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Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you to a point, but Google's target is much more moon-shot. Door-to-door complete self-driving in all circumstances, not just highway under careful conditions.

And by all indications they are succeeding - the roadblock is regulations and turning it into a consumer product. The tech is there.

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The tech is not there. If it were they'd be making more noise about it. Most of the big players (besides Apple) have demonstrated self driving cars in familiar environments; downtown SF or whatever. The problem is most of the country is not downtown SF. There's a lot of dirt roads out here. There's a lot of snow and heavy rain. Nobody has demonstrated self driving under all conditions. Or even under all non-extreme weather conditions.

We'll eventually get there but it might be another 20-30 years before we live in a world where a robot car will come ferry you off to wherever you might want to go.

I suspect the near term ~10-20 years will have some form of autonomous public-ish transportation running on certain roads that are routinely re-mapped. Highways and busy city streets are likely candidates for autonomous operation.

You make a really good point. Given the economic impact to companies, I think it will be much faster.

For instance, the Germans flew their first jet in 1941. Only 17 years later, the Boeing 707 was flying, and transportation around the world changed immensely.

Given that we had just come out of a war (2 if you count Korea), that's pretty fast. I'd think a comparable timeframe would apply rather than your 30 year estimate. Heck, 30 years ago you didn't even have a cell phone!

I'd like to see these cars' behavior when they encounter a road work crew with a closed lane and flaggers directing traffic.

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