When will we have driverless cars for the masses?

[Daniel Nenni]

Interesting interview with Simon Segars, CEO of ARM. Nice piece of history. I have been researching automotive IP for a blog and have been asking how long will it be until we have driverless cars? According to Elon Musk it is right around the corner but as a semiconductor professional I am a bit less optimistic.

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Will Arm's Simon Segars Do For Self-Driving Cars What He Did For The Mobile Phone?

I do know however that quite a few companies are working on it. Automotive is one of those market segments where systems companies are now developing their own chips. We see this first hand on SemiWiki as we track our automotive related blogs and the domains that read them. To date we have published 354 automotive blogs that have been viewed close to 1.5M times by more than 1k different domains. It really is the who's who of the automotive industry.

So the question is: When will driverless (fully autonomous) cars come to the masses?

 

[Bernard Murphy]

Perhaps sooner in constrained environments. I saw one suggestion of driverless cars in gated communities for retirees. Makes sense.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

Perhaps sooner in constrained environments. I saw one suggestion of driverless cars in gated communities for retirees. Makes sense.

Agreed, followed by mass transit and congested city taxis. A completely autonomous society would work much better than a partial one and that will take time. My guess is 10+ years.

 

[simoncc2]

Agreed, followed by mass transit and congested city taxis. A completely autonomous society would work much better than a partial one and that will take time. My guess is 10+ years.

I strongly recommend to read this article comparing Waymo (google self-driving car program) and Xerox : Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder | Ars Technica

Basically we need to reach a point where the cars won't need a human - which is not the case : Waymo still put a driver behind the wheels because we need someone in case there is a situation where the computer can't decide what to do.

Waymo's approach is to target taxi's speed : 65 / 70 mph because this is the market they are trying to enter. However it might be the wrong approach, because today we can already have self driving car at 25mph in retired community (and the person who built the start-up is someone from Google Waymo who left). The Waymo approach is compared to the Xerox approach with the PC back in the 70s before Apple enter the market with a mass approach and more successful in the 80s.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

Excellent article, well researched. It reminded me that a great product must be matched with a great company.

I strongly recommend to read this article comparing Waymo (google self-driving car program) and Xerox : Google’s Waymo risks repeating Silicon Valley’s most famous blunder | Ars Technica

Basically we need to reach a point where the cars won't need a human - which is not the case : Waymo still put a driver behind the wheels because we need someone in case there is a situation where the computer can't decide what to do.

Waymo's approach is to target taxi's speed : 65 / 70 mph because this is the market they are trying to enter. However it might be the wrong approach, because today we can already have self driving car at 25mph in retired community (and the person who built the start-up is someone from Google Waymo who left). The Waymo approach is compared to the Xerox approach with the PC back in the 70s before Apple enter the market with a mass approach and more successful in the 80s.