1. It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion).
2. Despite knowing about and following news about driverless cars for a while, there was something surprisingly (to me) compelling about watching the video. It's like you get a little taste of the full A to B that it can give you (door to door).
Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? I need to know how long I have to save..!
"It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion)."
Even now, several years into the current news/development arc of self-driving cars, I still can't believe this is going to be the future.
We're really never going to european (or japanese) style train networks ? We're really going to keep binging on roads ? We, as a nation of fat slobs[1] are really not ever going to return to a culture of walking ?
I always thought of car culture (and we absolutely live in a car culture) as some kind of 20th century aberration ... eventually, LA would get their streetcars and subways[2] back ... eventually Minneapolis and Denver would have 20, not 2 light rail lines ... eventually we'd graduate from shitty bus networks operated badly, for poor people.
Tesla cars are awesome. Successful self driving car software would be an incredible achievement. I worry that there is an arc of societal and urban development that has gone very badly awry and that this will further keep us from fixing it.
[1] That is not hyperbole.
[2] Yes, I know there is currently a tiny, minor subway in LA.
Cars changed the world. There's not really any going back from that. It works in places where the urban population is over 90% (like Japan) but not when urban population is substantially lower (like the US). How would the rural population get to the bus/train station? My grandma's house is half an hour by car to the nearest freeway, how long would she have to walk to get to public transport?
Public transport only works inside of cities, and there's a lot of infrastructure already built to support sprawling metropolitan areas where everyone has 1/4 acre of land surrounding their detached home. There's not a lot of push to tear all that up and forcibly relocate the residents to inner-city apartments.
You know the benefit of electric, self-driving cars, though? An intelligent car isn't going to run you over on your bike. Be happy about that.
I think you can go even further. Public transit is tough to do well in cities that don't have a certain level of density. They're building subways in LA, but the city just isn't designed for it, patterns of movement are too dynamic, and too much of the city is composed of single-family homes so the last-mile problem is huge. It can only ever have a limited impact at an huge cost. They would be much better off with congestion pricing and dedicated bus lanes on the highways and arterial roads, transitioning these to self-driving when it becomes possible.
Three of the best public transit systems in the world are Berlin, Tokyo, and New York, which are both amongst the densest large cities in the world (Berlin is almost exclusively 5 story apartment buildings). The Berlin subway is largely self-supporting without public subsidy, Tokyo's system is composed of two competing but interoperable systems, the larger of which is privately run, and New York's system was privately run until 1940. The lifestyle, weather, and zoning of the cities where it works kickstarted the construction, and there exists enough demand that they would have great public transit systems even without government initiative.
The number of people in America who live half an hour from the nearest freeway is so small as to be irrelevant. Nobody is suggesting that 0% of trips be taken by car. It's fine if your grandmother drives around. It does not matter in the big picture.
What matters is if the 82% of Americans who live in cities are forced to crawl through sprawling car-choked landscapes, or are able to live in a walkable environment. High reliance on cars prevents the latter.
By the way you were wrong about that Japan vs US comparison as well. USA has a higher proportion of urban residents than does Japan. And they have plenty of trains in Japan.
82% of Americans do not live in cities. Rather, they live in areas classified as urban (which really means not rural) by the census bureau. Here's the definition: "To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,500 people, at least 1,500 of which reside outside institutional group quarters."
Yes, I'm guessing that many of those urban areas are within half an hour of a freeway--though this may be less true in the West. But the vast majority of those 82% don't live in places that are remotely walkable.
Oh no, you're wrong. Public transport literally CANNOT work... after all, it didn't work in the USA. It's fundamentally impractical, and countries that make it work are performing magic.
/s obviously.
God I hate the responses on threads like this that insist on the impracticality of public transport worldwide because it doesn't work in the US. It's like mass Stockholm Syndrome or something!
Okay you can just stop that shit right now. No one said it's unfeasible everywhere just because it's unfeasible in the US. If you're sick of hearing about the US, I'm sick of every time someone says something about the US, someone else has to chime in and say "yeah but you're wrong because there are other countries". What you're arguing right now is that cars shouldn't exist in the US because public transport works somewhere else. Can you find the hypocrisy there?
Notice how I even said "it works in places like Japan"? Notice that? See it? Good. Now quit acting like like you're being oppressed every time someone mentions the US. Yes, the world is a big place, but guess what? The US exists and a lot of people live there. Deal with it.
