Human Drivers To Be Outlawed By 2050 Says Report

A report by research firm IDTechEx has claimed that autonomous cars will match safety levels or exceed them by 2024 and by the 2040s will primarily be fulfilling global mobility needs. It goes on to say that likely by 2050 human drivers will be outlawed. Features like adaptive cruise control have been around for just about a decade while features like lane keep and change assist just emerged in 2014 first on the Tesla Model S. These technologies are known as ADAS or level 1 autonomous capabilities, but the report postulates the self-driving chops of vehicles will be better than that humans by 2024. 

The report which has been dubbed "Autonomous Cars, Robotaxis & Sensors 2022-2042" claims that autonomous vehicles aren't distracted by elements that could distract a human driver. This could mean fellow drivers or mobile phones or any other thing as well. The report claims that 5G connectivity will be instrumental in the deployment of self-driving technologies and devices could get more real-time data thanks to the exponential rise in connected devices and manifold increase in speed of data transfer which will reduce latency. 

Google's Waymo is the pioneer of self-driving car technology 

With sustained growth, the report states that by 2046 self-driving cars could meet the demands of the US with vehicles clocking 3 trillion miles per annum. This would mean by 2050 such vehicles could be in a position to meet all the transportation needs of the world. IDTechEX forecasts, the development of the technology will not be an issue but rather it will be regulation around the technology that will be the main hurdle. 

Also Read: Tesla Unveils Dojo Supercomputer

It cites Tesla's example where the Model 3 and Model Y has lost the top safety rating by NHTSA after it lost the radar from the vehicles - as it believed a vision-based approach was a more scalable option. Tesla has announced Tesla Vision which is a full camera-based self-driving system that has algorithms trained on the Dojo supercomputer which are processed using the FSD chip on Tesla cars.