There should be some healthy dose of inspiring "propaganda", but this got out of hand - everybody claims "they have it".
I am so sick of this endless stream of lies, that I'm not even going to read the article. The next thing I am going to read on the topic would read something like "X has a viable self-driving car - it's hitting the market later this year.".
That won't happen till General AI. How would you do something as simple as drive the car onto a lift to change the oil without pedals and a steering wheel?
Or there is a concert and you need to drive onto the grass to park?
People talk as if there's some infinite number of unique edge cases when driving a dang car, but there simply isn't that much you actually do with a vehicle. Real deal no-drivers-license-required automated vehicles are coming pretty soon; maybe not in 5 years, but definitely within 20.
We are in a completely different situation today.
The only thing I can think that would sell me on the idea is a really low price point, e.g. sub-$10k to get a new, driverless, road-only vehicle. But I would only want that in addition to a "real" car.
In other words, now you need a hi-res, current map to show. Where does the data for that come from? (Oh wait, don't tell me: Magic!)
TL;DR: "remote control" != "self-driving"
Come to think about it - even 'just park somewhere' is remarkably complicated. I don't quite understand why self-driving cars should need external high quality maps and can't make do with onboard cameras as human drivers do.
But then the parking requires either a high-quality database of valid and off-limits parking locations, or the ability of the car to read the signs on parking lots and generally be able to distinguish private from public parking.
There will be an app for that?
Hey, James Bond was driving from the backseat with a Nokia 9000 (?) a few movies ago.
You know that there are 10s of thousands of self driving cars on the road RIGHT NOW, that you as a consumer can buy tomorrow.
Tesla sells thems, and they work.
That is absolutely self driving.
If half of your driving time is done by the car, that is still a massive benefit to consumers.
End to end autonomity, Is even better, of course, but I think that everyone is selling short the in between 95% self driving.
Even TINY features, like autobraking in emergencies, has the potential to save tens of thousands of lives every year, if it got fully deployed in all cars.
And for jobs, highway driving is 90% of what truck drivers do. If you have highway self driving (which we DO, right now!), then there goes most truck driver jobs.
But fully autonomous driving is still transformative in entirely different ways that makes it hard to treat the evolutionary steps as all that exciting even though many of them probably should be.
Could you ELI5 what the massive benefit is? The system requires you to be alert and focused on the road the entire time.
We know for a fact e.g. from the aviation industry that having a human sitting alert but doing nothing increases human response time and decreases the correctness rate of their actions, which is one reason why airplanes don't regularly land on autopilot, even though the tech has been there for a long time. In fact, auto-land on airliners is only used in very low visibility, low wind conditions, or for training to ensure pilots use it at least semi-annually.
The huge benefit of autopilot on airplanes and ships is that for normal operation out on the ocean or up in the sky, it's sufficiently safe that the pilot/captain can focus his attention elsewhere for long periods of time.
The truck drivers can just get up out of their seat and do something else. There goes 90% of truck jobs, as now you only need a driver for the first and last parts of a trip.
Other benefits: saved lives. The more highway driver cars we have, the less that humans will be driving, and the less chance that a human will make a mistake.
The level 2 and 3 stuff on a Tesla, is already a better driver than most humans.
Ehm, how do you come to this conclusion? Statistically, Autopilot Teslas are no safer than the NHTSA average, at least so far.
If I say "black swans are extremely rare in this part of the world", and you spot one the very next day, the Bayesian in you would assign a low probability to my statement being true, even though that's based on a sample size of one.
Anything fits within "autonomous except when not autonomous" - even the crudest cruise control.