Quote:
Originally Posted by NickyC
It's not an assumption, I've read quite a bit on the matter and from what I've gathered the tech is decades away if ever from mass adoption. The level 4 vehicles you are talking about, those which operate in a defined area, are well behind level 5 vehicles which are considered fully autonomous. Even the most optimistic (realistic) estimates are now around 2030+ for this.
What we're more likely to see in the next decade are so are better driver aides, such as computer assisted braking which we already have and other fine tuning. Fully auto? Likely 2035-2040ish best case scenario from what I've read. Considering how over glorified new tech always is, autonomous driving being a perfect example, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see it pushed even farther back than that.
I'll never own one regardless.  |
I'm in a related transportation business for the surveillance of aircraft. I know how the DOT works very well; and I work with the FAA on a daily basis (when the Government is not shutdown at least
). What I've not heard from any of the autonomous proponents is the US Government's role in the transformation to autonomous driving. Right now the US Government has an almost totalitarian control over the automobile industry; the Government defines crash safety regulation, emission regulation, environmental regulation (road building and production plant waste emissions, etc), and traffic regulation, just to name a few. So to think the US Government is going to let a "privatized" autonomous traffic system grow up from Uber, Lyft, GM, Audi, et.al. without any intervention from the DOT and other governmental agencies is just complete fantasy.
The one thing understood by people who work with the Federal Government and especially the DOT, is because of the high level of concern for public safety, adoption of new technology (and regulation of it) is extremely slow. For example, the FAA has just barely delved into to regulation and control of unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) flight. I've been in the process since the beginning, and that was just 5 years ago. While the FAA is running at an astonishing pace to catch up with the current state of UAV technology, it's about a decade behind and it is still at a snail's pace. The FAA is dead serious about safety (as it should be) and new tech takes literally decades to adopt. And air traffic is highly automated and purposefully extremely controlled to keep aircraft separated at all costs. Aircraft have three dimensions to travel in, where ground vehicles just have two, so there is an added measure of safety built into the air traffic system. So to think the US Government is not going to intervene in the roll out of Autonomous driving when it keeps aircraft separated by 5 miles horizontally and thousands of feet vertically, letting cars travel at bone-crushing speed mere feet from each other gives people within the DOT the serious shits.
And on top of that... there are the private injury lawyers, who will have a field day when computers start crashing into humans. Most of the injury lawyers must just be drooling over the advent of Autonomous driving; I'm sure they just can't wait.
Autonomous driving is not a cell phone app. 2035 is seriously optimistic IMO.