I think they are training and not testing. I might be wrong, but if I am right, the use of public roads is a necessity. This is how AI works, I guess.
Further, I would have started by making self-driving golf carts made out of nerf that can't go faster than, say, two miles per hour, and then iterated. It's reckless to immediately attempt to make Knight Industries Two Thousand, in my opinion. The potential for mayhem and death goes up with the kinetic energy, eh? Both speed and mass contribute to the "killer robot" aspect of these machines. Start small and light.
Also, let's call them "auto-autos", eh?
Of course, companies also started with small, slow vehicles like the Waymo firefly and the Nuro R vehicles. Voyage (acquired by Cruise) was doing their testing in a low speed access controlled retirement community, with essentially golf carts.
Deploying an unsupervised robot on the general public for training purposes is even worse than for testing purposes.
They are not safer. They are constantly behaving like this:
- https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832