In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US government.
2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed of travel required. That is: the sensors cannot see far enough ahead to react comfortably when going above N miles-per-hour. That might be a dated understanding of the issue though...
Source: I've been riding Weymo since 2019 when it first went public beta (NDA-restricted use). Rode one last night coming home from the airport!
Waymo is already giving driverless freeway rides to employees in Phoenix, so I don’t agree that it’s far away. It’s definitely a different challenge though.
If you screw up at typical speeds in SF, probably nobody will die. On a freeway, odds are a lot higher.
If a car is confused in an urban area, stopping in the middle of the street isn't 100% safe, but it's not super dangerous, whereas stopping in the middle of freeway suddenly is obviously extremely dangerous.
It's more of a challenge when your stopping distance is low (more problematic for trucking than it is for TaaS vehicles since trucks are so damn heavy).
I suspect some challenges are risks like tailgater collisions and high-stakes lane changes at speed, and even more problematic is just profitability (what if your cars are tied up in traffic jams, what if they don't have enough charge left to make a long round trip, etc).
NYC is another obvious challenge but Boston seems like a challenging middle ground.
I am not artificially intelligent and Boston’s streets are a fuckshow.
That I think is where they'll find problems when expanding to locales with less than conscientious drivers.
If I had to guess, I'd say Atlanta, San Diego, Houston and Miami.