Waymo operates on highly controlled and mapped environments. Can they handle Rome or Mumbai?
And lol at anyone who thinks any urban driving environment is “highly controlled”.
Aren’t you confusing “navigating” vs “driving”?
I remember the first time I went to visit my father in Kathmandu what his address was, and he patiently explained to me the street he lived on simply had no name or unique identifier. Or driving for the first time in Vietnam and being inducted into a traffic system where your only responsibility is the cone in front of you of things you can see. Or the terror of realizing that your second taxi driver of the day in Bangkok is literally on speed.
All this to say: no, I assume he means he can’t handle driving in Mumbai.
1. People do not as a matter of their daily complaints complain about bad traffic, bad drivers, dents, door dings etc. 2. There are less accidents per capita than US 3. Insurance is required, body shops work better than in US. 4. Electrification of tuk-tuk fleet is....impressive.
Waymo/Autonomos driving would drastically slow down most of transporation infrastructure in most of the world. I don't think waymo should spend billions figuirng out how to drive better than Indians.
My favorite data point here is Cairo: the sound of traffic there is horns blaring and metal-on-metal. Driving in Cario is a contact sport. And it doesn't seem to matter how nice a car is: a fancy Mercedes will have as many body dents as a rust bucket Lada.
All of the above happened over the last ~20 year or so. The progression clearly seems to point to this being more than hype, even if it takes us longer to realize than originally anticipated.
In fact, cricket doesn't even _have_ goalposts, it has wickets. Driving in cities outside North America is very different.
Waymo is testing in Japan: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/04/new-beginnings-in-japan
10 years ago the claim was that "cars can't drive autonomously," Waymo quietly chips away to the point that they absolutely can drive autonomously, even in an unpredictable environment (with evidently drastically lower-than-human accident rates, for example), and the reaction of those original people is to say "yeah but it can't drive in [even more complex place]"
Sure, that's not exactly surprising. We generally don't design technology to do the most complex version of the task it's supposed to do first. We generally start with a simpler scenario it can accomplish and progressively enhance it as we learn more. Cars have been doing that for decades.
So perhaps the tech doesn't work in Mumbai or Rome yet. Maybe we'll advance the tech to do that thing, or maybe we'll come up with a different solution to autonomous driving in these places if we find out it'll be more expensive to advance this technology than it will be to do something else instead. But either way, it's already doing the thing that many, many people claimed it can't do, and those people are now claiming there's something else it can't do. That is the very definition of moving the goalposts.
Perfect example of the saying: "if you have a big problem, first solve the smaller problems. Then your bigger problem may turn out to be not so big after all".
Current AI is much like that: one 'little' problem after another being solved (or at least, progressing).
Having navigation and music, and lane assist, and adaptive cruise control, and some cars that can operate autonomously in some environments is great, but it's not what we meant when we said self driving cars.
Today, you absolutely can "get in a car, tell it where you want to go, and it goes there while you read a book" - it's literally what Waymo is and has been doing. And now we're saying it can't do it in Mumbai, so it's still not self-driving.
At some point, the distinction seems pointless. We are undeniably continuing to make progress on the road to autonomous driving, and it does work in certain scenarios today. To suggest things are slowing down because we haven't met the most reason interpretation of the words is neither helpful nor correct.
...Can you cite that?
> And then the thing we said they can't do changed to something else.
...And they were the same people?
> We are undeniably continuing to make progress
Where did anyone deny this?
> To suggest things are slowing down
Where did anyone make this argument?
The quote from TFA:
> but the hype has promised completely autonomous cars reliably zipping about in rush hour traffic.
The author did not restrict that to SF, and is presumably referring to "hype" that "promised" this globally.
> Currently available software may very well make human drivers both more comfortable and safe...
Which is objectively not what Waymo does, and whether intentional or not, invalidates the progress that has been made.
Also, immediately preceding that:
> Driverless vehicles in closed systems have been in use for a long time.
Which is also not what current frontier self driving technology is.
> Where did anyone make this argument?
The title of the article is quite literally "Is Winter Coming?"
Anyway, you're moving the goalposts here. Waymo is operating at scale in actual human cities in actual rush hour traffic. Sure, it would struggle in Buffalo during a snowstorm or in Mumbai during the monsoon, but so do human drivers.
We don't expect technology to be on par with human capabilities but to exceed them.