Self-driving has been long proven to be a workable idea. Yes, there's the other 90% of the work making it work reliably and safely enough in diverse environments, but we know this can be done, it's just a matter of throwing money at it.
And it's not like there isn't a possible alternative either - we could be adapting roads to be much easier on self-driving cars. It's just that cooperation and coordination between humans is a way harder problem than self-driving, so it's easier to have a bunch of vendors solve the problems in tech the hard way, rather than to rely on the world to maintain roads properly.
My belief is that, if full self-driving isn't becoming widely available in first world countries in 5 years, it's not going to be because of engineering problems, but rather because of legal and process issue around deploying it.
I don't think we know it can be done - has anyone demonstrated a self-driving car that works in all conditions, but is prohibitively expensive in its current form? If they had, you could extrapolate and say 'it's coming as soon as the tech gets cheaper'.
You can't adapt roads to fog or snow (unless you're going to enclose them in a tunnel). You can't adapt roads to pedestrians or bicycles (unless you prevent them from going near the road). Whatever adaptions you could make would be prohibitively expensive to roll out to all roads everywhere. In both the country I live in, and the USA, the government can barely afford to maintain the existing highway infrastructure.
Of course it will get better, and self-driving will be more widely deployed, but I don't think you'll ever get 100% percent coverage (assuming that's what we both agree is the goal).
I think in a way you're agreeing with my point - the last bit is just too hard, whether it's engineering, legal or political.
And it's not like there isn't a possible alternative either - we could be adapting roads to be much easier on self-driving cars. It's just that cooperation and coordination between humans is a way harder problem than self-driving, so it's easier to have a bunch of vendors solve the problems in tech the hard way, rather than to rely on the world to maintain roads properly.
My belief is that, if full self-driving isn't becoming widely available in first world countries in 5 years, it's not going to be because of engineering problems, but rather because of legal and process issue around deploying it.