Whether they can feasibly scale out to many other cities in an economic fashion is still unknown, but on a technical level they're definitely possible, because we already have them.
And yeah, cities and countries vary in difficulty, though as far as the US goes, SF is quite technically challenging in terms of urban obstacles (though the weather is of course quite mild).
And when I see how most modern cars handle signs like a speed limit to e.g. 30km/h with both additional texts like "from 9-15” and additionally on "monday-friday" or limited "for 300m" I always shake my head.
There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).
The hardware is more expensive than regular cabs. The software has cost billions, an may cost billions more.
Operationally, energy use should be marginally higher. Hourly cab-driver wages: gone. Insurance and write off — we'll see, but if the software is any good this should be considerably lower.
I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
> I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
If we assume the technology won’t improve any longer, this is true. But I don’t think that is a very safe assumption. Everything seems to point to the question being when rather than if.
People said the same shit about Phoenix: "ohhhhhh, but what about the cities that don't have extremely wide streets and almost no pedestrians???" Now that they're in SF, the goalposts immediately move.
Weather will be gradually solved, just like other technical aspects.
We have some interesting experiments (Cruise, Waymo) wandering around (a subset of) our streets, but they simply can't drive nearly as well as 98% of humans.
They achieve some measure of "safety" by failing safe e.g. stopping and putting hazard flashers on when confused. But they're not an effective or useful "service" for us, in the current state. Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
The problem is by the letter of the law, the car can simply never proceed. People drivers don’t need to adhere to that letter so much, so can get creative, auto taxis can’t.
Haven't tried it, but I hear Cruise is considerably worse.
> Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
I've done considerable mileage in Waymo and these two situations it handles pretty well. I think the software is improving rapidly - I've reported some problems that happened consistently that a week later seem to have been resolved