Is widespread commercialization of self-driving cars decades out? No, 2-5 years according to Google!
Google has made no secret of its ambitions to revolutionize transportation with autonomous vehicles. Chief Executive Officer Larry Page is said to be personally fascinated by the challenge of making cities operate more efficiently. The company recently said the driverless car technology in development within its Google X research lab is from two to five years from being ready for widespread use. At the Detroit auto show last month, Chris Urmson, the Google executive in charge of the project, articulated one possible scenario in which autonomous vehicles are patrolling neighborhoods to pick up and drop off passengers. “We’re thinking a lot about how in the long-term, this might become useful in people’s lives, and there are a lot of ways we can imagine this going,” Urmson said in a conference call with reporters on Jan. 14. “One is in the direction of the shared vehicle. The technology would be such that you can call up the vehicle and tell it where to go and then have it take you there…”
Travis Kalanick, Uber’s CEO, has publicly discussed what he sees as the inevitability of autonomous taxis, saying they could offer cheaper rides and a true alternative to vehicle ownership. “The Uber experience is expensive because it’s not just the car but the other dude in the car,” he said at a technology conference in 2014, referring to the expense of paying human drivers. “When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost [of taking an Uber] gets cheaper than owning a vehicle.”
One group of players you never hear mentioned in these articles…the Detroit car companies. Remember, they would have gone extinct in the 2007-8 financial crisis if the government hadn’t bailed them out. Are they completely missing out on the autonomous vehicle and ride-sharing trends now, instead picturing the millennials and their children living in the exurbs with two cars in every garage? If so, they may be headed for short-term extinction. I’m also waiting to hear more about autonomous trucks and buses – they have to be coming.