> It's not easy, and it's not impossible. It's just hard, like television or xerography. Those took decades from first demo until they worked well. This doesn't fit well with the startup make-money-fast model. It does fit with the big-company R&D lab model.

Amen, and to my view, that's probably a good thing. As much as I think driverless technology will be a boon when it eventually arrives fully, the interim is damn scary. I would much rather have a decade or two of intervening half-solutions that actually provide well understood levels of safety. If a company was willing to shoot for something less than the moon, we might have been on track to have specialized carpool lanes that support driverless conveyance (e.g. buses or taxis) within major cities and possibly within 30, 50 or even 100 miles of them, depending on the metro areas and funds to adopt them. The problem is, who is willing to fund research into or consider implementing at a city scale technologies that required infrastructure investment when there's all these players acting like they'll have a perfect solution in a year or two?

I would much rather have a more modest but well understood solution in place in 3-5 5 years and a good beginning for a stable and trusted fully autonomous system in 10-15 a than the broken promises, and IMO incredibly optimistic PR we get now that serves no purpose other than to steal market share of money and public perception.