I don’t know what to tell you...Tesla et al have most definitely NOT shipped a completely self driving car. Period.
Google is tricking you to some extent, with their ‘million miles’. Here’s how:
For decades, experiments have been attempted at what would be considered a ‘guided’ car. Usually the experiments would involve a series of sensors along a road, or a wire beneath. For a variety of reasons, this won’t work large scale...and what Google purports to be working on is different: self driving, unguided, autonomous cars.
And that’s what their press release says. And that’s what you believe...and repeat...’a million miles driven’.
Here’s the Paul Harvey part: It is STILL guided, and not really autonomous at all. What have they replaced the wire under the road with? Well, prior to the Google car making a trip, a fleet of Google Street cars goes through the route, making multiple 3D scans of the route, and correlating them together. Every driveway, lamp post and stop light is scanned, filtered through elaborate algorithms to create ‘shapes’ out of point clouds, and developed into a map. Said map is then programmed into the Google car.
You see, the car really isn’t as autonomous as the press release. The map is just about as restricting as a railroad track is to a train. Without it, the car cannot proceed.
Now raise your hand if you have made 3D LIDAR scans, correlated them together, and used software to reduce the point clouds into recognized features....
...I had to quit typing for a minute there, because my hands were raised. I’ve used this type of equipment, and I know exactly what it takes (angles, overlap, max distance between control points) to make an accurate map. And, I know that the storage and processing of the point clouds take racks of computers...and a lot of time...and ALOT of human review of the map. Probably thousands of hours for each new mile ‘mapped’.
Oh, and since the world constantly changes, areas have to be re-mapped. The only really effective way to manage this is a national registration system for the maps, and requirements that municipalities register changes (new stop sign, construction zone, etc) ahead of time, so a Google Street car can go re-map the new feature. This exact requirement has been placed on the nation’s major railroads already (under a mandate called Positive Train Control)...and they have successfully lobbied against enforcement for 4 years now, citing cost (and they already have fixed control in place). Now, do you really think that within 5 years we will have you fully autonomous luxury automobile on the market...which would mean:
1) A majority of states will have passed laws allowing fully autonomous vehicles
2) Google will have expanded its mapping from a current 0.5% of the nation’s roads to at least 50%
3) A national map registration system will be in place - affecting every township, county, and city in the nation
Of course not.
Beyond 5 years? I still say never. The self driving safety features on the Tesla (which you repeatedly confuse for an autonomous vehicle) will become widespread, and will be useful/improve safety....and generally make commutes easier. Given these improvements, and the large technical obstacles to an autonomous vehicle, I just don’t see consumers needing or wanting the latter. Absent government intervention, it just won’t happen.
Oh...going to the moon was orders of magnitude simpler. And you may recall that final adjustments at re-entry were actually manually controlled :)
Google stuff might have started that way. But it isn’t anymore. And Tesla folks aren’t doing that at all, yes they’re primarily leveraging the collision avoidance system, but they’re on the fly. It’s interesting because they’re basically taking opposite approaches, Google is going from scratch and trying to go to the end, Tesla et al are saying “look we already have most of the pieces in places as feature, let’s incremental our way to it”. So yeah Tesla and company aren’t fully self driving, but they are to the point that you can just let go of the wheel for long periods of time and let the car do it, and it can handle most stuff. It’s not just the safety features it’s LEVERAGING the safety features into: push the button, don’t touch the wheel, the car drives itself and can handle most issues. That IS a self driving car. At worst right now what we have are self driving cars that aren’t very good drivers, they’re on a learners permit, but they’re driving.
Self driving cars is orders of magnitude harder than going to the moon. But we have orders of magnitude more computing power to throw at it. The modern smartphone has more computing power than NASA had. We are in a world where computing power is no longer a barrier to pretty much anything, we can throw a couple hundred GFLOPS into a car without impacting the cost of the car. It’s now just a matter of gathering the data from sensors and doing something with it. And we’re already doing it, it’s just a matter of how much. Declaring never is ignoring what is already happening.