What's the difference between driverless and self-driving car? The ultimate goal of self-driving car is driverless. Current state of the art does require a driver to be with the car.
And years of regulatory red tape. Moving from current -> self-driving legal and regulatory framework will be one battle. Moving from that to a driverless model will be much larger.
And those updates have to percolate through federal, state, county, and city level regulations. Making it an inherently slow process.
I agree, and I think that's also good for driver and traffic safety. As I mentioned a while back, in case of traffic light going dark, officer has to stepped in to regulate the traffic. Current self-driving car is not capable of handling that without any faults. Among cars, they need to negotiate who to move first on a all-away-stop sign. Self-driving cars need to be able to get data from government relating traffic condition. Currently we all rely on GPS data to determine whether there's congestion or not, as well as user's input (Waze) but that's far from enough to be 100% driverless.
Dataset availability is really really poor today. We can move with great confidence on known conditions, but so many edge cases remain to be solved.
But the end goal is that as a driver of my own car, I can just sit in the passenger seat. As a passenger of a taxi, similarly, I expect no driver.
The ultimate goal of self-driving car is to be driverless. But, if you want to produce a car without driver seat & steering wheel, then yes, from that perspective, driverseat-less car is different from self-driving car.
It's not about the seat, it's about whether or not a driver needs to be in that seat. Lower levels of autonomy need a driver to be able to step in. That is self-driving, but not driverless.
As I said three times already, self-driving car ultimately doesn't need a driver to be on the steering wheel. Why is it so hard to understand that? That's the whole idea of self-driving car.
Whether you have to pay someone.