Jesus christ it's like I insulted your mother or something.
And income inequality means that people can literally afford to pay for other people to not be near them as they travel.
Busses and trains and other mass transport will return when income inequality is reduced to the point where the amount it costs people to pay for their own space is no longer affordable for them, but if you're earning 500 times the person next to you, you'll happily pay what it takes for them to disappear.
Trains are an artefact of income inequality. Someone can afford to build them and it's not you. Someone has all the leverage over whether you get a ticket to ride and at what price, and it's not you.
I think the future is self-driving public transit. I imagine minivans that perform dynamic route optimization. Instead of a bus that stops every block on a pre-determined route, use an app to input your pickup location and destination and the self-driving van picks you and a few people up from a small radius, and drops people off in a small radius. This will be faster and cheaper than both public transit and even driving yourself (no hunting for parking).
That would be great. One problem though: Self-driving tech may offer a very cheap taxi, so many users would prefer not to use shared vans.
Heck, to a certain extent we're already in that scenario, with some sharing services are cheaper than cars(@ridewithvia, @ridechariot, and maybe uber pool and lyft line) - and yet people prefer cars.
Unfortunately, public transit is way less profitable than selling cars to people, so self driving public transit doesn't seem like the top priority, despite having the best net benefit for society
Good point. I have always imagined this to be government subsidized just like public transit is today. I live in Seattle where we're spending billions laying light rail, and I have to wonder if it's all for naught, if self-driving public transit will make rail obsolete.
While self driving cars will do great things for people such as yourself (and overall I fully support their development/adoption), I also share the fear that it will prevent American urban centers from a desperately needed shift away from cars dependence in favor of better public transit and urban density. I really don't see the idea of every person in the country having their own personal transportation device (or even shared self-drivings car with something like uber) as a sustainable path for the US to continue down.
The technology for good transportation in/among major cities already exists: walking, biking, mass-transit, and high-speed rail. I wish Americans would be more open to these concepts rather than dismissing them in favor of the form of transit that has yielded nothing but horribly designed and polluted cities.
Actually, this maybe a step forward towards better mass transit, if there is one. If I run an autonomous taxi service to pick/drop people, and if I see that there is money to be made by offering to pick/drop multiple people at once, why wouldn't I? Economics of bus is relatively minor compared to investing and operating trains, so this may very well be a possibility.
A huge part of the urban footprint today is set aside for parking. With self-driving cars, people will use rideshare services and banish parking lots to remote areas outside the city, freeing up more space for parks or density. This technology is also much safer for bikers and walkers. Self-driving will be a benefit for urban areas and supports more walkable cities.
The math in the following image is not going to change regardless who is driving the car. If you want to have a city, you need to have public transport. If you want to have a suburban sprawl, that's another story.
the math changes because the autonomous cars become the public transport. all the cars on the left aren't necessary because they wont sit in a lot all day, they will continue to drive and deliver passengers all day. it creates an option of a private form of public transportation, something that only sort of 'half' exists with uber, since you obviously still have the human driver factor (who requires pay, health insurance, hours off, can be drunk on the job, etc) which makes costs/prices go up. If you can automate the driver, rates fall drastically. if you can make the cars electric, you help the planet. it all works nicely together if everything plays out right.
The math changes for how much storage space for cars is needed, but not how much space is needed for transporting people. Changing a garage to something more useful is not exactly helping traffic jams.
Self driving cars change what roads mean. Once we get to full fledged self driving taxi culture, cars won't park. Car sharing will be common at the cheaper end. So it becomes a lot more like busses. Much smaller fleet on the road. I expect that roads will get pedestrianized, returning them to common usage, because a Google car will calmly stop if a child is kicking a ball in the road.
Trains are intrinsically unequal, they serve hub towns at best and cities only at worst, they are dirty, cramped, noisy, unprivate and they don't go when or where you want to go. Even with Google maps seaming together journeys out of trains and busses, you end up waiting and walking a lot. And trains are an intrinsic monopoly with a staggering up front investment, you can't make them better with market forces. I foresee self driving cars cannibalizing the train's market of people who just want to pay for journeys rather than the vehicle.
