Comment by badpun
3 years ago
Compared to general self-driving, it's relatively simple to make self-driving taxis work in just a couple of cities (preferably ones with minimum adversarial weather, too) - you just test the code against that particular dataset until it performes reasonably well, manually fixing the edge cases along the way if need be. It's still a monumental, multi-billion dollar project, but I would be surprised if it wasn't achievable.
Do you know that their tech is specifically optimized for those cities and won't work well elsewhere? Or is that speculation? As far as I'm aware, unless you were able to compare the performance of FSD against Waymo on an arbitrary road, you can't really make that argument.
I'm not talking about any specific tech solution. I'm merely pointing out that getting a self-driving taxi to work in a single city of your choice is a vastly simpler problem than general FSD.