> The market is so huge that it's worth it even if it takes decades of R&D costing billions a year. This is a common trap novice founders fall into. They see

> The market is so huge that it's worth it even if it takes decades of R&D costing billions a year. This is a common trap novice founders fall into. They see that a market is huge, and simply say "well if we can just get a piece of the pie we'll be great!" It's like saying you only need to take 1% of search from Google. Yes, that is a huge opportunity, but how are you going to do it besides hopes and dreams? If ~$10 billion invested turned into an actual self-driving technology that could be generalized, it would almost certainly (if competition also develops it you essentially have a commodity and are now in the airline industry where there's a huge moat but the margins are still awful) be worth it. But people are becoming more cognizant that maybe that technology just isn't ready yet and nobody knows when the next breakthrough will occur. Is it possible one of the competing companies already has it and just hasn't shared it? Technically...but I am very confident that right now the state of the art just isn't good enough and the people in charge are naively throwing money at the problem hoping it bears fruit. I realize the person I am responding to largely shares my opinions on self-driving cars not being ready for prime time yet (I'm familiar with his website), I just wanted to point out a common fallacy that leads people to work on fruitless endeavors. In my opinion an AI winter is coming before self-driving cars are "real" - by which I mean a profitable solution that can be scaled.