Here's what I have always said. Its never gonna happen. The reason: Lawyers. Eventually there will be a tragic death and it will be blamed on the driverless car. The lawyers will sue anybody and everybody involved into oblivion. It will kill the industry.

You could argue all day about the overall statistics, about how human drivers kill others all the time, and how safe the driverless car is overall, etc. It won't matter. When the right case comes around and a young child is killed, or a whole family, and there is any inkling that the driverless car was at fault, they will lose.

Heck, there are plenty that have been killed already, mostly in those Teslas. Those Teslas do doubt will drive themselves, but you aren't "supposed" to do that. But of course, people do it all the time. I always make a game when I am on the freeways, whenever I go by a Tesla, I look over and see if the driver has their hands on the wheel. I would say, somewhere around half the time, they don't. This is easiest in the Bay Area, where there are tons of them driving around.

Tesla so far has avoided the lawsuits, based on the fact that they have specifically said to the owners "you are supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention". Then Musk winks and says hey we have a new and improved self driving mode. Whether this is fair or not, you decide. The Joshua Brown crash was a total fail of the system and he was wiped out into oblivion. But, no lawsuit, as it was deemed his fault for not paying attention and letting the car drive itself.

There are just too many possible shortcomings that will require ever-increasing levels of AI and computing power to resolve, some of which have been mentioned. The fog, the rain, the dust, the unplanned construction detours, and so on. And the hacking? If it can done, some griefer somewhere will do it.

How many people know how to turn into a skid and get out of it?

I have thought about this a lot, and here is something that relates to it, somehow, I think. This is something I think about every time I hop in the car and go somewhere.

If you take a 200 foot view from above and analyze it, the current system simply should not work. It defies all logic that for the most part, yet it does work. Yes, every day all over the place there are mishaps, crashes, people hurt, people killed. But when you look at the total number of cars and the total miles being driven, for the most part it works. Every day you go out and go somewhere and come back unscathed, it worked.

But how it can possibly work gnaws at me every time I get in the car. Whenever I meet random people that are part of the overall general population, I always find that at least about a third of them, if not more, are marginally sane, if sane at all. After a few minutes of conversation, it becomes apparent that this person is existing in some other plane, where logic is right out the window. They seem completely oblivious and incoherent. Sometimes I wonder how on earth they can even exist in society, and have a means to support themselves, and be able to deal with all the trials of everyday life. Now, when you get in your car, you are surrounded by a random mix of all the people in the population. Some are truly out of it. Some no doubt are on drugs, alcohol, etc. A fair number are talking on their phones are texting. And here you are, especially on the freeway, going 60-80 miles an hour in a two ton projectile, and surrounded by dozens of others, and most of the time, the spacing between the cars is just a few feet, nowhere near enough to allow for a defensive maneuver if something goes wrong. I am amazed that it all goes along without constant crashing all over the place.

Somehow, apparently, peoples' brains get wired to be able to handle all of the inputs and outputs for driving a car at speed on a crowded road, and make the necessary adjustments, and be able to avoid problems most of the time. Its not trivial to do this, from a mechanistic point of view. But it works. For driverless to take over, the AI has to equal the processing power of the human brain. Maybe its doable some day?

I have a newer model Toyota with some of the new safety features. One is lane guidance or whatever they call it. Its supposed to keep you in your lane. It looks at the stripes and the curbs and such and figures this out. Not long after I got the car, I was taking a freeway exit where you come to a stop sign to a cross road. I was making a left. But this cross road is constructed very oddly visually, as you have to sort of make a hard jog across the big road. Its hard to describe, but this is what it looks like on Google Earth. Its no problem to figure it out for a person, but the computer had some issue with it. I start heading across, and the next thing I know the damn thing is trying to take over the steering wheel, and I had to fight it to avoid going the wrong way. I think it thought that middle divider part was the lane I should be heading into. I shut that crap off after that. Somehow after about 50 years or so of driving, I have never had a problem figuring out how to stay in my lane. I should be good.

I do have the front collision detection enabled still. It seems like a good idea. It hasn't messed up on me yet, although it did start to flash a few times when it didn't really need to. Such as, when coming up to an open intersection and green light but at somewhat of an odd angle, and there are cars on the left side waiting to turn.

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But a Tesla is not a self-driving car. You are supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and pay attention at all times. Of course, you can elect to not do that. You can end up like Walter Huang that way. What happened there is not all that different than I mapped out above. Just another odd variation in the lanes that was not expected and was handled incorrectly. In this case, total disaster for the results.

Let's not forget Christine's boyfriend.

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