Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement?
And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets.
The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.
Nobody is saying that it’s impossible but rather that it’s much harder that the people fundraising claim, and that companies shouldn’t be allowed to cut corners doing their alpha testing on public roads with little oversight and no compensation for the negative externalities they impose on the actual residents of the cities they’re being tested in.
And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets.
The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!