This is the end game for autonomous cars

Marc is a California-licensed attorney and founder of Hoag+Co., the only autonomous vehicles- and urban mobility-focused consulting firm in the world with an international team composed exclusively of PhDs, engineers, attorneys, and startup founders based in San Francisco, Paris, and Amsterdam.

2017. Doesn’t it sound futuristic? Except that, somehow, we aren’t really that futuristic yet. I mean, we still drive ourselves around in giant two-ton pieces of metal, killing ourselves at the rate of 3,000 people per month — yes, that’s the equivalent of a 9/11 tragedy every month — and with autonomous cars finally becoming a thing of (beautiful) reality, many people are still facing this spectacular revolution with great trepidation at best, and genuine fear and even anger at worst.

And that’s a shame. Because autonomous cars are about to improve our lives by orders of magnitude; they will offer a step-change improvement the likes of which we last saw with the roll out of the internet; antibiotics; vaccines; and, previously, the steam locomotive, iron working, and, originally, the wheel itself. This isn’t hyperbole: it’s the glorious future that awaits us, not hundreds of years hence, but within the next 30–50 years or so.

The end game for autonomous cars is not hundreds of years away. No. It will actually be reached sometime…