rbt
Senior Member
So how are those autonomous vehicles coming along?
Waymo provided 700,000 driverless rides this year, an order of magnitude higher than last year. Long way from covering the continent but it's clear they have something useful. The task now is making it profitable rather than building minimal functionality. Paying down R&D costs requires large scale, but they need to demonstrate an operating profit per vehicle first and much of that is just cleaning, maintenance, insurance and other hum-drum items.
Higher speed roads like freeways and snow are still a work in progress. They seem happy with performance in rain and dense fog, which is an improvement from last year. As far as tech goes, they're still early on the S-curve.
Highways are easy when you can ignore specific problems, which is why driver assist mechanisms often start there. They're more involved when the onboard electronics are expected to handle all situations, including the extremely infrequent events, that occur on a highway.
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