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“self-driving cars are probably much further in the future than most people realize”

I think the opposite. I think they are going to arrive rapidly. Technological acceleration keeps getting faster.

The biggest obstacle to self-driving cars is government bureaucracy. But big corporations have become adept at navigating these waters and getting things done.

The second biggest obstacle is legal responsibility when it comes to who is at fault in an accident. Big companies will take on the risk at first. Then insurance companies will adapt.

The third biggest obstacle is consumer resistance. That’s not very hard to overcome. The biggest part of this will be addressing safety, such as preventing hackers from taking over cars.

It will be like touch tone service on landlines. First it was an option. Eventually rotary was not an option.

Expect for self-driving cars to be commonplace in 5 years.

In 10-15 years the debate will be what to do with the hold outs who still want to drive. Many places will start outlawing human drivers, or at least limiting where they can drive.

Of course a civil war in the US or a major world war would slow down this timeline drastically. So might major economic disasters.

The biggest obstacle to self-driving cars is the combination of economics and customer expectations. In other words, a car is going to have to be ridiculously expensive in order for it to do what people expect it to do (i.e., drive itself in a manner that is safer and faster than they get around now).

We are now in a paradigm where people either trust the technology too much (they think it can do more than it is capable of doing), or they don't trust it enough (they aren't willing to use it even if it costs the same as a regular car). The tragic crash in Florida last year where the Tesla operating in "auto-pilot" mode crashed into a tractor-trailer should be a warning to everyone about the limits of technology. If a self-driving vehicle can't even reliably detect a tractor-trailer in its path, then I'd say we're really back to the drawing boards on that technology.

And the technology is the easy part, as you suggest.

Government bureaucracy isn't really an obstacle here at all. In fact, it is likely going to be a huge biggest asset for manufacturers of self-driving cars ... because the only way I see these things getting any traction in the next 25+ years is if governments force people to buy them.

Another Freeper posted a link to an article on a thread about the same subject a few days ago to demonstrate how underwhelming today's technology is. It was titled "Reporter Rides Driverless Car," and it was all about the research being done in driverless technology at Princeton University.

The article was published in a California newspaper ... in 1960.