Where are we in the robocar boom? Close to a takeoff. Waymo has put a few cars on the road with no driver already. Some of Tesla’s customers are already acting as if Tesla’s software is safe enough to be a driverless car.
Isn’t this basically where we were three or four years ago? I feel like I’ve been hearing that self-driving cars are “close to a takeoff” for about five years now, with plenty of cars able to drive safely most of the time, but without any evidence that they’re anywhere near handling the long tail of tricky situations.
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.
Isn’t this basically where we were three or four years ago? I feel like I’ve been hearing that self-driving cars are “close to a takeoff” for about five years now, with plenty of cars able to drive safely most of the time, but without any evidence that they’re anywhere near handling the long tail of tricky situations.
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.