[jfoster]

"The autonomous Google car may never actually happen."

Directly underneath that, an image captioned: "A Google self-driving car maneuvers through the streets of Washington in 2012."

This article is rubbish. It makes lots of arguments that sound valid, but are actually nowhere near being insurmountable. Take the first one, for instance. Supposedly, the need to map the roads is a huge burden. Well, what if they just design the cars so that when a road is unmapped they need to be manually driven, but after that has been done a certain number of times, can be driven on that road autonomously? Only a tiny proportion of drivers would even encounter that situation, and even new roads would become autonomous-compatible from day one. (or thereabouts)

Overall, the article acknowledges that varying degrees of autonomy are already being built into vehicles. To not come to the conclusion that these will be iterated on and become (more or less) full autonomy is short-sighted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3oc1Hr62g