This year, rumors that Google parent Alphabet was seeking to sell a portion of its investment in Waymo confirmed that the journey to Level 5 autonomy will not be direct or quick. And it will be grindingly expensive — even for Alphabet’s seemingly bottomless purse. More than a decade of “it’s coming soon” has given way to underappreciated, steady technical progress for autonomous vehicle deployment.

According to Amara’s law (coined by Roy Amara, Stanford University computer scientist and past president of the Institute for the Future), “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” The prevailing assumption that the current AV leaders will continue to dominate the market underestimates the profundity of the changes that autonomous vehicles will bring over the next decade. 

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