Like other people, I like to start the year by making predictions about what will happen, particularly with respect to self-driving cars and autonomous vehicles. Following the example of Scott Alexander, I assign probabilities to my predictions.

100% Confidence

No Level 5 self-driving cars will be deployed anywhere in the world.

90% Confidence

Level 4 driverless vehicles, without a safety operator, will remain publicly available, somewhere in the world.
No “self-driving-only” public road will exist in the U.S.
Tesla will remain the industry leader in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems.
An autonomy company will be acquired for at least $100 million.
Level 4 autonomous vehicles, with or without a safety operator, will remain publicly available in China.

80% Confidence

C++ will remain the dominant programming language for autonomous vehicles.
A lidar-equipped vehicle will be available for sale to the general public.
My parents will not ride in an autonomous vehicle (except at Voyage or anywhere else I might work).
Tesla will not launch a robotaxi service.
Fully driverless low-speed vehicles will transport customers (not necessarily the general public).

70% Confidence

Waymo will expand its public driverless transportation service beyond Phoenix.
A Chinese company will offer self-driving service, with or without a safety operator, to the public, outside of China.
A self-driving Class 8 truck will make a fully driverless trip on a public highway.
Aerial drone delivery will be available to the general public somewhere.
Tesla will remain the world’s most valuable automaker.

60% Confidence

Fully driverless grocery delivery will be available somewhere in the US.
Tesla Full-Self Driving will offer Level 3 (driver attention not necessary until requested by the vehicle) functionality somewhere in the world.
A member of the public will die in a collision involving a Level 4 autonomous vehicle (including if the autonomous vehicle is not at-fault).
A company besides Waymo will offer driverless service to the general public, somewhere in the US.
A company will deploy driverless vehicles for last-mile delivery.

50% Confidence

Level 4 self-driving, with or without a safety operator, will be available to the public somewhere in Europe.
A Level 3 vehicle will be offered for sale to the public, by a company other than Tesla.
The US requires driver-monitoring systems in new vehicles.
The industry coalesces around a safety standard for driverless vehicles.
Self-driving service will be available to the general public, with or without a safety operator, in India.

Normally, I’d wrap up 2020 by looking back at the predictions I made at the beginning of 2020. Except…I didn’t make any predictions at the beginning of 2020. I skipped a year, so I’ll have to dig back two years to look at the predictions I made at the start of 2019.

Following the example of Scott Alexander, I assign probabilities to my predictions. This allows a finer-grained evaluation of how accurate my predictions were. Unfortunately, scoring one-year predictions two years later kind of nullifies this exercise, but here we go.

100% Certain

✓No Level 5 self-driving cars will be deployed anywhere in the world.

90% Certain

✓Level 4 autonomous vehicles will be on the road, at least in test mode, somewhere in the US.
✓Deep learning will remain the dominant tool for image classification.
✓Human drivers will be permitted on all public roads in the US.
✓No car for sale anywhere in the world will include vehicle-to-traffic-light communication. [Maybe by now this is true in China?]
✓C++ will be the dominant programming language for autonomous vehicles.
✓Autonomous drone delivery will be available commercially somewhere in the world. [Google and Walmart have announced pilots — unclear if those pilots are currently ongoing.]

80% Certain

✓Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public (with or without a safety operator) somewhere in the US.
✓Waymo will have recorded more autonomously-driven miles (all-time) than any other company.
✓Level 4 vehicles will operate, at least in test mode, without a safety operator, somewhere in the US.
✗No vehicle available for sale to the general public will come with OEM-installed lidar. [I think the Audi A8 still has a lidar, but it’s unclear. Volvo announced Luminar-equipped vehicles, but they’re not yet in production.]
✓No dominant technique will emerge for urban motion planning.

70% Certain

✗Level 4 vehicles will be available to the general public somewhere in Europe.
✓Level 4 vehicles will be available to the general public somewhere in China.
✗An autonomous shuttle running on public roads will be open to the general public somewhere in the world. [This seems like it must be true, but I’m not sure where. Public shuttles from May Mobility and Navya pop up periodically, but they always seem to be short-term engagements.]
✓A company will be acquired primarily for its autonomous vehicle capabilities with a valuation above $100M USD. [Luminar, Uber ATG, Zoox, although all of those are special cases in their own ways.]
✗Grocery delivery via autonomous vehicles, with no safety operator, will be available somewhere in the world.

