Human interventions are some non zero number in current self driving cars and will likely be that way for a while. Does this mean self driving is a scam and in fact it is just a human driving, and that these are actually ADAS. Maybe in some pedantic sense, you are right but then your definition is not useful, since it lumps cruise control/ lane-keeping ADAS and Waymo’s in the same category. Waymo is genuinely, qualitatively a big improvement above any ADAS/ self driving system that we have seen. I suspect Rodney did not predict even Waymo’s to be possible, but gave himself enough leeway so that he can pedantically argue that Waymo’s are just ADAS and that his prediction was right.
This is not about crashes. By all accounts, the Waymo cars are mostly fully self driving, I beleive even the article author agrees with that. This includes crash avoidance, to the extent that they can.
The remote operation seems to be more about navigational issues and reading the road conditions. Things like accidentally looping, or not knowing how to proceed with an unexpected obstacle. Things that don't really happen to human drivers, even the greenest of new drivers.
Ok, but crashes are much worse than navigational issues or accidentally looping. It’s only status quo bias that makes us think driving is more solved if you get the accidental looping fixed before the crashing.
Only true up to some extent. If a car can't get you anywhere, then crashing is almost irrelevant: you won't use it, because there's nothing to be gained from that. A car looping around in a parking lot is extremely safe, but completely useless.
Some of them are scams, yes. For stuff like Waymo, it definitely doesn’t match the hype at the time he made the original predictions. As pointed out above, there were people in 2016 claiming we’d be buying cars without steering wheels that could go between any two points connected by roads by now.
