Waymo, Cruise, and a few other companies are sending out empty cars to pick people up. The have off site people to remotely take over if the cars get stuck, but that’s in no way fast enough to deal with a safety issue.

>>This is the same way automation has always occurred. You get the machine to deal with 90%, 99%, then 99.9% etc of cases until people move from doing job X, to being backup, to troubleshooting problems.

Of course. We are now at maybe 20-30% coverage though. Once we are at 90%, maybe in 30-40 years, then we can start saying things like "we have self driving cars".

The point of these trials is to demonstrate safety not simply test limits. Waymo cars work fine in conditions and areas outside of their current tests.

So if you took an existing Waymo car and dropped it in a middle of a previously unmapped city, it would be "fine"?

The software however isn’t setup for non US road signs and laws for every country on the planet.

PS: I am ignoring sanity checks that would need to be removed. If the car thinks it drove to Hawaii then clearly something failed.