they aren’t remotely close to dealing with city streets, with on-coming traffic, bi-directional turns, and multiple modes of traffic that are extremely fragile (peds, bikes, etc)
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They could solve this problem by moving their research center to England.
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There’s also a NASCAR joke in here somewhere…
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Was in SF the other day and for the fourth or fifth time saw one of those self-driving cars w the various boxes and cylinders and cameras and such mounted all over it. It was a Chevy Bolt, which happens to be our new EV car as well (love it)! So we slide up next to them at a traffic light and I say (gesturing between our rides) nice EV! He says yeah! I say, yours self driving? Pretty much he says. I point to the Enk-wife and say She likes driving, so I don’t have to! Big grins all around. Turning left is for chumps, right? Am I right? Right?
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Then they would be having trouble turning right.
As my high school track coach used to say:
“Just keep turning left and I’ll see you at the finish line.”
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Per Kevin Kline’s character in Grand Canyon (1991),
This is difficult stuff. Making a left turn in L.A. is one of the harder things you’ll learn in life.
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I don’t think the problem is self-driving cars here, it’s turning left. Without a protected turn it can be really hard and dangerous for a human. Too often it’s a gamble, and the automated cars aren’t designed for gambling, they’re designed to be safe. A large proportion of car collisions happen on left turns, for good reasons!
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You get the team in England to solve left turns, the team in the US to solve right turns, and then just merge the teams.
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That is actually the plan Uber’s vehicles use, yes. It is safer and faster.
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The point I was trying to make is that left hand turns at intersections in the US and right hand turns at intersections in England are the same problem. If you can solve it you don’t need to start again for driving on the other side of the road.
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Maybe. Or maybe truck driver turns into truck babysitter.
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But only for areas where you can make 3 rights to get to your left. Uber is/was testing in Pittsburgh where there are plenty of dead ends and one way streets that make the 3 rights solution impossible.
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It’ll be something like that for long-haul truckers: a gradual reduction of duties from driver to human backup to on-board security guard to remote babysitter, accompanied all the while by a steeper fall in pay. Until the corporate executives decide they’re not needed anymore.
Long-haul truck driving is one of the few remaining jobs in America where one can (at great costs to health and relationships) still earn a middle-class wage with a HS diploma or less. In less than a decade that will be gone, which is probably why in the context of that map even some conservatives are talking about a UBI.
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Eventually. Probably. It’s going to be a long time before autonomous trucks have the technical skill to perform tasks like backing into loading docks. It’s probably going to take a combination of specialized facilities and autonomous driving advances. Ten years from today, ten years from tomorrow, hell, the way the boffins in Silicon Valley approach real world problems it could never happen.
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somewhere over there near the Zoolander joke, I assume…
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Now I wonder what you thought I had in mind with my previous post.
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If Waymo have to rewrite all their code for driving on the left, they’re doing it wrong.
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I’m surprised I haven’t seen any of those jokes yet.
Just imagine Waymo having their own NASCAR team, with a purpose-built Firefly running the necessary software to bring it around the track. 
Also, a golden opportunity for someone with Photoshop skills to meme up a NASCAR-spec Firefly.
