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Farhad and Mike’s Week in Tech: Cars With, and Without, Drivers

Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry.

Mike: Buenos dias, Señor Manjoo! I’m back from vacationing in Puerto Rico, where it was 85 degrees and beautiful all week. I also ate enough mofongo to kill a horse. No regrets.

Farhad: Speaking of regrets, I’m at International CES, the overcrowded consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas. There haven’t been many major announcements yet, but I’m expecting a huge one soon: the announcement that my flight home is ready for boarding.

Mike: So, back to what we do best: Our mildly insightful banter about tech news! And despite being the first week back after the holidays, it has been pretty busy.

Yahoo continued its weird death spiral, shuttering its YouTube competitor, Yahoo Screen. Investors are less than thrilled. Oculus VR, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company, began accepting pre-orders this week for the Rift headset, which costs a whopping $600. Hard-core virtual reality nerds are less than thrilled. And Twitter is considering making tweets longer than their 140-character limit, a move that has practically the entire Internet — say it with me — less than thrilled.

Farhad: Mike, you’re forgetting other news from CES! Netflix announced that it had expanded its streaming service to cover nearly every country in the world. Also, did you see Fitbit’s new smartwatch, the Blaze? It’s — let me put this as nicely as I can — ferociously ugly. The company’s stock plunged to a new low this week. You might say investors were less than thrilled.

Mike: My favorite part was when United States marshals raided the hoverboard booth.

So let’s get into the meat of this week’s happenings. It’s all about cars, a topic that brings me a sense of wistfulness ever since I moved to New York and gave up my ugly, busted old beater.

We saw General Motors agree to invest $500 million in Lyft, the ride-hailing start-up, and the two companies will work on developing a network of self-driving cars. Ford aims to have fully autonomous cars by the end of the decade. And, of course, the Googles and Teslas of the world are plugging away at their own versions of self-driving cars, the timetables of which are still unknown.

Please tell me what is going on. If the state ever allows me to be a father, will my children grow up learning how to drive? Or are smart cars going to be the new norm?

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Mercedes-Benz is among the automakers working on self-driving cars.Credit...Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

Farhad: It seems clear to me that self-driving cars are coming — someday. That might be because I live in Mountain View, Calif., Google’s hometown, and I see robot cars on the road as often as I see Toyota Camrys. The big question isn’t whether self-driving cars will one day become the norm but when, where and, most important, under what business model.

The G.M. investment gets at that last question. People have been saying for a couple of years that ride-hailing apps are going to reduce car ownership, because in some urban places it’s already much cheaper and easier to use Uber or Lyft than to own. Self-driving cars would eliminate the ride-hailing companies’ biggest cost: the human driver. The price of an Uber or Lyft ride would plummet, and at that point it might be silly for anyone to own a private vehicle.

Mike: Outside of being awesome, and drag racing in an old muscle car, obviously.

Farhad: Uh, right. But as I was saying, that explains G.M.’s bet on Lyft. I suspect we’ll see other efforts by auto companies to team with tech companies on shaping the future of transportation. The car companies want to get a stake in the robot future of driving before the robots kill their business model.

Mike: I guess this is the point where I come in and say, “This is totally not going to happen anytime soon.” Headlines quoting the chief executives of these automakers and tech companies have pronounced the end of having to drive yourself within the next three to five years.

Meanwhile, it was only last month that California introduced its first set of guidelines for autonomous vehicles in the state, which is subject to revision and complaints from the aggrieved (namely, Google). Lord knows how long it will take to get past regulatory hurdles on a state-by-state basis, much less on a federal — and even international — level. Then you’ve got lobbyists with their own interests, labor unions that represent human drivers, and so on. Basically what I’m saying is, don’t get too on board with the idea of ditching your car just yet.

All of that said, Uber’s role here is interesting. The company has opted to research all of its tech in-house rather than, say, pairing up with an automaker as Lyft did. Perhaps that’s to keep the research proprietary instead of sharing it with companies like G.M., which could become far more adversarial with Uber down the line. (For now, Uber has struck uneasy partnerships with automakers, helping drivers finance car purchases with certain discounts.)

Here’s my guess as to what we might see within the next three to five years: more advancements like automatic steering, self-parking and lane-changing technology, much of which is in line with what companies like Tesla are doing. Those advancements still require a driver behind the wheel — and California, at least, will also require drivers in so-called autonomous vehicles — but the driver’s role is becoming less crucial every day.

The advent of this type of technology could also affect the cost and implementation of auto insurance — something that ride-sharing companies like Uber could certainly benefit from.

Farhad: Maybe my mind’s gone soft from all the noise of CES, but for once I agree with you. I think this is all going to take some time to shake out and it will probably be messy. Anyway, here comes my taxi — I’m leaving Las Vegas!

Mike: Vaya con dios, Señor Manjoo.

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