That's what people said five years ago. I am sure something will happen eventually, but it will take longer than people expect and the results will never be as good as people are currently fantasizing that they might be. We'll get to "good enough" but never to "great".

I don't know of anyone who was saying self driving is only five years away in 2011. It was still a fantasy then.

Now we actually have working software and hardware, and real people are experiencing self driving. I live in the bay area, but not a month goes by that I don't see a self driving vehicle at some point. And that's not counting the Teslas that are autopiloting their way down the highway next to me that I don't even know about.

How is it that "real people are experiencing self driving"? I was under the impression that Google's autonomous vehicle and other projects like it were still all technology research prototypes. There is a very big difference between the sort of next-generation cruise control driver assistance features Tesla and others are providing, and the sort of fully autonomous wheeled robot people are fantasizing about when they hyperventilate over the city of the future and its wondrous transportation technologies.

Maybe my negative feelings are excessive; I'm just really, really tired of having people jump in with the whole "but self-driving cars will change everything!!!" routine every time people try to have a serious conversation about public transit investment.

They're more than just prototypes. Their employees are using self-driving cars for their daily lives. If you have a friend who works at Google (well Waymo now) who is using the car, you can get a ride. Also, as a driver on Mt View roads, I have experience self-driving as someone behind and next to the vehicle. They aren't the "robotic" drivers you'd expect, but fit in pretty well. They still show signs of being a robot (like the way they approach a turn with a biker is very mechanical) so you can tell it is self driving, but it clearly works.

And also there is Uber's self driving fleet. They are actually taking people from place to place who use the Uber app in a self driving vehicle.

In all cases someone is still at the wheel, but they aren't doing anything other than monitoring and logging the ride and cases where the car didn't behave like a "normal" driver.

Will they stop when they see a ball fly across the street, because a child may be chasing it. Fringe cases will determine their success. Until then, it will be glorified cruise control.

Do all humans stop when they see a ball? Of course not. Some of them miss it, some of them ignore it, some of them don't make the connection.

The problem is people expect self-driving cars to be perfect on day one. They won't be. But they are already safer than humans driving.

Then the question arises who is responsible for that imperfection. Remember the Toyota auto acceleration issue and how that played out socially.

Safe driving is one of the most complex things done by people. If tech companies are good enough to solve that, there many things more profitable and easier to solve.

I beleive it will be more realistic for them to develop seprate and exclusive infa for these vechiles. We can then plan rest of the things around that infra.

Integrating self driving cars into current infra will require a true AI or something closer.

I'll be a believer the first time they actually put a fully unmanned vehicle on a public road with no "safety" driver on board. That'll be big news indeed and indicate that the technology is far enough along to be taken seriously on a massive scale.

For some very limited use cases five years may be realistic. For a car that can do everything and go everywhere a human driver can it's more like 50 years.

What limited use case though? Driving around a populated city? They can already do that. And that covers a whole lot of use cases.

There are already autonomous Ubers taking people around Philadelphia and now San Francisco.

What limits do you think will exist?

"Nuclear energy will be too cheap to meter"

That's still true, if not for government regulation. :) Wait for the new Republican admin to make nuclear cheap again.