I'm so curious about how the internal dev teams feeling about all this scaling. Four cities across 3 states -- surely there are differences in road signs, lane markings, emergency procedures, etc. Let alone the sheer volume of data of doing hundreds of thousands of miles ever week!
Massive kudos to them if they are able to do all this without things being aflame on the inside...
Only they know for sure where the bottleneck is. How much mapping do they really need before their software can drive it. How cautious are they being? How slowed down by the capital cost of cars and needing to set up maintenance depot's are they? How much is held up by legal approval in each jurisdiction? Knowing Google, the software is rock solid, it's the rest of everything that's taking forever.
My understanding is they have to make extremely detailed maps of where they operate and at great expense, and everything sort of breaks when anything changes. So lots of work indeed!
Because the last time a self driving car company "moved fast and broke things", they killed a woman. That's unacceptable. So it's slow and steady to make sure that never happens.
Massive kudos to them if they are able to do all this without things being aflame on the inside...