[userbinator]

I assume someone took manual control because it started to move right after.

This is why I believe self-driving cars will always need a human to take control whenever unusual situations arise, just as planes with autopilot still need a pilot's attention.

[msandford]

Airplanes on autopilot usually have many minutes and several hundred miles worth of buffer before something bad happens.

Cars that say "I don't know what to do, Jesus take the wheel!" might only give drivers a fraction of a second.

At some point quantitative differences become qualitative ones.

[ikeboy]

But there are autonomous planes known as drones.

[superuser2]

Almost nothing "in production" with the military is autonomous for the entire flight, just piloted from the ground. Those that do have some autonomous operation still require manual takeover for critical situations i.e. landing. And we don't trust them with human passengers.

Drones are essentially treated as disposable, because they are. We just lose them sometimes. This is not a state of affairs you can have with a car containing multiple humans navigating pedestrian, cyclist, and construction-laden streets.

There's also a lot less that happens during (most of) flight. Surroundings are relatively static, other planes in the environment actually broadcast what they are and what they're doing, so you don't have to discern it from visual noise. There are no stop signs, no intersections, very little traffic, etc.

[seanmcdirmid]

> Almost nothing "in production" with the military is autonomous for the entire flight, just piloted from the ground.

We are awfully close:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_X-47B

http://www.wired.com/2013/07/navy-drone/

There is definitely a point where the drones are going to be better at take off and landing than human pilots, in that case...safety will become an issue (why let humans do it when the drone can do safer?).

The same will happen with cars. It is only a question of whether that happens in 2020 or 2030.