What indication is there that [self-driving cars are] coming soon Not to be glib, but TFA? or that commercial applications will be commoditized? There are ma

What indication is there that [self-driving cars are] coming soon Not to be glib, but TFA? or that commercial applications will be commoditized? There are many companies working on specifically this. I find it hard to imagine an uncompetitive market, but you're right, that could happen. Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day. I guess I sort of agree with you, but the question is "cost savings as compared to what?" Tractors aren't priced according to cost savings compared to oxen. The most someone can charge is the cost savings of their device compared to the next best alternative. So tractors are priced relative to the value they add as compared to other tractors. We should expect something similar in a competitive market for self-driving trucks. But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today If self-driving cars are commercially feasible in this way, surely self-driving trucks are, since one truck carries a lot more stuff (economically speaking) than one car. Also transistor counts are still going up, see GPUs. And this sort of thing is amenable to ASICs. And we can already pack sufficient compute into a van. And the computers aren't even the most expensive part -- "laser is the sauce". and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs). I don't understand your point here, but note that one important way that self-driving trucks deliver value is by dramatically increasing the duty cycle of the vehicles. All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road. Strong agree on this part.