> another way to look at it is the self driving car - they got there eventually

Current self driving cars only work in American roads. Maybe Canada too, not sure how their roads are. Come to Europe/anywhere else and every other road would be intractable. Much tighter lanes, many turns you have a little mirror to see who's coming on the other side, single car at a time lanes that you need to "understand" who goes first, mountain roads where you sometimes need to reverse for 100m when another car is coming so it's wide enough that they can pass before you can keep going forward, etc.

Many things like this that would require another 2 or 3 "nines" as the guy put it than acceptable quality in American huge roads.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ4NWIt...

Waymo has promised to launch In London and Tokyo next year. New York, London, Tokyo probably covers the entire spectrum of difficulty for self driving cars, maybe we need to include Mumbai as the final boss but I would be happy saying self driving is solved if the above 3 cities have a working 24/7 self driving fleet

Give the Waymo guys some credit - San Francisco isn't the suburbs of Houston. It might not be quite the same as a 1000 year old city in Europe, but it's no snack either.