> Waymo cars reportedly have problems turning left, a flaw the Information calls “the Zoolander problem”: local residents reported waiting behind Waymo cars for minutes at a time as the algorithm hesitates to turn into traffic.

UPS drivers are told not to turn left for a reason. Couldn't Waymo do the same?

I've seen a huge uptick of Waymo cars on the road lately. I live in Cupertino (the next town over from Mt. View) and yesterday I saw three within the span of one light cycle, each going in a different direction. At this point I see at least one if not a lot more every weekday.

> "Competing with other companies with autonomous-vehicle programs like Uber, Tesla, Apple, and GM’s Cruise, Waymo is leading the pack in terms of road miles driven."

I'd think Tesla would be leading in terms of autonomous mikes driven given that they have sold 100k+ vehicles with Autopilot.

Can these systems reason? If a driverless car went on a road that started spiraling so that the road would be upside down, would the car just keep following the road, not realizing it will fall down or would it realize it cannot continue?

When did the meaning of the adjective "driverless" change from "without a driver" to "with a safety driver, engineer and a remote operator"?

It doesn't say 10M miles by how many cars though? Could they start trialing discounted Taxi Ride on a massive scale? How many more miles of testing do we need before this can be rolled out commercially?

Here is the pace.

2012 miles per day 240

2014 miles per day 636

2017 miles per day 4,630

Feb 2018 miles per day 10,753

June 2018 miles per day 16,494

July 2018 miles per day 25,000

Interestingly enough, the new version is supposed to have a completely revamped sensor suite including a new LIDAR, new cameras and radar.

This suggests two interesting things to me:

1) Google/Waymo, the "software and ML can solve this problem" company is admitting that hardware is important to solving the problem.

2) They are likely much further away from L5 or even public release than some believe given that they are now completely revamping their sensor suite.