Transportation

Aurora CEO Chris Urmson Says There’ll Be Hundreds Of Self-Driving Cars On The Road In Five Years


In a wide-ranging conversation about AI and self-driving cars at the Forbes Under 30 Summit, Aurora CEO Chris Urmson told a crowd of AI enthusiasts that within five years, there will be hundreds or maybe thousands of of self-driving vehicles on the road, “delivering packages or moving people around.”

Urmson knows a little something about self-driving cars. He’s a 15-year veteran in the still nascent field, making his bones in the DARPA Challenges that ran from 2004 to 2007. He was an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, noted for its AI and robotics research, before joining Google to lead its self-driving car project.

In 2017, Urmson cofounded Aurora Tech, which is developing self-driving car technology for the automotive industry, partnering with customers like Volkswagen to incorporate its tech into future autonomous capabilities for cars. The company has raised nearly $700 million in venture backing to date, and is valued at $2.57 billion, according to Pitchbook.

One reason for the acceleration of self-driving car technology, Urmson said, was improvements in lidar, the laser detection system that enables self-driving cars to see the world around them. One challenge for that technology is that it can be disrupted by weather conditions and other objects on the road. But advances in technology, such as those developed by lidar company Blackmore (which Aurora acquired earlier this year), have made it easier for self-driving cars to navigate tricky conditions.

Though he made a bold prediction about self-driving cars being market ready in five years, he cautioned that those cars won’t be in your driveway anytime soon. Instead, they’ll be parts of large taxi fleets and cargo delivery services. “I think both economically, it’s going to make much more sense as part of a fleet, and socially I think it’s better that these are shared resources.”

He did ruefully admit, though, that his predictions about the timeframe of self-driving cars have been wrong before. “I said a little while ago that when my son turned 16 that we were hoping to not have to have him drive, but sadly he turned 16 like a month ago.”



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