60% Certain

✗No Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public, without a safety operator, anywhere in the US.
✓Tesla will offer the best-performing Advanced Driver Assistance System available to the public. [“Best-performing” is subjective. Various ratings have downgraded Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving, largely due to poor communication and driver monitoring. But Tesla still seems to me to be clearly in the lead with ADAS.]
✓All publicly available Level 4 vehicles will use lidar.
✗A member of the public will die in a collision involving a Level 4 autonomous vehicle (including if the autonomous vehicle is not at-fault). [Not that I’m aware of since January 1, 2019.]
✗Self-driving cars will be available to the general public somewhere in India. [Not that I know.]

50% Certain

✗A Level 3 vehicle will be for sale to the general public somewhere in the world. [Audi has pulled back on this. Volvo has announced but not yet delivered.]
✓Tesla’s full self-driving hardware will include a custom-designed computer.
✗Amazon will make routine (e.g. non-demonstration) autonomous deliveries using autonomous vehicles. [Supposedly Scout is still testing deliveries, but they’re pretty under-the-radar and I don’t consider these yet “routine.”]
✓A company will be acquired primarily for its autonomous vehicle capabilities with a valuation above $1B USD. [Zoox, although this is not quite what I expected when I made the prediction.]
✗Two of the US Big Three and German Big Three (i.e. two of six) will merge.

Evaluation

Evaluation one-year predictions over a two-year horizon isn’t really accurate, but here’s how I scored.

100% confidence = 100% accuracy

90% confidence = 100% accuracy

80% confidence = 60% accuracy

70% confidence = 40% accuracy

60% confidence = 40% accuracy

50% confidence = 40% accuracy

The graph should ideally be a straight line up and to the right. Instead, my graph looks like this.

Not terrible, but room to improve, for sure.

Looking over what I got wrong, it seems like two-year-ago-David thought there would be much more widespread public testing of Level 4 vehicles (Europe! India! Deliveries! Fatalities!) but all with safety operators. Instead, we’ve seen steady and cautious progress (more miles, removing the safety driver) by the largest companies in the markets in which they were already operating.

Better predicting next year!

Reuters reports that Ouster, a five year-old, San Francisco-based lidar startup, plans to go public via a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company), at a market capitalization of nearly $2 billion. Kudos to Paul Lienert at Reuters, who also broke a recent story on Apple’s car efforts and is having quite a week.

According to Reuters, Ouster is the fifth lidar company this year to “agree” to go public via a SPAC, after Velodyne, Luminar, Innoviz, and Aeva. That’s kind of amazing, especially given that the primary customer of these companies will presumably be self-driving car manufacturers, almost none of whom have even launched a product yet — much less built profitable businesses.

I confess to not fully understanding the advantages of SPACs. I assume they bypass a lot of the paperwork and headaches associated with traditional IPOs. But I also imagine that in theory they should come with quite high capital costs. The number of SPACs available to take a startup public is much smaller than the number of institutional investors who would buy shares in a traditional IPO.

However, the outsized valuations of Luminar and Ouster, in particular, show that companies can achieve really high valuations via SPACs. According to the CEO of Colonnade Acquisition Corp., which will acquire Ouster and take it public, “It’s not a business plan — they’re selling real products to real customers right now.”

That’s kind of a surprising quote for a $2 billion valuation.

In any, congratulations to Ouster!

Although neither Amazon nor Walmart are known first and foremost as self-driving companies, they both have been doing a lot of work in the space. But they have been doing that work differently. Amazon has been investing while Walmart has been partnering.

I wrote about this for Forbes. I was a bit surprised myself as I listed off all the self-driving efforts.

Amazon

• Zoox
• Rivian
• Aurora
• Amazon Web Services
• Amazon Robotics
• Amazon Scout
• Amazon Prime Air Drones

Walmart

• Gatik
• Cruise
• Waymo
• Udelv
• Ford
• Nuro
• Flytrex

Check out the post on Forbes.com.