Same. I'm really happy that, insofar there's cars, they're good. However, having lived in walkable cities, where the car is basically a specialty tool for moving furniture or going away to the country for the weekend, the idea of it becoming even more enmeshed into daily life is a grim prospect.
There is hope. More and more young urbanites in dense cities are already eschewing car ownership for walking and on-demand rentals. Even European-style public transit can only be so convenient[1], and a fleet of selfdriving ubers would be perfect. I hope that this will mean even fewer people decide to own cars and that car ownership becomes increasingly uncommon.
[1] public transit is great for when you have a lot of time and aren't carrying a lot of things. Doing, say, your weekly groceries by bus or walking is annoying af. Source: living in a European city without owning a car.
PS: I live in the US now and not having a car is much more convenient than it was in Europe. Uber and zipcar and getaround are magic. We didn't have that in my city
As much as I agree with you on the importance of good public transport, I am hopeful that the "car culture" will evolve into an alternative to the existing public transport systems; Once we have self-driving cars running on clean energy operating in an Uber like sharing economy model, there will be no need for car ownership and the cost of a ride will be low enough for the majority of people to afford.
I understand that this is more difficult to achieve in reality than in ideas but I am hopeful. About health related issues, we will still have to look for other ways to make a healthier society.
don't compare europe with japan with regards to rail usage, they really don't compare. Japan's usage is over half again the nearest European nation; Switzerland.
plus in many if not most countries rail simply doesn't go where people need to be. in countries with a choice cars are winning out and with autonomous and eventual ev powered cars it won't be a bad thing
train networks and subways are significantly more expensive to build, operate and maintain, even electrified ones. Roads + autonomous electric cars are hard to beat in terms of efficiency, utility and ease of operation.
Roads are indispensable and essential for last mile connectivity. No matter if trains and subways become 10 times more popular they will always exist in addition to the road infrastructure. Thus autonomous electric cars are a huge boon, its just common sense.
> Efficiency of energy use? Moving a 2000kg electric car around for 1 person is never going to be efficient.
That depends on how you are defining efficiency (doesn't it always), an electric motor with a good battery backed by a good powergrid (nuclear/renewables) is about the most efficient solution to "one person going from Point A to Point B" in many ways, I'm in favor of public transport but even in a European country it can let you down.
Also in the future with electric self-driving cars I'd happily not own a car (I don't now) and just rent one as and when it's needed from a pool of cars, that would take cars off the road compared to now.
Now that we have electric and self-driving cars you assumptions of what a car is have the ability to be drastically altered.
>Space? Roads take up way more space than tracks.
Highways can now be minimised to two tracks, the standard width of a vehicle, vibration reports can tell the councils where pothole repair is most needed.
>Moving a 2000kg electric car around for 1 person is never going to be efficient.
Car's are 2000kg in part to protect the driver, as crashes trend to 0 there's no reason they need to be so big.
>Roads even with autonomous cars will never have the throughput of a train-line.
Trains are rarely full. Cars can get smaller, we can mitigate traffic jams.
A single lane of highway doesn't get more than 2000 cars per hour. Even self driving won't increase that much. If all cars have to wait for someone to get out of their cars since we're only on 1 lane then it'll get even worse.
Eletrics cars are 2000kg because a the battery weighs a lot.
Trains get smaller too when it's not rush hour. France regularly runs one carriage trains the size of a bus.
Mitigate and smooth flowing aren't the same thing. On way to work I see cars backed up for miles. Doesn't matter if they're self driving or not when cars move bumper to bumper already.
A road even with perfect operation can only carry about 2000 cars per lane mile per hour. That is /very easy/ to beat with any other kind of technology.
I'd like to see a self-driving car navigate London's narrow streets with cars both sides and the negotiation that goes on between drivers about who goes first.
I'm impressed with this self-driving on California's spacious streets in perfect weather. I'll be really impressed when I see a self-driving car go down a London street in pouring rain, realize it needs to allow someone to come from the other direction and reverses and moves to the left to allow them through.
These are problems which are actually improved as more cars move to autonomous driving. A sensible government would mandate that manufacturers must upload anonymised data about each car in real time, which would effectively allow for cross-talk between cars. This could enable automatic remedies to the above situations (car X tells car Y "I've got more room behind me, let me reverse), but also prevent them in the first place: car X might pull over because it knows car Y is traversing that street. It would also help to prevent traffic jams which would be a nice orthogonal benefit.)
