With that pricepoint, maybe you don't need to implement actual autonomous driving, but instead it could be implemented by employing millions of dronepilots in some far away country that drive your car for you.
I don't really mind driving the 10 minutes to the store.
I mind driving 90 minutes between San Diego and LA. I mind driving 90 minutes between San Jose and San Francisco. I mind driving 7 hours between LA and SF. I mind driving driving 24 hours (two 12 hour shifts) between San Diego and Austin.
And for those of you suggesting car rentals, have you seen the price of car rentals even before Covid? It was getting to the point that car rental was often more expensive than airfare.
Cars in cities today are incredibly stupid compared to public transit. Full autonomy could change that.
I continue to expect something of this nature to be necessary before we get self-driving tech anywhere close to where we want it to be. Cameras simply don't work in all conditions, and even with LIDAR mistakes can be made. There needs to be an external reference point.
The physics of the eye are relatively complex, the data processing and recognition we do more so, and the ability to dynamically mentally model a set of controls onto a vehicle of arbitrary shape and dimension even more so.
Cameras are not eyes, the algorithms we use to detect are completely different, the algorithms we use are completely different.
I can't prove that it is impossible, but its different enough that it might be. A bit like saying a tomato and a brocoli are both vegetables with organic matter, but good luck making Tomato Juice with broccoli.
Also see Comma's Openpilot for adding automatic lane centering to a recent 3-4 year old car from Honda, Hyundai, Toyota and others.
Though also, at the same time the liability questions would quickly become... Complicated.... With that model
'I'm sorry! Hit a lag spike, blame Telus.'
It’s a fun idea that we can create a whole generation of Bangladeshi click farmers that drive people instead… but it’s a nonstarter for a bunch of reasons.
Not sure what you mean with Bangladeshi click farmers
There would be licenses, regulations, threat of lawsuit, qualifications and all sorts of other mandatory requirements. If someone wants to be cynical then, yes, a lot of these safeguards would not be put in place until after a certain number of deaths had been exceeded. eg seat belts, air bags, traffic lights, speed limits, road rules in general.
The idea is still viable.
These already exist in Taxis, and have you ever been in a Taxi? Their drivers aren't exactly the pinnacle of driving excellence.
Human intelligence could be useful for navigating construction work.
Really, what we need is to overhaul road construction (and maybe roads in general) signage and protocols to make them machine-readable, not just human readable.
At some price point, it will always be a lot cheaper to add humans than it is to make the cars "self driving". And the last % I'm almost certain will never be cheap enough for autonomy.
In other words - the value of proposition of autonomous driving would be completely fine if the car gives up on unarguably difficult situations and alerts the driver to take over. As of now, however, the car will boldly do something stupid and dangerous.
Since my last service, it seems they've updated it and it's far more sensitive than it used to and seems to break in many situations where it previously did not. What sucks about that is the vehicles behind me are caught off-guard with no obvious signs of the need to break and then the jackass in the GMC SUV slams on his breaks.
I also see people very quickly stop using their autopilot, as you will think ca. twice a day: "so do I really want to spend 8.50 right now?"
Makes me wonder what those humans are now doing for a living.
The issue is not the idea of remote control per se, though connection drops etc. would be a risk, but the notion yoga can outsource it to somewhere with far cheaper labour.
Playing a game with input lag is terrible because you always need need to do all your inputs ahead of time in anticipation what a frame 100ms in the future will tell you. That might make precise control very difficult, not just in unanticipated situations such as e.g. emergency braking.
Unexpected road accidents typically involve someone who may not even be thinking about driving, who then have to notice the random screech, focus their eyes and process what's happening, then determine they need to immediately break, then break.
The problem with input lag isn't that human input is under 100ms, it's that too much of a gulf between input and on-screen response breaks the feedback loop - your brain struggles to connect your input alterations to an alteration actually happening. If you're throwing a ball, when you twist your wrist the ball is twisted immediately when the wrist holding it is twisted (because it's physically pinned to the hand that's physically attached to the wrist, and literally cannot be out of sync with the fingers gripping it).
It's like how VR users need under 30ms of latency or they throw up, except less drastic.