How long will it be before Uber's self-driving car fleet doesn't require the presence of a driver who can take over?

Quicker than we think. But still likely a couple of years. Maybe early 2019.
The great thing is that this is not (for now anyway) a federal issue. States (and other countries) can decide for themselves that a fully automated Self Drive Vehicle (“faSDV”) can take the street without a driver.
In Georgia a ‘golf cart’ can drive on any 35 mph (or less) road. Some states will be willing to open the door to faSDVs sooner rather than later. Does PA want to keep their Pittsburgh based / Carnegie Mellon based faSDV technology business? Well they better be early with approvals or maybe GA will find an enticement to get them to move (no humans required to control the faSDV). Perhaps the same for Google and Apple in CA. Ford and GM are going to be restricted in MI? I don’t think so.
Initial faSDV approvals are likely to be areas smaller than an entire state. A city center, a college town, or a resort island are examples of geofenced areas that might pretty quickly get a state to approve.
It’s not clear to me that states are allowed to permit the removal of the steering wheel and pedals. National vehicle standards would seem to limit this particular feature of faSDVs.
The better question to ask is where is Uber going to get the faSDVs. A handful of cities could easily require 10–20,000 faSDVs. An initial 20,000 vehicles could cost $2 billion not counting infrastructure. Uber need the cash and an auto manufacturer to commit to dedicating a line to produce these pretty quickly. The deal and the production engineering could easily take a year or two. Then time to actually build the faSDVs. This gets us to 2019 pretty quickly.
Further it’s not clear that Uber could take earlier (pre approval by state authorities) faSDV delivery. Putting a human in the faSDV driver seat is ok for a small test fleet but very cost ineffective for a big fleet.
A story about one state…Florida…
Autonomous | Self-Driving Vehicles Legislation:
A good example is Florida. Florida already allows the operation of an faSDV by any licensed driver on any state road. Not related to testing…any end consumer can own and operate an faSDV today. So in Florida, I could let an faSDV drive me to work or the beach. It will only take ‘minor’ tweak to this law to cover unlicensed persons. It’s not clear to me that there is any requirement for a human to be able to take control of an faSDV or for a human to sit in the ‘driver’ position.
And, for testing, the faSDV doesn’t have to have any human in the vehicle.
It’s not all visible but legislative progress is being made and, legislatively, a few states are very close already to allowing faSDV operation.
How soon? Quicker than we think. But still likely a couple of years. Maybe early 2019.

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[1]  This post was originally written as a response to this article:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/18/ubers-first-self-driving-cars-will-start-picking-up-passengers-this-month/?ncid=rss

[2] This post originally appeared on Quora.com on August 19,2016:

https://www.quora.com/How-long-will-it-be-before-Ubers-self-driving-car-fleet-doesnt-require-the-presence-of-a-driver-who-can-take-over/answer/Bob-Reisner


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