Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC
Yeah, because technology never evolves and becomes cheaper and/or more efficient, along with smaller and more portable.
I can't carry around a computer 1000s of times faster than one that took up the space of a whole room 30 years ago in my pocket. Not at all.
Seriously do people think things just get to a point and stop?
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No, but they certainly won't happen overnight like some people seem to think. I'm point out that something like this is going to have to be reliable and if you want the same reliablity as aircraft, you won't be getting it that quickly.
I'm NOT saying it won't happen am I?
These things take time to get right, to get tested, to get approved by government (after they all rewrite laws), then to get implemented and then revised again when something unexpected goes wrong.
Right now they are just in the technology feasibility phase. It won't be until the real serious development begins where things will get serious. Tesla is just beginning that phase and look how long it's taken, but yet we don't see wide adoption due to costs.
It's going to take a ton of finessing to get perfect (though perfection is not possible). People are saying Polaks reasoning and replies are over simplistic, I see it the other way around. He's at least thinking of the hurdles that have to be overcome, giving a sense of reality. Meanwhile the true simplistic answers and rejecting those realities and just saying everything will work based on things like ABS, traction control, blah blah blah. The complexity of having a fleet of self driving cars operating perfectly in any condition/environment is magnitudes greater than those simple technological advances, but people are thinking it's simple.
There are extremes being thrown around in this thread, from it'll never happen to it's happening now! There's a middle ground here. Yes, it WILL happen, but with the current environment of ensuring things work properly and government requirements, you can be sure it won't be very quick either. Unless of course you want to put the countries best engineers into it and have the government pour a crap ton of money into it, like the Apollo program, in order to get an expedited schedule. Even with that though, you are not guaranteed to have anything go wrong, as such with any technological advancement. Hell, we can't even get airbags or throttle linkages correct in mass production.