[minwcnt5]

Calling San Francisco a "town" diminishes what they've achieved. It is the second densest urban center and ride hailing market in the US, and a difficult place for humans to drive. I think being able to effectively replace Uber drivers there means that once they crack freeway driving and snow, the regulatory, economic, policy, and social hurdles will start to fall like dominos.

I don't think this is how most people expected this to go. My personal belief was that self-driving cars would be limited to medium-density suburban areas initially (i.e. places where the driving is relatively simple, but there's still enough demand for it to be economically viable). It's astonishing that they were able to move from suburban trials to high density environments so quickly.

[dmix]

Everyone obsesses on the technical side which was necessary but scaling it up country wide as a functioning profitable business entity, even just urban/suburban, requires far more than just heavily subsidized R&D work and experiments as a minor taxi player in a few places.

I have doubts the very slow pace of expansion was just a matter of regulations and nailing down the tech. It has to make sense as a business otherwise they aren’t going to dump billions into sensor factories (where each LIDAR suite currently costs around $75k to make), cars, and service infrastructure.

Just like how Tesla wasn’t just a of matter of making the first prototypes of electric sports cars. The real magic and barrier to entry was the factories and infrastructure to make the economics work.