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I have a $100 bet going with a coworker at the office. We defined self-driving cars: When I can pull out my phone in any of at least 5 major metropolitan areas

I have a $100 bet going with a coworker at the office. We defined self-driving cars: When I can pull out my phone in any of at least 5 major metropolitan areas around the world, order a driverless car, have it pick me up and deliver me to a specified location within the city in a timely fashion, with as little risk as getting in a taxi. He is sub 20 years. I'm thinking more like 40-50 mark. My thesis? We can solve the technical challenges, but so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change to make this viable that it will be more than 2 decades until we see self-driving cars as a reality across multiple cities. Of course, I would be more than happy to lose the $100 as it would make everyone's lives better that much sooner. But I'm skeptical.

baddox 11y ago
Call me a technology optimist. I'd bet 10 years.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  You want to get in on this bet? We could open up a pool on the prediction markets.
  - baddox 11y ago
    Probably not. I don't think it's sufficiently well-defined for me to trust an arbiter to resolve the bet satisfactorily. Also, time value of money.
  - epimetheus 11y ago
    http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/ would help facilitate this, though the minimum is 200 dollars.
- lamontcg 11y ago
  I'd agree. I think in 10 years we're starting to have the conversation about when human driving should be banned in metro areas. At that point it'll be obvious that the technology has arrived, and the safety record will be there, but not everyone will have the technology. There will be the problem of telling someone with a jalopy that they need to park that outside of the metro and pay for an Uber to their destination which will probably snarl that up for at least a decade or more... At some point, though, as rich people are zipping along in cars that never get pulled over for speeding or having taillights out, the "Uber tax" is going to be calculated to be less expensive than the "PoPo tax" on the working poor.
  - ufmace 11y ago
    I'm rather skeptical on that happening anywhere near 10 years. Even if the tech was ready to go full-scale tomorrow, just the process of tooling up to make tens of millions of these cars and actually selling them to people, letting them trickle down to lower-income used car buyers and letting the oldest manual cars trickle out of the market could take decades. Once the first ones are available on the open market, I'd expect at least 10 years of them being very expensive rich peoples' toys while the remaining edge cases and kinks in the tech are worked out, manufacturing scales up, insurance and legal issues get sorted out, various road maintenance departments learn to deal with their needs, etc.
    - petra 11y ago
      One reasonable scenario for rapid deployment of self-driving cars - is shared vehicles, driving a few people at a time over a shared but optimal route. It's possible that such vehicles will have 5x-10x total occupancy per day of regular vehicles(which sit idle at most times). And it could imagine how the right financial incentives would shift a large share of the manufacturing capacity towards such cars. And considering the car replacement rate at probably something like 20 years - maybe 10 years is a possibility of starting to have that conversation.
      - ufmace 11y ago
        That's an good possibility for getting self-driving cars to market sooner and getting more people in them all right, but I'm thinking we have to get a lot of manual cars out of the market before anyone starts taking the idea of restricting them seriously.
      - paulryanrogers 11y ago
        Rush hour patterns imply that a lot of that idle time would likely remain idle. EDIT: Fixed typo
  - epimetheus 11y ago
    I think 10 years is just a bit optimistic. I think it'll take about 10 years from the time we have the software/hardware at a point where it is ready. I think that could be 5 years. I think it'll be another 15-20 years after that where the majority of cars on the road are self driving. Baring any crazy legislation, which I don't think would happen, in the US anyway.
- prawn 11y ago
  I think you or the colleague are more likely to be correct than 40+ years. There are hugely capable companies driving this and more understanding than ever on what will be achievable and how much money will be on the line. Self-driving, electric cars will make future taxi-equivalents affordable enough that it's considered for many instances. That makes for a massive market. It's not as though current taxis have a sparkling reputation as drivers either. Not many will be sad to see the end of them.
a-priori 11y ago
I have a bet going on with my wife that our 1-year-old daughter will never take driving lessons when she grows up.
- simplemath 11y ago
  I'm hoping there's a viable SDC on the market when my eldest daughter turns 16 in 5 years
- simplemath 11y ago
  I'm hoping there's a viable SDC on the market when my eldest daughter turns 16 in 5 years
- umanwizard 11y ago
  Do you live in the suburbs? This could become true, but more because of the increasing urbanization trend making public transit more attractive than cars in more places.
  - a-priori 11y ago
    We haven't exactly spelled out the terms precisely, but the spirit of the wager is that self-driving cars will be involved somehow. Certainly public transit could be part of a mix of transportation options, but I wouldn't win if self-driving cars don't come to fruition yet she doesn't get a driving license because she can subsist entirely on public transit.
- mercutio2 11y ago
  I have the same plan for my four year old!
rqebmm 11y ago
