I don't think that's the case at all. At Google I/O they announced that Waymo has been doing fully autonomous driving in a limited fashion with real people in Phoenix for ~6 months.
Doesn’t Wayno already have level 5 autonomous vehicles operating in the Phoenix area? So far they’ve had about 65,000 driverless miles[1] (and 6 million miles with safety drivers). That number should increase pretty quickly now that they’re scaling up their service. So far it seems like the main problem is that they get rear-ended by inattentive human drivers.
Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora.
Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1]
Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020.
Does anyone know what Waymo is doing in Phoenix? I saw a lot of there cars there but they were always being driven by someone in the driver seat (Jan-Feb 2022). They say they are driverless there but I never saw it and probably saw 500 Waymo cars/Waymo cars 500 times while there.
Waymo is already using autonomous vehicles in AZ without a safety driver behind the wheel. There are fully autonomous Waymo vehicles driving around in parts of AZ.
I think you are really understating it. I believe Chandler, AZ has been Waymo's proving grounds for years, and according to this article (https://www.wsj.com/us-news/waymo-phoenix-arizona-self-drivi...) the Phoenix area is the leader of autonomous vehicle service.
Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'll go mainstream.
I don't feel assured in the slightest. Cherry-picking one of the poorest performing "self driving" systems is a bit disingenuous.
Have you bothered to review what Waymo has accomplished? It's certainly not level 5 autonomy, but within its constrained service areas, it absolutely works.
In large parts of Phoenix, you can download an app and summon a driverless Waymo vehicle.
Waymo ride service is not fully autonomous. There are remote assistant drivers that take over the situation if the system comes to a halt. I am guessing that the number of times they have to take over the cars remotely vs. number of times rides are fully autonomous in Arizona doesn't make it a good business to scale up. It makes sense to go back and focus on technology instead of scaling up a platform that might be just a loss leader.
Edit: It looks like they aren't [1]
1: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/7/18536003/waymo-lyft-self-d...
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