Apparently Waymo is aiming for SAE level 4, so ultimately they should get past that issue I guess (since the lack of the “human must be ready to take over at any moment” requirement is pretty much the point of… what is it, SAE 3 and over?) But yeah, for testing, the challenge remains…

It would be interesting to know how often humans have to take over from Waymo, and also how often humans who’ve taken over from Waymo get into accidents.

I mean, it is not really realistic, but hypothetically one could imagine a driving strategy that has a low expected number of crashes, but puts the car in an easily detectable, strategically bad position, and then just dumps that position on the safety driver. Of course I’m sure Waymo wouldn’t do anything like that because it is, like, the most obvious bad-faith strategy which would be caught on a rigorous review and would be ruinous for the company.