Ford CEO Jim Hackett scaled back hopes about the company's plans for self-driving cars this week, admitting that the first vehicles will have limits. "We overestimated the arrival of autonomous vehicles," said Hackett, who once headed the company's autonomous vehicle division, at a Detroit Economic Club event on Tuesday. While Ford still plans on launching its self-driving car fleet in 2021, Hackett added that "its applications will be narrow, what we call geo-fenced, because the problem is so complex."
Gonna work on 4 square blocks in Shelbyville.
Hopefully the hype fades and I can find a new obsession and stop boring everybody. But, look, here's the basic thing:
If self-driving cars of the fantasy variety were going to work in the near future, or even be close to working, there would be a prototype by now. Not a consumer friendly device. Not a ready to scale for production device at noninsane costs. But a machine with 8 billion sensors and 4 tons of computers and whatever else was "necessary" to make it work. We'd have the coast to coast drive that Musk promised 3 years ago even if it took a $100 million decked out car to do it. And they can't do it, my friends.