Reports Of The Death Of Self-Driving Cars Are Greatly Exaggerated

Recent weeks have seen a number of reports of the death of self-driving cars, triggered mostly by the closure of Argo.AI, the self-driving startup funded by Ford and VW. That shutdown hasn't been the only bad news in a year of bad news for almost all of tech. The declarations that self-driving cars are a decade or more away have come from press like Bloomberg and Techcrunch, but perhaps more concerningly from insiders like Oxbotica and Luminar (though they claim to have always felt this way.) We've also seen all the public companies (except MobilEye) see very large stock declines this year, especially the SPAC-funded startups. Monday saw the "merger" of LIDAR pioneer Velodyne into Ouster.