> Personally I think we're 1-2 years aways from initial commercial rollout and it'll grow very quickly from there.

I think you're very optimistic. Bear in mind that Musk often over-promises on timelines (for instance, he said the new in-house autopilot in the Model S would have parity with the old outsourced one by the end of 2016, it still doesn't), and it will take sometime to regulate and legislate a whole new set of laws and structures around self driving (especially around matters of liability in the case of accidents).

I can imagine in 2 years we see more complex and intelligent implementations available for the general public that can manage route mapping and full autonomy in an ideal situation (you'd better hope its not snowing), but where drivers are still required to be present and have their hands on or near the wheel at all times.

I agree, I think we are farther off from truly autonomous driving than we believe, too many factors play into it that tend to be forgotten( I'm guilty of it as well when it comes to self-driving or a lot of technologies I'd love to see sooner than later):

1. Some people just enjoy driving their cars, tinkering with them from an automotive perspective and the like, self-driving cars will inhibit that due to their heavier reliance on software, design differences and lack of modification abilities as opposed to today's vehicles, self-driving cars won't gain acceptance from that crowd for a while.

2. The first accident that is caused by a self-driving car will cause a major set-back in the eye of the public, airplanes are over-engineered for the sake of redundancy and safety and I don't believe that level of detail will be applied to self-driving vehicles, honestly. Government standards will be met and companies will achieve the best safety ratings they can because it just doesn't hurt your product to have that as a selling point(I purchased my last vehicle for my family almost solely on it's high safety ratings) but sooner or later a self-driving vehicle will cause a casualty or injury.

3. Control and change, it is a complete paradigm shift for transportation as a whole and it will take a while some people to want to adapt or change with the times, a lot of cars are driven for sentimental reasons, the self-driving car tends to pull away from the romantic image of a vehicle(road trips come to mind as an example).

4.Cost, Self-driving cars bring a whole new level of technology to the consumer, how will that be handled from a financial perspective? Car dealers aren't known to be consumer friendly. Will there be economy models available? What about the individuals who just can't afford a self-driving car and are fine with a non-self-driving vehicle, individuals who can't afford to purchase a new car at all?

And along with cost: maintenance. The failure of a sensor could have far more dangerous consequences than a worn-out catalytic converter. You'll have to keep your car's sensors in much fitter trim. That will be impossible for lots of people who today can barely keep their car passing inspection.

Even when the subject is Uber you get people who somehow aren't able to process the notion that autonomous vehicles will be shared, managed and maintained by large scale professional fleet management services, and rented on a per trip basis. Every major company developing fully autonomous passenger vehicles is pursuing this model.

That's the reason. We are unable. Somehow we aren't able to process this subtle notion you have revealed to us. Even now, I find myself unable to grasp this nuance.

If they are truly just taxis, then their penetration will be approximately what taxis are today plus some increment to account for lower pricing. Maybe add rental cars.

Lol, this whole thread feels like it's out of a time warp from 2013, before the rush, when most people were still pretty naive about these things.

So where is the math that lets everyone suddenly afford to and want to take taxis everywhere?

In New York City, a taxi driver takes home maybe 50% of the money collected in fares after costs (whether depreciation on their own car, renting a taxi by the day or week, gas, etc.) That may be high but it's a nice round number.

If we take this as a general rule of thumb (and NYC cabbies make more than the average), that means you could but cab fares by roughly 50% by eliminating the driver. Maybe that forces a behavioral change on the part of some urbanites. But I can pretty much guarantee you that cutting cab prices by 50% will minimally affect behaviors in most places.

And that's not even counting the many places where having the most rudimentary cab services is barely a cost-effective business today.

Many analysts have crunched the numbers, and come up with similar results, but Brad Templeton has been thinking and writing about Robotaxis longer than anyone else, so I'll link to his numbers:

http://ideas.4brad.com/robotaxi-economics

Those numbers seem quite consistent with what I wrote. Costs per mile of a "normal" car today of about 50 cents/mile. (Which is approximately the IRS reimbursement rate so that seems very reasonable.) So that would be a good ballpark. Which is 1/2 to 1/3 of Uber today.

Sure, you can speculate about optimized taxi designs (which aren't especially relevant to non-core urban areas with high car ownership today) but small electric vehicles could exist without self-driving too.

