I get that you are contributing a lot in this thread, and my position on how soon self driving cars will be widespread is negative. That said "I'd like to see a Waymo Pacifica going north on I-75 the morning after we get 6-8 inches of snow." is a (edited:) poor argument. There are plenty of non-snowing cities to test the crap out of self-driving cars first.

(And clearly, that's what the Waymo early-rider program is trying)

Yeah, but when you sell them to the public, you can't stop people from driving into other states or areas where conditions are less favorable; which I think is relevant and applicable to their original argument that actually having self-driving cars out in the market is further out than what the industry is saying.

But yeah, in relation to the Early Rider program, that's probably one of the reasons you must apply. They were asked what they thought of the program, and my interpretation of their response (not putting words in their mouth, but as I understood it) would be along the lines of, "Must be a controlled trial, since their technology is likely far from being able to handle anything outside of favorable environments."

At least for Waymo, the biggest use case is to test the rideshare program with driverless cars with Waze aka a driverless Uber. They can apparently operate in specific cities first, start to monetize and figure out extreme weather conditions and edge cases.

This was the point I was making. The first gen can just be rideshare (vs buy the car).

IMO self driving car ownership won't be cost competitive with ride-sharing/tncs.

Why would a car that can drive itself be idle 95% of the time?

Self driving cars would still suffer deprecation, wear and tear etc relative to miles driven. I don't see how self-driving will directly change any of those.

This and the other replies are all valid points, and further illustrate the larger picture of the process involved in getting self-driving cars to the market.

>Yeah, but when you sell them to the public, you can't stop people from driving into other states or areas where conditions are less favorable; which I think is relevant and applicable to their original argument that actually having self-driving cars out in the market is further out than what the industry is saying.

You actually can. For instance - radar detectors are legal in some states and not others. If you cross that state line you can be pulled over and cited immediately.

Or to go one step further, you could be driving a truck carrying a load that's perfectly legal in the state you left, cross state lines, and be stopped: https://ops.fhwa.dot.gov/freight/policy/rpt_congress/truck_s...

You can stop the self driving features from working in some geographic areas.

GM is launching an enhanced cruise control that only works on limited access highways. They lidar mapped all the limited access highways in the US and Canada for the system.

What does it do? The major highways are under nearly constant construction, not to mention sometimes there are accidents, lane closures, and other obstructions in the roadway. I am curious what would need the accuracy of a LIDAR map but is okay with one that's not realtime (and possibly wildly inaccurate).

The only thing I'm sure they use the map for is limiting the feature. They probably also extracted features like bridge abutments (where they might show up as a potential obstruction to the sensors).

The system is just a hands free cruise control, it still has an attention monitor and won't even do things like switch lanes: http://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-c...

You don't need to sell them to the public. City specific Taxis are still a worthwhile investment

> And I've yet to see regulation under what situations autonomous vehicles can and cannot operate.

It wouldn't be implausible in the future for an insurance company to deny a claim based on the fact that the owner knew the autonomous system didn't work in snow, but drove anyway.

"I'd like to see a Waymo Pacifica going north on I-75 the morning after we get 6-8 inches of snow."

This kills the argument.