> I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?
What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4.
The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was and is around the notion that the vast majority of us would be sat in self-driving cars by now. That was always wildly optimistic. We're making progress and that's great! But there were a lot of breathless predictions years back that have not come to fruition.
This market is manned and a serious challenge. The trial is Arizona is in an extremely quiet, predictable suburb as well as being small scale; unmanned but not as serious a challenge.
Each of these is different but neither's existence by itself proves unmanned in challenging locations is right around the corner. It's kind of an exercise in Baysian statistic, how much more likely this makes one think unmanned taxis in serious location is depends on what one thinks the initial probability is.
SF seems like a pretty serious location to me. Granted, its still manned, but it makes sense that they'd start out manned in any new environment out of an abundance of caution. It seems likely that we could see a switch to unmanned in SF in the next 1-2 years if things go well. I have to think at least Waymo believes this is likely, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this.
Surely this is just moving the goal posts. If they can launch in Chandler and in San Francisco then a huge amount of the contiguous United States is on the table.
Nope, not even close. There's a very specific reason they've picked Chandler, and it's that there's relatively little weather and the roads are fairly simple (among many other things specific to Chandler).
The vast majority of the contiguous United States is decidedly not "on the table" as of now.
"The contiguous United States" is still a decade (or more) away. It may literally never happen.
It generally doesn’t snow in SF or Chandler. I personally like snow, so I wouldn’t describe that weather as significantly worse. But my understanding is snow makes it hard for lane keeping, and then there’s all sorts of edge cases like streets that aren’t plowed and require special driving techniques, people placing cones to reserve parking spaces, etc.
I feel like San Francisco is a good progression - still generally good weather, but much more crowded, more traffic, more special cases, pedestrians and bikes, one-way roads, topography, limited visibility due to hills and no-setback buildings, construction, buses, etc. It's a significant leap in urban complexity, probably greater than 98% of the rest of the USA.
Regarding the weather, lots of people have mentioned snow, but much of the Midwest, Northeast, and especially the South can have sudden torrential rain. I haven't researched it but I would guess that a Florida rainstorm would be hard for both radar and visual guidance. I predict their next city will be Orlando, in partnership with Disney. Then somewhere like Boston (harder - older street pattern and more snow) or Philadelphia (easier). Each of those 3 would "unlock" new territory they can cover. I predict that NYC will be one of the last areas "unlocked".
I completely agree. I was pretty critical of them when they were just a tiny slice of Arizona, but going from n to n+1 is really major progress.
The fact that the +1 is a city as complex as SF is a really good sign as well. If they can handle SF, they can handle Charlotte, Atlanta, LA, and many other major metros just as "easily".
That's the point of this comment chain. They don't have to make it work everywhere in the contiguous United States to have a useful product. The (robo)taxi market is concentrated in big metro areas and that's what their focus is.
The thing is, with apps providing start and end point, they don't even need to be able to handle a full city to get a benefit. They can geofence really aggressively, and the moment they can ditch the safety drivers from a sufficient subset of journeys based on routes requested, they have an advantage.
Exactly. They can outright ignore really hard markets,. and be present in markets that have a decent percentage of routes they can handle and fall back to dispatching regular cars on routes their full automation can't handle.
What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4.
The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was and is around the notion that the vast majority of us would be sat in self-driving cars by now. That was always wildly optimistic. We're making progress and that's great! But there were a lot of breathless predictions years back that have not come to fruition.