When will we see self-driving cars on our streets?

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Autonomy on wheels.
Autonomy on wheels.

A swift perusal of the internet shows that most pundits expect to see lots of driverless cars by 2022.

Here are some forecasts:

Fully autonomous vehicles will be on the road before 2022, says NVIDIA CEO: The CEO of the chipmaker NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said that “It will take no more than four years to have fully autonomous cars on the road.” This refers to actual cars driving on the road (not just car models being ready technically) and assumes that the key legal issues will also have been resolved.

Audi to introduce a self-driving car by 2020: Scott Keogh, Head of Audi America announced at the CES 2017 that an Audio that really would drive itself would be available by 2020.

NuTonomy to provide self-driving taxi services in Singapore by 2018, expand to 10 cities around the world by 2020: The company has just started trials of its self-driving taxis in Singapore’s 1 North District. It plans to deploy self-driving taxis commercially in Singapore by 2018 and aims to be operational with fleets of self-driving taxis in 10 cities of the world by 2020.

Delphi and MobilEye to provide off-the-shelf self-driving system by 2019: Both companies have announced that they will bring a fully self-driving (SAE level 4) system on the market for use in a variety of cars in 2019.

Ford CEO announces fully autonomous vehicles for mobility services by 2021: Mark Fields, Ford’s CEO announced that the company plans to offer fully self-driving vehicles by 2021. The vehicles, which will come without steering wheel and pedals, will be targeted to fleets which provide autonomous mobility services. Fields expects that it will take several years longer until Ford will sell autonomous vehicles to the public.

Volkswagen expects first self driving cars on the market by 2019: Johann Jungwirth, Volkswagen’s appointed head of Digitalization Strategy, expects the first self-driving cars to appear on the market by 2019. He did not claim that these would be Volkswagen models.

GM: Autonomous cars could be deployed by 2020 or sooner: General Motor’s head of foresight and trends Richard Holman said that most industry participants now think that self-driving cars will be on the road by 2020 or sooner.

BMW to launch autonomous iNext in 2021: At their annual shareholder meeting, BMW CEO Harald Krueger said that BMW will launch a self-driving electric vehicle, the BMW iNext, in 2021.

Ford’s head of product development: autonomous vehicle on the market by 2020: Raj Nair, Ford’s head of product development, expects that autonomous vehicles of SAE level 4 (which means that the car needs no driver but may not be capable of driving everywhere) will hit the market by 2020.

Baidu’s Chief Scientist expects large number of self-driving cars on the road by 2019: In an interview session, Andrew Ng, the chief scientist of the Chinese search engine Baidu expects that a large number self-driving self-driving cars will be on the road within three years, and that mass-production will be in full swing by 2021.

First autonomous Toyota to be available in 2020: Toyota is starting to overcome its long-standing reluctance with respect to autonomous driving: It plans to bring the first models capable of autonomous highway driving to the market by 2020.

Taking a consensus, world opinion has autonomous cars on our streets by 2022. Look for one on a street corner near you.