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How Soon Will Self-driving Cars Be Everywhere?
As part of an excellent presentation and recent podcast, analyst Frank Chen of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz takes a crack at answering the question above. First, this from an audio presentation with slide deck, “16 questions about self-driving cars”:
So when will this beautiful world happen? … NuTonomy says 2018 they’re live in Singapore, top ten cities by 2020. Delphi and Mobileye say they’ll have self-driving systems available to the car manufacturers by 2019. … 2020 GM says that’s when it will have its cars. Ford says 2021 they’ll have Level 5 cars available to fleet makers. BMW ships the iNEXT in 2021. Tesla who’s arguably out ahead of this right now says 2023. Uber says that its entire fleet will be autonomous by 2030. And IEEE says that by 2040, 40% of all care on the road are autonomous. So you see quite a range of predictions on when this glorious future happens, and then once it starts we don’t know what the demand curve will be…. But look, it’s going to happen in our lifetime, which is probably not something I would have predicted ten years ago.
As to that last point: How fast will driverless cars spread once they are first on the road? Here on the podcast is Chen, Carl Pope (former executive director and chairman of the Sierra Club and author — with former NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg — of the upcoming book Climate of Hope: How Cities Businesses and Citizens Can Save the Planet), and a16z’s Sonal Chokshi:
Sonal Chokshi: How fast do you guys think that will happen? What’s the rough timeline?
Frank Chen: Well, if you look at public estimates given by the auto manufacturers. I’m talking about incumbents now. You’ll see a range, anywhere from 2019 to 2024 being the year where they first introduce their autonomous vehicle. It might happen even earlier for fleet sales. The most aggressive auto manufacturers are saying 2019 is when this revolution starts and then we have a question of what’s the adoption curve. Will it be S-shaped like it was for the iPhones? Will it be straight up to the right because it’s just so awesome? And obviously that has implications of which companies are going to win, but it’s going to start soon.
Carl Pope: I think one of the things that’s important is if we go to shared vehicles … every shared vehicle replaces roughly eight other vehicles. Even today, with today’s technology and today’s ownership patterns, if you only have an eighth as many cars on the road but people are still driving as much, more or less, that means every car drives eight times as far a year. Now we turn over the automobile fleet every thirteen years and most of the projections people are making about how fast this happens assumes that thirteen-year turnover rate. … If you only have an eighth as many cars and they’re driven eight times as far and they’re retired, let’s say, five times as quickly, the whole automotive fleet is turned over in three years. So it might start a little later than the optimists think, might start in 2022, but it might be over by 2025.
Chockshi: Why might it be over?
Pope: Because in three years the whole fleet might have rolled over and once you start selling autonomous cars in large numbers people will not buy cars that have to be driven. Being able to drive your own car is going to become a very expensive option.
Hopefully I correctly matched all the voices to the right person. If you have an interest in the subject, I urge you to listen to the entire episode. And you might want to also check out this congressional hearing from today on driverless car regulation.
Published in Culture, Technology
I don’t have kids, but I’m enough of a kid myself that I have a car full of stuff: toolbox, empty gas can, spare auto fluids, jumper cables, tire chains, hiking boots, skates, skate wheels and tools, cameras, lenses, tripod, a stack of plastic shopping bags (since they don’t give them out in L.A.), thin jacket, heavier jacket, hat (for use when the top is down), umbrella, 115VAC inverter, USB and audio cables for connecting my phone… Doing away with all, or even most, of that would be a big crimp on my lifestyle.
Sorry I took a while to get back to this. But here’s my answer!
I don’t think we have the foggiest notion about the future of driverless cars. Going from tech demonstrations to changing the core of our transportation infrastructure requires us to transition through a whole lot of unknown unknowns.
One of my favorite examples of a failed technology ‘revolution’ was the Segway. When it was first demoed, a whole lot of futurists and analysts bought into the idea that it would revolutionize the way we get around. To progressives, it was the perfect answer to the ‘last mile problem’ of public transit. The problem with public transit has always been that unless you live in a few very dense areas, it’s always a problem to get from home to a transit station, and from the transit station to your destination. Enter the Segway – a portable transporter anyone could learn to use, and which you could just ride right onto the train, then off the train and into your building and even up the elevator.
So many people bought into the hype of the Segway that breathless articles were being written about how it was going to fundamentally change the very way we build cities. So what happened? As it turns out, people didn’t like sharing sidewalks with them. They were dangerous to other people’s ankles in confined spaces, and before you knew it cities were passing ordinances preventing them from being on public sidewalks and other congested places.
That ended the miracle of the Segway. And note that it met every single one of its technology promises. It’s a useful device, and eventually they found a niche in some areas – meter readers, people moving around large factories, etc. But the promised revolution never happened. Society just chose against it.
So what could go wrong? A million things. Some we can guess at today, others that won’t be apparent until after we put the cars into use in a widespread fashion. How will other drivers respond to them? Will they take advantage of them and cut them off in traffic? Will they turn out to be annoying on the road, leading to protests? What happens when one intentionally swerves into a collection of children on the sidewalk to avoid a cat running across the road?
We can count on there being incidents like this, and probably many similar ones over time if driverless cars are widespread. How we react to those incidents is completely unknown.
I also worry about systemic, complex-system type effects when millions of autonomous cars are on the road interacting with each other using learning algorithms. I think it’s likely we’ll start seeing weird feedback loops and strange behaviors much as we see in the stock markets today.
On the other hand… If it turns out that people really, really love driverless cars, we’ll put up with a lot to have them. There are all kinds of legal, ethical, systemic, and social issues we will have to work through, but if these vehicles bring us enough value, we’ll figure it out unless the problems are simply intractable.
I think the tech is do-able at the micro level. I think a car can be built that can safely navigate its way around public roads under the right conditions. It’s the macro scale and exceptional stuff I worry about. What happens when 10,000 autonomous cars in a city are caught in a snowstorm? How much damage can they sustain without losing their integrity? How repairable are they? Can you still drive one after a fender-bender that you can’t afford to fix for a few months?
These are known unknowns, ’cause I can think of them. The real problems are the ones we haven’t even conceived of yet.
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