Comment by ddp26
6 hours ago
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.