I have not been following the development of self-driving car tech very closely, but I have some familiarity with the difficulty of the challenges involved and I have a feeling that we are at least two decades away from having fully autonomous tech authorized for use on public roads. Am I underestimating the progress of the tech? I have the impression that there is a tremendous amount of unjustified hype in this field.
It is both an over and underhyped field depending on the area you are looking at.
HUGE difference between consumer self driving car [Everywhere, at all times] and the Machines as a Service [Geo, time, weather-fenced operations][1].
Waymo appears to be at the head of the pack; Sacha Arnoud, Director of Engineering for Waymo gave a talk a few weeks ago at MIT[2] and gives a good idea. We are about 5 years out until these start rolling out as MaaS (machines as a service). Probably 10+ years for level 4 highway operations for consumer models according to Frazzoli.
You're not underestimating anything. Rather, the vast majority of developers (much less everyone else) have no familiarity at all with the challenges that self-driving tech has to overcome.
