Who will win the self-driving race? Here are eight possibilities

My first thought was that a decade from now there will be a very limited number of self driving cars on the road, still. Mostly because people (not all people, but most people) will be very scared of the technology, no matter how good it is. Every time there's an accident it'll make news. Any deaths will make the news. It will not matter if statistically self-driving vehicles are safer.

I do wonder, can it ever be as good as or better than a person? Won't they always hesitate more, be slower than, and take more time than a real person driving? If it costs a little less to take a self-driving taxi than a person-driving taxi, why would anyone bother? What's the motivation for people to go with a self-driven thing over a person driven thing? Will there really be a big price difference?

Tesla is the only serious contender so far. They're the only company with real life cars on real life roads all over the world. It's not just the technology, it's deployment of the technology at scale. It's a platform.

Comma.ai is good too and I think it'll be a great option for adding AI-like capabilities to future and past "dumb" cars.

I see right around 0% chance for Cruze and others. They'll never figure it out. Chinese companies might though.

I think we'll see Tesla, some emerging Chinese automaker contenders, lots of current brands with smart features, and technology like Comma.ai. The future isn't just "does a car have AI?", it's the combination of the hardware of the car, battery management, routing, and platform.

Still curious about what Apple intends to do here.

Self-driving is not a solvable or a winnable problem, because the problem or question isn’t defined. It’s a probabilistic space, where the world presents scenarios, and a computer must make a “correct” or “good” decision as often as possible, for the widest range of inputs.

Because there isn’t a grand unified formula for self-driving, I’m not even sure how we can talk about it being “solved”. Maybe Tesla might be able to self-drive on US or EU or first world clearly marked streets with 99.99% automation, assuming training data exists for all road signs and weather conditions? Is that what we mean by self-driving being solved? That might be possible in the next few years.

Other than that, doesn’t seem like there’s going to be much more than driver assist. Driving is a general intelligence problem, not something machine learning can solve - by definition ML can only work on problems it has many known solutions to.

The whole name "self-driving" is invented to pull the wool on public's eyes, and is a misnomer.

It's fundamentally clear to anybody moderately technically literate that what "self-driving" companies can't be called "driving," yet there are way more studied, and credited people than us here working in these companies who know that, and stay silent.

Tesla can't even get their cars to drive in an empty tunnel