Do you have a source for the 15 years number? I keep seeing people on HN saying 15-30 years, probably based on that widely misrepresented SXSW talk, and that just doesn't match up to the state of the technology or progress on the legal/regulatory front. Robotaxis will be in some California cities around 5 years from now unless some major setback happens. Here's a report that summarizes some of the sentiment I see in the industry [1].

Remember: there are already 100% fully autonomous vehicles roaming real roads in Silicon Valley. 5 years is a very long time to shrink and improve sensors, learn from real-world driving experiences, and beef up the software.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/report-10-million-self-drivin...

The tech isn't the only problem to solve, or even (weirdly enough) the major problem. We still have to deal with regulatory frameworking, legal frameworking, consistent road signs, improving infrastructure (most California roads are in third-world shape, especially in SoCal), and so forth. The cars could be ready tomorrow, and we'd still need a good 15+ years to make the roads ready for them at scale. It's depressing.

Heck I worry just about the maps! The amount of times Google Maps has told me to drive onto an old road that doesn't exist anymore, or veer 90 degrees to the right over a highway, these autonomous cars are going to get lost a lot.

I'm seeing someone DDoSing autonomous taxis by booking a ton of them to an address with known bad routing...

Autonomous cars with drivers ready to take control because that's their job. Figure 50 years for robo-taxis.

Autonomous cars have to be all or nothing, a human cannot take over a car at speed. Humans taking control is a process that takes seconds. Accidents happen in much less time. IOW, robo-taxis and autonomous cars will happen at the same time. 50 years? Maybe not quite that long, but it's not going to be soon.

Oh, I agree. I was saying that today's "autonomous" vehicles have professional testers ready to take over. That certainly doesn't work in the general case. You can only automate so far until you have to turn over control entirely and that's a long way out. (Google has effectively recognized this with it's steering wheel-less vehicles.)

Again, do you have a source for that, or at least some detailed reasoning? In a notorious story, a police officer pulled over a Google Car with no driver in it [1]. That was last year, on a real street. Completely driverless cars are already here, they just need to be refined over the next few years to be ready for wider adoption.

[1] http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/us/google-self-driving-car-pul...

Read the literature, e.g. http://hal.pratt.duke.edu/publications

There's a huge difference between mostly working (especially on a highway) and truly autonomous door-to-door.

Sorry, which literature in particular? That page has a variety of posted papers, most of which cover things unrelated to practical autonomous road vehicles.

You also don't seem to have addressed my point that there are cars on the road right now with no driver behind the wheel. We are long past the point of mostly working and very close to the point of autonomous door-to-door in favorable cities.

In one city, with really good road paint, street signs, and incredibly detailed maps compared to everywhere else, almost no rains, and never any snow. And those cars are rare. Try making 10% of the cars on the road made up of them, all of which go to the extra safe fallback mode at a particular intersection; 1 out of 10 cars doing that will annoy the hell out of 8 of the other human driven cars. Now try 30% of the cars made up of cars in fallback.

I think autonomy will be partial, conditional, and thus not door to door autonomous for at least a decade.

I sooner expect Alphabet to sell this tech to a big 10 auto manufacturer, or to Apple, for the same reasons as Boston Dynamics: where's the cashflow? If it's not up for sale in 5 years, I'll expect it's the real deal and we'll see door to door in another 10 years.

Yes, but the point is it doesn't need to be ready for 100% of locations immediately. Los Angeles alone has close to 19 million people. Add in other favorable cities like San Jose/SV, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix and you're looking at a fair portion of the total US population. You can have robotaxis serving those cities initially while the technology matures, and location-restrict autonomous driving for consumer-owned cars to the same places. People seem to think that the moment autonomous cars hit the road, they need to be able to handle a blizzard on a dirt road in upstate New York, but that just doesn't make any sense.

Is Google a good benchmark? They get all the attention, but it's weird to believe an advertising company about the timeline for autonomous cars.