I see this pro cross-talk argument all the time... but wouldn't that leave open a big vulnerability for bad actors to send false data between cars and, if they should choose to, control multiple vehicles and cause collisions?
I would hope that the vehicles trust their own sensors before trusting the claims of other cars. The most a car should be able to lie convincingly about should be its intentions since they're unobservable. If car A says "I'm going to let you take this left" and car B tries taking the left and then car A tries to ram them, car B should ideally take evasive action (braking or speeding up) as it would from a human driver just randomly charging an intersection.
Those are emergency situations, though. I'm talking specifically about a model for cooperative decision making between AI wherein the AI has access to data from both sets of sensors (in its most limited example), and is therefore able to make a superior decision to if it had only its own data.
Simple scenario to illustrate this: car X enters a narrow bidirectional road which is lined with cars. There is enough room only for one car to pass at a time, safely. Car Y enters from the other end. Several more cars enter behind car Y (we'll call these Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4).
One car must reverse back down the road from the midway point, in order for any cars to pass through.
Car X and its driver cannot see what is behind car Y, but for car Y to reverse it must rely on Y1, Y2, Y3, and Y4 reversing. In order for this to happen, Y4 must first reverse despite not being able to see why it needs to reverse (either through meat or tech sensors).
The optimal solution is that sensor data reviewed in the aggregate by each car leads to a cooperative decision that car X should reverse until it can pull over, and allow the other cars to pass before proceeding.
In an emergency situation it's also possible to envisage scenarios in which shared data analysis and cooperative decision making are optimal. For example, consider cars X and Y now destined for a high speed, head-on collision. The right lane of the road (car X's right, car Y's left) is clear and the left lane (car X's left, car Y's right) is a deep trench. A primitive or non collaborative AI might suggest that both cars swerve to the same direction to avoid collision, which results in a collision of similar magnitude. A better solution than swerving the two cars into each other might be to swerve one into the ditch and one into the road. The optimal solution is likely to swerve only one car and hard stop the other, knowing that the other car is going to move its direction of travel significantly. This can only be done by giving the cars the ability to make decisions collaboratively.
Those are valid concerns. For the emergency scenario I have to wonder if it is possible to never trust another car to the point where it can induce a less optimal solution than an independent estimate could produce. For instance if the OtherCar says "Don't worry, I'll swerve into the ditch, just keep driving" and both MyCar and OtherCar keeps driving, we both die, so maybe MyCar says "he said he'd swerve, but I'm going to hard brake instead of driving" because impacting a ditch at speed x is roughly similar to getting hit while stopped at speed x and that's the worst case scenario for braking, whereas the both cars moving at speed x at each other is worse.
Not as tight an example as yours I'm afraid, but humans make cooperative decisions all the time where we use information and continue to be suspicious of it and hedge against lies. I think any realistic cooperative tech system where there are untrusted components needs to stay skeptical as well.
I completely understand what you mean and agree it's a valid concern.
I'm probably super naïve, but I think there's probably a way of digitally signing hardware components so that we can trust sensor data from other cars.
If cars upload their data, as well as data about other cars detected in their environment (e.g. positions of other detected cars), we could detect the suppliers of false or incorrect data by comparing data from multiple cars in each situation. It's not perfect, but could be a step in the right direction.
> I see this pro online banking argument all the time... but wouldn't that leave open a big vulnerability for bad actors to steal data and, if they should choose to, control multiple bank accounts and cause fraud?
It's part of the growing myth that is "self driving cars".
People seem to hand-wave and make up what these supposed future self driving cars will do - and worse, they hand-wave and assert they'll be objectively better at X than humans, without any evidence to backup the assertion.
Self driving cars are made by fallible humans using fallible programming languages and constructs. They can't possibly account for every situation or scenario - but people hand-wave and say it magically will.
Sure, one day you'll be able to sleep in the back seat of your car or read a book while it precisely weaves you between traffic only to navigate you right off a cliff. Or the neighbor's kid with a laser pointer prevents your car from turning into the driveway.
> they'll be objectively better at X than humans, without any evidence to backup the assertion.
Google's road tested self driving car is already safer[1] than a human driving. Suggesting that a computer will be a more reliable processor of data and computer of maths than a human is not something which needs data to back it up. The ability of drivers is so variable and in the aggregate there are so many of them that it's almost self-evident that a self driving car which crosses a very low threshold for entry ("being road legal") will be better than a human.
