[jschwartzi]

This is a serious problem if you have to take over during disengagement. If you spend most of the year not driving you risk falling out of practice, and then the one time you must rely on your own skill is in an unusual situation requiring you to exercise good judgement at speed. I would expect most disengagements to result in accidents because of this.

[lsc]

There was a bunch of research on this a while back, essentially saying the driver needs to be paying driving level attention the whole time or the car needs to handle itself completely; you can't just expect someone to go from not driving to driving at 60mph without warning.

I mean, you can probably design autonomous "disengage" modes- hitting the emergency blinkers and heading for the breakdown lane is the extreme default. On a lesser level, the thing could just drive like I do. If a merge is too tricky? Just keep going straight, and recalculate on the next exit.

This is helped by that fact that modern cars seem to have pretty good "Just don't run into something" sensors already, and from my own experience as a bad driver with a decent accident record, not running into other things is most of the battle.

So yeah, I could totally see autonomous cars evolving the ability to safely get themselves off the road. Of course, you're still gonna need to do that a lot less often than every three thousand miles, but you don't have to get it to zero, just around the point where normal cars break down mechanically.

[Retric]

I don't think people are going to enter their destination for every trip. So, people will still do some driving even with self driving systems.

On top of that most situations with disengagement have not resulted in crashes. Really it's failing to pay attention during normal driving that's most often at fault, a 'buzzing you need to pay attention now' system solves most of the problems even if the car is not driving it's self.

[stevenwoo]

You make fair points, but didn't Waymo first show cars with no steering wheel whatsoever as their target? I have only see the Waymo branded vans in recent months, not the tiny custom cars (forgot the name of them).

[Retric]

WePod and some other companies already have self driving buses doing limited routes in foot traffic. Which is basically the Waymo tiny car demo.

It turns out to be significantly easier problem than full speed road traffic. Which IMO is why google gave up on that concept demo.