Disconnect: fully self-driving cars aren’t coming as soon as you think

Disconnect is a new weekly column in which Tech in Asia’s Charlie Custer pokes at holes, plays devil’s advocate, or otherwise attempts to rain on the tech industry’s parade.

“Your next car will drive itself.” That’s a sentence you’ve probably heard. But sadly, the tech industry’s hype machine has gotten a little ahead of itself when it comes to self-driving cars. Your next car won’t be self-driving, although it might well have autonomous features.

Semi-autonomy in cars isn’t even the future, it’s the now. Tesla, for example, has an autopilot mode that will do your highway driving for you, and even parallel park your car. Most other automakers are working on autopilot systems that will be integrated into their cars – at least the higher-end ones – in the very near future.

But driving in clear conditions on a highway is not, unfortunately, the entirety of driving. Semi-autonomy is here to stay, but full autonomy is still a long way off.

Damn you, weather!

Weather is still one of the biggest limitation factors for self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles like Google’s use lasers, radars, and cameras to interpret their environment and make driving decisions based on the information. That’s great in clear weather, but unfortunately those systems can all be limited or completely blinded by atmospheric and weather conditions. For example:

Rain: Rain happens everywhere, and it can have a pretty serious impact on self-driving cars. In particular, it affects their cameras and laser systems, which depend on a clear view. This is a problem you can see firsthand thanks to a Hyundai self-driving car competition in Korea last year. The competition took place over two days. The first was clear, and the car aced the course. The second day featured what looks like some light rain, and the results were pretty brutal:

In just the first 20 seconds of that video, you’ll see the car veer out of its lane and then take a dangerously wide turn that brings it partially into the wrong lane. From there it stops repeatedly, drives onto the curb, and takes a whole lot of very dangerous turns. Remember: this car had no problems on the day the weather was clear.

Granted, there are probably systems that can handle rain better than this one. But consider: this was clearly very light rain (testers are walking around outside without umbrellas). And even Google, which has been working on a fully-self-driving vehicle for quite some time now, makes no mention of rain handling on its site. As of last year, Google said it hadn’t even tested the car in heavy rain.

Not soon, but eventually