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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

Google Car as in Waymo? Isn't that still growing and getting expanded? Obviously self driving is harder than everyone thought, but its not abandoned by any means.

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I still don't understand why everybody thought self-driving was so easy. It was clearly always going to be decades, not years for them to be ready for the mass market but so many people were acting like normal cars were already obsolete.

Not to mention that 10s of thousands of people die from automobile accidents every year, so even if it was dead-simple it would still require a lot of scrutiny and a conservative approach to making it mainstream. And it's nowhere near dead-simple.

As far as I understand it, "everybody" was manipulated into thinking it is around the corner by media babbling about the new exciting developments from high profile companies like Google. It rememeber that time quite vividly. It was around 2014, when my not-so-tech-informed friends started to tell me that in a few years, I will be able to own a self-driving car, me being blind and all that. I was telling everyone that they have been over-stimulated by media, and they mostly didn't want to believe me, because, you know, it is so much easier to believe the latest hype...

And now, roughly 10 years later, there is no real self-driving car in sight, which is a good thing IMO.

To me, it looked like Google and other SV companies were using the media to hype up the self-driving car thing to get VC money for these projects, which are obviously long term, that is where we agree....

I think Google actually got it right for how hard it is. They've pumped billions of dollars into it and their vision was always long term, and they decided to completely skipping the dangerous L2-3 "immediate driver attention may be required at any time" phases. Compare to other self driving tech which is promoted way too early, and only L2-3.

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