Living in NYC I would say try driving without breaking any laws or road rules and see how far you get. You can't drive half a mile without driving in the other lane to get around something.
the problem is, even if you solve 80% of cases 100% of the time, those 20% of outliers are not easy to get 100%. How should a autonomous car behave when it sees a basketball bounce across the road near a playground? Any human would assume: "there might be kids, I should slow down even if the ball isn't obstructing my path" a car isn't going to be able to make those decisions.
It depends on what you define success. Only Waymo has actual real, live robotaxis right now; Tesla's FSD very much isn't that, despite promises that it'll be here next year for the past 9 years. But in terms of "how much does it suck to drive 2 hours in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway", we've made leaps and bounds of progress since the original Darpa Grand Challenge, 20 years ago in 2004. Yeah I'd love to own a Tesla and rent it out as a robotaxi and have it earn money while I'm not using it. I'd also like a flying car. And a pony. To say that we "don't have anything even remotely close" when we have actually made progress, just because some pie-in-the-sky goal hasn't been meet, is where I take issue with. I don't know how much that last 20% will take, but if we've only made it 80% of the way, that's still not "don't have anything even remotely close" territory.
My point is that, in this case, it is. Totally fine if you disagree, but in terms of how much it sucks to sit in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go-traffic, or just any 3 hour drive on the freeway, the SOTA is so much better compared to 20 years ago that it is worth celebrating. Complain about not having robotaxis all you want. What already exists is miles better than OG cruise control from the 90's, which just kept you at a constant speed, and didn't even have radar to automatically slow down if the vehicle in front of you slowed down.
It is further than my cheapo cruise control + lane assist ; on long modern straight roads and in traffic jams, it's almost fsd to me. In other situations it is not functional at all. So these modern ones are better but how much?
