I remember growing up believing flying cars were just around the corner. As today's children get their driver's licenses a decade from now, they'll think about when they grew up believing self-driving cars were just around the corner.
Flying cars are doable, and there are several prototypes of a flying car. However, flying cars aren't safe and aren't cost-effective.
Self-driving cars in 1960 require a significant infrastructure to operate, and can't operate with human drivers. (Edit: Not to mention they don't exist)
Self-driving cars today work, and are cost-effective, and it's likely that they will be safer and create a much better traffic ecosystem than humans ever will.
Self-driving cars ONLY work on the immaculate freeways of California that they are almost always (unfairly) tested on. Any precipitation renders the LADAR sensors all but useless, and many everyday driving scenarios like "left turn onto traffic" and "no lane markers" are still are far from being solved yet.
Any real improvements in the technology will be the result of fundamentally different techniques than what the state-of-the-art is currently using (since this is Hacker News: state-of-the-art really is just an "ad hoc" pipeline that looks for things like "lane markers" using things like Canny edges along with a PID controller for the steering wheel actuator, with some other "cheats" like an over-reliance on human-compiled map data provided "a priori").
An end-to-end deep learning approach seems promising, but the current results aren't even usable at this point.
Five years from now, every car (even my Jetta, not just luxury cars) will have the equivalent of what Tesla's "auto pilot" looks like now, but a human in the front seat will still very much be a necessity.
Next comes recognizing where the road wants you to go (lane markings and such), which works reasonably well now, especially if you have mapping information. That's automatic lane keeping. All the major manufacturers have that working.
Then comes dealing with other road users. Google is putting a lot of effort into this, with some success. See Urmson's video from SXSW.
Looking ahead, we need somewhat better and much cheaper sensors. The rotating Velodyne thing is still too clunky and too expensive. LIDARs that deal with rain and fog can be built; you need to get back more info than just the first return. "First and last" return is helpful; you'll get a solid "last" return from a hard obstacle in the rain, while "first" looks like noise. That technique is used in aerial LIDAR scans to get both the top of vegetation (the first return) and the ground surface (the last return). It's also possible to range gate through fog. Here's some range-gated imagery.[1]
Solid-state flash LIDAR may be the way to go. Units today are still about $60K, but that's a consequence of low production quantity. The custom imaging ICs aren't inherently expensive. There's a startup claiming to do this, but their web site is all hype, no shipping products.[2] (Pro tip: Calling yourself "The leader in 3D sensing" when you haven't shipped makes you look fake.)
Automotive is now using mostly 77 GHz radars. That's almost good enough if you have scanning in both elevation and azimuth. Even at 77GHz, you can see bicycles and people. Really good 3D radar plus vision might be good enough for serious automatic driving. Existing low-end 2D narrow vertical angle radar just keeps you from rear-ending the car in front.
[1] http://www.obzerv.com/webfolder_download/bb0e026522747b003d9... [2] http://www.quanergy.com/
edit: Also to be clear the driver assist features seen on cars like the model s are not what most people are referring to when they talk about self driving cars here.
Just saw your edit/addition, so I'm going to add more as well:
When did I even conflate them -- even if the state of the art is actually "driver assist" as you've described?
Google’s self-driving cars aren’t “fully autonomous”. Without human drivers, they’d lose control approximately every 1,500 miles, according to Google’s own reports.
Can you guess how many driverless miles their "self-driving cars" have driven?
Hint: It's zero.
If you're curious, here is an example of a much more grounded academic talk (read: not a TED talk) from 2015 by a renowned (in the autonomous vehicle research community) Boston (not California) researcher who worked with Thrun that corroborates the issues I've mentioned earlier:
That's a loaded question.
I don't feel comfortable sharing my credentials here (even though they would very much lend credibility to what I am saying), but I can also assure you that I am not divulging any insider information.
However, I claim that my argument still stands without the support of "insider information" -- given that self-driving vehicle research's domain is primarily academia; all of Sebastian Thrun's work (THE founder of the Google self-driving car project and Google X itself), for example, is more or less out in the wild (even if behind walled garden academic journals).
"Presumably google has the best right now, so you must be talking about them."
That's quite an assumption.
Also have you ever been to the east coast of the US? The roads here are much worse, and we have potholes.
Now, you can get ones anywhere from $200-$5000. That's why I am sticking with my 5 year prediction for an auto pilot Jetta.