L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good enough.
By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year.
Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.
Is remote assistance good enough though? It probably works fine when you have a fleet of 100 cars on the road, but 10,00? 1,000,000?
How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.
When manufacturers (after taxi companies) start competing for this, the manufacturer that can have 1 remote driver per 100 vehicles will beat the one that needs 1 remote driver per 10 vehicles. A manufacturer might require massive halls with thousands of workers to pilot their fleet of cars, but so long as customers pay the bills, that's no problem. And customers will need to pay the bill through subscriptions on FSD packges.
By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year.
Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.