Elon Musk stated that their technology is 2 years away from full autonomous driving. Tesla is planning LA -> NY fully autonomic drive by end of this year.
Waymo has already started a real pilot of fully autonomic driving for regular people in Phoenix area. I predict that means they are less than 1 year away from ditching training wheels and launching it fully.
Some think that changing laws to make legal will be the hard part but I see the opposite: states will be competing for who's first to make it possible.
Many states, including CA, already made testing possible. You just sign up and ask "can I test my self-driving cars, on real roads, possibly destroying other cars on those roads and killing people. Pretty please?".
Laws are hard when they're controversial and self-driving cars are political goldmine:
* dramatically less deaths and other kinds of destruction due to less accidents
* cheaper transportation
* the sheer coolness of self-driving
It'll take only few states in US to allow it and other states will have to follow or the politicians will look very stupid if a taxi drive in SF costs $1 and the same is $10 in Chicago.
No-one will have to flaunt the law, it'll get changed very quickly.
Waymo has already started a real pilot of fully autonomic driving for regular people in Phoenix area. I predict that means they are less than 1 year away from ditching training wheels and launching it fully.
Some think that changing laws to make legal will be the hard part but I see the opposite: states will be competing for who's first to make it possible.
Many states, including CA, already made testing possible. You just sign up and ask "can I test my self-driving cars, on real roads, possibly destroying other cars on those roads and killing people. Pretty please?".
Laws are hard when they're controversial and self-driving cars are political goldmine:
* dramatically less deaths and other kinds of destruction due to less accidents
* cheaper transportation
* the sheer coolness of self-driving
It'll take only few states in US to allow it and other states will have to follow or the politicians will look very stupid if a taxi drive in SF costs $1 and the same is $10 in Chicago.
No-one will have to flaunt the law, it'll get changed very quickly.