💡 5 Quick Questions for ... technology reporter Timothy B. Lee on self-driving cars, flying taxis, and more

"You could imagine a scenario where, if you need to get from Silicon Valley to downtown San Francisco, that's a 20-minute flight as opposed to a two-hour drive during rush hour."

Some intense self-driving action in the film Minority Report

“Next year for sure, we will have over a million robotaxis on the road.” — Elon Musk, 2019

It’s been quipped that fusion power is just 20 years away … and always will be. Perhaps much the same could be said of fleets of self-driving cars zooming around America’s highways. So when will fully autonomous vehicles ferry cargo and carry passengers up and down streets near you? What’s standing in the way of the self-driving future we’ve been promised? To get answers to those questions, I caught up with Timothy B. Lee for a quick chat that also touched on the flying cars we ought to be taking to work by now as well as the social media companies we got instead.

Tim's wonderful newsletter, Full Stack Economics, focuses on the intersection of economics, technology, and public policy — Faster, Please! readers should definitely check it out for some great content! Before going independent, Tim wrote for Ars Technica, Vox, and The Washington Post

1/ When will there be a million self-driving cars on America's highways?

One big question there is the definition of self-driving cars. People talk about Tesla Autopilot or other vehicles like that that are partially self-driving or provide driver assistance. There are probably a million of those already. If we're talking about fully autonomous, where there's nobody behind the [steering] wheel, my best guess is in the early 2030s, let's say. But my confidence interval there is pretty wide. I could see it being in the 2020s or mid- to late 2030s.

I definitely think the early vehicles will be limited in some way. You have some companies like Waymo and Cruise that are working on taxi services, primarily. You have other companies that are working on automated trucking. And then you have some that are doing package delivery. So one of those three is likely to be the first application, and it's very possible that one of those will have a breakthrough several years ahead of the others. And so we might have a million driverless delivery vehicles on the roads before we have any very many taxis or vice versa.