[n2d4]

> said we'd have self driving cars "in a few years" back in 2015

And they wouldn't have been too far off! Waymo became L4 self-driving in 2021, and has been transporting people in the SF Bay Area without human supervision ever since. There are still barriers — cost, policies, trust — but the technology certainly is here.

[amccollum]

People were saying we would all be getting in our cars and taking a nap on our morning commute. We are clearly still a pretty long ways off from self-driving being as ubiquitous as it was claimed it would be.

[n2d4]

There are always extremists with absurd timelines on any topic! (Didn't people think we'd be on Mars in 2020?) But this one? In the right cities, plenty of people take a Waymo morning commute every day. I'd say self-driving cars have been pretty successful at meeting people's expectations — or maybe you and I are thinking of different people.

[wat10000]

The expectation of a "self-driving car" is that you can get in it and take any trip that a human driver could take. The "in certain cities" is a huge caveat. If we accept that sort of geographical limitation, why not say that self-driving "cars" have been a thing since driverless metro systems started showing up in the 1980s?

[vidarh]

And other people were a lot more moderate but still assumed we'd get self-driving soon, with caveats, and were bang on the money.

So it's not as ubiquitous as the most optimistic estimates suggested. We're still at a stage where the tech is sufficiently advanced that seeing them replace a large proportion of human taxi services now seems likely to have been reduced to a scaling / rollout problem rather than primarily a technology problem, and that's a gigantic leap.

[kjkjadksj]

People were doing that in their tesla years ago and making the news for sleeping on the 5

[ipaddr]

Reminds me of electricity entering the market and the first DC power stations setup in New York to power a few buildings. It would have been impossible to replicate that model for everyone. AC solved the distance issue.

That's where we are at with self driving. It can only operate in one small area, you can't own one.

We're not even close to where we are with 3d printers today or the microwave in the 50s.

[vidarh]

No, it can operate in several small areas, and the number of small areas it can operate in is a deployment issue. It certainly doesn't mean it is solved, but it is largely solved for a large proportion of rides, in as much as they can keep adding new small areas for a very long time without running out of growth-room even if the technology doesn't improve at all.