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Comment by asadotzler | Hacker News Reader

That's not us though. That's a third party worth trillions of dollars that manages a tiny fleet of robot cars with a huge back-end staff and infrastructure, and only in a few cities covering only about 2-3% of us (in this one country.) We don't have steering wheel-less cars and we can't/shouldn't sleep on our commute to and from work.

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I don't think anyone was ever arguing "not only are we going to develop self driving technology but we're going to build out the factories to mass produce self driving cars, and convince all the regulatory bodies to permit these cars, and phase out all the non-self driving vehicles already on the road, and do this all at a price point equal or less than current vehicles" in 5 to 10 years. "We will have self driving cars in 10 years" was always said in the same way "We will go to the moon in 10 years" was said in the early 60s.

"Achieving that goal necessitates a production system supporting it" is very different from "If the control system is a full team in a remote location, this vehicle is not autonomous at all" which was what GP said.

I read GP as saying Waymo does indeed have self driving cars, but that doesn't count because such cars are not available for the average person to purchase and operate.

Waymo cars aren't being driven by people at a remote location, they legitimately are autonomous.

You are underestimating the hype around self-driving. A quick search gives this from 2018:

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/in-two-years-there-could-be...

The open (about the bet) is actually pretty reasonable, but some of the predictions listed include: passenger vehicles on American roads will drop from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030. People really did believe that self-driving was "basically solved" and "about to be ubiquitous." The predictions were specific and falsifiable and in retrospect absurd.

I meant serious predictions. A surprisingly large percentage of people claim the Earth is flat, of course there's going to be baseless claims that the very nature of transportation is about to completely change overnight. But the people actually familiar with the subject were making dramatically more conservative and I would say reasonable predictions.

What Waymo and others are doing is impressive, but it doesn't seem like it will globally generalize. Does it seem like that system can be deployed in chaotic Mumbai, old European cities, or unpaved roads? It requires clear, well maintained road infrastructure and seems closer to "riding on rails" than "drive yourself anywhere".

Waymo’s valuation is probably in the $50-100B range.

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