Sunday, January 28, 2024

Pavon hangs on

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Matthieu Pavon hangs on for first PGA Tour win at Farmers Insurance Open

BY: JACK HIRSH 




Matthieu Pavon birdied the 72nd hole to win the Farmers Insurance Open

ORLANDO RAMIREZ/GETTY IMAGES

Matthieu Pavon made the one mistake he couldn’t.

Leading the Farmers Insurance Open by one with six holes to go in the final round, Pavon, a PGA Tour rookie making his third start as a member, airmailed the 14th green.

What’s beyond the 14th green at Torrey Pines South, you ask? Nothing good if you’re playing golf.

After the green is a steep embankment of rough that’s considerably shorter than the rest of the five-inch rough around the two-time U.S. Open host. Once you hit the red penalty area line, it doesn’t take long for a golf ball to become lost in the bluffs of the Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve. That’s where Pavon’s ball seemed to be headed.

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However, the next time CBS’s cameras cut to Pavon, he was standing over his third shot. Somehow, the ball hung up in the intermediate cut of rough.

On a difficult course like the South course, it was the kind of break that separates winners and losers, and that’s what it did. Pavon managed to pitch his third at 14 to a foot, then made a 24-foot par save at 16 before finally muscling a third shot on the 72nd hole from the deep rough to just eight feet to seal the Farmers Insurance Open title.

“I can’t thank the PGA Tour enough to give us the opportunity to come from Europe and compete here in America against the best players in the world,” Pavon said. “That’s always been the dream for me. I got finally a shot and I took it.”

Pavon seemed on the verge of blowing his lead when he missed a short par putt on 17 and drove into a bunker on 18. He laid up in the rough and then somehow willed his approach over the pond at the famous par-5 finisher and made the putt to preserve a one-shot win over Nicolai Hojgaard after he birdied the 72nd too.

With his first PGA Tour win, Pavon becomes the first winner who earned membership from the Top 10 of last year’s DP World Tour standings after the category was added for this season. Pavon also nabbed his first DP World Tour win last fall at the Acciona Open de España. He then birdied his final four holes at the DP World Tour Championship to finish T5 and jump up five spots in the standings, enough to earn one of the 10 cards awarded to top finishers on the European Tour with no other PGA Tour status.

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BY: JACK HIRSH

Ironically, his four-birdie run in Dubai jumped him passed Hojgaard’s twin brother, Rasmus in the standings to earn the final PGA Tour card

Pavon’s win is also the first PGA Tour title by a player from France. The win will put Pavon in prime position to represent his country at home at this summer’s Olympics in Paris.

Pavon was battling for much of the day with Hojgaard and Stephan Jaeger, who, like Pavon and the rest of the golfers in the top nine heading into the final round, was searching for his first PGA Tour win.

The Frenchman took the solo lead after Jaeger’s bogey on 12 and never relinquished it the rest of the day. His short miss on the 71st opened up a number of possibilities as he played the final hole with just a one-shot lead over Hogjaard, who reached the 72nd green in two by the time Pavon stepped up to his third.

But from 143 yards, Pavon’s third benefited from a rain-softened final green as it landed in the middle of the putting surface and then took the slope back toward the hole. His final putt just barely dripped over the edge to slam the door.

“I was so pumped at that time, I know I had the energy to lift that ball up on the green,” he said. “I kind of aimed to the middle of the green knowing the face would close a little bit because it’s quite deep and thick. That ball came out like a butterfly and it really feed the slope on the green and left myself a nine-footer or something. That was the right time to prove I have the guts to finish that tournament and I did it so I’m so happy about that last hole.”

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Jack Hirsh

GOLF.COM EDITOR

Jack Hirsh is an assistant editor at GOLF. A Pennsylvania native, Jack is a 2020 graduate of Penn State University, earning degrees in broadcast journalism and political science. He was captain of his high school golf team and recently returned to the program to serve as head coach. Jack also still *tries* to remain competitive in local amateurs. Before joining GOLF, Jack spent two years working at a TV station in Bend, Oregon, primarily as a Multimedia Journalist/reporter, but also producing, anchoring and even presenting the weather. He can be reached at jack.hirsh@golf.com.

 

 

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robotaxis in 2024

 

What’s next for robotaxis in 2024

What’s next for robotaxis in 2024

In addition to restoring public trust, robotaxi companies need to prove that their business models can compete with Uber and taxis.

