The last driver license holder
one thing is certain: The last person to get a driver license is already born — the speed of technology development and recent announcements confirm that.
Digital players
The California
DMV alone issued to 13 companies licenses for road testing autonomous technologies.
Google alone has 58 test vehicles on roads across the U.S., counting for 80 percent of all registered test cars. Google has accumulated an impressive 1.6 million autonomously driven miles, adding between 10,000 and 15,000 miles every week. In total, this counts for 90 percent of all test miles driven in California. Added to that are 3 million simulated miles every day, according to Google’s
January report.
Tesla, on the other hand, revealed that their customers have driven more than 100 million miles in Autopilot mode since its roll-out in October last year. And
Elon Musk recently announced that Tesla is less than two years away from having a complete autonomous car.
Uber and
Baidu are just two more digital companies that started testing autonomous cars.
The technology is advancing rapidly. Given the overall number of miles driven and comparing them with the number of accidents, the cars are already as safe as human drivers: 12 accidents occurred with Google vehicles during the 1.6 million miles of road tests, and only two of them were the fault of the Google cars. The cars had an incident every 133,000 miles; this is on par with reported and non-reported
human accidents with property damage.
Traditional automakers who’ve been asleep at the wheel for some time are now ramping up their efforts with the goal to catch up with those newcomers from the digital industries. Honda, Mercedes, Audi, Ford and GM all have test vehicles and are frantically acquiring technology or entering into partnerships like
GM and
Fiat. Even suppliers like Bosch got test licenses. Additionally, announcements involving
BMW revealed that the focus of their i-series is shifting to autonomous vehicles; the
release to the market is expected in 2021.
Singularity plays out
Following Ray Kurzweil’s statement on
Singularity, we will see exponential acceleration in the development of the required digital power and intelligence of self-driving car AI. Conservative expectations that draw from past linear experiences may be coming faster than most of us expect through the exponential component.
Other players
AUTOSAR, an automotive system architecture for standardizing automotive electronic control units, is expected to have in its 2018 release version 4.4 everything included for autonomous driving. This system standard is expected to be included by 2020 in the cars built by its partners, including BMW, Ford, GM, Daimler, Volkswagen and Volvo.
Sensor technologies are also advancing rapidly, and prices are dropping. Modern cars are equipped with hundreds of sensors, including radar, cameras, GPS and accelerometers. Additionally required sensors such as
Lidar are predicted to drop to a few hundred dollars in the next few years.
Technology research firm
Vision Systems Intelligence listed all the companies that provide solutions for or drive autonomous technologies; the amount of companies is impressive. More than 200 companies work on autonomous driving solutions and — if we extrapolate trends from other hot industries — many more will follow.
Although a
majority of drivers today are still skeptical about handing over control to a machine, experiencing a self-driving car for themselves and seeing insurance rates go up for human drivers will quickly change that. Regulations may follow suit; by 2030, manually driven cars may even be outlawed or restricted to closed circuits.
The last driver
Given the facts of these joint efforts and the resources spent by major players, once Liam (or Sophia or Ethan) turns 16 in 2031, they will not be required or even allowed to get a driver license. Especially when we consider the
dismal driving record of their age group. And they may not want to do it anyways. The
Department of Transportation shows declining rates of driver license holders among teenagers, a trend that
other countries also notice.
