Google plans to make their self-driving car available to the public by 2020 [0]. Perhaps they aren't going to hit that deadline but I doubt they'll miss it by 80 years.
Great, they're saying that, but, on the other hand, they only operate them in a small area in Mountain View because the level of detail the things need to operate is just not there anywhere in the US. In addition, the driverless cars have trouble dealing with temporary road closures and the like -- the kind of stuff human drivers have to deal with regularly. It's not at all clear that this is going to be a practical technology anytime soon, despite all the hype.
> Would you buy a self-driving car that couldn’t drive itself in 99 percent of the country? Or that knew nearly nothing about parking, couldn’t be taken out in snow or heavy rain, and would drive straight over a gaping pothole?
> If your answer is yes, then check out the Google Self-Driving Car, model year 2014.
Self driving cars are essentially a software project (and more) and I've never heard of a software project having an estimate that far out and ever being even close to making its deadline.
My personal opinion is that self-driving cars that are reliable enough to literally not have a steering wheel will be perpetually a "few years away", similar to how we're always saying nuclear fusion or true AI is just a few decades off. It's like the 80/20 rule but more like 99/1... That last 1% of capabilities required to make cars truly driverless are going to take 99% of the effort.
Making them available in California isn't the same as making them available in a). Countries that have weather, and b). Countries that have curved roads.
As another poster comments, it's as close as several other science fiction things that are always "A few years away!".
Is there any basis for thinking this is 100 years away when we have working prototypes now? Compare other technologies which had working prototypes; did any take 100 years to get to operation? (The longest/closest I can think of is 'flying cars', which first ran in '47 and don't have a clear road to success today. There are many counter-examples.)
There's a lot of examples. Just watch Back To The Future Part II for some obvious examples.
When they landed on the moon, do you think they thought we'd still be faffing about doing not much in space 50 years later? I'm betting they thought we'd be colonising mars by now.
[0] http://www.ibtimes.com/google-inc-says-self-driving-car-will...