Read more →


Week in Review

Sunday, January 28, 2024

This week’s roundup: How one mine could unlock billions in EV subsidies. How satellite images and AI could help fight spatial apartheid in South Africa. What’s next for robotaxis in 2024. And more.

Plus, it’s the last day to get a FREE tote and save 25% when you subscribe to MIT Technology Review.


ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

What’s next for robotaxis in 2024

In addition to restoring public trust, robotaxi companies need to prove that their business models can compete with Uber and taxis.

January 23, 2024
Two men walk along a sidewalk as a Cruise brand robotaxi drives by.
CRUISE

MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of our series here.

In 2023, it almost felt as if the promise of robotaxis was soon to be fulfilled. Hailing a robotaxi had briefly become the new trendy thing to do in San Francisco, as simple and everyday as ordering a delivery via app. However, that dream crashed and burned in October, when a serious accident in downtown San Francisco involving a vehicle belonging to Cruise, one of the leading US robotaxi companies, ignited distrust, casting a long shadow over the technology’s future. 

Following that and another accident, the state of California suspended Cruise’s operations there indefinitely, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration launched an investigation of the company. Since then, Cruise has pulled all its vehicles from the road and laid off 24% of its workforce.

Despite that, other robotaxi companies are still forging ahead. In half a dozen cities in the US and China, fleets of robotaxis run by companies such as Waymo and Baidu are still serving anyone who would like to try them. Regulators in places like San Francisco, Phoenix, Beijing, and Shanghai now allow these vehicles to drive without human safety operators. 

However, other perils loom. Robotaxi companies need to make a return on the vast sums that have been invested into getting them up and running. Until robotaxis become cheaper, they can’t meaningfully compete with conventional taxis and Uber. Yet at the same time, if companies try to increase adoption too fast, they risk following in Cruise’s footsteps. Waymo, another major robotaxi operator, has been going more slowly and cautiously. But no one is immune to accidents. 

“If they have an accident, it’s going to be big news, and it will hurt everyone,” says Missy Cummings, a professor and director of the Mason Autonomy and Robotics Center at George Mason University. “That’s the big lesson of this year. The whole industry is on thin ice.”

MIT Technology Review talked to experts about how to understand the challenges facing the robotaxi industry. Here’s how they expect it to change in 2024.

Money, money, money

After years of testing robotaxis on the road, companies have demonstrated that a version of the autonomous driving technology is ready today, though with some heavy asterisks. They operate only within strict, pre-set geographical boundaries; while some cars no longer have a human operator in the driver’s seat, they still require remote operators to take control in case of emergencies; and they are limited to warmer climates, because snow can be challenging for the cars’ cameras and sensors. 

“From what has been disclosed publicly, these systems still rely on some remote human supervision to operate safely. This is why I am calling them automated rather than autonomous,” says Ramanarayan Vasudevan, an associate professor of robotics and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan.

The problem is that this version of automated driving is much more costly than traditional taxis. A robotaxi ride can be “several orders of magnitude more expensive than what it costs other taxi companies,” he says. “Unfortunately I don’t think the technology will dramatically change in the coming year to really drive down that cost.”

That higher ticket price will inevitably suppress demand. If robotaxis want to keep customers—not just those curious to try it out for the first time—they need to make the service cheaper than other forms of transportation. 

Bryant Walker Smith, an associate professor of law at the University of South Carolina, echoes this concern. “These companies are competing with an Uber driver who, in any estimate, makes less than minimum wage, has a midpriced car, and probably maintains it themselves,” he says. 

By way of contrast, robotaxis are expensive vehicles packed full of cameras, sensors, and advanced software systems, and they require constant monitoring and help from humans. It’s almost impossible for them to compete with ride-sharing services yet, at least until a lot more robotaxis can hit the road.

And as robotaxi companies keep burning the cash from investors, concerns are growing that they are not getting enough in return for their vast expenditure, says Smith. That means even more pressure to produce results, while balancing the potential revenues and costs. 

The resistance to scaling up

In the US, there are currently four cities where people can take a robotaxi: San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. 

The terms differ by city. Some require you to sign up for a waitlist first, which could take months to clear, while others only operate the vehicles in a small area.

