And my point still stands. How do you define a "fully autonomous vehicle" is an important question. Consider the following three possibilities:
- Drives better than the median human driver in average weather conditions on half of the roads in the US (alternatively, for harder goals, replace with US+Europe or World) - Drives better than 95% of people in 95% of weather conditions on 95% of roads in the US - Drives better than any human in any weather conditions on any road in the US
I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.
>A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and have more experience driving in the snow than I do. And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or undisciplined drivers.
Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).
For context, we know that the first goal (better than average driver in half of road conditions) is now achievable by teams of 1-3 people on a tight budget in O(months) (and really, maybe weeks), since people have done that and posted it on the internet.