It's different because San Franciso is not Phoenix. It's much harder.

Do you expect to wake up one day and have self driving cars work in every city? That's just not what today's technology can accomplish. You either end up with broadly applicable L2/L3 (Tesla, Comma) driving, or you get narrow scoped L4 driving.

The scope of L4 widening is a real change.

Waymo was driving in SF 5 years ago.

Waymo driving has improved a lot in 5 years. A proof of concept is different a from production service.

The scope is larger.

>it was just an even more limited environment

Huh, so are you saying maybe we're a little close to autonomous cars than we were 5 years ago?

If one believes that autonomous cars with no limitations on environment will never exist, then no progress will get us any closer to infinity.

If you think geofencing scales to solve the FSD problem. Otherwise no.

sure, “no closer” is hyperbole and in the most literal sense of the phrase, we are closer because time has passed… but in the practical sense, we are closer today because testing is going well and so permission has been granted to expand testing — the technology is not meaningfully different, what’s happening today could have happened 5 years ago (if safety regulations were more lax and had permitted testing with less data).

So what have the engineers working on this been up to for the last 5 years? Nothing?

There's "asking clarify questions", then there's "intentionally missing the point to be argumentative".

True, until it can off-road in the amazon rain forest it has not improved.