Waymo is and will always be vaporware.
The "future" of automonous travel is going to be large geofenced shuttles with no other cars on the road (think large college campuses, corporate campuses, amusement parks, etc.)
The "future" of automonous travel is going to be large geofenced shuttles with no other cars on the road (think large college campuses, corporate campuses, amusement parks, etc.)
Even high speed rail is highly automated ( due to the fact that there's little a human can do better when at 320km/h).
Poorly marked road? Messed up road signs? Erratic drivers? Construction cones? Construction workers? Potholes? Road vibration? Road kill?
Just because it can navigate a sunny California parking lot doesn't mean any of these systems are ready for primetime. The most common job in most American states is truck driver. If there's basically 0% market penetration by L3-L5 systems in the space as of 2021, I'm not holding out any hope that L3-L5 systems will be commonplace in people's garages in the next 15-20 years.
Bird poop: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8529507/_9...
Construction: https://youtu.be/s1mAWg23phU?t=484
Erratic, unexpected crap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weXDUc5Osto
I am surprised Waymo did not try to target this market first as its a lot lower risk and easier to pull off.
Probably the same reason Google kills projects if they don't become a giant market leading success quickly. At Google/Alphabet's current scale a moderate win is not worth pursuing.
It's amazing how many people bought into the hype that there would be widespread self-driving taxi services by the end of last decade and that kids growing up today would never need to learn to drive. Even a relative skeptic like Rodney Brooks is looking to be overly optimistic at this point. https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
The real question here though is "Is this safer and cheaper than just paying a bus driver $12/hr?". My suspicion is no. And when you don't have the scale effects of millions of applications, it simply doesn't make sense.
The biggest issue with autonomous travel is that it needs a 0% failure rate. Anything worse than that is not good enough, even if it's safer than non-autonomous driving by an order of magnitude.
The narrative around FSD has changed very quickly this year. By the end of the year, Tesla is going to be neck deep in lawsuits.