Waymo is not solving driving, it is closer to a sophisticated Disney Parkland ride. It is running inside a tightly constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- HD pre-mapped roads
- Curated infrastructure
- Remote ops fallback
This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior.
A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve.
It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
From a consumer perspective, no one cares what Waymo really is. If customers can pay and get from point A to point B reliably and safely then it doesn't matter how the sausage is made. Regardless of technical challenges and limitations they're obviously going to expand coverage to more areas.
If you put human lives on the line, both on the shared public road and inside the Waymo then how the sausage is made totally matters, as directly applies to what the failures modes are. Safe from A to B only holds in ideal conditions and limited zones. The hard problems like rare edge cases, weather, unpredictable humans, are precisely why it cant scale easily.
If the tech was truly solved, Waymo would not be geo fenced or expanding so slowly.
It may not scale easily but it is scaling. Waymo (Alphabet) has access to essentially infinite capital to make that happen. I predict that within 10 years the majority of the US population will have access to their rides.
Im not because the statement you wrote is too generic, « not solving driving » … solving driving could mean many different things. It’s the classic rage bait one liners you see on Reddit from Tesla bag holders. It’s funny because everything you’ve described IS solving « driving » from my perspective. I sit in the back and go read hacker news without having to drive.
Roads are not solving transportation, they are closer to a sophisticated trace track. Roads are a constrained Operational Design Domain:
- Geofenced areas
- pre-build structures
- Curated infrastructure
- fallback to gravel in times of the inevitable event of maintenance.
This is not general transportation, it is a highend infrastructure inside a controlled environment. The system degrades exactly where humans/horses do not: River crossings, Creeks, steep hillsides, marshes, beaches.
A river flooding a road is not and "edge case", it a usual occurrence, and a problem that roads do robustly solve. It works due to extensive maintenance, not because the asphalt can actually deal with water.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.
Asphalt is not marketed as Level 5 intelligence. You can make analogies but that is very different from a rebuttal...that you did not do. The hard part is still unstructured human chaos. Time will prove which one of us is right.
I am pretty sure you are underestimating how important it is for them.
But we can look at their own scientific publications.[1]
No maps no driving....carnival ride...
"High Definition (HD) maps are maps with precise definitions of road lanes with rich semantics of the traffic rules. They are critical for several key stages in an autonomous driving system, including motion forecasting and planning. However, there are only a small amount of real-world road topologies and geometries, which significantly limits our ability to test out the self-driving stack to generalize onto new unseen scenarios..."
Most of this comment was written by an LLM. There are certain tells, such as the tone, as well as usage of “ for quotations instead of the much more common ". I think you added the last couple of sentences.
- Geofenced areas
- HD pre-mapped roads
- Curated infrastructure
- Remote ops fallback
This is not general autonomy, it is highend automation inside a controlled distribution. The system degrades exactly where humans do not: construction, unmapped lane shifts, police manually directing traffic, chaotic mixed behavior.
A cop overriding a light is not an “edge case”, it is a semantic and social reasoning problem that current perception stacks still do not robustly solve. It works because the world is pre modeled, not because the car understands driving.
Scaling that beyond a few mapped US suburbs into Europe is a totally different problem. Dont get fooled by Wall Street stock pumping.