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Comment by marblar | Hacker News Reader

> Google pioneers like Anthony Levandowsky and Chris Urmson are talking 30ish years now before we'll see unmanned cars driving across the country. This may have something to do with why so many google vets have jumped ship over the last year.

Source?

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Here's Urmson:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...

Levandowski said “In 30 years, every single new car will be autonomous. That’s completely obvious", so I guess he's a little more optimistic.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/19/self-driv...

> But he took exception to the notion that Google was announcing any sort of delay, instead describing Urmson's new decades-long delivery window as an "expansion" of what he has said in the past.

There seems to be no change here. Silicon Valley will have autonomous taxis in this decade. You can't guarantee 100% of new cars sold will be autonomous until you have a plan for Calcutta and Barrow, Alaska.

We'll see autonomous cars being implemented quite soon, but don't expect to see some kind of Uber-like conquest for world domination in the next decade. It will be slow, plodding, and bound by the constraints of the technology.

And John Leonard at MIT has said in the last couple years "not in my lifetime." He's in his forties or so. At least the particular quote I looked up was "taxis in Manhattan."

It's certainly possible that at least subsets of highway driving could come much sooner. Which would be useful but you don't get to the whole potentially not own a car until you can self-drive without a human present on most roads under a wide range of conditions.

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