles.
"It can't find the lane markings!" Kerssemakers said. "You need to paint the bloody roads here!"
Reuters says that poor lane markings and inconsistent markings are found throughout the three million miles of paved roads in the U.S., only putting more pressure on tech companies and automakers in autonomous-vehicle development to sharpen their sensors. Altogether, the news agency says about 65 percent of the country's roads are in poor condition — an estimation produced by the U.S. Department of Transportation, with the U.S. placing 12th worldwide for transportation infrastructure.
Even Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted to the great challenge that's ahead of his company and others, calling faded lane markings "crazy" for his semi-autonomous vehicles to digest.
"If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose," Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, told Reuters. "But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails."
Mercedes-Benz and Toyota previously told us that they don't see fully-autonomous cars being ready to hit the road by 2020 and challenges like these only seem to reinforce some of the reasons why that is.
"I am skeptical that we will be done with both in four years," Gil Pratt, the head of the Toyota Research Institute, told us back at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2016 in January. "That's a very short time and we have a long way to go [with the full development of autonomous cars]. And again, just because we are 90, 95 percent of the way there doesn't mean if you've been climbing a mountain and you've been walking through the foothills — and that's 95 percent of the miles you have to go — that the last five percent when you have to climb up to the peak ... that's the hard part. It's going to take us a lot longer to get up the rest of the way of the peak than it has been the easy part."
We guess, figuring out how autonomous cars can manuever within faded lane markings falls in that "last five percent" Pratt is talking about.
Good luck figuring this out.
