There's no reason to believe that's a level 4 autonomous vehicle, other than the marketing release of the company that makes it.

Going from early cellphones to smartphones was an engineering problem. All the technology was already available and it was a case of putting it all together in a way that worked and that could be manufactured at scale and for profit.

With vehicle autonomy, the problem is that we don't know how to create autonomous AI agents yet, so we don't know how to make a car driven by such an agent. Claims of level 4 autonomy should, at this point, be treated like claims of teleportation or time-travelling back in time: theoretically possible but we don't know how to make it happen in practice.

The issue is that there are so, so many edge cases to worry about. Simple example: someone decides to troll you in your self-driving car and steps out in front of it. You don't have controls in the car, so you can't go around them - you have to wait for them to move.

In reality, it seems like it would resolve quickly - you get out and yell at them, call the police if that doesn't work, etc. But it can get more sinister - criminals _already_ block the road to force drivers out of their car to rob them[1][2]. Now, if you know that might happen, you can just drive around the obstacle. Unless, of course, you're in a self-driving car where you might not even be able to get it to do a u-turn. Related issues would be areas where the practical advice is "don't stop" - not even at red lights - if you're there late at night due to the risk of car jacking[3][4] (this might be out-of-date now, to be fair). Can rules like that be encoded into a self-driving car?

OK, yes, you probably could find a way to do it. But that's almost certainly just the tip of the iceberg in terms of "ways people will fuck with self-driving cars" and "things people do that are technically illegal but still safer than the alternative." Could you solve enough of those in 5-10 years, _on top of_ making self-driving cars work in sun/rain/snow/fog/night/tornados/etc safely and consistently? I think that's very unlikely. Decades seems far more likely to me.

[1] https://abc7chicago.com/593111/

[2] (Non-EU only) https://wgntv.com/2015/03/31/robbers-set-up-fake-road-blocks...

[3] https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/201...

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLEO/comments/2rzsdz/are_there_an...

Have you seen the roads in Alabama? They have this weird, red asphalt and rarely any edge lines. In Louisiana they have these elevated roads over the bayou that don't seem to have break-down lanes. In Tennessee they have roads that go through mountains with shocking curves and gradients. Pot holes, broken lights & signs, weird parking lots, new construction, and seeing a small ball roll near the road and knowing that a kid might be coming after it soon.

It seems like it would take an endless list to cover every new edge case. Our technology is a amazing, but I almost think the edge case is places where autonomous driving makes sense.

The thing I trust the least is the operators they want to put in these cars. They better be completely autonomous, self-maintaining, and somehow tamper-proof. It's a really tall order, which I hope we do fulfill one day. But maybe I'm a pessimist, and they have it all figured out already.

Re robbers, car jackers and the like in some ways you may be better with a self driving car as they seem to be covered with cameras and report back to base the whole time so the crooks would be photographed and the cops called. Already the Tesla cameras have caught a few https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqBWt9rRx-U

Re all the edge cases - yeah that'll take a while.

There was a movie which featured autonomously driving trucks, they were held up and stolen from by the bandits putting a cow in front of them, then just taking the cargo while it was stopped.

You can certainly have all the cameras that you need but if the bad guys have their faces covered and identifying marks hidden then you're not going to be able to do much.

> There was a movie...

I'm pretty sure there is an early scene in the movie Solar Crisis[1] that plays out similarly to what you're describing. This movie was on one of the cable movie channels when I was growing up, so I got a higher-than-normal dose of it.

I don't remember a cow, though (but then this probably isn't the only sci-fi movie out there with such a scene). I think one of the characters first parked a motorcycle in the road, but the truck plowed through it. After that, they stood in the road instead, and that caused the truck to screech to a stop right in front of them, blasting a message on a PA about how they were breaking the law by impeding it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Crisis_(film)

Yes, that’s going to be very helpful to the investigators when they finally figured out what happened to the car and to your body. Might not be helpful to you, though....

License plate can be covered (or more often - using stolen car) and balaclavas cost just few dollars.

If it is know it is stolen a hi tech truck can be remotely ... of course there is another kind of risk. But if one just ensure only one guy can open the container or the container is fixed with pin certain distance from a driver etc.

Ther is always a way.