Study Says Driverless Cars To Be 15% Of The Market by 2030 - What Will It Take For That To Happen?

Laws, such as those they have in California for EVs, to create a market where one doesn't exist.

Or profitability, where taxi companies can save money by taking drivers out of the loop. (But will consumers feel safe enough in such a cab?)


The big downside with respect to automotive autopilot, can be seen from two perspectives:

(1) If you implement it as a option, and you hold the driver accountable in case of system failure or error, then you have to make automotive autopilot far more correct that what exists in general aviation (GA). A plane merely has to stay on a programmed course in the sky, avoiding few well-documented obstacles, such as mountains, towers, and other aircraft broadcasting their whereabouts, and it does this with clearances of several thousand feet. In a car, those clearances can be less than a 3 feet, and the obstacles are far, far more dynamic. Secondly, when GA autopilot fails, the pilot has a lot more time to (a) notice, (b) gather his wits about him, and (c) establish manual control of the aircraft. In a car, there could be milliseconds between system failure and collision.

(2) If the autonomous system is implemented in such a way in which there is NEVER a human driver (i.e., no controls for a human), then you need a system that's much, MUCH more accurate, reliable, and failsafe than the best the GA industry has ever offered.

BTW, autopilot for a single-engine piston aircraft is a option that costs several tens of thousands of dollars. That's no big deal when you view a $20,000 option for a $400,000 new aircraft. It's a very big deal when you're trying to sell that system in a $35,000 autonomous car. The automotive industry is attempting to deliver a system that's orders of magnitude more complex, accurate, responsive, and reliable than the GA industry currently has, for about 1/10 of the price or less. Good luck.

It's Californication...

A stroke.

It is going to fun to see how this unravels. Do you really think people in self driving cars will be content to be driven at the speed limit when everyone else is passing them? When your car decides that its best to kill that pedestrian then crash into a bus how will you feel? Will anyone be able to pay for repairs when the system fails out of warranty? What will it be like when some pimple faced kid high on pot or alcohol decides to have some fun knowing the driverless car next to him, in front of him or behind him cannot hit him but he can cause it to do crazy things to avoid hitting him?

Attorneys are salivating at the idiocy of autonomous cars