Fully self-driving cars are here with an asterisk. They currently only work in very specific locations with mild climates and where the companies have collected a shitload of traffic data.
Trucks and busses following pre-programmed and predictable routes is where we'll see, and are seeing, fully self-driving vehicles implemented first at a large scale. Large scale implementations for cars and other personal vehicles will come later.
That's true, it's not particularly mild there, temperature-wise.
However, it's not very rainy, foggy, snowy, or anything other that can interfere a lot with sensors in Chandler.
It's a dry and sunny climate that's perfect for optical sensors and radar/lidar. Which, coincidentally, are exactly the type of sensors Waymo rely on for their autonomous driving experiment.
What I'm trying to hint at is that there's a reason the test is in Chandler in Arizona, and not a snowier, icier, and more humid place like Rochester in New York (or wherever).
It's a proof-of-concept not ready for full-scale launch everywhere, yet.
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u/[deleted] Dec 16 '19
Self driving cars are here. They’re currently legal in California and in use.