Elon Musk said that Tesla's driverless technology was "probably better than a person" more than a year ago. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/11...). What I'm saying is, Musk is a big promoter of Tesla and taking his ideas of when the technology will be ready at 100% face value is foolish.
This is likely more due to regulatory reasons than anything else. Waymo's cars have an exceedingly low rate of required intervention.
But that's not really a very impressive feat compared to 3-5 days of non-stop driving in NYC. I mean who cares if it can go cross-country? I want it to take me from my apartment to the office to the grocery store to Target out to dinner and then back home again.
Hundreds and hundreds (probably >1,000 even) of those cross-country miles are going to be desolate and essentially carless.
As it is driving on a boring highway all day and finding a hotel at night sucks. I'd much rather leave the driving to the night while we sleep.
While that's nice, it's kinda the low-hanging fruit.
I'll be impressed if somebody manages autonomous driving in, say, New York (or Kolkata if you're feeling ambitious), at night, during snowfall, navigating a construction site and/or traffic regulated by policemen.
This is taxing but completely possible (and entirely expected) for a human driver. Whereas the lane-following autopilot in my car is routinely confused by shadows on a pleasant day.
We are quite far apart however on how close we are to "just works."
Waymo has already started a real pilot of fully autonomic driving for regular people in Phoenix area. I predict that means they are less than 1 year away from ditching training wheels and launching it fully.
Some think that changing laws to make legal will be the hard part but I see the opposite: states will be competing for who's first to make it possible.
Many states, including CA, already made testing possible. You just sign up and ask "can I test my self-driving cars, on real roads, possibly destroying other cars on those roads and killing people. Pretty please?".
Laws are hard when they're controversial and self-driving cars are political goldmine:
* dramatically less deaths and other kinds of destruction due to less accidents
* cheaper transportation
* the sheer coolness of self-driving
It'll take only few states in US to allow it and other states will have to follow or the politicians will look very stupid if a taxi drive in SF costs $1 and the same is $10 in Chicago.
No-one will have to flaunt the law, it'll get changed very quickly.