IMO this is an academic exercise for at least a couple of decades in any case but it's an interesting thought experiment.

The health of the sensors will become part of the safety inspection.

I've seen a fair amount of stuff in 40 years of driving:

Snow, of course. I live in Salt Lake, and I think it's going to be hard to automate a car to drive as well as a good, experienced snow driver.

I've hydroplaned once.

I've had a malfunctioning traffic light that gave me a green left turn arrow across oncoming traffic that also had a green.

I've seen an unattended baby stroller go coasting across a crosswalk just as the light turned green.

I somewhat often take my car onto dirt roads. Sometimes I have to be rather conscious of the clearance and where the rocks are so that I don't rip the bottom out of my oilpan. I also have to think carefully about how I approach the sandy patches so I don't get stuck.

My brother in law had his front brake lock up on one side while driving at freeway speed.

I've had the vehicle in front of me break an axle and drop a rolling tire on the road in front of me, while it went down the road dragging the brakeshoes on the ground. That happened on a cloverleaf; the driver of that vehicle did well not to roll it.

Maybe the worst I've seen: A pickup dropped an extension ladder in the middle of the freeway. It was rotating, and as it rotated, it grew in length. A bunch of cars were having to dodge it, plus dodge the cars that were dodging it.

There are a lot of crazy things that can be thrown at you while you're driving. Programming a computer to be able to handle all of them as well as a human is really hard - you first have to think of all of them.

Autopilot 2 just achieved parity. Late, but done.

As of today, AP2 is still missing the following AP1 features:

* Auto-dimming touchscreen

* Automatic windshield wipers

* Autopark - perpendicular

* Display cars in other lanes

* Side collision avoidance

* Side collision warning

* Sign recognition

It's also still steering itself off the road in places AP1 worked fine. There are videos over at r/teslamotors on Reddit or the TMC forum.

I received an email the other day saying side collision avoidance has been added in the latest update, but the rest still stand.

That seems crazy that automatic windshield wipers aren't enabled... my 2008 Honda Civic has those!

To put this into perspective, the things that recently shipped are autosteer and auto-braking at high speeds.

Who the hell did they outsource from?

The automatic wipers were from someone else like Bosch, they used to have a bug similar to a bug on Mercedes cars.

Mobileye.

Nobody doubts Elon's ability to execute. He's just famous for missing his own deadlines.

Didn't check /r/Tesla and /r/SpaceX lately so I don't know what the current value is, but Elon Time coefficient used to be something around 1.7 or 1.8 ;).

I completely disagree. If you look at a recent video of Tesla self-driving real-world "debug" mode with identification/classification bounding boxes, that and Musk's bet on the simplicity of pure-optical CV they have a convincing argument for full autonomy reasonably within a few years.

I can't prove it but I will say 10x your prediction, between 20 and 50 years to get a real self driving car, a car with no wheel, fully automated. Maybe 10 years to have automated highway-only trucks. I think expectations are completely unrealistic in this.

For technological or regulatory reasons? (for context, I often see cars without steering wheels tooling around Mountain View)

And I have seen robots that answer carefully worded questions by their creators, does it mean robots can talk?

I think it will be easy to get to the 80-90% but the last bits are going to kill this. Bad weather conditions, night, extreme situations, etc. Self driving cars have to drive better than the median, because the median includes drunk and elderly drivers dragging it down. I'm sure a self driving car will drive better than a drunk but that's not the goalpost, the goalpost is you and me, intelligent rational drivers who basically never have accidents (that are our fault). This is going to be very difficult as the situations that arise often times require an intelligent decision, intelligent prediction. I just don't see all those machine learning dumb systems getting there, not removing the wheel. And until the wheel is removed its useless. A car that drives but requires me to be aware enough I can take over on a split second is not self driving, so the bar is very high.

How often does it snow in Mountain View?

Why is that relevant? The person stated that they expected autonomous vehicles to take 20-50 years to have no steering wheels. My point is, such vehicles already drive on the roads in some places. The limits are already often more regulatory than technological.

I wasn't replying to the person, I was replying to /you/.

The impression I got from your statement was that you consider fully autonomous vehicles not far off. I disagree.

The point I was making was that the vehicles you see driving around are literally fair-weather vehicles.

