Facebook was started by one college kid 4 years prior. Waymo has had the resources of one of the largest companies in the world for the last 10 years.

And their core goal of truly autonomous vehicles is a technical challenge that at this point seems like it will take at least several years more than what they originally thought 3 years ago. Their situation is not similar to FB in 2008 at all.

Even if they overcome this the bigger question is whether the market opportunity is worth the R&D costs, and whether or not bulky self driving vehicles are the best and most lucrative solution to mass transit.

Speaking of market opportunity, are there SDVs being tested in outside of California and Arizona? The rest of the US gets its fair share of rain, snow, and ice. Even if the Bay Area can manage self-driving cars, when would we expect a rollout in places like Minneapolis or Boston?

Yes, there are. Off the top of my head, in the US:

Las Vegas (Aptiv), Pittsburgh (Aptiv, Aurora, Ford, Uber ATG), Dearborn MI (Ford), Miami (Ford), Washington (Ford). There's also a retirement community in Florida that Voyage is testing in.

nuTonomy is testing in Boston too.

Volvo is testing self driving cars on public roads in Sweden.

I think the CEO of Waymo has already said that that driving in bad weather is likely much farther away.

That seems like a huge problem. Even places with idyllic weather like California can have bad days. I'm skeptical of anything purporting to be a revolution in transportation when it will largely limited to a few select areas and is prone to catastrophic failure based on something as common as snow or rain.

They tested Waymo out in Kirkland Washington for a bit. It doesn't have snow, but I'm sure they got a lot of data about wet conditions.

Because of the elevation of parts of CA & AZ, it's absolutely possible to encounter snow and ice (and even whiteout conditions on interstate highways!) in those states, if you make the effort to find it. A smart testing team would make the effort to head for the mountains when the forecast calls for wintery weather.

You're right, and not just rural areas.

Flagstaff, AZ (pop. ~70,000, and double that in the metro area) has colder average lows than NYC during the winter, and several times more snow.

It's the closest major(-ish) town to the Grand Canyon, which is about 75 miles away.

Or Mumbai? Or Jakarta?

Even if the answer there is "never", so what? Do we really need to set the bar at "replace all vehicles everywhere in all situations" for it to be a success?

It becomes much harder to justify buying a self-driving car if there are many parts of the country where I can't drive it. Even a mid-tier sedan can be driven all the way up the west coast from southern california to Seattle as long as you have chains and wait for the pass to be open. Waymo's cars are designed to not even have steering wheels, last time I checked...

Most likely due to Waymo being not designed for personal consumer use... but I’d also say they are pretty detached from having to deal with real societal problems.

Self driving cars is indeed a cool technical problem to solve if you asked an engineer, but if you asked society what it needed I doubt self driving cars would be the answer.

No but there is an opportunity cost to the research on self-driving that could potentially be spent on other methods that seem less cool.

Facebook in 2008 had a singularity of users, so people were more comfortable with the answer.