[adarsh_thampy]

Add country to the equation, and you can easily add another 20-50 years into the already 20+ you mention.

Take India, for example.

-- The infrastructure is poor.

-- Drivers ignore rules to suit their convenience.

-- A lot of people depend on driving for their livelihood. Union minister, Nitin Gadkari, has already made it clear that they will not let tech that affects the livelihood of so many people come in and take jobs. Most governments that rely on the vote bank of poorer sections of the society will not dare to move against this mandate.

-- The preferred and most popular mode of transportation is still two-wheelers. I don't see anyone building self-driving two bikes. That rules out almost half of the Indian population's transportation

I don't think India will be ready for another 50 years to have fully self-driving vehicles.

[tonyedgecombe]

The poor infrastructure could work to their advantage, they could build it to suit new applications. In the West we have a huge legacy infrastructure that is hard to deal with. It’s somewhat similar to the way Africa skipped traditional telecommunications and went straight to mobile.

[adarsh_thampy]

Might be possible on less dense cities.

Conjusted cities like Bangalore and reeling under bad city planning. Adding a self-driving vehicle is not going to be of much help.

The govt does not have money to spend on road repairs. Corruption at the contract level is rampant. Putting 1+1, I doubt India will use it to their advantage.

[seanmcdirmid]

China on the other hand has horrible traffic problems and no where to build new roads in its most dense cities. They also have an autocratic government that can say “no more manual driven cars on or inside the 4th ring road” to optimize road usage.

[dx034]

But would autonomous cars be that much more efficient? you may get some efficiencies but I doubt it can solve the problem itself.

[TomMarius]

In my city in Europe, my average speed is 23 km/h but I rarely go less than 40, more often 60-70 - meaning that I wait a lot, and I'm alone in the car. Yes, shared autonomous cars would help my city a lot.

[re-actor]

I didn't realise autonomous vehicles make the roads wider.

[pmontra]

Maybe TomMarius means that autonomous vehicles could negotiate intersections without stopping. No traffic lights required, only rules of precedence. It's going to be a slow procession but maybe the average speed would increase.

I'm not sure how that would mix with pedestrian crossings. In some dense areas there would be a non stop flow of people walking across the street and cars wouldn't be able to move.

[seanmcdirmid]

The cars can work together to reduce riding distances, move faster in tandem when going in a green light, and so on. They virtually make the road much wider by eliminating human inefficiency in driving.

[TomMarius]

Actually they do. There are streets full of parking empty cars, moving cars are at best a half.

Plus reduction of number of driving cars to roughly one third.

[hawaiianbrah]

I don’t disagree, but I did want to point this out: https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/ces-2019-bmw-self-ridin...

[adarsh_thampy]

In the article, they say that it's not self-driving 2 wheelers, but rather, assistance.

Couple that with 3 people sitting on the bike (quite common in India), I doubt this will work in my lifetime!