Autonomous cars will be part of our reality faster than most people realize. While manufacturers have a four-phase plan to bring about the fully autonomous car within the next two decades, Google promises to have them ready as early as 2017, just three years distant.

My guess is that Google’s could be the "heaven" vision. In July they spent $966 million to purchase Waze, a company with a brilliant smart phone navigation app. The app delivers the best routes based on the historical choices of the 50 million Wazers combined with the traffic speeds they are experiencing in real-time. Back in the day, when I was CEO of Zipcar, I was struck that we knew the precise times, days, durations, and distances of car travel more intimately even than car manufacturers did. Today, Waze offers a greater insight into the exact travel paths of what must be on the order of a billion trips over many years. If you wanted to get into the on-demand public transport world, you couldn’t ask for better data against which to understand and predict exactly where and when people will want to travel. Couple that with Google Ventures single largest investment to date — $258 million — into Uber, which has perfected the request, pickup, and delivery side of the equation, and you’ve got a clear blueprint for tomorrow’s transportation (if you take as a given the autonomous vehicle itself, of course).

via Will a World of Driverless Cars Be Heaven or Hell? – Robin Chase – The Atlantic Cities.

Am I too late?