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.
So long as they can drive safely, who cares?
I don't think the AV manufacturers Have to get All the fruit ... the tech isn't there yet.
All they have to do is get enough to justify the investment ... and none of us have any idea how that works. I know General Electric used to get more in tax credits than it owed in taxes because ti got "research and development" refunds. And ti was about the biggest company on the planet making billions a year.
In nay case ... taxis and trucks might be good scenarios ... taxis are already in operation, have been for a good while. And there, yes, the reason for AV is to get the cost of the driver out of the equation.
here's what i see: A bunch of people who really don't know much are telling the people who know a lot about how to do stuff we don't rally understand.
Unless some posters here are doing cutting edge work in AV programming or optics or computer-processing directly related to AV ... or unless some posters here are CFOs of major corporations investing in AVs .. we don't really know what is happening now, let along what is predicted. Whatever we know is gleaned from month-old news reports and year-old disclosures.
We have no idea why certain companies seem to be investing in AVs, or how much they have really invested, or how those investments might be structured ... maybe the investments arr written of against profits to lower the company's tax burden? We don't know.
To assume that all these multi-billion-dollar corporations have been duped .... but Joe Blow form Nowhere has it all figured out ... yeah, no. Waymo, or Alphabet, Intel, Ford, GM, the Euro carmakers ... they know more about what tech is available and what is in the pipeline than we do. because of different states' reporting requirements, they know a Lot more about how their vehicles are performing than we do.
But ... whatever. Sometimes discussion turns into debate, and when we are debating things we simply don't know we are wasting precious life.
Be well.