Honestly, it really hasn't been the same story forever.

In the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge, of 21 teams entered, 15 qualified to race on the course, and none finished the 240 km course. The best result was 12km. That was off road, with no requirement to obey traffic laws or other cars to hit.

Since 2009, Google/Waymo has 5 million driverless miles under their belt.

Is it 5 years away? I don't know, but this is not the same story forever. This is iterating and improving at a breakneck pace.

That's the problem with exponential development. It seems like you're getting nowhere for decades, then all of a sudden it's starting to amount to something, and in the span of maybe a year or two it goes from impractical to plausible to obvious and ubiquitous.

The problem with predicting these curves is there's usually a confluence of factors that lead to that tipping point. When the right algorithms, hardware, and software are combined it'll be obvious in retrospect, but right now we're still fumbling around with primitive solutions.

When will there be a TPU-type device suitable for in-car use? When will there be adaptive deep-learning algorithms available that can work in the demanding real-time environment of a vehicle? When will enough testing be done that we know such a solution can work without endangering people?

It will happen, but pinning down when is very hard. You'll only know when you're close, and by then you're already flipping from impossible to inevitable.

You saw a driverless car (with a safety driver) drive past you five and ten years ago?

In October 2010, Google announced that they'd logged 140,000 miles with a self-driving car, with a driver, including through San Francisco and a lot of California [1]. So eight years ago is possible, and I'm willing to grant a little hyperbole here.

[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at...