You can literally watch cars self-driving in all kinds of places and conditions. Yes, they make mistakes. So do humans.
That's a very strong statement with not much to back it up.
They drive fine in straight, wide, sunny, south US roads (and even there not always), they struggle even in US cities, put them in any European country and it's game over. Mountain roads in swizerland during a snow storm ? Foggy twisty roads in the woods ? These won't be solved easily, even Waymo's ceo acknowledged that fully autonomous cars won't be able to drive everywhere.
The fact that the two cases that work best have a similar climate to the 2007 DUC really highlights the reality that these methods haven’t been proven to scale generally. The industry is still chasing that 2007 success, and it’s not surprising that over 15 years they’ve improved that. But do I need to link to all the promises from CEOs about where they thought we’d be today? Those predictions were based on the idea that the DUC prototypes would be more generally applicable. The successes since then have shown we can make the experience better, but don’t show we can solve autonomous driving in the general case.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx7fHEhnIZk (snow, like the google demo)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg | https://youtu.be/LSX3qdy0dFg?t=2229 (snow, but not the one I was thinking of)
- at current traffic levels, accidents are rare
- but fatality rates are high (20% of helicopter accidents)
- the commercial carriers have much better accident statistics than general aviation
- commuter and on-demand flights are much worse than commercial scheduled flights
- rather more than half of all accidents have a root incident near an airport - taxi-ing, departure, initial climb, approach, landing.
My conclusion is that mass adoption of flying cars (as in, millions of people piloting small aircraft with varying levels of maintenance, safety inspections, training, and traffic control) would be a terrifyingly foreseeable disaster.
On the other hand, I hold out real hope for fully autonomous vehicles being potentially safer than a distracted teenager on the road.
I might feel like intervening, 1 out of 10 times at this point. I might not be the typical driver, but I definitely feel like its ready for early adopters now.
However, even though I'm a big fan, I don't see how these can easily transition to "mass consumption", because as we get into the uncanny valley where the auto drive is good enough to take over, the masses are going to completely check out of their responsibility to be a good backup driver.
So I feel like we are going to be stuck in the current space for a long time, maybe 10 years. Until you Auto Drive is so good, you can ride one without getting a drivers license.
