Probably true, but these companies will be among the first to deploy; no need to measure against general "widespread deployment". There are autonomous taxis already, albeit not quite yet in the wild.

There is no autonomous car that has been certified to be without someone who can drive it inside - and it's likely that such certification is still a few years away. I would guess it will take 2-3 years of cars driving on their own with hardly ever any need for a person to intervene before such certification is given.

In my city there are many small streets with bad traffic and environment, that at least once a week I need to verbally negotiate with other drivers who goes first and who goes back. If all cars are autonomous, they may negotiate that; But if only half are, I don't see how this will work.

Most US cities have the benefit of being built for cars; But most European cities do not; and even in the NYC, there are weird small streets that often require negotiation among drivers.

I have not seen autonomous cars drive in snow and ice and road construction on any regular basis. Until that works I can't imagine driverless cars anywhere except in good weather states.

In NYC at least, robocars could just avoid the goofy streets, since the easily navigable streets are never that far away.

What if your apartment is on a goofy street?

There's a whole spectrum from door-to-door taxi service to fixed-route public transit. I don't see why consumer expectations couldn't be set such that it's not weird to be dropped off a block or two away. Take a (more expensive) manned car if you need to be dropped at your door step. The same tradeoff id already at play with buses vs taxis/Uber.

Plus there's already a precedent in Uber Pool for something that's in between a bus and a taxi. They even will ask you to walk a short distance sometimes.

Pickup / dropoff at nearest non-goofy intersection.

Wow! Really? My commute from the southern edge of Boston (Jamaica Plain) to the northern part (Allston / HBS) on Friday involved 2 road constructions, a car stopped inside a rotary that made the entire loop gridlocked, and countless pedestrians jay walking because the fine was reduced to $1 in the 1970's so no one cares.[0] I'm not sure people who live in grid cities and calm suburbs can even comprehend the madness here. Self-driving cars will take decades here.

[0] http://www.mass.gov/courts/selfhelp/tickets/jaywalking.html

Who cares? If self driving cars work for 50 percent of cities, that is still massively massively revolutionary. That's still trillions of dollars.

People are underestimating how game changing "mostly working" self driving cars are.

Fortunately for them, every major company that is working on selfdriving cars has been yelling about 2020 as the date of release for level 4 autonomous vehicles.

So they only need to wait 3 years, not 10.

The legal problems that everyone talks about will be (comparatively) minor.

A bunch of pro-innovation, anti gov regulation red states like Arizona will fully legalize it (why do you think Ubers CEO has been meeting with Trump?) , and the rest will follow once these states test drive the cars at scale, and they start to save thousands of lives.