[maxyme]

Living in Phoenix for several years and working in Chandler (the headquarters for the self driving car division where my office was actually on the initial training route before they allowed passengers) I can say the cars suffer from being overly conservative. I don't think this is a bad thing for self driving cars, in contrast Ubers cars (before they were banned from the state for disabling collision detection and killing someone) drove aggressively. Ubers cars needed to be taken over to stop from hitting pedestrians crossing at intersections and continually drove at least 5mph above the speed limit.

In Phoenix everyone drives fast on the highway, but Waymo cars drive 5-10mph under the speed limit. There are some unprotected left turns across 4 lanes they may try but being conservative they crawl across and eventually get stuck in the middle. This is probably a good thing for now and as confidence with the engineering team on the hardware and software goes up it can likely be tuned.