That means very limited routes. That is a technical problem.
Hopefully, NASA solves the technical problem and commercial supersonic flight returns
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/armstrong/taming...
Waymo is currently limited to a small amount of towns for a mix of economic, policy, and social reasons. Probably in that order. Just being sufficiently better than human drivers was never the entire barrier to entry for this to be a real business for Google, at least one that becomes nation-wide or global.
To me it sounds like you’re just being sort of vague. Yes, absolutely everyone knew there were social issues too.
Where will self driving be in 5 or 10 years?
My interest atm is mostly the economics question of whether LIDAR will scale widely in near term combined with the social risks (ie, millions of cars with $30-50k in sensors, which atm cost as much as the car itself, so basically only e-taxis, no personal ownership + high cost of maintenance) vs cameras being good-enough... that's a far more interesting question. It's pretty obvious LIDAR/ultrasonic or a combination with cameras is superior. So maybe some ambitious person will find some mass-producible middle ground within <5yrs shrug
I don't think this is how most people expected this to go. My personal belief was that self-driving cars would be limited to medium-density suburban areas initially (i.e. places where the driving is relatively simple, but there's still enough demand for it to be economically viable). It's astonishing that they were able to move from suburban trials to high density environments so quickly.
I have doubts the very slow pace of expansion was just a matter of regulations and nailing down the tech. It has to make sense as a business otherwise they aren’t going to dump billions into sensor factories (where each LIDAR suite currently costs around $75k to make), cars, and service infrastructure.
Just like how Tesla wasn’t just a of matter of making the first prototypes of electric sports cars. The real magic and barrier to entry was the factories and infrastructure to make the economics work.