Our industry failed here in setting expectations. We had people like George Hotz showing how easy it was, and Elon Musk promising "autopilot", when in reality h

Our industry failed here in setting expectations. We had people like George Hotz showing how easy it was, and Elon Musk promising "autopilot", when in reality he has fancy lane following. These people knew exactly where these systems break down, but glossed over that fact. I'm optimistic on self driving technology, and I work at a company which builds a part of that tech stack. Here, in the bay area, there are a number of companies that got large amounts of funding trying to do self driving with cameras and computer vision alone. They'll fail. Camera based perception is not a solved problem, and it won't be for a long time, which leaves the traditional robotics sensing approach of Waymo and Cruise. These guys will have something workable first, but it won't be safe enough to be considered L4 or L5 anytime soon. Everyone else is miles behind Waymo and Cruise when it comes to generalized self driving, while others are quietly making good revenue on things like parking lot shuttles, mining equipment, and shipyard hauling. I would love to have an autonomous mode in my car which requires no human intervention, so that I can sleep, or go out for a few too many drinks and have the car bring me home. Working directly on this stuff, I can see that I won't have such a car within ten years, maybe even twenty. I sure hope it's available in twenty, since i'll be too old to drive safely. You're right, it's possible, but very hard. The barrier to cross from L3 to L4 is very high, and part of it is demonstrating to regulatory agencies that you have a safe system in all conditions, which will take a very long time.