I work for a company that, among other things, tracks trends in lots of industries and technologies, and makes near- and long-term forecasts of their evolution. Hype aside, I have seen no evidence of any change in independent assessments of when truly autonomous vehicles would see commercial adoption. Five years is really not a long time, when most people who don’t work for car companies or hype-happy news agencies were already projecting timelines into the late 2020s/early 2030s. Whether you consider that “close” to a boom or not is a matter of semantics and perspective.
Seems like you guys might have (or be able to create) a dataset on who makes what kind of forecasts, and who tends to be accurate or hyped re them. Would be great if you could publish some simple stats from such a dataset.
Sorry for the month+-long delay, but I meant the 1st option. To a first approximations, people seem to still be estimating the same calendar year (say, “2035” or whatever) as they estimated in 2015.
I work for a company that, among other things, tracks trends in lots of industries and technologies, and makes near- and long-term forecasts of their evolution. Hype aside, I have seen no evidence of any change in independent assessments of when truly autonomous vehicles would see commercial adoption. Five years is really not a long time, when most people who don’t work for car companies or hype-happy news agencies were already projecting timelines into the late 2020s/early 2030s. Whether you consider that “close” to a boom or not is a matter of semantics and perspective.
Seems like you guys might have (or be able to create) a dataset on who makes what kind of forecasts, and who tends to be accurate or hyped re them. Would be great if you could publish some simple stats from such a dataset.
I probably could, but could not share such without permission from marketing, which creates a high risk of bias.
When you say “no evidence of any change” in autonomous vehicle timelines, do you mean
5 years ago the forecast said N years and today the forecast says N-5 years, or
5 years ago the forecast said N years and today the forecast says N years
? I.e., “no change” as in “we do seem to be getting closer at roughly the expected rate”, or as in “we don’t seem to be getting closer at all”?
Sorry for the month+-long delay, but I meant the 1st option. To a first approximations, people seem to still be estimating the same calendar year (say, “2035” or whatever) as they estimated in 2015.