“You’ll ride in robot cars within 5 years” according to report from 5 years ago
You’ll ride in robot cars within 5 years. Thus spake the headline just over five years ago—on September 25, 2012. The source of the prediction was Sergey Brin, one of Google’s co-founders.
At the signing then of a new law regulating the testing of automated vehicles on public roads in California, Brin was asked how long it would take before self-driving cars became a reality for the public. He confessed that he was reluctant to overpromise, and then declared: “You can count on one hand”—and to render the metaphor more vivid, he helpfully held up his hand, which all before him could see was a garden-variety, non-polydactylous hand sporting five fingers only—“the number of years it will take before ordinary people can experience this”.
2017 quickly became a popular year to cite when predicting when advanced automated vehicles would be ready for the public (e.g., here, here, and here). But really, Brin’s statement was pretty vague. Crucially, he didn’t specify the level of driving capability in the cars that the “ordinary people” would be able to experience. A charitable reading is that Brin was speaking loosely and wasn’t actually making a binding commitment to a five-year delivery timeline of any specific technology, and if his estimates happened to not be precisely in line with the opinions of the team developing the tech (which are not on public record), we shouldn’t admonish him too severely as he wasn’t directly involved in the self-driving car project anyway. And what Brin said was prefaced by his even vaguer comment that testing was to ramp up within the next year, and after that, “I would hope that people can more broadly utilize this technology within several years”. He clarified, “Yeah, so it’s, uh, I mean, sort of single digit hands, I can count on my hand…”. He joked that the self-driving car team members in the audience were gesturing to him to stop talking, at which point he finally uttered the famous “you can count on one hand” proclamation.
The five-year statement was vague enough to begin with, but those who were hands-on in actually developing the tech were careful to hedge further. Early the following year, in 2013, Automotive News quoted Anthony Levandowski, at the time product manager for the Google self-driving car, as saying: “We expect to release the technology in the next five years. In what form it gets released is still to be determined.” By early 2015, Reuters was quoting “a Google executive” as saying that Google was in discussions with automakers and suppliers to “bring self-driving cars to market by 2020.” A couple of months later, that new, looser timeline was invoked again when Chris Urmson, then director of the self-driving car project, told delegates at the TED2015 conference that while his 11-year-old son was due to take his driving test in four-and-a-half years, his team were “committed to making sure that doesn’t happen”.
By early 2016, Urmson had a more nuanced message, and a new, improved, hazier timeline. Speaking at South-by-Southwest in Austin, he said of their self-driving technology: “How quickly can we get this into people’s hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it’s three years, maybe it’s thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it’s a bit of both.” He emphasized that “this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive—the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations.”
Waymo (formerly the Google Self-Driving Car Project) are now inviting members of the general public to apply to ride along with their test vehicles in their early rider program in Phoenix—another exciting step forward, but it’s far from mass-market availability of a perfected automated vehicle. The lesson here is not that Google betrayed us. Rather, it’s that enthusiasm for the developing technology of automated vehicles led some commentators to read too much into and assign too much weight to a loosely worded response to a reporter’s question five years ago. Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future, as they say—and it’s even more difficult when we let ourselves get carried away by hype.