> They can't possibly account for every situation or scenario - but people hand-wave and say it magically will.
Nobody is saying that they will any more than people argue that autopilot on a plane will. It's very plain to see that right now, as of this second, there is a self-driving car which is safer than a human driver. It is not yet legal to buy, but it doesn't change the fact that it's safer. It may be that a bug crops up which kills a few people. But that doesn't make it less safe, it makes the cause of death for some of the users different to "human error".
The important question then becomes - is society OK with bugs and shortcomings in software and hardware killing people? (this is based on the assumption that even driverless cars will not be perfect, some people will still die on the road)
So far, society seems to not be OK with this (as-in we'd rather a person do the killing, even if we think that killing was wrongful).
We aren't OK with autonomous robots having weapons, even though they might be objectively better at guarding prisoners, military bases, killing "bad guys" in bank robberies, etc. We freak out when a fatality occurs at an automotive plant, and those robots only pivot in place!
If society is going to agree we're all OK with a bug left by some short-sighted engineer being responsible for people's deaths - then OK. However, I wager people aren't really OK with this, most just haven't really considered this aspect yet.
A lot of the backlash against autonomous weapon systems is fed by the last 50 years of sci-fi movies showing what might happen (however unrealistic), self driving cars are a different thing and there isn't really an equivalence.
Sure there will be legal issues (in a crash who is responsible, the driver, the manufacturer or the programmers) but they will get resolved with time and case law.
The economic advantages to self driving cars are huge (unless you drive for a living but then progress is what it is), 35,000 people a year die on American roads an order of magnitude improvement would save ~32,000 lives a year (and that's just accidents resulting in fatalities, many many more experience life changing injuries), this generation of drivers might not like it but as the cars get better and better at driving themselves the next generation will hand over more and more of the responsibilities until a human driving a car manually on the road will look like an anachronism.
Also people aren't ever going to be happy with a bug in hardware or software killing someone but we are currently 'happy' with allowing tens of thousands of people to die from car accidents, if the motorcar had been invented in 2000 many people would have wanted to ban it immediately.
"You want to operate a 2500KG metal box at 40mph in proximity to people!? oh hell no!"
There is no reasonable argument for preferring that more people should die as long as the agents of their deaths are the kinds of biological organisms we're used to. What we happen to be already accustomed to has no relevance in determining what we ought to do in the future, except in trivial cases where the different alternatives don't lead to widely distinct numbers of casualties.
Why make it centralized? I generally am suspicious of "anonymized" datasets (in the abstract) as any usable data is probably enough to nonymize someone given a couple other pieces of data. Forgive me if you didn't mean a centralized system but I took upload and anonymize to suggest that.
In the case of cars some radio comms (uhf, wifi, or even bluetooth?) is probably sufficient since there is no reason for a car in New York cares about the opinions of a car in San Francisco. You'd probably even see performance gains under a distributed system since latency is effectively taken out of the equation (time of flight for local radio being effectively instantaneous).
Don't worry. It's not you, it's an anonymous person who leaves your house every morning and comes back after working in the same place you do. Nobody could ever associate that with you.
I agree, it would be interesting to see. I'd also like to see it handle driving in both a heavy snow winter, like Calgary, and also a muddy brown snow winter, like in Ottawa. I feel like for a long time self driving cars won't be able to handle unplowed streets and will have to get the human to do anything truly difficult.
One issue with self driving cars in snow climates, at least in the area I live in, is that in addition to the issues that come with snow covered roads in the winter, the painted lines are often mostly or completely faded come spring and are not fully repainted until months after the snow has melted.
I've been driving on a track like this few weeks ago, where grass and branches were sticking out on the road, any the collision prevention assist on my car was freaking out, because it was sensing an immediate collision from all of its sensors. Not to mention that there was nowhere for two vehicle to pass, if I met someone else either I or him would have to reverse a significant distance.
The situation I'm keen to see is how self driving cars deal with single track roads with passing spaces (which are pretty common in the wilder parts of the UK, e.g. Scottish Highlands) - if there is a conflict the general rule used by locals is that the car that can most easily reverse back to a parking space does so.
NB I'm sure "proper" behaviour can be programmed - I'm just keen to see it! (And who waives if it is a self driving car?)
