Henrik Christensen, director of the University of California San Diego’s Contextual Robotics Institute says kids born today will never get to drive a car.

In a recent interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune, Christensen says his prediction is based on the fact that the auto industry is going down the path of a driverless future.

“Autonomous, driverless cars are 10, 15 years out,” he told the US newspaper. “All the automotive companies—Daimler, GM, Ford—are saying that within five years they will have autonomous, driverless cars on the road.

“With autonomous, driverless cars, we can put twice as many vehicles on the road as we have today, and do it without improving the infrastructure.

“My own prediction is that kids born today will never get to drive a car.”

But Christensen’s prediction has provoked some skepticism.

It suggests most non-self driving cars will be off the roads within 15 years.

That is unlikely considering the average age of a US vehicle is 11.5 years.

So with 258 million light vehicles on the road in the US alone, and 17 million new ones sold each year, we’re unlikely to see fleet turnover for decades, experts say.

Robot chauffeurs

And analysts expect only 21 million autonomous vehicles globally to reach the roads by 2035.

Despite the advent of new technology to turn manual cars into robot chauffeurs, the US is in no shape to handle hundreds of millions of autonomous vehicles on its lanes, streets, and highways anytime soon.

Earlier this month Gill Pratt, head of the Toyota Research Institute, said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that “none of us in the automobile or IT industries are close to achieving true Level 5 [i.e. full] autonomy. We are not even close.”

However, autonomous vehicles, complemented by car services such as Lyft and Uber, could make it preferable and more affordable to ride with robots rather than get a driver’s license in many areas.

Experts remind us that tractors and automobiles took nearly 50 years to replace the horse on farms and across delivery systems in the US.

Building robots that understand your personality

Christensen also predicts robots in the future will learn all about you.

“They’re going to use potentially all of the data that’s available about you.

“We would like to build a robot that would help (elderly people) stay in their house another five years. The cost of going to a managed-care facility is somewhere around $80,000 a year. If you could stay in your home, the cost would only be about $20,000.

“When we build the robot, we would want it to know: What is your personality? When do you get up in the morning? When do you go to bed? Are you a tennis person? A TV person? I think people would want the robot to be highly customized to them.

“The real question is, who else has access to that data? Is it going to be companies like Facebook, Google and Apple?

“Are we confident that they are not going to abuse that information to try to sell you information, or sell it to somebody else?”