“It’s a scam,” says George Hotz, whose company Comma.ai Inc. makes a driver-assistance system similar to Tesla Inc.’s Autopilot. “These companies have squandered tens of billions of dollars.” In 2018 analysts put the market value of Waymo LLC, then a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., at $175 billion. Its most recent funding round gave the company an estimated valuation of $30 billion, roughly the same as Cruise. Aurora Innovation Inc., a startup co-founded by Chris Urmson, Google’s former autonomous-vehicle chief, has lost more than 85% since last year and is now worth less than $3 billion. This September a leaked memo from Urmson summed up Aurora’s cash-flow struggles and suggested it might have to sell out to a larger company. Many of the industry’s most promising efforts have met the same fate in recent years, including Drive.ai, Voyage, Zoox, and Uber’s self-driving division. “Long term, I think we will have autonomous vehicles that you and I can buy,” says Mike Ramsey, an analyst at market researcher Gartner Inc. “But we’re going to be old.”You had executives who desperately wanted the product, tech guys who were either true believers or saw that, "uh, sure, boss, just need a bit more money," and journalists who typed up every absurd announcement without any skepticism.
I go back sometimes and read stuff from 2016 and 2017 and it's just amazing how absurd it all was. It did occur to me that people would read something like, "proponents claims self-driving cars will soon need no human intervention 98% of the time," or something similar, and misunderstand. That doesn't mean "98% of trips." It means "98% of the time."
Those were made up numbers, of course, but conceptually it's a very different point. If 2% of the time your "driver" acts like a 15-year-old on his first day out with a learner's permit, that's going to be a very bad driver and make for very unpleasant trips! And I don't mean unsafe, I mean confused and not very efficient.
They sorta work and the technology is neato, but sorta isn't good enough. Sorta isn't superior to a human driver.