Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velocity to create up to the minute traffic overlays. They'll be able to approach politicians and police forces with a message like "hey, want to get serious about safety? These are the top one hundred drivers in your area who need to be taken off the road now— click through to our portal to find dozens and dozens of videos of each one speeding, weaving, failing to yield, running stop signs, etc."

Each individual incident may be hard to prosecute, but when you have all of them in a bundle, a few a week for months at a time, it'll become impossible not to act on it. When crashes happen, they'll be able to shame the jurisdiction after the fact by publishing dumps of the incidents leading up to it that were not acted on.

The highway goes from N lanes to N5 (or more!) lanes and then back into N lanes, usually with the lane markings being completely absent in the process. You have to pick a lane to get into, with your choice being potentially impacted by such things as "are you a truck?", "exact change only", or "I have an EZ-Pass", not to mention the potential for some lanes to be outright closed. The signage is likely to be somewhat unique and potentially counterintuitive to normal meanings--the lane under the big yellow light is the kind of lane I usually want to take, especially since it's usually higher speed than the lane under the big green light. Drivers are going to be more erratic than usual ("oops, I don't have EZ-pass" SWERVE*). And they usually occur smack-dab in the middle of limited-access highways where people might want to use self-driving cars.

The thing is, that car was far enough away that both cars could have easily turned in front with room to spare. My wife had seen it before starting her turn, and realized there was plenty of time. In fact, after a few seconds, the driver in front of my wife realized just how much time they had, and finally made the turn, still before this other car arrived. Because my wife is an attentive driver this wasn't a problem, but you could certainly see a driver in her position starting to make the turn while looking to the left, and rear-ending the car that suddenly stops for no apparent reason. Of course they would be at fault for doing so, but the first driver's excess of caution, if you want to call it that, would also be a contributing factor.

Why would they need to force Level 5? They can operate with the promise of L5 in the future, until the moment the statistics show it’s safe to turn it on.

Between now and then they can provide a steadily increasing supply of value to their customers. And steadily ramp the data they have to improve the system.

I have no idea if it will be 2 years or 10 years or 100 years before they can turn on Level 5 without a geofence.... but what difference does that number make? It’s academic. It’s not an existential question for either company’s self driving value prop.

And consider that different jurisdictions will set different dates. All it takes is one government to OK L5 in some area, and Tesla’s ass is covered. And every jurisdiction that signs on will put more pressure on other jurisdictions to follow suit.

To me, that’s the brilliance of Tesla’s strategy. They have decoupled their forcing functions from the L4/L5 legislative question. Governments can drag their feet as long as they want but it won’t hurt Tesla’s ability to sell the tech or collect the data they need to improve the tech. They are already selling autonomy features, and they can make that value prop incrementally better year over year for as long as it takes.

having a mix traffic (humans&automated cars) is a recipe for a disaster.