When I see one of these cars in South Boston (narrow streets with street parking) during the winter (piles of snow everywhere), I'll believe they're a reality. Until then, they'll remain 90% of the way there.
A level 4 car would, by definition, never require you to take over while the vehicle is in motion. This level of automation operates safely with nobody in the driver's seat.
A level 3 car requires a driver to pay full attention and "zoning out" would be unsafe behavior on behalf of the driver. Level 3 is considered by many to be dangerous given the human propensity to zone out despite being responsible.
One key question here is how you'd handle the cases where the system can't reliably perform at the top level. Consider the scenario I described earlier with a system which was level 4 in reasonable conditions: attempting to switch between full self-driving and human oversight frequently would be a safety hazard but you could probably safely release a system which is, say, L4 for long highway trips where a human driver could take a nap for an hour before having to take control to enter a complex city like Boston where the system would you to treat it as L3 or less for the entire trip during bad storm conditions or construction because it's safer to set the expected level of attention clearly at the beginning of the trip.
That isn't level 4, that is level 5.
> you are going to have build systems which safely handle that challenge of inconsistent attention
Level 4 is geofenced, but able to perform safely without any level of attention from any human driver. If a human is required to be in the driver's seat to take over on demand, then you are describing level 3, not level 4.
> attempting to switch between full self-driving and human oversight frequently would be a safety hazard
It shouldn't be. If a self-driving system can't safely reach a place to park in a region, with no human interaction, it is not level 4 in that region.
Everyone keeps going on about the edge cases, about self driving cars not being ready until they can handle everything. Half the people on the road can't handle all the edge cases. They exist, they are drivers.
Let's not pretend the bar to be a "driver" is so high.
It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great.
I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc.
These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is] "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing exactly what a current, human-operated car is an irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by the GP comment.
This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and live in the wilderness with them indefinitely.
That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better the world would be without people like this.
Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make them not "cars".
In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing the argument you are trying to make.
You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own a car without human driving controls.
I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be marketed to consumers for a long time.
What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving capabilities. These cars will match every one of your criteria.
... do we even need n-gate anymore?
Roads currently exist that human beings can currently drive on. If you tell me you have a fully autonomous car, I would expect that to mean it can do everything a human can do on currently existing roads in all conditions that a human being can operate in. This seems entirely reasonable.
This has nothing to do with "sustainability".
Your comment was not "these are not 100% replacement for cars yet", which would obviously be uncontroversial. It was "these are not a reality yet". You've chosen an arbitrary bar for considering these "real", in exactly the same way that serving small rural communities is an arbitrary bar with which to dismiss the real value that subways create.
Technology doesn’t arrive perfectly in its final form. Progress for AVs is going to look painfully iterative from here. Waymo and others will roll out their AVs to increasingly more difficult areas while also reducing the number of disengagements. They will all likely have a human operator fallback for quite some time.