Closed course testing has been near perfect. At some point it needs to be real world tested. It's arguably already far safer than human performance. That seems like a reasonable threshold for prod testing. If this were a vaccine it would likely be on schedule already.

Assuming that what you say is true about closed course testing (and that they truly made an effort to replicate the dynamism of a city), why do they gotta test this snack dab in the middle of cities (where we should rather invest in public transportations anyway) instead of, I don't know, some trails in the woods, where there would also be a bunch of unknowns?

All this reeks of "gotta go to market ASAP to please the investors / shareholders above the rest of humanity" to me.

A driverless car without an emergency stop button IS a death trap. Arguing that this is not so is just really dumb, sorry. All big machinery have emergency stops for a reason, and the laws for those reasons usually are written in blood.

A driverless car without an emergency stop is a disaster in the making

Have you been in one of these vehicles? There is an emergency stop. It's just not a brake. Are you assuming that people can better predict when it's safe to stop emergently? I've never seen data that shows that. If you are in a panic situation the emergency stop pulls over and stops as soon as it can do so safely. You can't break a bus or a train or a taxi. As a passenger you can request any of those to stop when safe to do so. Cars are death traps. People are dying in cars all the time. Driverless vehicles are a safer option and saying otherwise is either ignorance or pushing a luddite agenda.

Waymo's are safer than human drivers, prove me wrong.

Fascist snitches aren't safe. Done.

I work in an area adjacent to autonomous vehicles, and the primary reason has to do with data availability and stability of terrain. In the woods you're naturally going to have worse coverage of typical behaviors just because the set of observations is much wider ("anomalies" are more common). The terrain being less maintained also makes planning and perception much more critical. So in some sense, cities are ideal.

Some companies are specifically targeting offs road AVs, but as you can guess the primary use cases are going to be military.

Safety is not the main concern. Congestion is one, among many. Highly recommended to watch Not Just Bikes' video on the subject, as it really opened my eyes. There are already reports of Teslas circling the block in residential neighborhoods in Austin for hours.

Holy mother of too-much-shit-on-the-screen, that’s unwatchable.

Seeing so many disingenuous conservatives clutching their pearls about this, while being completely fine with unspeakably cruel shit they're doing to immigrants (including green card holders, and others who are here legally) is infuriating. Fucking shameful.

Property damage to insured vehicles owned by a corporation vs. actual human beings