Th3 Core

Louise wants a Level 5 EV with 250 range.  I figure Tesla or -maybe- Kia will be there in 2 years.

2023... 2025...  Picky, picky.

I think the rural and open-country highways & interstates will allow Level 5-ish travel fairly soon, 2025 at the outside.

>the manuals on modern cars are as thick as Chilton's Manuals and take up all the space.

Nope.  They don't give manuals anymore.  They tell you to go online.  It is maddeningly frustrating.

I'm going back and buying an extended maintenance protection on the Subaru luxury barge Ascent I bought last Fall.  I'm not worried about the mechanicals, it's the electronics 4-6 years from now.

Not cold fusion. That's probably entirely bogus, though the debate has re-ignited. Agreed. That is nothing like Level 5 autonomous driving.

I'm talking about utility-scale hot fusion, which is seeing a renaissance, some significant advances and once again promises that we are less than 15 years from utility-scale implementation.

Setting aside bad analogies, you're right in the sense that I am applying linear (even worse asymptotic) thinking to an emerging tech that may eventually hit an exponential inflection point. If this is the year we hit an exponential inflection point, it will be the year I'm  completely blindsided.

Anyway, I'm basing my skepticism on things I hear from my nephew, who is steeped in Silicon Valley car culture and runs his hacked together assisted driving open source system, and on a recent Austin Russell interview. I found a transcript here:

https://www.theverge.com/22298001/luminar-austin-russel-ceo-interview-self-driving-cars

People try to say, “Oh yeah, we’ll solve it. It’s easy. We’ll figure it out in 2022 or ‘23, whatever it is.” No, this stuff is really hard and no one has ever actually solved it at this point to date for the kind of application domain that you’re looking at.... It is improving, it’s getting better, but the software is not going to be there for a while, for more of these urban environments and constraints, regardless of what anyone might say, if you want to try to have a car go from point A to point B in these environments. It’s going to take time even with our sensors, it’s going to take a lot of time. But the point is how do you get this out there sooner than later? That’s where you’ll go for the more constrained environments.

But the thing is that it gets to a point of where you approach like 99 percent accuracy on it... But even if you get there, it’s still not even remotely close to being good enough. You need like 10 nines worth of reliability in there. And it gets exponentially harder with each nine.

I would say, in theory you could probably buy a car without a steering wheel, that’d take you from point A to point B in a more limited geographic capacity, by between 2025 and 2030. But the question is, would you really want that, would you buy a car that can only take you to certain limited destinations, and it’s safe?

Ha ha! Yeah, I'm not a fan of driving either. I truly hope you guys are right and my pessimism is unwarranted. I so want to let my robot drive me around.

I used to be fine with tons of driving and I've had several driving jobs (I guess technically, I still do when I drive the little snowplow for the county). But after a massive amount of driving in 2003, my legs just hurt and after 4 hours in car.

The day Starfleet announces the home version of the transporter is the last time I will ever get in a car.