Let's see now: CMU, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, USC, LAAS, USyd, Oxford, Caltech, just to name a few. All of these universities have already dropped at least that much building technology for the DARPA Grand Challenges or related research demonstrations.
Right. But I want my car to drive me to work and back while I sleep or read. But to get there I think first business must commercialize it through their simple desire to increase profits, then it may become cheap and accessible enough for average Joes like me.
When you require two people with a driver's license in the car at all times you kill any profitable commercial reason to use self-driving cars. And that to me is a huge mistake.
Commuting to work (if you drive > 2 0minutes at highway speeds) is probably the most dangerous thing by far that all of us do on any given day.
Distracted drivers, drunk drivers, sleepy drivers (like me!) this is why we need self-driving cars.
But I think the path to mass use of self-driving cars goes through commercial use of self-driving cars.
But the requirement that two drivers need to be in the car will restrict it to no one who wants to invest in it to be more profitable.
Right now this is simply for experimentation and I wonder who'd drop one million dollars just to experiment?