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Comment by lucianbr | Hacker News Reader

Regardless of the definition, I can't buy and own such a "driverless car" because I don't operate a supervision center with people available to "assist" the car. Whatever "assist" means. Nor can any company that's not large enough to operate the infrastructure.

I'm sure at least some of the hype is in regards to people owning such "driverless" cars.

It's driverless by definition because it does not have a driver, but it's not autonomous by definition, because it requires outside help to function. Cool hair splitting. It's an impressive technical feat for sure. In regards to perceived benefits for society, it's part of the way there, as it reduces the number of humans required to driver from 1 per car to 0.something per car.

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These cars are not meant to be owned. They're part of a fleet.

They are driverless and specifically L4 autonomous, which is the best autonomy you can get right now. The vehicles that can operate without any help doesn't exist. You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your expectation.

No, what you explained is 100% what I expected. Driverless cars for Google. For me, I'll be waiting a loong time.

Doesn’t seem impossible to offer remote assistance as a paid subscription. The real showstoppers are cost and maintenance of the self-driving hardware which is astronomical

> vehicles that can operate without any help doesn't exist. You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your expectation

Eh, I'd say we're a decade out from an L5 vehicle. It'll officially be L4, on road only. But that matches a good fraction of American drivers' capabilities.

Since the assist doesn't require real time response (e.g., the failure mode is the car not moving, not you dying unlike a tesla) it seems like a non taxi version could simply set you up as the assist monitor.

If you fall asleep or don't respond it's fine, you're just stuck.

I don't think Google plans to do this for a variety of reasons, but I don't think there's fundamentally any reason they couldn't.

> If you fall asleep or don't respond it's fine, you're just stuck.

"Just" being stuck on a highway doesn't sound too safe. If you have multiple supervisors watching the fleet it's less of a problem than when it's one fallible supervisor.

Presumably if you own the car you can act as your own “assistant”

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