Found it. In the US it's actually 11.4 years for the avg age of a car.
http://th3core.com/talk/water-coolerextra/bedtime-story/

Quote

QuoteWithin two decades, we will have almost unlimited energy, food, and clean water; advances in medicine will allow us to live longer and healthier lives; robots will drive our cars, manufacture our goods, and do our chores

Let's start with the obvious... In two decades....

-- "robots will drive our cars" --
The average age of a car on the road today is 11.4 years[1] and that number has been generally rising as cars last longer (remember when it was a feat to get 100K miles out of a car). If ALL new cars become robot-driven 8 years from now, that means that two decades from now at most half of the cars on the road will be robot-driven. Do I need to say that 8 years from now, few if any production cars will be robot-driven. Verdict: utter fantasy.

>In the US it's actually 11.4 years

>the average age of a car in the Uk is 7.5 years

They have Fiat. That brings their average waaaay down.

Than what must the avg be in France? They have Peugeot!

It may be lost on the eurotrash that we're only half-joking.

hey, Mr-most-disposable-society-in-the-world....we don't get old cars because the old ones are still good, we get old ones because we're poor and new ones cost a lot. that's also why we still walk places occastionally

anyhow - we have other issues in the UK. Cruise control, for example, not so common - we don't trust cars to drive themselves. We'll be very polite about it but boy will we want an off button. And we won't want cars driving themselves on roads on which we are driving. And it takes us 20 years to get planning permission for a new road - we're looking at longer than 2 decades here. Also retro fittng to a manual sounds a lot harder than to an automatic?

There's going to be a hell of a long overlap period either way - our landrover is, er, probably 30 years old and unless we win the lottery it'll be running for at least the next 10.  If we get a new one then it'll be running for another 40 years.  And the chances of my dad relinquishing control to a robot is zero. He thinks his laptop is out to get him ffs.

The increased road speed and automated parking space scenarios are great, but not the easiest to achieve with a mix of robot cars and humans. Perhaps somewhere like SF will be brave enough to introduce it first but I can't see it being the norm for a very long time.

I think we will get a lot of safety overrides first before we get truly self driving cars. Things like cutting the throttle if you are too close to the car in front. Etc.

Change in car driving will be generational like most things are. We had seat belts for decades and nobody used them but after a couple of generations we were able to make them mandatory. Same with self driving cars or otherwise automated cars.

We, in the US, also need to sort out the automobiles position in our society, right now we build everything to be dependent on the car. If you don't have a car you are a second class citizen, but will that continue to be true in the future as we become a more urban culture?  Right now we can't afford to maintain all the roads we have already built, yet we keep building new ones as if we are going to keep expanding to the suburbs like in the past.

>UK

Crickey, they still use buildings that are 400 years old!  In the US we are bulldozing Walmarts that are  only 15 years old. The Brits won't give up their Humblers for at least another 30 years.   

>retro fittng to a manual sounds a lot harder than to an automatic?

Good point. I wonder how the Mercedes robotruck is tackling that?

>land rover >30

One of my best friends is (US) nationally acknowledged as the 'God of Land Rovers' (Series I & II).   He's currently converting old LR's to run on Mercedes 300 diesels. They're getting 25mpg and running on veg oil.  I'll let you know when his robo-conversion kit is available, hhh.

> Mr-most-disposable-society-in-the-world

Here ya go, Gurtie.   See, we're struggling to keep those old clunkers viable while we lounge by the poolside awaiting our robot bartender to give our drinks to our robot butler.  Keeps the immigrants employed, too.

http://www.gasvalet.co/

That's a 408 area code -- San Jose, Southern Silicon Valley.  I can't tell if this is a joke, clickbate or the real deal.  Looks like the website was slapped together in 5 minutes.

FWIW, I am driving a 15 y.o. sedan with nearly 1/4 million miles on it.

The World's First Self-Driving Semi-Truck Hits the Road

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/worlds-first-self-driving-semi-truck-hits-road/


While I'm at it, I might as well tie this in to the coming Jobs Apocalypse:

Somewhere along the way the U.S. became a nation of truck drivers

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/keep-on-truckin-in-a-majority-of-states-its-the-most-popular-job-2015-02-09

If I were a young truck driver, I wouldn't worry that much about automation. My neighbor is retiring this year after 30+ years of driving a semi and as near as I can tell, few make it to 65. He got lucky because we haven't had any real winter the last three years of his career and the winter before that he started saying he wasn't sure he could drive a semi through another winter.

Anyway, the point being that as automation steps in, attrition will thin the ranks and the roads he drives with curves and snow and erratic pleasure drivers and animals are a long ways from being automation-ready.

Meanwhile, if I were a young airline pilot, I'd be shaking in my boots. That's a more controlled situation and most of the time I think planes could fly themselves and the military and spooks are turning out highly-trained drone pilots who have no need of being in a cockpit to fly. I think it will be a long time until there's NO pilot in the cockpit, but I can't see the sense of a pilot and co-pilot (sometimes plus a navigator). And after the German pilot incident, I expect we'll see planes have the ability to be controlled from the ground for safety reasons.

>military

I read a news story that said the F-35 will probably be the last manned fighter plane the US Navy will buy.  Future Navy fighters and bombers will be drones eventually robots.

Self-Driving Trucks Are Going to Hit Us Like a Human-Driven Truck

massive disruption, but this article is "reporting cannibalism" (media disaster reporting joke)

https://medium.com/basic-income/self-driving-trucks-are-going-to-hit-us-like-a-human-driven-truck-b8507d9c5961

That article links to this:
http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-the-most-common-job-in-every-state

It is really telling that the #1 job in America is trucking in the majority of states.  I don't understand how there isn't more outcry over the TPP treaty being rammed through.  Between globalization and technology killing all the low skilled jobs I don't understand how the general population isn't freaking out right now.  Is it that the vast amount of people just aren't paying attention?  I have four kids and these thoughts keep me up at night.

>I read a news story that said the F-35 will probably be the last manned fighter plane the US Navy will buy.  Future Navy fighters and bombers will be drones eventually robots.

I sort of think that we will have robot planes in the future, but then we may end up back in a time where we have humans combat flying again.  There will be a time when drones will be vulnerable to hacking -- may be sooner than we think.