(Originally published on LinkedIn in June 2024)
The answer is simple – we already have autonomous cars in the market, just not level 5. They are rarely ever level 3 or 4 but almost all new cars of a decent make and model are level 1-2, containing at least some driving assistance and partial automation features. Though, I should point out that autonomous vehicles have been there for decades. If you have ever used a shuttle train at an airport or the DLR tube line on London underground, you have already experienced a fully autonomous vehicle (which would be categorized as level 4 vehicles because they operate fully autonomously but only within a specific controlled environment).
You might now rephrase your question as “When will we have level 5 autonomous cars in the market”. As a realist engineer, I would say “never”. Why? Because level 5 means “anytime, anywhere” which is quite impossible to do. Even if we engineers achieved it some day in a developed country like Germany or USA, that doesn’t mean the same vehicle would be able to drive autonomously on Indian roads.
Even when you restrict the definition of level 5 to “anytime, anywhere in one specific place“, it still might be a pipe dream because, as I already said before, it’s just very hard to expose vehicle’s sensors and automation algorithms to and test them for all possible (i.e. infinite) road-traffic scenarios. But if we redesigned road and city infrastructure in a way that the driving environments for vehicles are much more controlled than today (for example, no pedestrian crossing possible on a road network), then it might be possible to bring fully autonomous vehicles on the streets right away (the technology is actually ready; just the environment and public acceptance is missing).