[echelon]

Self-driving is solved and is scaling up.

They're deploying Waymo in Atlanta now and they're already driving around sans-humans.

Atlanta is not a grid. Atlanta has crazy and dangerous road design. Random roads built in random places. Potholes, lots of hills, sharp angles, lack of shoulders, no margin or protection from 45mph oncoming traffic (90mph delta with ZERO margin or division), weird infrastructure, five and six and even seven way intersections, pedestrians, jaywalkers, motorcycle gangs that ride in the wrong lanes. You name it, Atlanta's got it.

Atlanta has lots of weather. Tremendous amounts of subtropical rain in the summer, fog, and other low visibility and dangerous conditions. Intermittent summer rain that pours so hard that it's a literal rain curtain white out. Seasonal tornadoes.

Self-driving is here now. It'll be everywhere by the end of the decade. I can't wait to buy my own Waymo-equipped vehicle.

[lm28469]

It was supposed to be everywhere by 2020 and even earlier lol, I'll believe it when I'll see it, until then it's wishful thinking or investors talk

[echelon]

> I'll believe it when I'll see it

That time when people had blocky cell phones. Then they were in everybody's pocket.

That's self-driving now.

It's here, just uneven. You can ride in one today. Soon, it'll be taking over for trucking, delivering everything you can think of on-demand, and revolutionizing how we think about transit and travel.

Instacart and Uber Eats and Amazon same-day are blocky cell phones. Soon we'll have instant logistics. A ten times faster Amazon. A world where almost everything can be delivered instantly and cheaply.

Trains and subways and metros are rigid and inflexible transit corridors. Soon we'll have last-mile transit pods for everyone that connect everything and everywhere and make suburbs highly desirable and sought after again.

Self-driving will be like the internet or smartphones all over again. And we're right at the precipice.

The financial gradients of all of this ensure that it'll happen and that it'll happen fast and all at once once we get past the inflection point.

But back to your point: you wouldn't call those blocky cell phone users non-cellphone users. The tech just wasn't evenly distributed. It got there in short time, because the tech was world-changing. So too shall it be with self-driving. The economic advantages are inevitable.

[kgwgk]

> You can ride in one today.

And you could do it in 2020. It seems unlikely that it will be “everywhere” in 2030 unless you give that word a quite restricted meaning.

[babyent]

It’s not worth replying to some people bro.

The issue around self driving is more laws and regulations than it is a matter of tech.

There’s a reason these companies spend so much time effort and money on legal hurdles.