[ghaff]

Historically, big corporate R&D labs spent sizable sums on speculative research that, in many cases, didn't amount to anything.

In the case of the auto manufacturers, subsets of autonomous driving are interesting. If a car can truly be hands and eyes-off on highways (and the tech for that is fairly close), that's a product that almost sells itself.

I'm much more skeptical about driverless cars doing arbitrary pickups and dropoffs. I do think that anyone who is investing on the assumption that an Uber will be able to offer that in a few years is going to be disappointed. It will happen but not quickly with a few caveats like maybe fixed locations can be established to simplify the problem.

[TillE]

This is such a well-defined problem with clear constraints, it's not the kind of R&D that can fail in the sense of a drug with unacceptable side effects or a high-tech fighter jet which becomes an overpriced boondoggle. It's simple navigation of paved, mapped roads with an array of sensors. Except perhaps for really harsh weather, even the edgiest edge cases are pretty limited in scope.

The absolute worst case scenario, within a couple years, is that you have limited deployment in favorable conditions, with fail-safes and human operators ready to take over remotely.

[robotresearcher]

You understated the constraints and missed the most important one: almost never, ever kill anyone. Driving around is relatively easy. Driving around and almost never killing anyone is much harder.

[mrguyorama]

You have to do better than not killing anyone. Every single accident, including ones not your fault, will be used against you to argue that your systems are death traps. You can't injure people, or cause property damage, or even be rear ended. You have to produce cars that are able to drive so defensively, that insurance is no longer necessary