> Maybe it will have technology to not go on that street until it is good to do so.
Have you driven in London? (Or other comparably busy and narrow city - even NYC at least has 'American-width' roads.)
It's not technology that's required, barring perhaps flying car technology.
If every way is busy, you can't just wait eternally, you have to communicate with other drivers as parent commenter said, maybe let a couple of people go, and then realise when you just need to go for it and 'force' someone to wait for you if they're not otherwise going to.
It will be really awesome to see a car do that safely and autonomously.
There'll come a time, perhaps, when two cars are flashing their headlights at each other to communicate, for no real reason other than "that's how human-driven cars did it in the old days"!
"Common" as in you that you get to see some every day and people don't bat an eyelid anymore? Or "common" as in being the majority of vehicles. My bet on the first one would be like 10-15 years, the other - 30+.
It's going to be slow until it happens in a rush, I think. There will be a tipping point where enough cars are self driving that it stops being a geeky add-on and starts being seen as a moral necessity. Roughly at the point where government statistics of manual versus self driving motor accident rates gain enough data to be comparable.
There will be a huge public to-and-fro about negligence versus freedom, with driving manual being the new driving drunk, but the insurance premiums will settle it.
Yeah, once the technology stabilizes and the legal and regulatory frameworks have been established, there will be a big wave of adoption.
I predict that many in bigger cities will give up on owning their own car, and join car sharing services.
Then you can choose between a private car just for you, or a shared ride where the car optimizes routes and picks up multiple people.
Other benefits: it's just you? take a small 2 person car. On the way to a party with some friends? Get a nice Mercedes to drive you there. Need to transport some furniture? Get a pickup.
Of course this only holds for cities and densely populated suburban regions. Or if you don't have to drive long routes on a regular basis.
I think it's going to be a war of lobbies, with "traditional" automotive companies spreading FUD, and insurance companies pressuring for faster adoption.
It's worth mentioning - which I already hinted at in another comment - that self-driving cars, awesome as this is, will be yet another area where our privacy gets compromised, same as with mobile phones. This will push governments to favour it in the long run and eventually outlaw "regular" cars altogether as too anarchic (or make using them so expensive and cumbersome that it's going to amount to the same thing).
I doubt traditional auto companies will spread FUD at first, they are gonna see this as the next shiny new thing. This is their tape -> CD moment, everyone needs to replace their hardware, it's a bonanza.
When they truly understand that it's going to turn them all into taxi makers, that owning a car is completely passé, they'll panic. That will be their DVD -> streaming moment, but it will already be too late.
>> When they truly understand that it's going to turn them all into taxi makers
I'm sure they understand that. Some even do moves in that direction, like Ford ackuiring chariot, the shared ride provider, and Mercedes collaborating with Via.
> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK?
I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world.
According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time.
Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.
Sure this can probably account for 80% of the general use cases, and surely the remaining 20% are the highly complex, low occurrence cases.
But I think saying this took 30 years is cheating a bit. There were fits and starts and long periods of no development until breakthroughs in other fields (machine learning) occured, which can now get us the rest of the way. Not to mention, the pareto principle doesn't account for Moore's law
That assumes that the remaining problems are best solved using our current machine learning techniques. It may be that it takes several additional long periods to find the breakthroughs necessary to finally solve the remaining problems. 100 years can go by quite fast.
I'm afraid it will be the same as image recognition technology. It's "easy" to get good image recognition that works in 80-90% of the cases, but it still fails at the easiest edge cases(best image recognition in the world fails at telling a difference between a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print). So I think we will go through a few years of manufacturers making cars which can drive themselves in perfect weather, but we won't see a car that can drive in all conditions for at least a century.
So soon, we'll all be driven autonomously 80% of the time, and 20% of the time, some guy will drive. At that ratio, it seems on-demand transportation wins over cars, and the end result is the same - we don't drive.
> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK?
And it should be able to automatically detect that it's in the UK and drive on the left side of the road... I'm curious - can you even get a Tesla in the UK (or Japan or Australia, etc), and do they make a right-side driver model?
1. It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion).
2. Despite knowing about and following news about driverless cars for a while, there was something surprisingly (to me) compelling about watching the video. It's like you get a little taste of the full A to B that it can give you (door to door).
Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? I need to know how long I have to save..!