This looks about right, and I'm not claiming to be prescient, just basically saying what Chris Urmson and Bill Gurley already said years ago.
I'm curious what specific statements by Chris Urmson you are referring to. When he was in charge at Waymo in 2015, they announced that their solution is good enough to drive a blind man around town. And this was before they acknowledged they're using teleop.
The links to the articles are in the 2018 comment I linked.
The Urmson one is from March 18, 2016 talking about a 5-30 year time frame, and the Gurley one is from April 2017 talking about a 25 year time frame.
Without any more context, "drive a blind man around town" has about 3 decades of wiggle room in it... If you look at Waymo's recent blog posts, they have similar words that sound good but leave wiggle room, and they've been doing that forever.
And reading back over those articles, they hit it right on the head:
Over the next five years, hundreds of companies will claim to have successful self-driving cars, Gurley said. But he said he’s reading between the lines of press releases, which often tout tests in very controlled environments that do not totally reflect the real world.
“The part we haven’t figured out yet, the last 3 percent, which is snow, rain, all the really, really hard stuff — it really is hard,” Gurley said. “They have done all the easy stuff.”
-----
Urmsson was trying to having it both ways, but if you read between the lines it's obvious what he was saying:
Urmson put it this way in his speech. "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both."
He went on to say, "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."
In an interview, a Google spokesman agreed that Urmson was describing some aspects of the project differently than the company had in the past. "Yes, there was some new stuff in there," the spokesman said. "That was obviously the intention of the speech: To say some new things."
-----
That was OVER FOUR years ago. People didn't get the message and kept pouring money into it. Prediction: if we get economically viable level 4+ self driving in the next 10 years on a $1B+ dollar scale, it will come by way of a breakthrough, not by an extension of existing tech. That is, by throwing out tens of millions of lines of code that's been written and billions of dollars in hardware that's been designed and manufactured, and taking a different approach.
I'm curious what specific statements by Chris Urmson you are referring to. When he was in charge at Waymo in 2015, they announced that their solution is good enough to drive a blind man around town. And this was before they acknowledged they're using teleop.