FWIW, this is exactly how I see the roll-out of autonomous vehicles. It will happen in pieces with some of those coming quite fast, and others taking a decade or more.
ben-evans.com
It naturally follows that we will have vehicles that will reliably reach a given level of autonomous capability in some (‘easy’) places before they can do it everywhere. These will have huge safety and economic benefits, so we’ll deploy them - we won’t wait and do nothing at all until we have a perfect L5 car that can drive itself around anywhere from Kathmandu to South Boston. And so, if we call a car even L4, we have to say, well, where are we talking about? We might mean ‘most of this country’. But more probably, it will be L4 in one neighborhood, L3 in another and only L2 in a third - and a car might encounter all three of those on one journey. Put your route into the map and it will tell you if today is an L5 day or not.
Hence, for example, a number of companies are working on autonomy for long-haul trucks on the basis that a highway is a much simpler and more constrained environment than a city street, and highways are 80-90% of the mileage of a long-haul truck, so just solving the highway part is worth doing even if you need a human driver to take over at each end, like a pilot taking a big ship into a harbour. So, that truck is L4 or L5 on the highway, but L2 or L3 on city streets. |
