Yes. My median is probably 2.5 years to have 10 of the 50 largest US cities where a member of the public can hail a self-driving car (though emphasizing that I don’t know anything about the field beyond the public announcements).
Some of these bets had a higher threshold of covering >50% of the commutes within the city, i.e. multiplying fraction of days where it can run due to weather, and fraction of commute endpoints in the service zone. I think Phoenix wouldn’t yet count, though a deployment in SF likely will immediately. If you include that requirement then maybe my median is 3.5 years. (My 60% wasn’t with that requirement and was intended to count something like the current Phoenix deployment.)
(Updated these numbers in the 60 seconds after posting, from (2/2.5) to (2.5/3.5). Take that as an indication of how stable those forecasts are.)
Waymo’s website says they are serving riders in 11 US cities (all of which are among the 50 largest).
Waymo feels very real in SF: it’s a product that’s easy to access, people use it because they like it rather than for novelty, it’s able to serve most routes within the city, and it has nearly as much market share as Uber (here’s some slightly stale data, I think by now its share is more like 25%). I don’t have direct visibility into the other 10 cities, but I think at least a few of them still have a waitlist. My current best guess is that we’ll hit my 2.5 year prediction a bit before 3 years (and probably hit my 3.5 year prediction a bit early).
Overall I think that self-driving deployment has been faster than most technical people expected in 2016. It was probably somewhere around my 20th percentile.
Thanks for taking the time to write out these reflections.
I’m curious about your estimates for self driving cars in the next 5 years, would you take the same bet at 50:50 odds for a 2028 July date?
Yes. My median is probably 2.5 years to have 10 of the 50 largest US cities where a member of the public can hail a self-driving car (though emphasizing that I don’t know anything about the field beyond the public announcements).
Some of these bets had a higher threshold of covering >50% of the commutes within the city, i.e. multiplying fraction of days where it can run due to weather, and fraction of commute endpoints in the service zone. I think Phoenix wouldn’t yet count, though a deployment in SF likely will immediately. If you include that requirement then maybe my median is 3.5 years. (My 60% wasn’t with that requirement and was intended to count something like the current Phoenix deployment.)
(Updated these numbers in the 60 seconds after posting, from (2/2.5) to (2.5/3.5). Take that as an indication of how stable those forecasts are.)
It has been almost 3 years! I’m not living in the US, but curious how your prediction went.
Waymo’s website says they are serving riders in 11 US cities (all of which are among the 50 largest).
Waymo feels very real in SF: it’s a product that’s easy to access, people use it because they like it rather than for novelty, it’s able to serve most routes within the city, and it has nearly as much market share as Uber (here’s some slightly stale data, I think by now its share is more like 25%). I don’t have direct visibility into the other 10 cities, but I think at least a few of them still have a waitlist. My current best guess is that we’ll hit my 2.5 year prediction a bit before 3 years (and probably hit my 3.5 year prediction a bit early).
Overall I think that self-driving deployment has been faster than most technical people expected in 2016. It was probably somewhere around my 20th percentile.