Auto industry diverges on timeline for self-driving cars

Automakers and suppliers gave widely differing timelines for the introduction of self-driving vehicles on Thursday, showing the uncertainties surrounding the technology as well as a split between cautious established players and bullish new entrants. Chipmaker Nvidia, facing direct competition with the world's top chipmaker after Intel's $15 billion deal to buy autonomous driving technology firm Mobileye this week, gave the most optimistic predictions. Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang forecast carmakers may speed up their plans given technological advances and that fully self-driving cars could be on the road by 2025. "Because of deep learning, because of AI computing, we've really supercharged our roadmap to autonomous vehicles," he said in a keynote speech to the Bosch Connected World conference in Berlin. Germany's Bosch, however, the world's biggest automotive supplier, gave a timetable as much as six years longer to get to the final stage before fully autonomous vehicles, and declined even to forecast when a totally self-driving car might take to the streets.