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Coast-To-Coast Autonomous Tesla Trips 2-3 Years Out, Says Elon Musk (google.com)
Jalopnik reports that Elon Musk's predicted window for being able (for Tesla owners, that is) to call up your autonomous car and have it find its own way from New York to California, or vice versa, is astonishingly close: 24-36 months from now. From the article:
As far as the summoning feature is concerned, Tesla plans for the 33-foot range to greatly expand—soon. Within two years, Musk predicted that owners will be able to summon their car from across the country.
“If you’re in New York and your car is in Los Angeles, you can summon your car to you from your phone and tell the car to find you,” Musk said. “It’ll automatically charge itself along the journey. I might be slightly optimistic about that, but not significantly optimistic.”
In getting from one place to another, Musk said autopilot “is better than human in highway driving, or at least it will be soon with machine learning.” If it’s not already better than human, Musk said it will be within the coming months.
But right now, Musk said the car still needs a human around, just in case.
“The car currently has sensors to achieve that cross-country goal,” Musk said. “But you’d need more hardware and software, you’d need more cameras, more radars, redundant electronics, redundant power buses and that sort of thing.
North West Rail Link (NWRL) which is a huge urban metro line in Sydney is driverless.
City driving is MUCH harder than highway.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Different manufacturers (Lexus, BMW) have done automated highway driving for years. Highway driving is the easy one. I know you think Tesla invented the idea, but they really didn't. It isn't hard to make a car follow lane markers on a highway and avoid other cars. The hard part is the 20% of the rest. Get a grip on how complex non-highway driving is.
Exactly this. For this reason, I've found it easy to be dismissive of Google's claims. They have hardly discussed situations like this, not to mention bad weather, construction, etc. Google tends to promise big potential, then drop projects, because, hey, 'failure is good.'
The problem with Elon's claims is that he has credibility. He has a history of doing exactly what he claims and persevering at it. So he is either putting his credibility at risk, or he has some ace up his sleeve to mitigate _all_ of the odd cases in the short term.
I will say, in the long run the driverless car will change the nature of roadways in one way or another to eliminate the situations described. You can't really predict how these things unfold, but the basic underlying premise will change. But that is measured in decades, not 2 years.