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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
by 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 agoOne 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 agoThat'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 agoRush hour patterns imply that a lot of that idle time would likely remain idle. EDIT: Fixed typo