Can the "mass production self driving cars are just a couple of years away" meme finally die yet? Are we ready to admit that maybe this is a harder thing to invent than we've been trying to make ourselves believe?
Given there are auto manufacturers[1] that already exist with self driving cars, I'm going to go ahead and say its not a meme and more just a technology in the process of being fully realised.
Some times, things just take time. Especially when you're trying to create machines capable of not killing the general public.
Tesla's are not self-driving cars in the sense of revolutionizing any driving. You still have to pay attention and be ready to take over all of the time. That means you can't sleep, read emails, etc. on your commute. It's a fancy lane assist that reduces mundane movements you have to make and it improves safety, but it's not resulting in super cheap automated taxis or overnight road trips.
In that case we had self-driving five years ago, I guess OP meant mind-off self-driving. That's the hard part, it could even be an AI-hard problem. Because if you have to pay attention with hands on a wheel, it's not a huge convenience improvement. And there's also the problem that human-take-over situations will be increasingly dangerous as the self-driving software improves.
And by the way, the auto-pilot video is underwhelming. Several companies have more advanced self-driving tech than Tesla, e.g. Waymo is at least 3 years ahead.
What about this article makes you think this? Do you have some insight that all the major automakers are missing when they say they expect to have autonomous cars on the road in the next 5 years?
The article you linked to indicates that places with good weather and good roads could see the technology in 3 years. For all places in all conditions it may take 30 years: "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations."
Even in the Bay Area, there is periodically bad to less than perfect weather - we had 30+ straight days of rain about 15 years ago in one of the El Nino years, and that would have killed Waymo's steering wheel-less cars' useability. It's almost like none of the people who made that decision were here when that happened.
Yes the Bay Area is probably not ideal, yet still much better than Jakarta or New Delhi.
But even an area that was unsuitable for self-driving cars half the time would see huge demand for self driving cars: half the time the car would drive itself, the other half it would be a regular taxi driven by a human being.
The Bay Area only has a lot of self-driving cars because the engineers are there, note that WayMo is letting people take rides in Phoenix, not the Bay.
Thanks for the clarification. I see them on San Antonio and in out of the way neighborhoods in Los Altos all the time but I guess from this article they are simulating more novel situations for the self driving AI and doing real world regression testing. It was only last year I saw one Waymo slow at every pedestrian crosswalk on San Antonio and there were no pedestrians nearby and the crosswalk lights were not blinking so definitely a necessary step.
