Municipal approval was probably only a minor part of the development time tho no? Google was operating Waymo in Mountain View for years before they expanded. The vast majority of the time cost was in development.

I think technology development can be faster thanks to better AI systems like VLA models, but I do think the time to real deployment will be long.

My pet issue is that the dexterity of the hands is still really poor. A human hand is incredible with what it can do.

I think between the general manipulation tasks, world understanding, and more these systems are still a long ways out for widespread use, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they find niche uses near term.