We're going to have autonomous cars that can drive SF-LA long before we have high-speed rail. Self-driving cars from the big players are planned for the 2020-2021 model years.
I'm not sure you have to wait a few years. There is a certain something about saying self driving cars are future dream when they are working for real 24/7 in SF.
Technically, self-driving cars are about 1 year out from being better than human drivers under normal highway driving conditions. If they continue to follow that curve of progress, then by (my hand wavey estimates) 2018 you should see micro-mapped urban driving scenarios (similar to google car in the bay area) capable of responding to traffic lights, construction lights, 2019 you should should see exception based systems (Construction pylons, road flares), 2020 gets you responding to Traffic Police, hand waves, and 2021 fills in the gaps that I'm not thinking of.
So, in theory, by end of 2021, within the Bay Area (at least South Bay - Think Mountain View/Cupertino Area), Ford should be able to start deploying on a Trial Basis, automated fleets of cars that will, more safely than humans, pick up and deliver people under good driving conditions, during the day, over very micromapped routes.
Once they get that nailed, they should be able to start expanding to other neighborhoods in the Bay Area, until by 2028-2030, an automated car should be able to pick up and deliver you anywhere in the SFBAY area that has presumably been micromapped, while at the same time providing pretty decent highway automated driving experiences for good portions of California.
Based on those lessons, (and probably in parallel with the California Experience) - other countries/states/cities will likewise be micro-mapping their road systems, and also creating "Automated Capable Areas" - that will, over time, merge - until eventually you should be able to get, over well known roads, in non-inclement weather conditions from pretty much anywhere in the United States to Any other area, more safely than you would with a human. My prediction is 2050 at the latest, and 2040 if there is aggressive investment. (The actual data probably lands somewhere between those two).
Honestly, human drivers are so horrible, it's hard to believe that with just a few hundred billion dollars of investments over the next fifteen years, that we shouldn't be able to come up with something better.
Yeah, don't wait for self driving cars, it could be 30 years before they're fully realized. Autonomous vehicles can do wonderful things when it comes to addressing first and last mile problems, but as the backbone of a commuter transit system, rail's capacity to do the heavy lifting will be as viable as it ever was.
While that's true, the less flippant question is whether fully autonomous cars -- where "fully autonomous" is defined as being able to climb in one, kick back and do your work with no concern the way you conceivably could on a train -- will (a) exist, (b) be road-legal, (c) be widely available, and (d) be generally affordable within a timeframe that makes a high-speed rail line moot. I don't think that's remotely a given.
I'd be willing to bet good money that there will be high speed trains between LA & SF before there are widespread robo-cars.
- it's a hard problem, in my mind comparable to general AI, which has been "10 years away" since the 1950's. It seems to me to be one of of those "hard 10%" problems where you get what you think is 90% there, but the last 10% takes a lot longer than the first 90%.
- I believe that a generational change will be required to get over the strange attachment most Americans have to conventional cars
- American litigiousness will put manufacturers out of business. They might be safer than normal cars, but at some point they're going to kill or seriously injure somebody, and then they're going to come in for huge damage awards.
For the last two years I worked on autonomous cars. The one thing everyone in our company agreed on, regardless of political persuasion, was that robo-cars were going to thunder fuck the high speed rail. A 2033 deadline makes this all but certain.
"Self driving" cars which require a human to be ready to take over are totally plausible in that time frame...
But are you suggesting that in 5 years a person can summon an autonomous taxi in the Bay area? By autonomous car I mean the client (passenger) will not need to be ready to take control nor will there be any other human in the vehicle for that purpose, and the vehicle will transport the client from one place in the Bay to another over the public road system, mixing with other non-autonomous traffic of various types.
If so, I'm in for USD $100. I say that in 5 years (12/17/2020 or before) it will NOT be the case that a user can expect to summon an autonomous (as defined above) taxi for transport anywhere in the United States.
This will happen within 15-20 years? I don't think so. Maybe the self-driving tech will be there, but the infrastructure overhaul required to support these "high speed trains" would be massive and produce traffic delays in the existing system. Not to mention the cost of testing this at production-scale.
That would be great but in reality we're going to need self driving cars which are near enough perfect with the existing infrastructure to get some major traction before roads start getting designed for them.
Let's take a look at some of those realistic timelines. A quick googling gave me a very helpful listicle by VentureBeat from 2017, titled Self-driving car timeline for 11 top automakers. [1]
Some examples:
Ford - Level 4 vehicle in 2021, no gas pedal, no steering wheel, and the passenger will never need to take control of the vehicle in a predefined area.
Honda - production vehicles with automated driving capabilities on highways sometime around 2020
Toyta - Self-driving on the highway by 2020
Renault-Nissan - 2020 for the autonomous car in urban conditions, probably 2025 for the driverless car
Volvo - It’s our ambition to have a car that can drive fully autonomously on the highway by 2021.
Hyundai - We are targeting for the highway in 2020 and urban driving in 2030.
Daimler - large-scale commercial production to take off between 2020 and 2025
BMW - highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021
Tesla - End of 2017
It certainly wasn't just Tesla who was promising self-driving cars any second now. Tesla was definitely the most agressive, but failed to meet its goals just like every other manufacturer.
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