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The goal is a car that can drive itself, empty, or without a licensed passenger on board, that has disruptive potential. Being able to do the whole job in a limited geo-fenced area is better than being able to do half the job anywhere. There are hypothetical safety benefits to partially autonomous vehicles, but it's not a game-changer, it won't transform mobility. Waymo was doing partial autonomy pretty well back in 2012, before self driving cars were even a twinkle in Elon's eye, and before anyone had ever taken seriously the notion of utilizing deep learning in autonomous vehicles. The real challenge is in fully validating the safety and reliability of these systems to the extent that a commercial robotaxi service becomes feasible. I recall having conversations back in 2012 wondering *what if these things get pretty good, reliable enough that they can be counted on to be safe, but still subject to getting hung up or confused in any of the myriad situations drivers can get into where some sense of contextual awareness, creativity, and higher level reasoning is required, and there were big debates about whether Remote control, or remote guidance would be viable as a solution for tricky situations. It turns out that Both Waymo and GM are doing this. I'm not sure yet what the ratio of remote monitors to operational vehicles is expected to be for initial pilot deployments. It could be 1:100, or 1:10, or something else. What's fascinating is that Analysts have estimated about $100 billion (not counting China) have been invested in the emerging self driving car industrial ecosystem that includes software development, chips, sensors, fleet management service, mapping, logistics and everything else. I don't think there's an historical analogue for something like that, where so much effort and value has been placed in an as-of-yet unproven technology. For me the interesting thing is that it's all playing out according to a script (it's needed some revision, but not much) I wrote as thought experiment in 2010 just by asking myself "Well, what would happen if this technology actually came to fruition?" I've been following the development of Autonomous vehicles since the Darpa days, but at that time I never took it very seriously as something that might actually work in the real world, it was just a neat science experiment. |