Another tech company has earmarked 2020 as the year of the automated car.
Baidu, known as China's Google thanks to its search engine's prevalence in the country, today unveiled Project Apollo, which hopes to get fully self-driving cars onto highways and city roads by 2020.
The company says its autonomous driving tech for restricted environments will launch in July, and by the end of the year cars will run autonomously in "simple urban road conditions."
Sure the "restricted environments" automated bus type things will work, but I don't really know what the utility of them is. Yes we have a general fascination with automating everything, but how many office park robot shuttles do we really need? Not exactly "disruptive."
And there's no such thing as "simple urban road conditions" which ultimately is the point of all of my pessimism.