[joshsegall]

I understand the googly eyed take on "the way of the future" of cars, but self-driving cars are going to be too impractical to become ubiquitous for much longer than 5-10.

Maybe this all works great in metro areas with mild weather, but it's not going to work well in severe weather, poorly/wrongly marked roads, "offroad" areas, and construction zones, which is still a lot of the country at this point (and most of 3rd world). I've driven in some backwards places where there are no maps or GPS, and I've driven in near-whiteout conditions, and I'm sorry but no robotic system today can deal with all those variables.

It's also not going to handle human trade-offs well--e.g. sometimes it's better to crash your out-of-control car than to ram into a schoolbus full of kindergarteners.

You can argue these are all low probability situations or that eventually AI will solve them all and you're probably right, but I'd argue these situations are going to prevent full adoption for much longer than 5-10 years. It's going to take near-human intelligence to overcome all of them. Until then, humans will still drive cars, and probably a lot more often that you can imagine, even if everyone wanted the utopian vision to be true.