[gfodor]

You're making a lot of claims here about the current state of the art of self driving tech. Presumably google has the best right now, so you must be talking about them. Do you have insider information or are you just guessing? Because it seems to me that the google self driving cars are capable of doing much more than working on "the immaculate freeways of California."

edit: Also to be clear the driver assist features seen on cars like the model s are not what most people are referring to when they talk about self driving cars here.

[Hydraulix989]

"Also to be clear the driver assist features seen on cars like the model s are not what most people are referring to when they talk about self driving cars here."

Just saw your edit/addition, so I'm going to add more as well:

When did I even conflate them -- even if the state of the art is actually "driver assist" as you've described?

Google’s self-driving cars aren’t “fully autonomous”. Without human drivers, they’d lose control approximately every 1,500 miles, according to Google’s own reports.

Can you guess how many driverless miles their "self-driving cars" have driven?

Hint: It's zero.

If you're curious, here is an example of a much more grounded academic talk (read: not a TED talk) from 2015 by a renowned (in the autonomous vehicle research community) Boston (not California) researcher who worked with Thrun that corroborates the issues I've mentioned earlier:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs

[Hydraulix989]

"Do you have insider information or are you just guessing?"

That's a loaded question.

I don't feel comfortable sharing my credentials here (even though they would very much lend credibility to what I am saying), but I can also assure you that I am not divulging any insider information.

However, I claim that my argument still stands without the support of "insider information" -- given that self-driving vehicle research's domain is primarily academia; all of Sebastian Thrun's work (THE founder of the Google self-driving car project and Google X itself), for example, is more or less out in the wild (even if behind walled garden academic journals).

"Presumably google has the best right now, so you must be talking about them."

That's quite an assumption.