Everyone obsesses on the technical side which was necessary but scaling it up country wide as a functioning profitable business entity, even just urban/suburban, requires far more than just heavily subsidized R&D work and experiments as a minor taxi player in a few places.

I have doubts the very slow pace of expansion was just a matter of regulations and nailing down the tech. It has to make sense as a business otherwise they aren’t going to dump billions into sensor factories (where each LIDAR suite currently costs around $75k to make), cars, and service infrastructure.

Just like how Tesla wasn’t just a of matter of making the first prototypes of electric sports cars. The real magic and barrier to entry was the factories and infrastructure to make the economics work.