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I have not been following the development of self-driving car tech very closely, but I have some familiarity with the difficulty of the challenges involved and I have a feeling that we are at least two decades away from having fully autonomous tech authorized for use on public roads. Am I underestimating the progress of the tech? I have the impression that there is a tremendous amount of unjustified hype in this field.

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It is both an over and underhyped field depending on the area you are looking at.

HUGE difference between consumer self driving car [Everywhere, at all times] and the Machines as a Service [Geo, time, weather-fenced operations][1].

Waymo appears to be at the head of the pack; Sacha Arnoud, Director of Engineering for Waymo gave a talk a few weeks ago at MIT[2] and gives a good idea. We are about 5 years out until these start rolling out as MaaS (machines as a service). Probably 10+ years for level 4 highway operations for consumer models according to Frazzoli.

[1]Emilio Frazzoli, CTO of nuTonomy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWSbItd0HEA [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg

You're not underestimating anything. Rather, the vast majority of developers (much less everyone else) have no familiarity at all with the challenges that self-driving tech has to overcome.

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