Forgive me for this but all self-driving cars do is act as the default to postpone and diffuse support for scalable and long term (also driverless) infrastructure with the false promise that self driving cars that will somehow solve all our transportation needs.

This technology will increase the issues we have as a society around the use of a car based transportation system, as they are simultaneously expensive to maintain for low density environments while also conversely being almost impossible to maintain for high density environments.

Car transport systems have no true limit on capacity so as the efficiency of the transportation system increases, so will demand and density.

If everyone changes to another transportation system powered by Waymo and others, what’s to stop a large number of people moving to self-driving cars, increasing the number on the road, and causing grid lock again meaning we have to increase massively the amount of car-centric infrastructure all over again. Isn’t that what history has shown us will happen?

Why do we keep supporting the most inefficient and expensive form of transport ever?

Downvote if you must but it is a warranted and substitute argument and worth considering. Even if you think it’s not or not on the appropriate post of whatever criticisms you wish to levy (or just as likely work on self-driving systems). It’s always amazing to me how hard people will defend the status quo while calling themselves “technology innovators.”