Matthew Yglesias in Slow Boring:
The Obama administration saw a flurry of tech sector hype about self-driving cars. Not being a technical person, I had no ability to assess the hype on the merits, but companies were putting real money into it, and so I wrote pieces looking at the labor market, land use, and transportation policy implications. But the tech turned out to be way overhyped, progress was much slower than advertised, and then Elon Musk further poisoned the water by marketing some limited (albeit impressive) self-driving software as “Full Self-Driving.”
That whole experience seems to have left most people with the sense that self-driving cars are 10 years away and always will be.
I am still not a technical person, but at this point I am prepared to make a technical judgment: The current conventional wisdom is wrong and autonomous vehicle technology has become underhyped.
More here.