"I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than a human this year," said Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, in January. For anyone who follows Musk's commentary, this might sound familiar. In 2020, he promised autonomous cars the same year, saying: "There are no fundamental challenges." In 2019, he promised Teslas would be able to drive themselves by 2020 – converting into a fleet of 1m "robotaxis". He has made similar predictions every year going back to 2014.

Most of those efforts haven't died, but the hype has faded considerably. Apple seemed to make the biggest reversal, reportedly laying off more than 200 workers last year from its autonomous-car effort called Project Titan. Google is still at it, with its Waymo car venture now offering a highly limited taxi service in Phoenix. But Waymo remains buried in parent company Alphabet Inc.'s GOOG -0.06% "other bets" segment, where it doesn't appear to be generating much actual business. The company's most recent quarterly filing said Other Bets revenue is still derived primarily from its broadband service once known as Google Fiber and licensing from its Verily Life Sciences venture. Intel, meanwhile, hasn't exactly revved up with Mobileye.

EU member states need to turn their declarations of intent about international cooperation on technological sovereignty into real projects. According to Kai-Fu Li, former president of Google China, Europe has little chance of winning even the "bronze medal" in the global race to develop artificial intelligence (AI). Although this sounds like a harsh judgment, there seems to be widespread agreement among analysts, commentators, and policymakers that Europe is missing the boat on technological innovation in general and AI in particular. Excessive regulation, a business environment ill-suited to start-ups, a lack of investment – the list of grievances is long. But, while these concerns are not completely unfounded, they are somewhat self-flagellating.

The motor industry's ability to deliver large numbers of self-driving cars by 2030 has been brought into question. A report commissioned by Dell Technologies highlights five key hurdles to the adoption of autonomous vehicles, including the AI-powered neural networks at their heart and the vast data streams required to keep the cars on the road. Frost & Sullivan, an international consultancy, anonymously interviewed 17 executives connected with the sector and found they were concerned by the daunting amount of digital information generated by autonomous fleets. One of the respondents said the volume could exceed the amount of data that is stored by Facebook.

The race to build mass-market autonomous cars is creating big demand for laser sensors that help vehicles map their surroundings. But cheaper versions of the hardware currently used in experimental self-driving vehicles may not deliver the quality of data required for driving at highway speeds. Most driverless cars make use of lidar sensors, which bounce laser beams off nearby objects to create 3-D maps of their surroundings. Lidar can provide better-quality data than radar and is superior to optical cameras because it is unaffected by variations in ambient light. You've probably seen the best-known example of a lidar sensor, produced by market leader Velodyne.

The race to build mass-market autonomous cars is creating big demand for laser sensors that help vehicles map their surroundings. But cheaper versions of the hardware currently used in experimental self-driving vehicles may not deliver the quality of data required for driving at highway speeds. Most driverless cars make use of lidar sensors, which bounce laser beams off nearby objects to create 3-D maps of their surroundings. Lidar can provide better-quality data than radar and is superior to optical cameras because it is unaffected by variations in ambient light. You've probably seen the best-known example of a lidar sensor, produced by market leader Velodyne.

A day after the disclosure of the first death in a crash involving a self-driving vehicle, BMW on Friday announced plans to release a fleet of fully autonomous vehicles by 2021. In a partnership with Intel and Mobileye, the German automaker said its planned iNEXT model won't require a human in the driver's seat. That marks a different course toward self-driving vehicles than Tesla, which offers a self-driving "autopilot" feature to those participating in a "public beta phase" -- though drivers are supposed to stay engaged and keep their hands on the steering wheel. That system was in use during a fatal crash in Florida in May in which a Tesla Model S failed to detect a big-rig in its path and apply the brakes. BMW Chief Executive Harold Krueger addressed the Tesla crash during a news conference in Munich, Germany, on Friday, saying his company is not yet ready to roll out partially or fully autonomous vehicles.

News reports tell us driverless cars are on the brink of ubiquity. This would soon mean driverless trucks could become commonplace, resulting in millions of truck drivers being replaced by robots. Very credible, unless you think about it for, say, more than 30 seconds. Maybe it's just me and my heartbreaking experience at the New York World's Fair in 1964, where I saw robots in the kitchen, video telephones and yes, driverless cars that also flew. We were promised that they would be here soon.

A group of self driving Uber vehicles position themselves to take journalists on rides during a media preview at Uber's Advanced Technologies Center in Pittsburgh (Photo: Gene J. Puskar, AP) SAN FRANCISCO -- Automakers and tech companies insist: Self-driving cars will pull up in five years. But the self-driving revolution may be stuck in the slow lane for some time, according to a Kelley Blue Book poll out Wednesday. Some 62% of those surveyed in by the auto-valuation outfit "don't think all vehicles will be fully autonomous in my lifetime." More surprisingly, a third of Gen Z respondents (ages 12 to 15) agree, which means we will still be driving ourselves towards the end of this century. That's a far cry from 2021, the self-driving car arrival date recently put forth by Google, Ford, Uber and others.