Yes, but switching back and forth multiple times? I admit to having done even this before too, but I certainly didn't feel proud of myself after. A really good human driver would avoid this kind of conduct by having a (just slight) bias towards decision "stickiness" to avoid looking silly. This isn't purely aesthetic-- looking silly or bizarre, even if technically safe and legal and effecient, in your driving behavior can attract police attention (not a concern for self driving I suppose).

That said I admit if these are the kinds of complaints we are discussing, as opposed to the kinds Uber attracted (like running a woman over in Nevada), Waymo must be doing pretty well. These are nitpicks to gradually address, not fundamental issues. Kudos to waymo, it was always obvious they were nearly the only player seriously trying

This tracks with how the messaging about Waymo has changed.

Early on, they had those concept cars that looked like they belonged at Disneyland or in a Chevron commercial. Then, they started modding off-the-shelf cars at talking up the Waymo Driver. I think at some point they decided their core competence would be self-driving specifically, leaving the "car of the future" bit to traditional car companies.

> We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven [...]

I expect that robot taxis will be both consumers and producers of that actual data. They will likely report the traffic conditions they experience back to the company that runs the robot taxi service, and that will become input to the rest of the fleet.

If the time it takes for observations from a given robot taxi to be incorporated into the data received by other robot taxis is short enough it might be possible to get interesting feedback loops. It may even be possible to get oscillations.

Agreed on this - think wayve is attempting this - building out the tech to license to manufacturers. Honestly makes the most sense and love the idea that all cars can have this and take over driving in specific areas.