Toyota's Gill Pratt on Self-Driving Cars and the Reality of Full Autonomy
It&#x27;s refreshing to see an article like this among the many other articles predicting self-driving cars will be here in ~2 years. Volvo has committed to selling level 4 vehicles by the end of this year (in limited locations) - I&#x27;d love for them to follow through and see how good their technology really is. I suspect the transition will be far more gradual than most people are willing to admit, and take decades instead of years.  Keep in mind, serious research into self-driving cars started in the 80&#x27;s, and then there was a huge increase in interest in the 2000&#x27;s because of the DARPA challenges. After that Google took interest, and recently the major automakers have become serious about it as well. But it&#x27;s worth noting that originally Chris Urmson had predicted Google would be selling fully autonomous cars today, and instead Google lost a lot of their talent in the last year including Urmson and there is no public deadline for selling a product.<p>I think progress is great and self-driving cars are awesome, but I don&#x27;t believe they&#x27;re just around the corner.