Of the technologies that have a reasonable chance of come to mass market in the next 20-25 years and having a significant impact on human society, driverless cars (also known as self-driving cars or autonomous cars) stand out. I was originally planning to collect material discussing driverless cars, but Gwern has a really excellent compendium of statements about driverless cars, published January 2013 (if you're reading this, Gwern, thanks!). There have been a few developments since then (for instance, Google's announcement that it was building its own driverless car, or a startup called Cruise Automation planning to build a $10,000 driverless car) but the overall landscape remains similar. There's been some progress with understanding and navigating city streets and with handling adverse weather conditions, and it's more or less on schedule.

My question is about driverless car forecasts. Driverless Future has a good summary page of forecasts made by automobile manufacturer, insurers, and professional societies. The range of time for the arrival of the first commercial driverless cars varies between 2018 and 2030. The timeline for driverless cars to achieve mass penetration is similarly stagged between the early 2020s and 2040. (The forecasts aren't all directly comparable).

A few thoughts come to mind:

1. Insurer societies and professional societies seem more conservative in their estimates than manufacturers (both automobile manufacturers and people manufacturing the technology for driverless cars). Note that the estimates of many manufacturers are centered on their projected release dates for their own driverless cars. This suggests an obvious conflict of interest: manufacturers may be incentivized to be optimistic in their projections of when driverless cars will be released, insofar as making more optimistic predictions wins them news coverage and might also improve their market valuation. (At the same time, the release dates are sufficiently far in the future that it's unlikely that they'll be held to account for false projections, so there isn't a strong incentive to be conservative the same way as there is with quarterly sales and earning forecasts). Overall, then, I'd defer more to the judgment of the professional societies, namely the IEEE and the Society of Autonomous Engineers.
2. The statements compiled by Gwern point to the many legal hurdles and other thorny issues of ethics that would need to be resolved, at least partially, before driverless cars start becoming a big presence in the market.
3. The general critique made by Schnaars in Megamistakes (that I discussed here) applies to driverless car technology: consumers may be unwilling to pay the added cost despite the safety benefits. Some of the quotes in Gwern's compendium reference related issues. This points further in the direction of forecasts by manufacturers being overly optimistic.

Questions for the people here:

• Do you agree with my points (1)-(3) above?
• Would you care to make forecasts for things such as: (a) the date that the first commercial driverless car will hit the market in a major country or US state? (b) the date by which over 10% of new cars sold in a large country or US state will be driverless (i.e., capable of fully autonomous operation), (c) same as (b), but over 50%, (d) the date by which over 10% of cars on the road (in a large country or US state) will be operating autonomously, (e) same as (d), but over 50%. You don't have to answer these exact questions, I'm just providing some suggestions since "forecast the future of driverless cars" is overly vague.
• What's your overall view on whether it is desirable at the margin to speed up or slow down the arrival of autonomous vehicles on the road? What factors would you consider in answering such a question?