I see that California has taken one step closer to having autonomous vehicles on its roads.

“The bill, signed off by state Governor Jerry Brown, only permits unmanned autonomous car tests at a couple of test sites, but it’s a big step towards road testing unmanned vehicles.”

In Ontario our government has made the following commitment as of October 2015.

And see the Ministry of Transportation Announcement discussing the program.

At this point (Oct 2016) Ontario has no applicants taking advantage of the pilot program.  It all looks good on a website but unfortunately the marketing hasn’t amounted to anything. Marketing is nice, but for the people of Ontario this has amounted to no more than sound bites.  What will the government do, if anything to ensure that we are leaders or at least participants in the space?  As a jurisdiction Ontario started years behind others.  We were playing catch up then and are still based on California’s announcement playing catch up.  If we want to have a presence in autonomous vehicles we do indeed have to be leaders and not followers.  Ontario needs to push the envelope and offer something other jurisdictions aren’t.  Or face the fact that the ship has sailed on autonomous vehicles and focus money and efforts elsewhere.  The government is very interested in preserving automotive jobs in the province yet is doing nothing to actually attract innovation.  Who would have thought that California would become an automotive hub, but they have high paying Tesla, Google and Apple jobs and nevermind the myriad of other companies working on automation technology in the valley.

I’m interested to see what, if anything the government does next.