Uh it literally isn't here. It'll be here when you can let a tesla off it's leash in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man and it consistently out-perform a human driver, including in novel situations. What's being tested is the minimum viable approximation that legislators are willing to tolerate on our roadways.
Tesla is not the front-runner; it hardly even classifys as in the race.
Waymo and Cruise are currently testing systems with no driver that do at least a passable job in most standard city driving conditions for (self-reported) hundreds to thousands of hours between traffic incidents. Humans average a few 10K-100K hours between traffic incidents so it is at least within the general ballpark. It remains to be seen whether they can improve adequately and robustly to be better than human drivers.
It is literally here in the sense that there are cars with no drivers that can operate for on the order of years (self-reported) without a critical failure that are currently in testing. It is not here yet in that human drivers are amazing and we do not know if AVs are better than human drivers as there is insufficient, unbiased evidence and the more extensive testing with safety drivers indicate they are still a factor of 10x to 100x away.
Excuse you? How is demanding self-driving cars demonstrably improve on the performance of their human counterparts shifting goalposts? What, we're all supposed to just sit with our hands in our lap and accept sharing the road with a mediocre implementation of what humans can already do?
> in every form of adverse driving conditions known to man
I don't need, for example, a self driving car to be able to handle snow particularly well, because it does not snow where I live. I don't need it to be able to drive well off-road because there are roads everywhere I go. I don't need it to be able to tow a trailer or a caravan, or drive a heavy vehicle. Self driving technology does not need to surpass humans in every single driving condition in order to be useful to a large number of people.
And if self driving cards are cordoned off to special areas, they are just another extension of buses, subways, trains, but with less manual operation needed. The criteria that self driving vehicles perform very well everywhere is extreme when we already have so many modes of transportation designed for specific contexts.
Then call them and market them as something other than "car". Because if you call it a car and market it as such folks will treat it like one, which means exposure to every type of road and weather condition known to man with potentially lethal consequences if the software can't keep up.