Expanding robotaxi services into a new city involves a huge upfront effort and cost: the new area has to be thoroughly mapped (and that map has to be kept up to date), and the operator has to buy more autonomous vehicles to keep up with demand. 

Also, cars whose autonomous systems are geared toward, say, San Francisco have a limited ability to adapt to Austin, says Cummings, who’s researching how to measure this type of adaptability. “If I’m looking at that as a basic research question, it probably means the companies haven’t learned something important yet,” she says. 

These factors have combined to cause renewed concern about robotaxis’ profitability. Even after Cruise removed its vehicles from the road, Waymo, the other major robotaxi company in the US, hasn’t jumped in to fill the vacuum. Since each robotaxi ride currently costs the company more money than it makes, there’s hardly an appetite for endless expansion.

Worldwide development

It’s not just the US where robotaxis are being researched, tested, and even deployed. 

China is the other leader right now, and it is proceeding on roughly the same timeline as the US. In 2023, a few cities in China, including Beijing and Shanghai, received government clearance to run robotaxies on the road without any safety operators. However, the cars can only run in certain small and relatively remote areas of the cities, making the service tricky to access for most people.

The Middle East is also quickly gaining a foothold in the sector, with the help of Chinese and American companies. Saudi Arabia invested $100 million in the Chinese robotaxi startup Pony.AI to bring its cars to Neom, a futuristic city it’s constructing that will supposedly be built with all the latest technologies. Meanwhile, Dubai and Abu Dhabi are competing with each other to become the first city in the Middle East to pilot driverless vehicles on the road, with vehicles made by Cruise and the Chinese company WeRide.

Chinese robotaxi companies face the same central challenge as their US peers: proving their profitability. A push to monetize permeated the Chinese industry in 2023 and launched a new trend: Chinese self-driving companies are now racing to sell their autopilot systems to other companies. This lets them make some quick cash by repackaging their technologies into less advanced but more in-demand services, like urban autopilot systems that can be sold to carmakers.

Meanwhile, robotaxi development in Europe has lagged behind, partly because countries there prefer deploying autonomous vehicles in mass transit. While Germany, the UK, and France have seen robotaxis running road tests, commercial operations remain a distant hope. 

Lessons from Cruise’s fiasco

Cruise’s dreadful experience points to one major remaining roadblock for robotaxis: they still sometimes behave erratically. When a human driver (in a non-autonomous vehicle) hit a pedestrian in San Francisco in October and drove away from the scene, a passing Cruise car then ran over the victim and dragged her 20 feet before stopping. 

“We are deeply concerned that more people will be killed, more first responders will be obstructed, more sudden stops will happen,” says Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, an activist group based in Washington, DC. “We are not against autonomous vehicles. We are concerned about the unsafe deployment and a rush to the market at the expense of the traveling public.”

These companies are simply not reporting enough data to show us how safe their vehicles are, she says. While they are required to submit data to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the data is heavily redacted in the name of protecting trade secrets before it’s released to the public. Some federal bills proposed in the last year, which haven’t passed, could even lighten these reporting requirements, Chase says.

“If there’s a silver lining in this accident, it’s that people were forced to reckon with the fact that these operations are not simple and not that straightforward,” Cummings says. It will likely cause the industry to rely more on remote human operators, something that could have changed the Cruise vehicle’s response in the October accident. But introducing more humans will further tip the balance away from profitability.

Meanwhile, Cruise was accused by the California Public Utilities Commission of misleading the public and regulators about its involvement in the incident. “If we cannot trust these companies, then they have no businesses on our roads,” says Smith. 

A Cruise spokesperson told MIT Technology Review the company has no updates to share currently but pointed to a blog post from November saying it had hired third-party law firms and technology consultants to review the accident and Cruise’s responses to the regulators. In a settlement proposal to CPUC, Cruise also offered to share more data, including “collision reporting as well as regular reports detailing incidents involving stopped AVs.”

The future of Cruise remains unclear, and so does the company’s original plan to launch operations in several more cities soon. Meanwhile, though, Waymo is applying to expand its services in Los Angeles while taking its vehicles to the highways of Phoenix. Zoox, an autonomous-driving startup owned by Amazon, could launch commercial service in Las Vegas this year. For residents of these cities, more and more robotaxis may be on the road in 2024.

Correction: The story has been updated to clarify that Cruise’s October 2 accident was not fatal. The victim was hospitalized with serious injuries but survived.

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