Robert Scoble says self-driving cars are coming but widespread adoption will take decades. Personal ownership could arrive in 15 years, but 40% adoption is a multi-decade problem. Autonomous vehicles could ditch steering wheels, reconfigure interiors for work, and be rented out to cover costs.
The famous line, I forget who said this, but the future is here. It's just not evenly distributed, right? There's, there are 20 self driving cars in the world and they're right over the hill. I see them on the freeway. I don't have one yet. So the future is already here. We already know what the future is going to be like for me. But I won't have one for 15 years because of cost, because of governmental concerns, insurance concerns, people concerns. You know, it'll take 15 years before I get one and it'll take another 15 years before, you know, let's say 40% of the world gets them. Right? Because it takes a while for a new technology, even one that's affordable to get, get spread out to everybody. And then It'll take another 15 years after that before it shows up, before everybody in your hometown has a self driving car. So it's a 50 year problem. 50 year problem.
But is this the idea of self driving cars that you have your self driving car? Oh yeah, not like taxis.
So you just, I, you could have an argument there. I want my own.
You want your own?
Okay, I want my own. I want, I like, I like my own car. In America, car is part of the culture, part of your identity. And having your own car with your own kids toys in the back and your own kids car seat and all that is, is the part of the, it's ingrained in the American dream. Okay, now you're right to think about how the car is going to change because of self driving car. For instance, if you really did have a self driving car and it could go everywhere and it worked great, why do you need a steering wheel? Why do you need to, why do you need to have the driver facing forward? Yeah, you could face backward, which is safer by the way, because if the car does ever get in a wreck, and it probably won't ever get in a wreck, facing backward is safer. But more so if I, if I have four people in the car now, I can play a game with them while the car's driving or I could have a video conference or I could take a class or I could be building a 3D model on my 3D printer, you know, and working on my surface computer or whatever is going to be next. Right. The car could be completely rethought and when you go down that path, yet it makes a lot of sense to rent the car out. So my car might go and pick up other people and charge them like.
At least, yeah, it can be used. And to make Some extra money and.
Get your and also wouldn't need it. So in San Francisco we're already, I pay about 25, $30 a day for parking where I work and some spots are $60 a day. So why does it need to park? Why can't it? Well, first of all, it could drive to a neighborhood where there there's free parking and wait there and until I get out of work and then come back and pick me up. Or it could go and pick other people up and actually make me some income and help pay for the car. So you're right to rethink. When technology changes like that, it changes what's possible. And most people aren't even thinking of the self driving car. I was racing Audi cars yesterday at the Sonoma Raceway and the instructor just can't, couldn't even dream of a day where he's going to have a self driving car. To him it's evil and he doesn't understand why anybody would want a self driving car. I said, you're a race car driver, you get to have fun driving cars. So for you, fun and your job is wrapped up in a driving car, right? For me, driving is not fun because I'm always stuck behind a truck on Highway 92 or I, you know, it's wasted time for me because driving is not fun. It's, it's not racing, right? Racing is fun. But driving on Freeway 280 at 70 miles an hour behind a truck, is that fun. And so why can't I turn that task over to a computer and let me go back to doing something fun for me? Reading a book, watching a movie, you know, reading Twitter or Facebook or doing editing my videos that I'm supposed to be editing. Why can't I go back and do those things with that 45 minutes and let the car drive itself? He can't understand that. Most people can't understand that. They resist change, they don't like change. And, and we see this over and over and over again, right? Steve Wisenak, when he developed the Apple one, he wanted his boss at HP to build the personal computer and said please build these things. I don't want to start my own company. I want to work at hp. I want to just be an engineer and come up with new things. And his boss says nobody's ever going to buy a personal computer. He didn't get it. He couldn't grasp that there were people, billions of people out there who wanted a personal computer. He couldn't grasp it. But based on where he was in that world. It's understandable. Just like this. This guy who races cars every day for a living. He can't understand why somebody would want to have a self driving car. And in 15 years it'll all change.
