Originally Posted by
mtb_addict
I have said all along the self-driving car as advertised is a fraud. They duped people into pouring millions and billions into a research that is decades away from any return for investment.
The fact is they did made great progress the past few years...but they fraudulantly use their past success to project the future success.
The past few years was all about "getting the easy low hanging fruit." Now all the easy hurdles have been overcome.
The hard part is still ahead. In order to make it work in a way to make a real difference to the world, they have to "get all the fruit off the tree." They still have no idea how to get the fruit higher up. The fruit near the top seems impossible.
What is really happening is that the advances in technology is being used to make driving easier and safer. This will not get us anywhere near the driverless utopia where it will be super safe for pedestrians and cyclists. Instead, this is about reducing the labor costs.
Like trucking companies welcome new technology that make truck driving easy. So they can hire less skilled drivers. The salary for drivers keep decrease while the advances in technology increase. In the future, you might have minimum wage workers driving trucks. That is the realistic goal.
I think they have actually made such great advances that they could operate within parameters that would ensure total safety. The problem is that economists have calculated the difference between the economic effects of widespread transition away from human-operated vehicles and they scare large investors as well as driver unions, parts-makers, etc.
Imagine how much wear and tear, crashes, and other causes for new car purchases and parts sales there are. Self-driving cars wouldn't just reduce waste at that level, they would also make it unnecessary for many people who currently buy and insure cars to do so, which would result in more competition for sales. Until the bean-counters have a sure strategy figured out to make as much money of self-driving car society as they do off human-operated car society, they will keep investing in negative press against self-driving vehicles. It is not that different from the time when Oprah and others decried automated phone systems. That was, of course, before call center jobs could be outsourced as easy as any other job.