Speaking today at Uber Technologies Inc.’s #TheYearAhead event, Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi revealed that the company is confident that autonomous ride-hailing is coming sooner than you think.

In an interview with Bloomberg’s Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait, Khosrowshahi admitted that true, reliable, autonomous vehicles for wide use certainly face a few more obstacles to overcome, but Uber will have autonomous cars working on the streets relatively soon.

Uber has already tested self-driving cars, but it hasn’t been without setbacks. In the cases when a customer chose to ride in an autonomous vehicle, the car would also contain two Uber engineers as well as the passenger.

Khosrowshahi says that the weather might not always be right or the mapping not perfect, so when a customer orders a self-driving car over a human driver, he or she might not always get what they asked for. “For 5 percent of cases, everything is going to fall into place and we will send an autonomous car,” Khosrowshahi said.

He explained that the 5 percent will keep growing and over time the cars will better understand the lay of the land. He believes it will take about five years to have the “perfect driver” in a city. “Every minute of every day that computer is going to get better,” he said.

Uber will then have to “retrain that driver” throughout cities all over the U.S. This will also be time-consuming, but he anticipates that Uber’s autonomous fleet will be ubiquitous in about 10 to 15 years.

Khosrowshahi admitted to being skeptical about self-driving cars in the past. Now, he said, “the choir has spoken and I’m listening.” Asked whether a child born today will have to learn how to drive, he answered confidently: “No.”

Image: Bloomberg