A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.

I agree that there are difficult regulatory issues to figure out, but don't underestimate the technical hurdles.

>I wasn't replying to the person, I was replying to /you/.

And my point still stands. How do you define a "fully autonomous vehicle" is an important question. Consider the following three possibilities:

- Drives better than the median human driver in average weather conditions on half of the roads in the US (alternatively, for harder goals, replace with US+Europe or World) - Drives better than 95% of people in 95% of weather conditions on 95% of roads in the US - Drives better than any human in any weather conditions on any road in the US

I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.

>A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.

Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and have more experience driving in the snow than I do. And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or undisciplined drivers.

Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).

For context, we know that the first goal (better than average driver in half of road conditions) is now achievable by teams of 1-3 people on a tight budget in O(months) (and really, maybe weeks), since people have done that and posted it on the internet.

> - Drives better than the median human driver in average weather conditions on half of the roads in the US (alternatively, for harder goals, replace with US+Europe or World) - Drives better than 95% of people in 95% of weather conditions on 95% of roads in the US - Drives better than any human in any weather conditions on any road in the US

> I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.

I agree on the first and third milestones. Or kinda -- perhaps the first milestone is only reached for California, or for US highways yet.

I think you underestimate how difficult the second milestone is. The variation is tremendous, even merely within the US, to say nothing about the rest of the world.

> Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and

I'm sceptical. I think there will be so much ambiguity, both through road situation and through human interaction which we interpret with comparable ease, that the car may be stumped. And we set the high hurdle of forgoing steering wheels, so we need some other, yet to be devised way to give the car hints safely and efficiently.

> have more experience driving in the snow than I do.

I wasn't thinking about handling the car (I can easily believe that a computer does a better job of that), but rather about decreased visibility, no visible road markings, etc.

> And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or

Fairly easy I guess. Just be defensive, put a bit of distance between you and them.

> undisciplined drivers.

Much harder. Not from a safety perspective (again, just be defensive), but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.

> Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).

Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting (which the computer will indeed be better at, I agree).

Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty (read my other posts if you're interested) :-)

EDIT: Thanks for the interesting discussion so far.

>I agree on the first and third milestones. Or kinda -- perhaps the first milestone is only reached for California, or for US highways yet

My anecdotal experience shows that there exist vehicles capable of tooling around on highways and city streets without the need for human interaction.

>but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.

There's a good video I've seen about how the Google cars can increase their assertiveness until they can go.

>Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting

Not if they can't see the children because, as I said, they're behind trees.

>Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty

Indeed, that's why I clarify that Adaptive Cruise Control isn't the same thing as an autonomous vehicle and you shouldn't use one to judge the other.

>Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you)

That's one of the things that most strikes me about driving in Manhattan. In large areas of Manhattan, at least at certain times of day, you have to be almost insanely aggressive from the perspective of tooling around Mountain View on the average day. Otherwise, you're not going anywhere and are going to have everyone blaring their horns at you. (Plus, pretty much every pedestrian will take advantage of your timid driving to cross the street in front of you while you're hesitating.)

Visibility issues with the sensors aside, I'd probably trust a computer in the snow vs. most humans. Less prone to be overconfident in their stopping/steering abilities.

> Visibility issues with the sensors aside,

You got what I was aiming for, yes.

That plus difficulty in understanding streets obscured by a cover of snow, etc.

> Less prone to be overconfident in their stopping/steering abilities.

Very true. Computers have weaknesses, but vanity is not one of them :-)

> I'd probably trust a computer in the snow vs. most humans.

I have a car (2016 model) with several fancy assistants.

The lane-following assistant (which only works in very limited, benign conditions anyway) is regularly confused by shadows on pleasant days. Or by puddles on less pleasant days.

The car-following cruise control has missed a 40t semitrailer and would have merrily accelerated right into it.

The car-following cruise control regularly panics because it suddenly interprets guardrails or street signs as cars. On an empty road. This is not nice, because it has braking authority.

The computer in my car, at least, can absolutely not be trusted.

What kind of car do you have?

BMW 225xe Active Tourer (yeah it's a mouthful :-) ).

There are fully autonomous vehicles driving around Mountain View all the time. They are not 10 years off, it is now.

