It sucks when press (or even our own marketing) give well-meaning people like you the wrong impression. We need to fix this. The positive impact self-driving cars will have on society far outweighs any desire we have to be first to market or turn a quick profit. We haven't launched a product yet, and we won't until it's safe.
For example, we built a mashup of lane-keeping assist and adaptive cruise control within the first 3 months of starting the company. It wasn't safe enough, so we didn't launch it.
We're on roughly our 5th major iteration of the product. It uses maps, but it also works fine without them. It uses a GPS, but it works fine without it. It uses lane markers for localization, but it works fine without those too. But it's still not safe enough, so we haven't launched it yet.
Plenty of tough problems left to solve, but enough upside to justify our commitment.
"Your Personal Chauffeur Keep your car. Just let it drive you." - getcruise.com
"Be the first to experience Cruise. We're currently accepting 50 pre-orders for a 2015 launch. Order now to join the driverless revolution." - getcruise.com, a few months ago. (Now the site offers only a wait list.)
If there's a "wrong impression" of Cruise, it's because that was the impression they deliberately gave.
I have deep misgivings about almost-automatic driving. Full automatic driving seems to be within reach, and is not that far away. It's almost-automatic driving that's troubling.
Suddenly handing control back to the driver when the automatic system can't cope is not going to work well. Commercial pilots have problems with that. Watch "Children of the Magenta" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10), where a chief pilot of American Airlines talks to other experienced pilots about how to use cockpit automation. Those are very well trained pilots. Yet this talk is about accidents which usually involved the end of a period where automated systems were flying the airplane, and then, for some reason, from conflicting traffic to weather to a runway change, the pilot had to take over. At that moment, sometimes the pilot didn't have full situational awareness, because they weren't flying the aircraft. That's when accidents happened.
Drivers are not selected and trained like airline pilots. An almost-autopilot puts them in a situation where they may have to take over suddenly. One cannot expect drivers to do that with a high degree of success.
The minimum safety requirement for automatic driving is probably to be able to pull over and come to a complete stop after a failure without user intervention. Or to drive slowly enough that slamming on the brakes is an adequate solution. That's probably why Google wants to initially deploy automatic driving on vehicles with a 25MPH top speed. At that speed, an emergency stop is a sufficient response to almost all problems. There's no need to be able to drive out of trouble at 25MPH.
A high level of driver ineptitude has to be well tolerated. People are going to use automatic driving when tired, drunk, stoned, or looking at a phone. That has to work, and work well. If not, people will die. This is a very tough human factors problem.
You can always get around this kinds of problems by stating the functionality clearly (and limiting it's actions to a well defined set), but exactly this diminishes greatly the functionality of the service.
If you guarantee to people they can safely idle, they will idle and barely look at the road. If you don't, they will have to maintain attention at all times and all this will be is a "strain-reduction device" (i.e. not so useful). There's no good half-attention for humans.
The agile startup mentality is great until you try to apply it to domains that are literally life-and-death.
http://wfdd.org/post/why-we-judge-algorithmic-mistakes-more-...
In fact, that's why I'm so aghast at these guys. They're (at best) delivering a 50% solution that will require human intervention. But their marketing strongly implies that you will be able to divert your attention from the road. A single bad self-driving implementation will poison the well for many years.
It seems to be lane-keeping plus radar cruise control, plus hype. All the major auto manufacturers have lane-keeping and cruise control working, and some are shipping it. It's good enough to work in most situations on freeways. Most. The auto manufacturers are reluctant to let customers use it as a full autopilot. The basic technology doesn't have enough situational awareness.
Here's what Mercedes has right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_RFzC_G5BA
(Turn up the video resolution and read the displays. Messages include "lateral effort from planning too high", "Timeout from ... radar", "Planning timeout ... steer", "Curvature from planning too high".)
Cruise is hyping their system as a full driver-can-do-something-else autopilot. The major manufacturers, all of whom are painfully familiar with liability claims, aren't ready to go that far. Their systems have features which force the human driver to stay reasonably alert. Cruise is app and web people, not real-time and avionics people. This is worrisome.
In autonomous driving marketing, Volvo is the current leader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E-tF-6PWU