Cruise's 3rd generation self-driving car

I guess the hedge-word there is "demonstrated". I'm not sure if Waymo et al have ever demonstrated their most advanced software to the public.

While I'm almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up.

Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation:

You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because there's an obstacle.

Simultaneously, a driver looking at their phone and not paying attention comes careening down the road. They're clearly going to rear-end you, hard. You COULD just pull forward and out of the way.....but the car won't, because of the lawn gnome. It can't know the lawn gnome doesn't matter in comparison to the damage your car is about to suffer.

Imagine this flip scenario:

You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids, a toddler, is in your way. The car won't go forward because there's an obstacle. Otherwise, same situation as above. Now, you ABSOLUTELY do NOT want to pull forward, because you'd rather get rear-ended than run over your child.

Even if you want to nitpick this exact scenario, surely you can think of a hundred similar contexts yourself, where driving involves understanding the value of different pieces of the car's immediate environment. A car cannot know the value of a child versus a lawn gnome, nor can it reliably detect the difference.

Even if such a situation only arises once in a thousand days of driving, with hundreds of millions of people on the road everyday, that's thousands of times per day. That's really bad.

Is it statistically better than the amount of harm done by human drivers? Possibly. But we all still get in cars believing we'll be better than other drivers. Who's going to get in a car when any given car has an equivalent chance of making a bad decision all on its own? It's just like getting in a car with a drunk driver.

Who's going to sign up for that? Not me, that's for sure.

That sensor assembly on the roof is ridiculous. What if I want to strap down anything to the roof, like a kayak, bike, luggage, or maybe a mattress? Good grief.

Regardless of whether it's true or not, the title is a great example of the "no true Scotsman". [0]

A: We built the first real self-driving car.

B: What about the Waymo car?

A: That's not a _real_ self-driving car.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman