| Translation: "limited city use in [selected] cities" seems to mean: - no driving on freeway with passengers (that alone is a huge limitation. You couldn't get to most major airports (in any sensible time) under that limitation. Add in trucks, rush-hour, ripple congestion, lane-splitting motorcyclists.) But presumably also, Waymo and Cruise don't want to pick an all-out war with human drivers working for Uber. Not yet. - if a driverless car gets confused or can't handle a situation on a city street, it can slow and stop completely and block traffic (and wait for emergency responders to intervene, or wait minutes/hours for remote human driver to override), which is "merely" an annoyance to locals. Whereas doing that on a freeway could injure or kill large numbers of people. - "selected cities" seems to currently only be southwestern and southern US (SF, PHX, LA, AUS), warm and mostly clear skies, nothing regularly getting near a bad freeze or with bad rain/ snow/ slush/ storms/ gusts/ visibility/ unpredictable ice and skidding [0]. - only cities with well-maintained signage, roads, road markings which can be imaged reliably etc. This is an implicit limit on the locality's income and tax base. - the recent Cruise secondary incident (near-fatality from a hit-and-run caused by a human-driven car) in SF and other incidents with pedestrians, cyclists and human drivers. "Just fix a few minor issues around the edges" will have a different meaning if you're a pedestrian, cyclist or transit user near a high-traffic street. This could easily become a political issue in some localities. Or maybe driverless will only be allowed in bus lanes or certain lanes of certain streets, or at certain times of day, or not near school pickup/dropoff, or through residential areas (like in 2011 when there were deaths of pedestrians in East Palo Alto residential areas due to drivers rat-running, exacerbated by the rush-hour to Facebook and on 101[1]). [0]: https://waymo.com/faq/ [1]: https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2011/09/28/girl-7-killed-in-... |
City-bound autonomous vehicles are still far away for the reasons you point out, but autonomous long-haul trucking is back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point.