How gauche! No, I don't want to make a
Long Bet on that.
I don't live in the United States where every CS graduate gets a Ferrari as a signing bonus (maybe a self-driving Ferrari one day). $USD1000 is clearly a lot more money to me than it is to you.
But if you'd like to take your own side of the bet and choose your own charity, please feel free.
Moreover, I'd like to know what the terms of that bet that you'd be making with yourself. Is it for a generally available car that can drive reasonably anywhere? In San Fransisco but also in small towns without super-accurate cm-scale mapping data (which will never be both everywhere and up-to-date)? Do we consider it a success if self-driving cars blindly drive into construction sites that haven't been mapped? Or crash into newly erected barricades? Because I don't, and that's exactly where we'll be in 15 years.
Autonomous vehicles are quickly approaching what I will acknowledge is probably an 80% solution. In nice weather, when their mapping is perfect in a perfectly-mapped area, and they have a good GPS signal, autonomous cars will work well (and currently are working well in testing).
That's not the standard that's expected. No one lives in a city without road work or construction going on. No one lives in a city where temporary or make-shift signs aren't being erected, or where there are never detours, or where there isn't ad-hoc communication going on between pedestrians and drivers, or where weather doesn't block LIDAR, or, ...whatever.
We will be nowhere near level 4 autonomous vehicles in 10 years time. And not in 15 years, either.
No one in this field is confident of that anymore. Not even Google is making the same bold claims that they were 3 years ago. Their own researchers are publicly hedging now (http://gizmodo.com/how-to-teach-an-autonomous-car-to-drive-1...) and backing away from their most ambitious claims.
The only other group that I'm aware of that's still claiming that we're anywhere near having generally-useful self-driving cars are the established car makers, none of whom have traditionally been serious AI and computer vision research contributors.