[gwbas1c]

I think you've missed my point: San Francisco is a poor choice for the earliest market of Cruise.

This argument comes from my interpretation of two books: "Crossing the Chasm" and "The Innovator's Dilemma."

Cruise can choose any market they want: any city, any municipality, any closed road network like a resort. I keep arguing that San Francisco is the wrong choice right now.

Choosing an early market is an important step in developing a technology business. It doesn't matter how wonderful your technology is, your company needs to succeed in its first market in order to move to another market and then to larger markets. Furthermore, your customers must be willing to put up with the bugs and shortcomings of your product compared to existing technology.

If a company overestimates the maturity of their product, they can lose the goodwill of the future customers who don't want to put up with bugs or other shortcomings.

I think the big problem that Cruise is facing is that they will be regulated out of existence before they fully debug their product. (For the sake of argument,) if they had used resorts as their first customer, They wouldn't have to worry about being regulated out of existence because they would only have to deal with a government; and they would have had a much easier situation to debug the product.

[grecy]

> I think you've missed my point: San Francisco is a poor choice for the earliest market of Cruise.

There are plenty of regulators and people who's entire job is to figure out if it makes sense in their city or not. Those people are in charge of making that decision for San Francisco, not you.

[gwbas1c]

From yesterday:

DMV tells Cruise to reduce its driverless vehicle fleet in SF by 50%: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/firetruck-siren-lights-o...

Proves my point that San Francisco is a horrible place to test market driverless cars.

> In a statement released Friday night, the DMV said it is investigating “recent concerning incidents” involving Cruise's vehicles in San Francisco. In addition to halving the number of vehicles in the city, the DMV called for Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors, to have no more than 50 vehicles operating during the day and 150 vehicles driving at night until the agency's investigation is complete.

> As SFGATE previously reported at the time of the Aug. 7 meeting, which featured a slide deck on autonomous vehicle performance in the city, “In 2023, the department logged about 50 incidents involving AVs that nearly crashed into personnel, obstructed travel or blocked stations, per the presentation — and five more reports were written up over the weekend.”

> Nicholson provided a statement in response to Chiu’s move, sent to SFGATE on Thursday by the city attorney’s office. “We do not believe the industry has any incentive to remain at the table and solve their problems,” she said. “These incidents with Public Safety are not going away and are in fact increasing.”

[gwbas1c]

I think you have a very poor comprehension of the issue; and the ability to discuss opinion in an online forum.

As a city, San Francisco has a lot of citizen initiated ballot questions. (When I lived in the city they had an initiative to rename the sewage treatment plant after George W. Bush.)

I wouldn't be surprised if an upcoming ballot has an initiative to ban self-driving cars.