I was just going to post this but forgot to login and here was your post. The hard part is the initial adoption when most cars are still manually driven and the good stuff comes when none of it is manually driven. How we get there will be and adventure.
This has been happening slowly in a lot of areas already. We went from manual transmission to automatic transmission without much fanfare. Even with the current self-driving trend, it is happening pretty slowly with various assisted technologies. I doubt things will change overnight.
I think we're going to see more and more advances like this where the chief obstacle to adoption is social, not technical. (This came up a couple weeks ago during a discussion of self-driving motor vehicles).
I agree that's the end-game but recently I've revised my expected timetable.
I fully expected that my daughters, now 12 and 13, might never need to own cars. My wife even thinks they may never need to learn to drive. I now think that's unrealistic. It's true that for 95%+ of most journeys, self driving cars would be fine, but that last 5% or less really matters even if for only a minority of journeys. Finding a parking space can be very hard and our current streets, curbs and driveways aren't designed for self-driving vehicles. Rural settings can also be highly challenging.
I think the big changes initially will be road haulage because companies can re-engineer pickup and drop-off points to be highly autonomous friendly and automated. Next will be companies like Uber and Lyft providing driverless cabs from and to designated points. Then a gradual demographic trend to less car ownership, but driverless cars for the masses are going to take at least a decade to come IMHO. The last 10m is really tough in too many common scenarios.
Self-driving cars will be world changing when they become commonplace. That isn't going to happen as fast as the industry says it will. The average family won't be using self-driving cars for 20-30 years in the best case scenario. I don't see even early adopters/wealthy people owning a completely self-driving car for at least 15 years. Regulators have yet to get their paws on these things beyond licensing them for research purposes.
I wonder how people felt when the automobile revolution was taking place. Probably a mixture of all the same things people are feeling now, human nature being what it is. Could probably look up the newspapers of the time to get a feel.
I like that bit in the article where it says the local politicians have stayed out of the way - that's the sort of thing politicians mostly should do.
For me the real turning point will be when the first passenger hails an autonomous vehicle that doesn't have a human behind the wheel, I'll be satisfied with a remote operator, because that will be truly novel as current laws asume a human behind the wheel.
What you're suggesting is that the first self-driving car manufacturer (as long as its cars are rolling off the lines of one of the major players) will dominate (parts of) the fleet sales market. That's not insignificant, but it's not the car market. I think you're underestimating how resilient the existing driving paradigm will be among consumers (i.e. the people buying personal cars and driving fleet vehicles).
> Catching up isn't easy, you won't be able to just reverse engineer it.
No, but the California-based employees with an understanding of that system will be able to get a nice payday when they start working for a competitor.
Self driving cars will mean the huge shift. As rehashed many times, most people won't buy a car but rather use it on demand. Right now a car is driven perhaps 15 000 miles a year which means probably two hours a day. This will jump to 12, perhaps 18 hours a day. Maintenance costs and reliability will be king and electric cars are huge leaders in that.
However, once cars are fully automated, the entire game will change.
This may be true, but nothing I have seen so far suggests that ubiquitous full automation will arrive until long after the likes of Tesla and Uber have run out of money. From here, it looks like we still have several rounds to go for each of
- Can we actually do it?
- Will the regulators let us do it?
- Will the public believe we can do it and trust us to do it safely?
That assumes there are no black swan events undermining the whole car industry in the meantime. Given the increasing population and congestion issues in many big cities, the corresponding increasing interest in planning/zoning policy so that using cars to get around is less essential, and the environmental implications of this kind of vehicle even if it's a hybrid or totally electrically powered locally, I think there's also a slight chance that demand for this kind of technology will never reach critical mass at all.
I have a strong sense that self driving will be generally distributed through the US car population before electric only vehicles given the pace of software vs. pace of battery technology. This will drive mass adoption of gas powered self driving cars pushing back the adoption curve for all electrics. One way to stem this may be through tax and insurance incentives, a discount on self driving due to safety, a discount for electric for environmental reasons, and an extra discount for both.
We don't have to guess though, the fundamentals are there. It'll be safer. It'll be cheaper. How would it not happen? It doesn't seem bold at all to think people won't be driving manually in the future.
Some trends will always hold true; cost of hardware goes down, capabilities of software goes up. I don't think anyone is saying it'll happen in 7.8 years, but as the HN group is aware, we've gotten much better at getting solutions to scale. There's a very real risk it'll happen faster than people can adapt. The people who's jobs will be first to be automated out are more likely living paycheck-to-paycheck. Those other, incremental, technological advances he compares against in the blog post took years for the labor force to adapt. How are we going to handle this?
Clearly the progress being made in the area of self-driving cars is undeniable. Seeing the articles and discussions crop up on a daily basis are making me wonder if we are headed for an AI Winter scenario in this area within the next decade or if this is the real deal and we will see self-driving cars at dealerships within 20 years.
This is so far from being my area of expertise. Just one observer's thoughts/questions. Insane how far we have come so quickly, at any rate.
I think your 10 year estimate is optimistic, but it is certainly coming to the point where the cars drive themselves. One of the interesting things about being driven, as opposed to driving, is that passengers rarely suffer from 'road rage.' That is a big win.
Perhaps more interesting will be the transition time, that point where half the cars are self driving and half are manually driven. Will manual drivers become more aggressive because they "know" the robo-cars will get out of their way? I expect it will be less fun before it is more fun.
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