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Originally Posted by Dadhawk
Mass adoption of automatic transmissions took decades. GM started selling the hydromatic in 1940 (or maybe '39), others had automatic transmissions back as far as the early 1900's, but even into the 80's more than half of all vehicles sold were still MT and in 1995 it was still 25% or so.
SUVs have also been around forever (the longest selling car moniker is "Suburban" after all) but I agree adoption rates grew exponentially in the last couple of decades after the minivan fell out of favor.
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My point was that expense hasn't stopped people from mass adopting something they want. The same argument can be said of paying for smart phones and more expensive data plans, cable TV, etc. Expense is a big factor, but there is nothing overtly expensive about autonomous capabilities. The cost is in developing the neural network, but that isn't inherently expensive either.
https://fortune.com/2016/03/14/self-driving-car-honda/
https://automobiles.honda.com/sensing
The S curve for mass adoption depends on the price, availability, etc for what you are defining. I'm not really concerned about trying to speculate about mass adoption. That will depend on interest, government regulation, price (but that is already cheap), public acceptance, etc. I'm more interesting in talking about when the technology will reach viability for full/level 5 autonomy. I think we are there already or within a year or two of being there.
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Experiments have been conducted on automated driving systems (ADS) since at least the 1920s;[9] trials began in the 1950s. The first semi-automated car was developed in 1977, by Japan's Tsukuba Mechanical Engineering Laboratory, which required specially marked streets that were interpreted by two cameras on the vehicle and an analog computer. The vehicle reached speeds up to 30 kilometres per hour (19 mph) with the support of an elevated rail.
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Technically, self-driving tech has been in development in one form or another for almost as long as automobiles have been around, so it isn't like we need more time. We are there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car