I’ve been doing a lot of considering about the concept of fully autonomous cars, mostly spurred on by how close I think my car is to being able to drive itself, or at least feels like it could. Recently I got a new car and it was a 22 model year upgrade, basically taking me from a cassette tape deck and no cruise control to an infotainment display integrating with phone apps and driver assistance (ACC, backup sensors, lane assist, blind spot indicator, while still the base model). I got a manual for funsies but once it’s in gear and CC set, I can literally steer it with one finger and don’t even need to monitor the relative speed to the vehicle in front of me. So coming to that, it just feels like it is almost touchable to have autonomous or self-driving-while-monitored cars become the minimum standard basically right now.

However, that clearly isn’t the reality, with even Teslas having an order of magnitude more sensors than mine, and then the huge gap between cameras and radar to LiDAR. To me it feels like there is probably a part to bridging between driver assisting systems to autonomous systems would have to be an infrastructure solution, but I really don’t know much of anything about that.