The transition to autonomous vehicles will be long and gradual. We’re not going to have self driving cars that don’t need a person in the driver’s seat for a long, long time no matter what Tesla wants you to think.
The first increment will be cars that can drive themselves on specific, well controlled roads. Perhaps toll roads or HOV lanes. Next, in very well mapped geo-fenced areas, but that may require some sort of street to car communication to bring the safety factor high enough to implement. In both of these situations, there will still need to be a driver ready to take control once the vehicle leaves the well controlled area.
But to be able to program a car to understand all situations that the human mind can interpret instantaneously? We’re a long way from that.
Have you watched the video of an autonomous car following a non-autonomous car down the freeway? The front NA car swerves suddenly into the next lane to avoid a stalled car, and the A car hits the stalled vehicle. If the second car had been a human, the driver may have been able to look thru the front car to see the upcoming stalled vehicle, or at a minimum the driver would likely have swerved just assuming the front car saw something bad.
That is just one example, but there are other situations that humans can interpret but will be very difficult to implement in software.
Maybe I’ve got autonomy on my mind because I read today that a couple made the first porno in a Tesla running on autopilot.
