"The company promises the tech will be on the road early next year. Autonomous driving technology has proven to be a lot more difficult to bring to market than any of the major automakers seemed to have planned for."
I honestly don't understand how this has proved to be "a lot more difficult to bring to market than any of the major automakers..." I'm not an expert, by any measure, but this seemed to be a nearly impossible thing to bring to market anytime soon. The technology seems impossibly hard, sure, but more importantly this is something that is new and looks super scary to most people. Every single time one of these things fail it's going to make headlines, and that's going to make it even scarier. I just can't believe Honda (or anyone else) got this right so fast. Even if they're like 95% of the way to having it perfect (or whatever the measure might be), that last 5% seems like it's going to be REALLY hard to get right without some serious trouble and some bad PR.
I too am skeptical (but happy to be proven wrong) about Honda's L3 claims. I think the "automaker optimism" is really just referring to Tesla loudly claiming they "will hit L5 this year" every year since 2015 while continuing to struggle. I don't see other automakers making such aggressive promises, thankfully.
I am hopeful coming from Honda that they have solved some of the critical issues. I was really impressed with their rider assist [1] for their new motorcycles and the ability to balance a bike. Perhaps that is a small feat compared to what level 3 will require but I am confident Honda will pull it off. This opinion is also based off the fact that I have a couple 37 year old Honda motorcycles that still to this day run strong and hard. I am just optimistic they can do what they say.
Well one issue is that too much of this development has been one sided. What needs to be done is force standardization of road markings and signaling and correct it where it is not compliant. So these systems have had to accept the fact that ideal conditions never exist.
The easiest opportunity in the US would have been to dress up the HOV and Express lanes and use them. They have controlled access and are specifically marked already to distinguish them from other lanes. however too many seem bent on doing it all at once for everywhere.
The first three tiers are not difficult. This claim by Honda doesn't not provide any more details other than they got a certification. We do not know if anyone else even applied for it or exactly what it entails.
Why is that? Afaik at least according to European and Japanese [1] laws, L3 is the first level where the larger liability of the OEM comes into play. That is because the driver can remove his hands from the wheel and therefore will need significantly more time to prevent an accident.
>The easiest opportunity in the US would have been to dress up the HOV and Express lanes and use them.
These are in very limited areas. An autonomous vehicle that can only drive in these lanes will be autonomous a small portion of the time.
>What needs to be done is force standardization of road markings and signaling and correct it where it is not compliant.
Maybe it's different where you are but road marking and maintenance, especially as you get into secondary roads, can be rather haphazard. This is not going to change markedly so that people can use autonomous vehicles.
I would guess you likely are more of an expert on computer technology than auto executives are. They probably saw demos of the 95% case, and have no real way to think about how much work that last 5% is, because no car companies other than Tesla treat computers/software as a core competency.
I honestly don't understand how this has proved to be "a lot more difficult to bring to market than any of the major automakers..." I'm not an expert, by any measure, but this seemed to be a nearly impossible thing to bring to market anytime soon. The technology seems impossibly hard, sure, but more importantly this is something that is new and looks super scary to most people. Every single time one of these things fail it's going to make headlines, and that's going to make it even scarier. I just can't believe Honda (or anyone else) got this right so fast. Even if they're like 95% of the way to having it perfect (or whatever the measure might be), that last 5% seems like it's going to be REALLY hard to get right without some serious trouble and some bad PR.