Self Driving Cars Probably Won't Surface Until 2025

More autonomous driving technologies are on the way, but fully autonomous vehicles at the mass market level aren't projected for the foreseeable future, experts said Tuesday at the Society of Automotive Engineers 2013 World Congress.

"2025 is the timeframe where we see cars driving themselves," said Christian Schumacher, head of Continental Automotive's Advanced Driver Assistance Systems for the NAFTA region, echoing the rough timeline for fully autonomous vehicles projected by most in the industry.

But semi-autonomous vehicles, with technologies such as pedestrian recognition and traffic jam assist — where radar and camera technology help a vehicle keep pace with other vehicles and provide automated steering control to maintain lane presence — may be just a handful of years away.

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vdiv - 4/18/2013 10:38:20 AM

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Frankly, self-driving cars have been in existence since, well, the car has, if not before. There are taxi cabs, mini cabs, limos, buses, trolleys, metros and trains of various kinds. If one is not too keen on operating the vehicle, it is taken care for them as these examples point out.

The whole point of the individual car is the freedom it offers the driver to go at the time, place, and manner they choose. As a society we continue imposing more limitations on these freedoms -- do we really want that? At what point do we say, enough is enough?

Say it is 3 AM, you are tired, you just want to go home, you jump in your "Google Car™" and slur something in the order of "Home! Go home!", and... nothing happens. The car just sits there, a big circle of death spinning endlessly on the grayed-out screen.

Why?

Because someone, somewhere in a data center has decided to do maintenance in the whee hours and "Google Cloud™" is unavailable.

"Fine", you say, "I'll drive it myself, I used to do that when I was 15, and I still play GT XVI". But there are two problems with that. First, you do not remember how, you've never done it in a "Google Car™", and second, if you manage to figure it out (remember, you are dead tired), you are not allowed to. City ordinance, for "safety reasons" only self-driving cars are allowed!

You say "The hell with it, I just wanna be home!" Somehow you manage to get going only to get pulled over by a "Google Cop™" automated police car, which promptly issues you an electronic "Google Ticket™", which leaves you baffled because the thing that triggered your ordeal was that "Google Cloud™" was shot, so how the hell do "Google Cop™" and "Google Ticket™" still work?

Maybe I am just an old geezer stuck in my ways, but I do not want such a future, be it tomorrow, or in 2025.