Whoosh (first part). I think that was their point.

In one sense the cars are not available to the public.

They are available as services of course, so you’re right in that sense.

But we do not know what is going on in the background (such as a team of “safety drivers” monitoring every inch of the drive with the ability to do who knows what at any time).

As far as I can tell, Cruise has an appearance of autonomy to reap the benefits of the PR around that. With the safety drivers (by another name perhaps, to hide their role) not physically present in the car, but connected over a network and operating behind the curtain. All of hacker news has fallen for this hook, line, and sinker.

Waymo is another story. With a restricted sandbox, it’s essentially a shuttle, not a car.

The saying is that fusion (not cold fusion) is always 10 years away. It’s not a hoax but it always seems slightly out of grasp. We are far closer to self driving cars than we are towards regular fusion as we’ve had working prototypes for decades. There hasn’t yet been a break even fusion reactor prototype.

Cruise launched publicly in San Francisco yesterday.

I believe both they and Waymo are using remote safety drivers but at a ratio of one for every 20 cars on the road and they expect that ratio to continually decrease over time.