Voyage CEO Oliver Cameron broke the self-driving car Internet recently (I just, but only a little), by predicting, “ I feel very confident that in the next 12-to-24 months, you’re going to see self-driving vehicles, with no person in the vehicle, moving people on a daily basis.”
Oliver hired me into Udacity four years ago to build the Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program, so I’m naturally inclined to trust his judgement 🙂
And I think he’s right about this! It might already be true, in fact.
Waymo is supposedly moving people in fully driverless vehicles in the Phoenix area and has been for quite some time. The riders are pre-selected and under NDA, so the reporting has been quite limited. But it might already be happening daily.
In very constrained, geofenced operational domains, I suspect we’ll see more companies launch driverless vehicle services — particularly Chinese companies, which don’t get a lot of coverage in the US, but are progressing rapidly.
In the meantime, if you want to see driverless vehicles in action, follow Oliver’s Twitter feed.
David Silver 