Ah, those pesky regulations that try to prevent road accidents...
If it's not a technological limitation, why aren't we seeing self-driving cars in countries with lax regulations? Mexico, Brazil, India, etc.
Tesla launched FSD in Mexico earlier this year, but you would think companies would be jumping at the opportunity to launch in markets with less regulation.
So this is largely a technological limitation. They have less driving data to train on, and the tech doesn't handle scenarios outside of the training dataset well.
Indian, Mexican and Brazilian consumers have far less money to spend than their American counterparts. I would imagine that the costs of the hardware and data collection don't vary significantly enough to outweigh that annoyance.
Do we even know what % of Waymo rides in SF are completely autonomous? I would not be surprised if more of them are remotely piloted than they've let on...
My understanding is they don't have the capability to have a ride be flat-out remotely piloted in real time. If the car gets stuck and puts its hazards on, a human can intervene, look at the 360 view from the cameras, and then give the car a simple high-level instruction like "turn left here" or "it's safe to proceed straight." But they can't directly drive the car continuously.
And those moments where the car gives up and waits for async assistance are very obvious to the rider. Most rides in Waymos don't contain any moments like that.
That's interesting to hear. It may be completely true, I don't really know. The source of my skepticism, however, is that all of the incentives are there for them to not be transparent about this, and to make the cars appear "smarter" than they really are.
Even if it's just a high level instruction set, it's possible that that occurs often enough to present scaling issues. It's also totally possible that it's not a problem, only time will tell.
What I have in mind is the Amazon stores, which were sold as being powered by AI, but were actually driven by a bunch of low-paid workers overseas watching cameras and manually entering what people were putting in their carts.
Can you name any of the specific regulations that robot taxi companies are lobbying to get rid of? As long as robotaxis abide by the same rules of the road as humans do, what's the problem? Regulations like you're not allowed to have robotaxis unless you pay me, your local robotaxi commissioner $3/million/year, aren't going to be popular with the populus but unfortunately for them, they don't vote, so I'm sure we'll see holdouts and if multiple companies are in multiple markets and are complaining about the local taxi cab regulatory commision, but there's just so much of the world without robotaxis right now (summer 2025) that I doubt it's anything mure than the technology being brand spanking new.
If it's not a technological limitation, why aren't we seeing self-driving cars in countries with lax regulations? Mexico, Brazil, India, etc.
Tesla launched FSD in Mexico earlier this year, but you would think companies would be jumping at the opportunity to launch in markets with less regulation.
So this is largely a technological limitation. They have less driving data to train on, and the tech doesn't handle scenarios outside of the training dataset well.