That's at least 4-5 automotive cycles away, IMO (so 25-30 year away).

And that's for the high end. The low end cars are probably 50-60 years away, IMO.

I expect to see little 25MPH self-driving cars running around senior communities quite soon. At 25MPH and below, sensor range required is low, data quality is good, and most problems can be dealt with by slamming on the brakes. That seemed to be the target market for Google's little bubble car. The problem there is price, not capability.

The notion that the low end cars will take decades longer is very, very ridiculous.

Ummm... how many cheap cars have: adaptive cruise control or lane assist? Both technologies have been available for expensive cars for what now? 15 years?

Really cheap cars don't even have automatic gearboxes (or they are bought without them 90% of the time, outside of the US).

By "cheap car" I mean something cheaper than $20000 and "really cheap" would be below $12-15000.

Ok, with "really cheap" you're talking about a species of cars that I'm unfamiliar with.

Here in the US, the sensors and control fly by wire that Lexus used a few years ago have largely trickled down to the Corolla and the like as a standard feature. The differences between making autonomy work on low end and high end cars will be purely a software problem. That's not the kind of additional work that takes thirty years.

The difference is not purely a software problem.

It's a price problem since you need to install a bazillion sensors, motors and other thingies which are basically used only for one purpose.

And regarding really cheap, you're on HackerNews, ergo less likely to ever meet those. But it's usually cheap models from cheaper brands such as Dacia, Hyunday, Kia, Tata, several of the Chinese brands. I doubt most people you know actually own one :)

> It's a price problem since you need to install a bazillion sensors, motors and other thingies which are basically used only for one purpose.

That's an overstatement. You need to install sensors, many of which you'd install anyway for the modern lane-keeping and crash avoidance features. The sensors are not ruinously expensive and economy of scale incentivizes an automaker that makes both cheap and expensive cars to get these features out to the low end very quickly. As Animats pointed out, you really want to order this stuff by the million, not the thousand.

I guess I wasn't arguing with the crux of what you're saying - having a feature is generally going to be more expensive than not having it. The overstatement was very strong, especially in terms of timeline for reducing the costs of this functionality.

Here in the US I don't even think you can buy a "really cheap" car; my current vehicle is a used Jeep TJ and it set me back $18k (great condition though - still, I overpaid a bit, but I consider it the price for getting the options I wanted on the vehicle).

While I'm sure there are probably new (or relatively new) vehicle out there sub-$15k, they probably aren't much to write home about. Certainly nothing I want (that's just my personal wants - for instance, if it ain't 4wd and/or it can't be lifted, I don't want it).

As far as the transmission is concerned, here in the US most vehicles can't be bought without an automatic. Manual transmissions are becoming the exception; most car models don't even have them as an option. The few that do (mostly trucks and sports cars) have seen declining sales of the option (and I wouldn't be surprised if it actually costs more to get it!).

I imagine that if you waited for the right manufacturer's incentives and so on, you could get a Toyota Yaris here for $13k, new, with financing. It's a very fine car for someone who can comfortably fit in it.

Well, prototypes have already drove millions of miles like that.

(Whether they also had a steering wheel is of course irrelevant, what the parent means is that they can drive without nobody needing to use the steering wheel).

All of the systems I've heard about need human intervention every couple of miles.