[mwattsun]

I want to be surprised, but after all the hype by FSD boosters, I'm prepared to be disappointed.

I'm skeptical because San Francisco is probably the worst city in North America to do this. I could believe this in San Jose with it's wide flat boulevards and I'm suspicious it's not San Jose first. San Francisco is unique in that the city planners decided to ignore that they had mountains in the middle of their city and laid a grid plan over the mountains. Most other cities lay roads that gently circle around and up a mountain. Not San Francisco. You go a straight line up and then straight down at an extreme angle.

The only way this can work is if they've cherry picked the safest streets and geofenced the cars to those routes. That's not what most people imagine about robo taxis. Not glorified light rail without the rails.

[redytedy]

I think your criticism in this thread is fully valid. But I wanted to say that even "glorified light rail" is an incredible accomplishment... The challenges are immense for getting failure rates as low as that would require. Behavior prediction, avoidance, pedestrian interaction, etc are all issues for any subset of streets.

[mwattsun]

I thought the same thing after I had time to think about the light rail comment. I certainly don't want to downplay the technical achievements. I am really excited about the progress. I think myself and others just want these companies to be honest with us, give it to us straight and tell us how we can help create the future, not blast out PR releases meant to suck in the less informed investor. I suppose if that's the only way to get the money to create this then I should learn to accept it.

Edit: two other concerns of mine 1) SF is a great place to kill a pedestrian with not completely proven driving technology, especially kids, because there are so many of them. And 2) These companies give very little consideration, if any, to the millions of people who drive for a living who might no longer have that means of supporting themselves.