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.”
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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."
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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.