> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK?
I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world.
According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time.
Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.
Sure this can probably account for 80% of the general use cases, and surely the remaining 20% are the highly complex, low occurrence cases.
But I think saying this took 30 years is cheating a bit. There were fits and starts and long periods of no development until breakthroughs in other fields (machine learning) occured, which can now get us the rest of the way. Not to mention, the pareto principle doesn't account for Moore's law
That assumes that the remaining problems are best solved using our current machine learning techniques. It may be that it takes several additional long periods to find the breakthroughs necessary to finally solve the remaining problems. 100 years can go by quite fast.
I'm afraid it will be the same as image recognition technology. It's "easy" to get good image recognition that works in 80-90% of the cases, but it still fails at the easiest edge cases(best image recognition in the world fails at telling a difference between a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print). So I think we will go through a few years of manufacturers making cars which can drive themselves in perfect weather, but we won't see a car that can drive in all conditions for at least a century.
So soon, we'll all be driven autonomously 80% of the time, and 20% of the time, some guy will drive. At that ratio, it seems on-demand transportation wins over cars, and the end result is the same - we don't drive.
I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world.
According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time.
Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.