You're right that there's significant legal and regulatory hurdles that have to be cleared, but I think they're more of an issue for broad adoption. SF will have a driverless taxi service probably within the next 5 years. Once that's in place it's only a matter of time/strength of the taxi lobby that's going to stop it, (and Uber has shown that can be broken even in places like London). If you're talking about _everyone_ in major economies having a driverless car, yeah, I think 40 years is realistic given the replacement rate for cars alone, nevermind the legal issues.
- Symbiote 11y ago
  I know what you mean, but London is a poor example — the well known "black cab" service has been heavily regulated forever, but cheaper "minicabs" have been available to book (rather than hail on the street) since the 1960s, and subject to a little regulation¹ since 2001. Most operators were tiny companies with a few cars servicing a local area, until Addison Lee started running a London-wide service about 10-15 years ago — they had nicer cars, better availability and marketing and so on. Uber set up in London under the same regulations. ¹ Additional car inspection, criminal record check on the driver, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#Private_hire_.28minicabs.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom...
smileysteve 11y ago
> He is sub 20 years. I'm thinking more like 40-50 mark. Perspective: * 60 years ago, we didn't have highways. * 45 years ago, seat belts weren't required. * 40 years ago, we expected engines to last 10s of thousands of miles. We didn't really understand crumple zones. Open containers and even drinking while driving. * 30 years, we added fuel injection, computers, and airbags. * 20 years ago, the hybrid car, better fuel efficiency, and side airbags Imagine what we'll know tomorrow.
- notahacker 11y ago
  Perspective: nearly 50 years ago we did have Category IIIa instrument landing systems in commercial jet aircraft capable of landing without pilot input. We had reliable gyroscopic autopilot capable of keeping aircraft on a set course long before that. Vast sums of money have been sunk into developing exceptionally reliable avionics systems since then. Passenger carrying aircraft still all have a pilot or two.
  - dorfsmay 11y ago
    Pilots on modern large aircraft are more like managers that tell the aircraft what to do, and do fly them to keep with minimum legal requirements (minimy numbers of landinds etc...)
  - Gracana 11y ago
    And in the US, don't pilots still have to do the landing part?
  - ubernostrum 11y ago
    And to complete the thought: the main reason why human pilots are still on all those aircraft is because... the automated/computerized systems still can't really make decisions that match what the humans can do. So the computer is really great at maintaining heading, altitude and speed for a set period of time, but really bad at deciding which heading, which altitude and which speed, and for how long (the best you can do that I'm aware of is have a human lay out the desired route and punch that into the FMC, and then all bets are off if conditions change along the way, and the humans will have to decide what to tell the plane to do again).
justin66 11y ago
>so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change to make this viable that it will be more than 2 decades until we see self-driving cars as a reality across multiple cities. It could be a lot more straightforward than you suspect. The three things we have going for us: 1. Car accidents are almost always resolved by deals made between insurance companies (this will be doubly true with unpiloted cars, which will presumably not commit criminal acts) 2. The same few large companies are likely to deal in insurance of piloted and autonomous vehicles, so there's not a huge incentive to go sue-crazy 3. If autonomous vehicles cause significantly fewer accidents and companies can charge the same amount for insurance covering them, that is a huge win for some very large companies with the power to get the ball rolling. Increased vehicle safety will be a big win for these companies in the short term, although in the long term some price discounts might be factored into the cost of autonomous vehicle insurance.
petra 11y ago
>> but so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change Let's go with that. Say that tomorrow Google finished the development of the car. It works very well. Than it just need to find a single city that would agree to a wide scale deployment. And I imagine there are plenty of reasons why a city might want to do that. Heck if Google cared, they could legally bribe politicians. And it doesn't even have to be a city in the west. It could be a city ruled by a dictator somewhere in africa. Or it could be a self driving car created by a chinese company, and china would be willing to take the risk to lead in this field. So maybe the first city isn't as hard as it seems. Now what happens after a car has proven itself in a city for a year or two ?Showing almost zero accidents, and all the other benefits of a self-driving car. How much will people everywhere would want it ? how much political support would it gather ? i imagine a lot. Would such support and proof be enough for relatively rapid deployment of self-driving cars ?
zodPod 11y ago
Careful, that $100 probably won't be worth shit in 20 years let alone 40-50.
Ensorceled 11y ago
I think you are seriously underestimating what the baby-boomers will do when they have to start giving up their drivers licenses because they are getting to old to drive.
randyrand 11y ago
Humans overestimate tech advancement for 3yrs in the future, but underestimate it 10 yrs in the future. Food for thought.
- arethuza 11y ago
  While I agree in general - I can think of a lot of technological predictions from my childhood in the 70s and 80s (fusion power, widespread off planet colonies, general AI) that we still seem to be waiting for.

