This is some crazy mental gymnastics.

I’ve seen them around in London - they are incredibly slow. There’s no way they’ll succeed here - speed is important for getting around.

This is what happens when people who live in a bubble automatically assume what works there must scale and make economic sense to the rest of the world.

Average driving speeds in London are already very low. How can they possibly be sufficiently slower as to be noticeable?

There's no way their slowness is going to make a difference in London. I would have thought the real problem is that they'll just get completely stuck at places where you have to be a bit aggressive to make any progress at all. They don't really have that in America.

That and cyclists/pedestrians can be kind of anywhere at any time. Again not a quite the same in America.

We'll see I guess.

They get stuck in LA as it is which is pretty chill for a major American city all things considered.

They're just really cautious and do need an extra 10s to think sometimes, and there's a lot of driving scenarios that don't allow that much time to decide to go or not. The biggest culprit seems to be unprotected intersections with the potential for human/bike crossing, which includes driveways which they insist on using for dropoffs (even when they're obviously not public driveways), which they then take a very long time to leave.

Both of these "don't really have that in America" routinely happen in San Francisco, which gets semi-aggressive during gridlock and has a good amount of cyclists and scooter riders. Waymos are known to not do well during busy events that result in gridlock (like Independence Day or big music festivals), causing so much disturbance that the city introduced their first geofence banning autonomous cars (but not Uber/Lyft) from part of the city during Fleet Week this year.

At the same time technology doesn't stand still and the algorithms now have an "aggressiveness" slider that goes up if the car can't make any progress.