I participated in an interview last week in which Alexy Khrabrov asked me about my vision for the next year in self-driving cars.
My guess is that over the next year we will start to see lots of cities crop up in which it is possible for a normal person to catch a ride in a self-driving car.
As far as I know, this is only possible right now in Singapore — where nuTonomy is running its self-driving taxis — and Pittsburgh — where Uber is running self-driving cars. (There are other locations with very restricted self-driving vehicles — like autonomous buses running on short, fixed routes.)
Today nuTonomy signed a deal with the city of Boston to start a self-driving car program in that city, which is also the hometown of nuTonomy, an MIT spinout.
So that brings the number of cities to three. It’s not hard to imagine similar programs in San Francisco and Mountain View (Google), Detroit (Ford, GM, Delphi), Stuttgart (Mercedes), Munich (BMW), and London (Delphi).
Hopefully imagination will become reality in 2017.
David Silver 