baddox 11y ago

Call me a technology optimist. I'd bet 10 years.

roymurdock 11y ago
You want to get in on this bet? We could open up a pool on the prediction markets.
- baddox 11y ago
  Probably not. I don't think it's sufficiently well-defined for me to trust an arbiter to resolve the bet satisfactorily. Also, time value of money.
- epimetheus 11y ago
  http://longbets.org/ http://longbets.org/ would help facilitate this, though the minimum is 200 dollars.
lamontcg 11y ago
I'd agree. I think in 10 years we're starting to have the conversation about when human driving should be banned in metro areas. At that point it'll be obvious that the technology has arrived, and the safety record will be there, but not everyone will have the technology. There will be the problem of telling someone with a jalopy that they need to park that outside of the metro and pay for an Uber to their destination which will probably snarl that up for at least a decade or more... At some point, though, as rich people are zipping along in cars that never get pulled over for speeding or having taillights out, the "Uber tax" is going to be calculated to be less expensive than the "PoPo tax" on the working poor.
- ufmace 11y ago
  I'm rather skeptical on that happening anywhere near 10 years. Even if the tech was ready to go full-scale tomorrow, just the process of tooling up to make tens of millions of these cars and actually selling them to people, letting them trickle down to lower-income used car buyers and letting the oldest manual cars trickle out of the market could take decades. Once the first ones are available on the open market, I'd expect at least 10 years of them being very expensive rich peoples' toys while the remaining edge cases and kinks in the tech are worked out, manufacturing scales up, insurance and legal issues get sorted out, various road maintenance departments learn to deal with their needs, etc.
  - petra 11y ago
    One reasonable scenario for rapid deployment of self-driving cars - is shared vehicles, driving a few people at a time over a shared but optimal route. It's possible that such vehicles will have 5x-10x total occupancy per day of regular vehicles(which sit idle at most times). And it could imagine how the right financial incentives would shift a large share of the manufacturing capacity towards such cars. And considering the car replacement rate at probably something like 20 years - maybe 10 years is a possibility of starting to have that conversation.
    - ufmace 11y ago
      That's an good possibility for getting self-driving cars to market sooner and getting more people in them all right, but I'm thinking we have to get a lot of manual cars out of the market before anyone starts taking the idea of restricting them seriously.
    - paulryanrogers 11y ago
      Rush hour patterns imply that a lot of that idle time would likely remain idle. EDIT: Fixed typo
- epimetheus 11y ago
  I think 10 years is just a bit optimistic. I think it'll take about 10 years from the time we have the software/hardware at a point where it is ready. I think that could be 5 years. I think it'll be another 15-20 years after that where the majority of cars on the road are self driving. Baring any crazy legislation, which I don't think would happen, in the US anyway.
prawn 11y ago
I think you or the colleague are more likely to be correct than 40+ years. There are hugely capable companies driving this and more understanding than ever on what will be achievable and how much money will be on the line. Self-driving, electric cars will make future taxi-equivalents affordable enough that it's considered for many instances. That makes for a massive market. It's not as though current taxis have a sparkling reputation as drivers either. Not many will be sad to see the end of them.

a-priori 11y ago

I have a bet going on with my wife that our 1-year-old daughter will never take driving lessons when she grows up.

simplemath 11y ago
I'm hoping there's a viable SDC on the market when my eldest daughter turns 16 in 5 years
simplemath 11y ago
I'm hoping there's a viable SDC on the market when my eldest daughter turns 16 in 5 years
umanwizard 11y ago
Do you live in the suburbs? This could become true, but more because of the increasing urbanization trend making public transit more attractive than cars in more places.
- a-priori 11y ago
  We haven't exactly spelled out the terms precisely, but the spirit of the wager is that self-driving cars will be involved somehow. Certainly public transit could be part of a mix of transportation options, but I wouldn't win if self-driving cars don't come to fruition yet she doesn't get a driving license because she can subsist entirely on public transit.
mercutio2 11y ago
I have the same plan for my four year old!

rqebmm 11y ago

You're right that there's significant legal and regulatory hurdles that have to be cleared, but I think they're more of an issue for broad adoption. SF will have a driverless taxi service probably within the next 5 years. Once that's in place it's only a matter of time/strength of the taxi lobby that's going to stop it, (and Uber has shown that can be broken even in places like London). If you're talking about _everyone_ in major economies having a driverless car, yeah, I think 40 years is realistic given the replacement rate for cars alone, nevermind the legal issues.

