Self-Driving Car Predictions for 2018

Here’s what I think the coming year has in store for self-driving cars.

100% Certain

No Level 5 self-driving cars will be deployed anywhere in the world.
No GPS or DGPS system will reliably exceed 10cm localization accuracy on all public roads in the US.

90% Certain

Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public, on public roads, somewhere in the world.
Deep learning will remain the dominant tool for image classification.
No US road will have a speed limit for autonomous vehicles that is faster than the speed limit for human-driven vehicles.

80% Certain

All Level 4 vehicles available to the general public will use lidar.
Somebody will die in a crash while due to a failure of Tesla Autopilot.
Waymo will still have driven more autonomous miles than any other company.
Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public somewhere other than Pittsburgh.
A company will be acquired primarily for its autonomous vehicle capabilities with a valuation above $100M USD.
No dominant technique will emerge for urban motion planning.

70% Certain

Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public in Pittsburgh.
Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public somewhere in China.
Tesla will sell the most advanced self-driving system available to the general public.
Deep learning will not be the dominant tool for object classification from point clouds.

60% Certain

2,000 students will have graduated the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree Program.
Level 4 self-driving cars will be available to the general public somewhere in Europe.
Waymo will have exceeded 10 million miles driven.
Tesla will produce 5,000 Model 3 vehicles in a single calendar week.
No member of the general public will die in a Level 4 autonomous vehicle.

50% Certain

Cruise Automation will open its Level 4 fleet to the general public.
Level 3 self-driving cars will be available for purchase by the general public.
A company will be acquired primarily for its autonomous vehicle capabilities with a valuation above $1B USD.
1,000 Udacity students will have jobs in the autonomous vehicle industry.
Self-driving cars will be legal for public use somewhere in India.

In a year, I’ll score these and see how I did!

Take a look at my 2017 predictions and scoring.