> they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever.
As Sinclair said, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something on which his salary depends on him not understanding."
The road to self driving cars is a capital intensive and entrenched in regulatory quagmire. Those two things are enough to keep VCs away.
But if you think about it, every trip that someone takes in a self-driving vehicle is a trip that they didn't take their own car or a taxi. Most trips are not complex, and most problems are with other human drivers. As the market grows the difficulty of the problem domain will shrink. If you can reach critical mass, infrastructure can be adjusted to specialize for self-driving cars.
That said, the illusion of self driving cars is that you can provide mass transit at affordable prices using existing infrastructure and specialized hubs/depots/fuel/roads for the vehicles. But we already have that, they're called busses. But busses are for poor people, so we don't invest in them.
As Sinclair said, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something on which his salary depends on him not understanding."
The road to self driving cars is a capital intensive and entrenched in regulatory quagmire. Those two things are enough to keep VCs away.
But if you think about it, every trip that someone takes in a self-driving vehicle is a trip that they didn't take their own car or a taxi. Most trips are not complex, and most problems are with other human drivers. As the market grows the difficulty of the problem domain will shrink. If you can reach critical mass, infrastructure can be adjusted to specialize for self-driving cars.
That said, the illusion of self driving cars is that you can provide mass transit at affordable prices using existing infrastructure and specialized hubs/depots/fuel/roads for the vehicles. But we already have that, they're called busses. But busses are for poor people, so we don't invest in them.