Symbiote 11y ago
I know what you mean, but London is a poor example — the well known "black cab" service has been heavily regulated forever, but cheaper "minicabs" have been available to book (rather than hail on the street) since the 1960s, and subject to a little regulation¹ since 2001. Most operators were tiny companies with a few cars servicing a local area, until Addison Lee started running a London-wide service about 10-15 years ago — they had nicer cars, better availability and marketing and so on. Uber set up in London under the same regulations. ¹ Additional car inspection, criminal record check on the driver, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom#Private_hire_.28minicabs.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom...

smileysteve 11y ago

> He is sub 20 years. I'm thinking more like 40-50 mark. Perspective: * 60 years ago, we didn't have highways. * 45 years ago, seat belts weren't required. * 40 years ago, we expected engines to last 10s of thousands of miles. We didn't really understand crumple zones. Open containers and even drinking while driving. * 30 years, we added fuel injection, computers, and airbags. * 20 years ago, the hybrid car, better fuel efficiency, and side airbags Imagine what we'll know tomorrow.

notahacker 11y ago
Perspective: nearly 50 years ago we did have Category IIIa instrument landing systems in commercial jet aircraft capable of landing without pilot input. We had reliable gyroscopic autopilot capable of keeping aircraft on a set course long before that. Vast sums of money have been sunk into developing exceptionally reliable avionics systems since then. Passenger carrying aircraft still all have a pilot or two.
- dorfsmay 11y ago
  Pilots on modern large aircraft are more like managers that tell the aircraft what to do, and do fly them to keep with minimum legal requirements (minimy numbers of landinds etc...)
- Gracana 11y ago
  And in the US, don't pilots still have to do the landing part?
- ubernostrum 11y ago
  And to complete the thought: the main reason why human pilots are still on all those aircraft is because... the automated/computerized systems still can't really make decisions that match what the humans can do. So the computer is really great at maintaining heading, altitude and speed for a set period of time, but really bad at deciding which heading, which altitude and which speed, and for how long (the best you can do that I'm aware of is have a human lay out the desired route and punch that into the FMC, and then all bets are off if conditions change along the way, and the humans will have to decide what to tell the plane to do again).

justin66 11y ago

>so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change to make this viable that it will be more than 2 decades until we see self-driving cars as a reality across multiple cities. It could be a lot more straightforward than you suspect. The three things we have going for us: 1. Car accidents are almost always resolved by deals made between insurance companies (this will be doubly true with unpiloted cars, which will presumably not commit criminal acts) 2. The same few large companies are likely to deal in insurance of piloted and autonomous vehicles, so there's not a huge incentive to go sue-crazy 3. If autonomous vehicles cause significantly fewer accidents and companies can charge the same amount for insurance covering them, that is a huge win for some very large companies with the power to get the ball rolling. Increased vehicle safety will be a big win for these companies in the short term, although in the long term some price discounts might be factored into the cost of autonomous vehicle insurance.

petra 11y ago

>> but so much physical, legal, and regulatory infrastructure needs to change Let's go with that. Say that tomorrow Google finished the development of the car. It works very well. Than it just need to find a single city that would agree to a wide scale deployment. And I imagine there are plenty of reasons why a city might want to do that. Heck if Google cared, they could legally bribe politicians. And it doesn't even have to be a city in the west. It could be a city ruled by a dictator somewhere in africa. Or it could be a self driving car created by a chinese company, and china would be willing to take the risk to lead in this field. So maybe the first city isn't as hard as it seems. Now what happens after a car has proven itself in a city for a year or two ?Showing almost zero accidents, and all the other benefits of a self-driving car. How much will people everywhere would want it ? how much political support would it gather ? i imagine a lot. Would such support and proof be enough for relatively rapid deployment of self-driving cars ?

zodPod 11y ago

Careful, that $100 probably won't be worth shit in 20 years let alone 40-50.

Ensorceled 11y ago

I think you are seriously underestimating what the baby-boomers will do when they have to start giving up their drivers licenses because they are getting to old to drive.

randyrand 11y ago

Humans overestimate tech advancement for 3yrs in the future, but underestimate it 10 yrs in the future. Food for thought.

arethuza 11y ago
While I agree in general - I can think of a lot of technological predictions from my childhood in the 70s and 80s (fusion power, widespread off planet colonies, general AI) that we still seem to be waiting for.