"fully autonomous around Mountain View" is not equivalent to "fully autonomous". In particular, Uber can't just take the former and deploy it everywhere.

They don't need to deploy it everywhere.

Even if it can only navigate between SFO and Mountain View, that's ready to deploy as a commercial venture. There will be an adoption ramp anyway. It will just follow the driving difficulty gradient.

In practical terms, it's ready now. Driving people home from the ski area in a blizzard will be the final task, but it doesn't need to be solved to put both Uber and GM out of business.

There is a bit of a misunderstanding in this thread I think.

I (and others, I believe) were arguing when a car we would want to buy could forgo a steering wheel.

You're right that e.g. Uber could have a steering-wheel-less fleet that they simply retire in adverse conditions, sooner than that.

Automonous cars that you buy won't be an important product historically, except as a data collection strategy for Tesla etc. Autonomous carshare will be at least half of the mobility market, eventually eating all but the very wealthiest customers, plus driving enthusiasts.

"want to buy" is a pretty nebulous and person thing. It doesn't seem meaningful to talk about without fully qualifying much less say "it's not possible". We can move the goalposts all we want but those sorts of cars are imminent for at least early adopters. If you want to say you won't feel comfortable for another 10 years, great, but that doesn't mean the event hasn't happened. It's a tremendous accomplishment. I've seen the fully autonomous cars making lefts on El Camino that I just would not do, ever, and they do it perfectly.

> We can move the goalposts all we want

I wasn't aware I did that.

> but those sorts of cars are imminent for at least early adopters

without steering wheels? Dear God I hope not.

I use driving assistants in my car, but I'm painfully aware of their limitations. These days we absolutely still need a steering wheel. In my car for mundane situations, in Elon's miracle machines maybe only to park in an utterly unmarked field at a festival or whatever.

It has already happened as I've said repeatedly. I'll stop bleeding karma pointing out reality.

What do those do when an intersection light is out and a crew is directing traffic?

Ask the human to confirm when it is safe to proceed.

...and have some kind of UI to explain to the car whether to pass the work crew on the left or on the right.

I dunno, maybe some kind of wheel in front of the human, which they could turn left or right to command the car to change direction ;-P

No, just ask.

I grew up thinking we'd have supersonic airliners any day now.

We had supersonic airliners for nearly 30 years.

That's the joke. We had a supersonic airliner, just like we have some cars driving around without steering wheels. But in 30 years the technology never got good enough to become mainstream.

The Concorde wasn't a case of us not being able to build it, though. It was a case of it just not being worth it to operate. Concorde technology was generally fine (27 years in operation). But supersonic transport is a niche even for wealthy people.

And it's not just snow and things like that. I'm in NYC this weeek which I think we can agree is not some rural backwater irrelevant to the rollout of vehicles. Has anyone who thinks the vehicles tooling around Silicon Valley suburbs with a driver to take over seriously think they can navigate Times Square at rush hour (or theater getting out)? People are everywhere. Bicycles are flying in and out. Cars are jamming themselves into turns. Etc. I find this sort of driving difficult and I have plenty of experience with urban driving.

The big car companies doing automatic driving (Ford, Volvo, etc.) are talking about 2020 as the rollout year for the technology. They're public about this because the supply chain has to get ready. Continental, the parts maker, says they'll have automotive LIDAR units in mass production in 2020. Not because they can't do it sooner, but because they can't turn on the production line until there are volume orders. Prototypes, of course, will be available much sooner. Probably now.

You have to keep in mind that Musk gives his predictions in Martian years.

Its complicated from ubers perspective though. Their product is "transportation as reliable as running water". How long until autonomy becomes that reliable?

Thinking specifically about: Weather, Supply shocks (morning/evening rush hour, concerts, professional sports games, parades)

> Their product is "transportation as reliable as running water".

Running water is very reliable. AWS can't keep a reliability zone working that reliably, and that's a rather easier problem than transportation.

Thing is, they don't have to rely 100% on autonomy. They can start introducing autonomous cars, in competition with human drivers, and adjust that number dynamically on an hourly basis. With the higher profits of those rides, they could even pay the human drivers more during those "supply shocks", as a kind of self-funded surge pricing, to fill up those gaps.

Musk misses the deaclones he sets for himself constantly. Maybe always?