Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for about 13 yrs.
Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place.
It would obviously take some time to turn over the current inventory of non-self-driving cars but even that would happen faster than most people anticipate. Americans already replace their cars quite often and it is hard to think of a more compelling nudge to replace your car than the prospect of not having to actively drive it.
As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.
The question of "how much and how fast" matters more than you give it credit for, I think.
Take drones - drones are "here" in some sense. You can buy one, they work. But there's a big question about how common drones will be and what they will be used for. How much we care about drone regulations, safety, tracking, etc, will depend a lot on how often we see them. Right now they're rare-ish, but if delivery-by-drone works they could be very common.
The same is true of self driving cars. Of course we will have some number of self driving cars and self-driving features will probably exist on most new cars eventually. But how many and how much they can do matters a lot! I think people point out existing problems to suggest that the magnitude and universality of the technology is still unknown and impactful.
> As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.
Right, but that's an absolutely massive issue. I could say that I am embarking on a project to enable me to flap my arms and fly, you might say that's not possible, but I say that's the whole point of the endeavor, to solve these problems!
The article outlines many very real problems that do not have answers. We can hand-wave and say "well, we'll solve them" but until we have any idea how, and the time it'll take to do them, "years" absolutely does mean decades, if not longer.
> self-driving is here and soon would be common place.
Ehh, "soon" and "common place" are both hedge words large enough to represent any future. Heck, you could say it alraedy is common place—you can see them all over the place in SF.
My instinct is that this entire self driving hype is to distract from how direly we need to invest in public transit.
Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place.
It would obviously take some time to turn over the current inventory of non-self-driving cars but even that would happen faster than most people anticipate. Americans already replace their cars quite often and it is hard to think of a more compelling nudge to replace your car than the prospect of not having to actively drive it.
As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the endeavor, to solve those problems.