> There's going to be a tipping point in the near future.

I'm not holding my breath. I grew up hearing people talk about how we would have Mars colonies by now. Imagine my surprise a couple of decades later when the shuttle program ended and the U.S. lost the ability to send people into space for a time.

The way I see it, the clock is ticking. If self-driving cars don't reach a certain level of capability soon, I suspect they simply won't; the technology will have plateaued at a point where it will not be viable in the foreseeable future. It'll be like supersonic flight: full of promise in the 1960s and 1970s, but mothballed for decades after that waiting for some engineering breakthrough to make it commercially viable.