Every time I see a news update on self-driving cars, I wonder, “when are autonomous vehicles actually going to become mainstream?”
To try to answer that question — and to provide another example of putting numbers in context — I performed the following analysis.
There are many definitions of “autonomous”, but for this analysis I’m going to focus on “Level 4” or above, meaning the driver is not required to pay attention to the road. This does not include current Tesla vehicles, nor most other commercially available driver-assist systems.
Waymo is by far the leading company in the US right now as measured by level 4 (or above) autonomous miles driven. They are frequently in the tech news and have a conspicuous presence on the streets of San Francisco. Waymo’s press releases have become more indirect over time, but my analysis estimates that their autonomous vehicle fleet drove about 27 million miles in 2024.
That’s just another “big number”, so let’s put it in context. According to the Federal Highway Administration, in 2024 the total distance driven by all US drivers was 3.2 trillion miles. If we conservatively assume that Waymo makes up 1/4 of all autonomous miles today, that implies that only about 1 out of every 30,000 miles driven was autonomous.
If we assume that growth proceeds exponentially (for example, doubling every year), how long will it take for autonomous vehicles to become mainstream?
I plotted the numbers. Note that the vertical axis is logarithmic! If it weren’t, all of the data points in the lower-left would be smooshed along the bottom of the graph. Straight lines on a logarithmic scale signify exponential growth.
Waymo’s autonomous mileage approximately tripled each year between 2014 and 2019 (from 100,000 to about 8 million). If we use that optimistic growth rate, autonomous mileage could approach ubiquity around 2034. If we instead use Waymo’s average 75% yearly growth rate from 2014 to 2024, we approach ubiquity around 2044.
In other words, even if everything goes extremely well for the autonomous car industry, it will probably take at least another decade before driverless vehicles become mainstream.
This is largely determined simply by the massive scale of the auto industry. Waymo’s website states, “We have over 40 million miles of real-world driving experience — that’s enough to drive to the Moon and back 80 times.” Then again, Americans as a whole drove to the moon and back 64 million times in 2024 alone.