https://www.reuters.com/article/waymo-autonomous-phoenix/way...
Sure, you can move the goalposts and say it's not "true" self-driving until it can handle all environments and weather conditions and whatnot, but self-driving cars are here. The question is how fast they'll go mainstream.
As for safety, all we really need is for them to be safer than the average human driver. As evinced by the ~40,000 road deaths every year in the US, that's really a pretty low bar. I'd even argue that full autonomous is/will be less risky than halfway houses like Tesla Autopilot where neither side is really in full control, but that's another story.
It's ready/safe when governments ("the people") decide it's such.
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
They've been very careful about it, and they have not finished work on it, so they need to keep the same standard that they had until now.
The technology is also ready for Phoenix. The company is not yet ready for the whole world (but I have no specific insight into what's holding them back).
It's totally different from Uber.
Where I live, road conditions are changing all the time. There’s new construction, new roads opening, temporary (a few hours at a B time) changes in lanes where you have to drive against the normal direction of traffic.
You can call it moving goal posts, but to deploy them generally, they either have to have general intelligence, or you need to input construction schedules, so that it won’t take certain roads during certain times. And then what? You can’t order a ride to certain locations?
There will always be corner cases that automation can't deal with, but Waymo will have some human troubleshooters around for that. So do us humans, for that matter: when a car breaks down, most people call the mechanic instead of applying their own general intelligence to fixing it.
Eg A road is accessible from 5am to 8pm. Outside those times traffic conditions change. Humans setup cones and control the flow of traffic. 2 lanes becomes 1 lane for all traffic. And traffic is managed so that depending on what direction you’re going, your driving against the normal flow of traffic.
This is a real scenario in a moderately busy area. Times may be wrong. The road is not blocked. But you have to take direction from a person. In fact this sort of temporary traffic change is fairly common especially due to road works.
