Since the 20^th century, we have often seen depictions of the future include things like flying cars and self-driving cars. While we are still nowhere near a world with flying cars, self-driving cars are proving to be not too far off in the future. There already are a number of programs and companies working on self-driving cars, but no fully functional self-driving car is on the market yet. Thus far, any company working on these kinds of vehicles are still quite early in the testing phases. For example, companies’ such as Waymo and Cruise are the current front runners leading the way for self-driving vehicles but can still only be found in a limited capacity in a few cities around the United States.

After the market for the vehicles experienced a decline over the last two years, we are starting to see a shocking uphill turn.

Market projections are depicting companies such as Waymo and Cruise as heading back towards the positives for the first time since 2021. The progress of the vehicles’ is also drastically changing. For the last two years, Waymo and Cruise have plateaued in their progress, leading many to question if we would ever see the vehicles successfully marketed in our lifetime. While progress is still slow moving, we are seeing the companies gain momentum beyond the point they were at in recent years.

Despite the positive turn, the progress is still nowhere near the projections made in 2017 and 2018.

When Waymo and Cruise first really made a name for themselves, they estimated having successfully designed technological advances by 2024 that were only minute concepts at the time. While we now see some work towards some of these features, the vehicles are far from what many hoped they would be by this point. Nonetheless, there is still decent competition between the two companies, which has fueled the fire to finish the vehicle production first. To many, Waymo is in the lead ahead of Cruise. However, some believe that overseas companies from either China or Europe are so far beyond either Waymo or Cruise that there is no real competition in the industry.

Nonetheless, we are seeing progress pick back up in the autonomous cars industry which is an incredibly exciting feat to witness. If you live in larger cities, you may already have access to being a tester passenger in the rideshare services of the cars. If your city is not a tester site for either company, in the next few years, it could be the next addition to their list, as they do expand quite often.