Replies

I still have on VHS a PBS special on a self driving car made in the early 1990’s. The car would go a foot or two, spend many minutes analyzing data, turn the wheels slightly, go another foot or two, spend many minutes analyzing data, etc.

It took quite a while for it to go a painfully short distance. We are at 20 years later. A lot has changed. And the next five will bring at least as much change as the last 20 did. We are on the cusp of so many technological advances that will hit people in their day-to-day lives that the mind boggles.

Self driving cars is just one of them. The funny thing is that we tend to view the future from the eyes of the past. The advent of self driving cars may come at a time when cars themselves are nowhere near the part of our culture that they are now. E.g. “virtual reality telecommuting”.

The car I rode in was fully functional. If you didn't see the "driver" sitting at the wheel doing nothing, or turning around and engaging in conversation with the passengers while the car moved, you wouldn't know the difference between the self-driving car and a "real" car.

Almost all of the technology was in place to do this once fuel-injected engines and on-board computers became standard equipment for vehicles. The only thing unresolved at the time was how the computer would be guided. In my case, the car was driven by the road (it interacted with transmitters and transponders in road signs and other roadside elements). Today, there's a GPS component that wasn't developed at the time.

The flaws that I identified to those guys are still there even though the technology has advanced. It's not a technological flaw, so your statements about rapid technological advances doesn't really apply here. The problem is failure rate, impacts of multiple failures and failsafe actions, and these are huge obstacles because a system of self-driving cars has very little room for failures.

A self-driving car is more technologically advanced that NASA's space shuttles, and those shuttles had catastrophic failure rates of 40% (measured by the number of vehicles) and 1.5% (measured by the number of flights), respectively.

I find it kind of silly to see a nation that can't even operate trains on time -- in a completely controlled environment, from a transportation operations standpoint -- so fixated on the idea that self-driving automobiles are anything close to feasible.

The advent of self driving cars may come at a time when cars themselves are nowhere near the part of our culture that they are now.

In other words, self-driving cars may come at a time when the need for them is diminished, and the cost of them is higher than a standard automobile. What kind of auto manufacturer is going to devote enormous resources to develop and perfect this sort of thing?