I feel like you missed the point pretty aggressively here if you're trying to claim waymo's existence in any way justifies burning roughly the GDP of Luxembourg on R&D. This should be a fairly alarming indicator of how utterly divorced the tech industry is from any kind of real world outcomes and just one of countless examples of tech industry hype resulting in embarrassingly miniscule returns when actual results are considered.
The cars exist, and they drive themselves. In the real world. Here's the latest city list:
San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Los Angeles, CA
Metro Phoenix, AZ
Miami, FL
Orlando, FL
Dallas, TX
Houston, TX
San Antonio, TX
Nashville, TN
I don't know why comparing it to the GDP of Luxembourg is interesting but sure. 1.9 million people die annually in car crashes.What would you spend it on?
pinches nose in frustration Yeah and they fled the Atlanta metro area because it rained. The point (the actual point here) isn't to relitigate Waymo's arc of existence. I merely hold them up as one of countless examples of the market's apparent disinterest in examining basically any of the tech industry's claims vs reality and how this leads to deeply perverse outcomes that absolutely would not be tolerated from any other industry segment. I'm guessing I'd get less pushback if I'd instead mentioned techbros attempts to reinvent trains badly from first principles being a smoke screen to sabotage mass transit projects, or pretty much anything involving social media or computers in classrooms.
While I have you I'm honestly curious what it is about Waymo that attracts all the devotion? That's super not a thing where I live so I'm guessing it's got to be some kind of regional cultural thing or something?
