Not only will safety take a long time for technical reasons, but its extremely predictable under what financial conditions corporate execs sweep safety issues under the carpet. If Alphabet has a few tricky quarters good luck to everyone.
Oh sure yeah. It'd take exactly one legislative push to place full liability in the case of accidents onto the vehicle manufacturer (where it clearly belongs) to fold up every autonomy division in the industry like a wet towel. What galls the shit out of me is there's apparently enough dumb money afoot to float R&D spend equivalent to the GDP of a middle of the road 3rd world country just to make cabbies lives even more miserable.
That dumb money mountain will go to fighting legislation as we have seen with big oil, telco, pharma, wall st etc. The money always flows and aggregates around anything that promises to become a monopoly tomorrow. And monopolies can then collect rent at whatever rate they want. This end state is what attracts money more and more. The money is not just to replace the existing solution, its reqd to capture and lock in talent, attention, suppliers, lobbyists, politicians etc. The more the spend the more competitors exit too, the closer to market capture. But they have been spending for a long time to end up in just 2 cities so the pressure to scale, monetize, compromise will keep growing.
