I agree, I think we are farther off from truly autonomous driving than we believe, too many factors play into it that tend to be forgotten( I'm guilty of it as well when it comes to self-driving or a lot of technologies I'd love to see sooner than later):

1. Some people just enjoy driving their cars, tinkering with them from an automotive perspective and the like, self-driving cars will inhibit that due to their heavier reliance on software, design differences and lack of modification abilities as opposed to today's vehicles, self-driving cars won't gain acceptance from that crowd for a while.

2. The first accident that is caused by a self-driving car will cause a major set-back in the eye of the public, airplanes are over-engineered for the sake of redundancy and safety and I don't believe that level of detail will be applied to self-driving vehicles, honestly. Government standards will be met and companies will achieve the best safety ratings they can because it just doesn't hurt your product to have that as a selling point(I purchased my last vehicle for my family almost solely on it's high safety ratings) but sooner or later a self-driving vehicle will cause a casualty or injury.

3. Control and change, it is a complete paradigm shift for transportation as a whole and it will take a while some people to want to adapt or change with the times, a lot of cars are driven for sentimental reasons, the self-driving car tends to pull away from the romantic image of a vehicle(road trips come to mind as an example).

4.Cost, Self-driving cars bring a whole new level of technology to the consumer, how will that be handled from a financial perspective? Car dealers aren't known to be consumer friendly. Will there be economy models available? What about the individuals who just can't afford a self-driving car and are fine with a non-self-driving vehicle, individuals who can't afford to purchase a new car at all?

And along with cost: maintenance. The failure of a sensor could have far more dangerous consequences than a worn-out catalytic converter. You'll have to keep your car's sensors in much fitter trim. That will be impossible for lots of people who today can barely keep their car passing inspection.

Even when the subject is Uber you get people who somehow aren't able to process the notion that autonomous vehicles will be shared, managed and maintained by large scale professional fleet management services, and rented on a per trip basis. Every major company developing fully autonomous passenger vehicles is pursuing this model.

That's the reason. We are unable. Somehow we aren't able to process this subtle notion you have revealed to us. Even now, I find myself unable to grasp this nuance.

If they are truly just taxis, then their penetration will be approximately what taxis are today plus some increment to account for lower pricing. Maybe add rental cars.

Lol, this whole thread feels like it's out of a time warp from 2013, before the rush, when most people were still pretty naive about these things.

So where is the math that lets everyone suddenly afford to and want to take taxis everywhere?

In New York City, a taxi driver takes home maybe 50% of the money collected in fares after costs (whether depreciation on their own car, renting a taxi by the day or week, gas, etc.) That may be high but it's a nice round number.

If we take this as a general rule of thumb (and NYC cabbies make more than the average), that means you could but cab fares by roughly 50% by eliminating the driver. Maybe that forces a behavioral change on the part of some urbanites. But I can pretty much guarantee you that cutting cab prices by 50% will minimally affect behaviors in most places.

And that's not even counting the many places where having the most rudimentary cab services is barely a cost-effective business today.

Many analysts have crunched the numbers, and come up with similar results, but Brad Templeton has been thinking and writing about Robotaxis longer than anyone else, so I'll link to his numbers:

http://ideas.4brad.com/robotaxi-economics

Those numbers seem quite consistent with what I wrote. Costs per mile of a "normal" car today of about 50 cents/mile. (Which is approximately the IRS reimbursement rate so that seems very reasonable.) So that would be a good ballpark. Which is 1/2 to 1/3 of Uber today.

Sure, you can speculate about optimized taxi designs (which aren't especially relevant to non-core urban areas with high car ownership today) but small electric vehicles could exist without self-driving too.

IMO this is an academic exercise for at least a couple of decades in any case but it's an interesting thought experiment.

The health of the sensors will become part of the safety inspection.

I've seen a fair amount of stuff in 40 years of driving:

Snow, of course. I live in Salt Lake, and I think it's going to be hard to automate a car to drive as well as a good, experienced snow driver.

I've hydroplaned once.

I've had a malfunctioning traffic light that gave me a green left turn arrow across oncoming traffic that also had a green.

I've seen an unattended baby stroller go coasting across a crosswalk just as the light turned green.

I somewhat often take my car onto dirt roads. Sometimes I have to be rather conscious of the clearance and where the rocks are so that I don't rip the bottom out of my oilpan. I also have to think carefully about how I approach the sandy patches so I don't get stuck.

My brother in law had his front brake lock up on one side while driving at freeway speed.

I've had the vehicle in front of me break an axle and drop a rolling tire on the road in front of me, while it went down the road dragging the brakeshoes on the ground. That happened on a cloverleaf; the driver of that vehicle did well not to roll it.

Maybe the worst I've seen: A pickup dropped an extension ladder in the middle of the freeway. It was rotating, and as it rotated, it grew in length. A bunch of cars were having to dodge it, plus dodge the cars that were dodging it.

There are a lot of crazy things that can be thrown at you while you're driving. Programming a computer to be able to handle all of them as well as a human is really hard - you first have to think of all of them.

Autopilot 2 just achieved parity. Late, but done.

As of today, AP2 is still missing the following AP1 features:

* Auto-dimming touchscreen

* Automatic windshield wipers

* Autopark - perpendicular

* Display cars in other lanes

* Side collision avoidance

* Side collision warning

* Sign recognition

It's also still steering itself off the road in places AP1 worked fine. There are videos over at r/teslamotors on Reddit or the TMC forum.

I received an email the other day saying side collision avoidance has been added in the latest update, but the rest still stand.

That seems crazy that automatic windshield wipers aren't enabled... my 2008 Honda Civic has those!

To put this into perspective, the things that recently shipped are autosteer and auto-braking at high speeds.

Who the hell did they outsource from?

The automatic wipers were from someone else like Bosch, they used to have a bug similar to a bug on Mercedes cars.

Mobileye.

Nobody doubts Elon's ability to execute. He's just famous for missing his own deadlines.

Didn't check /r/Tesla and /r/SpaceX lately so I don't know what the current value is, but Elon Time coefficient used to be something around 1.7 or 1.8 ;).

I completely disagree. If you look at a recent video of Tesla self-driving real-world "debug" mode with identification/classification bounding boxes, that and Musk's bet on the simplicity of pure-optical CV they have a convincing argument for full autonomy reasonably within a few years.