Waymo has already started a real pilot of fully autonomic driving for regular people in Phoenix area. I predict that means they are less than 1 year away from ditching training wheels and launching it fully.
Some think that changing laws to make legal will be the hard part but I see the opposite: states will be competing for who's first to make it possible.
Many states, including CA, already made testing possible. You just sign up and ask "can I test my self-driving cars, on real roads, possibly destroying other cars on those roads and killing people. Pretty please?".
Laws are hard when they're controversial and self-driving cars are political goldmine:
* dramatically less deaths and other kinds of destruction due to less accidents
* cheaper transportation
* the sheer coolness of self-driving
It'll take only few states in US to allow it and other states will have to follow or the politicians will look very stupid if a taxi drive in SF costs $1 and the same is $10 in Chicago.
No-one will have to flaunt the law, it'll get changed very quickly.
Elon Musk said that Tesla's driverless technology was "probably better than a person" more than a year ago. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/11...). What I'm saying is, Musk is a big promoter of Tesla and taking his ideas of when the technology will be ready at 100% face value is foolish.
This is likely more due to regulatory reasons than anything else. Waymo's cars have an exceedingly low rate of required intervention.
But that's not really a very impressive feat compared to 3-5 days of non-stop driving in NYC. I mean who cares if it can go cross-country? I want it to take me from my apartment to the office to the grocery store to Target out to dinner and then back home again.
Hundreds and hundreds (probably >1,000 even) of those cross-country miles are going to be desolate and essentially carless.
As it is driving on a boring highway all day and finding a hotel at night sucks. I'd much rather leave the driving to the night while we sleep.
While that's nice, it's kinda the low-hanging fruit.
I'll be impressed if somebody manages autonomous driving in, say, New York (or Kolkata if you're feeling ambitious), at night, during snowfall, navigating a construction site and/or traffic regulated by policemen.
This is taxing but completely possible (and entirely expected) for a human driver. Whereas the lane-following autopilot in my car is routinely confused by shadows on a pleasant day.
We are quite far apart however on how close we are to "just works."
I'm not sure how far away door to door taxis are, but I also would bet against Uber having a long enough market lock in to recoup losses.
1. Uber will be first to market with driverless car technology. That is, it will beat Waymo, all the actual car companies, Apple, Tesla, and 100 other startups.
2. Given 1, Uber's driverless car technology is a durable technological advantage (ie, even if it's first to market, that doesn't matter much if Waymo follows it to market 3 months later). Note that we are at this point stipulating that this technological challenge is doable with a team that you spun up out of nothing a couple of years ago, as not-the-best-resourced team on the block.
3. Given 2, the legal issues with driverless cars are resolved well enough that Uber has a viable business.
4. Given 3, Uber can successfully raise money for an incredible capital expenditure (how many cars are we talking here? 1,000,000, very conservatively? At $20,000 ea, very conservatively? So $20B investment), and then handle that kind of capital investment.
5. Given 4, build up all the supporting infrastructure for this business (parking, local cleaning, etc.)
6. Given 5, this all happens within Uber's operational runway (like, starts within 3-5 years, finishes within 10 or so)?
Personally, I'd put the odds of this at: 10% for 1 * 10% for 2 * 90% for 3 * 80% for 4 * 70% for 5 * 20% for 6 = roughly 0.1%.
But even if you're way more bullish on Uber than I am, can anyone really argue for more than 50% for 1 * 50% for 2 * 90% for 3 * 95% for 4 * 95% for 5 * 80% for 6? That's still only 16%.
P.S. did you mean bearish instead of bullish?
And the thing is that we're not there. Even if you say it's a decade out (which seems pie in the sky optimistic to me), can Uber really afford to burn through cash for another 10 years?
[ADDED: I didn't make my point well. I do think legal/regulatory will take some time independent of technical readiness, but IMO it's technical readiness especially in all the corner cases that's the long pole.]