Curious Canid

It is mostly semantics. I answered the way I did primarily because I was responding to “There are already self-driving cars, aren’t there?”. That seemed to be asking about functionality, not naming conventions.

I understand your point, but I disagree. There are currently no cars that are considered fully self-driving as defined by the people who created them. Except for the ones that are really just remotely driven, they all come with warnings that a human the driver must be at the controls and paying attention.

Current self-driving cars are like a printer that works most of the time, but requires a human to read everything it produces and to occasionally write in a few things that it missed or got wrong.

No, there really aren’t yet. Driverless taxis and delivery vehicles are all “monitored” remotely by people who effectively drive them when they get into situations the automation can’t handle. Individual self-driving cars all come with a lot of warnings (which many drivers ignore) that they require an active and aware driver for similar reasons.

And Tesla, who have been lying about their self-driving capabilities from day one, continue to run people down and smash into other vehicles on a regular basis.

The systems are good enough to handle 99% of the driving situations they encounter. That remaining 1% is still a long way from being solved. And “pretty good” is not acceptable when failures kill people.

GPS was life-changing. (Yes, I am that old.) It used to be necessary to find printed maps of wherever you were going, which wasn’t always easy. Then you had to figure out a route. The hardest part was often the last bit of the trip, since you weren’t likely to have a detailed map of your destination city. An if you got lost, figuring out where you were was sometimes quite difficult.

People tend to think of it as mostly affecting longer trips, but finding new addresses in a city was at least as much of an issue. When I lived in the bay area I had a Thomas guide that was 3/4" of an inch thick, just for finding my way around town.