&gt; Expecting humans to &quot;drive less idiotic&quot; is basically saying that google&#x27;s cars won&#x27;t work until human drivers are banned.<p>You should be skeptical of drawing conclusions based on a news article&#x27;s two-word excerpt of a presumably much longer comment. I seriously doubt Google <i>actually</i> thinks their cars will only be usable if human drivers massively change their behavior. It sounds more like an off-hand joke than a serious description of their product strategy.<p>&gt; I&#x27;ll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...<p>Ten years ago, the best autonomous vehicles in the world could barely make it through an empty desert test track. Five years ago, they could do a reasonable job of navigating urban areas that were closed off from normal traffic. Today they drive about 50 miles per day, <i>per car</i> on public roads with a safety driver. It&#x27;s likely not much longer before the safety drivers are considered unnecessary.<p>If you want to get a skewed, unreliable view of how this technology is developing, feel free to keep listening to &quot;armchair futurists&quot;. But if you actually look at what the engineers who are working on it say, and what they&#x27;ve actually achieved, it&#x27;s clear that steady progress is being made.