2018 in Review: A Rough Year for Self-Driving Cars

"[L]ooking back on 2018—which included lawsuits, wake-up calls about limitations and the first known pedestrian fatality from a self-driving car—does anything but sell the promise of having feasible self-driving cars on the road anytime soon," according to an article by Justin T. Westbrook.

"Contrary to what our tech overlords in Silicon Valley (and, to be fair, Detroit too) have been saying, we will not have fully driverless cars in a couple years. Or even several years," adds Westbrook. "If anything, this last year has only proven that self-driving cars won’t be viable on a massive scale for decades."

The survey of the year's news in autonomous vehicles that follows includes the first pedestrian struck and killed by a self-driving car in autonomous mode, which led to a cascading series of developments in the industry. Pretty much all the major players in the industry had their bad news cycles this year, but the result of all these rough patches reveals a pretty big mess.