What Techies Keep Getting Wrong About Industrial Automation
26th July 2025
Futurama must have been amazing. No – not the TV series, but the model city it is named after, built for the 1939 New York’s World’s Fair by Norman Bel Geddes. It showed a bold vision for the future: thousands of tiny cars moving on wide highways – all without the need for a human driver. This future wasn’t too far away either – 1960 was the year envisioned for full self-driving cars by its creator.
77 years later, in 2016 Tesla announced “Full Self-Driving Hardware on All Teslas”. This was exciting. Chilling in the back of your car, watching a movie while being chauffeured to your destination sounded like a dream.
Today, in 2024, full self-driving is still mostly a dream. Outside of a few pilot projects in restricted areas, it is no more available than it was in 1939. And there are good reasons for that. For one, traffic is much more messy, chaotic, and unpredictable than it looks on the surface. And then, government regulators and legislators move at a snail’s pace when compared to technologists.