Ah, those pesky regulations that try to prevent road accidents...
If it's not a technological limitation, why aren't we seeing self-driving cars in countries with lax regulations? Mexico, Brazil, India, etc.
Tesla launched FSD in Mexico earlier this year, but you would think companies would be jumping at the opportunity to launch in markets with less regulation.
So this is largely a technological limitation. They have less driving data to train on, and the tech doesn't handle scenarios outside of the training dataset well.
Indian, Mexican and Brazilian consumers have far less money to spend than their American counterparts. I would imagine that the costs of the hardware and data collection don't vary significantly enough to outweigh that annoyance.
Do we even know what % of Waymo rides in SF are completely autonomous? I would not be surprised if more of them are remotely piloted than they've let on...
My understanding is they don't have the capability to have a ride be flat-out remotely piloted in real time. If the car gets stuck and puts its hazards on, a human can intervene, look at the 360 view from the cameras, and then give the car a simple high-level instruction like "turn left here" or "it's safe to proceed straight." But they can't directly drive the car continuously.
And those moments where the car gives up and waits for async assistance are very obvious to the rider. Most rides in Waymos don't contain any moments like that.
That's interesting to hear. It may be completely true, I don't really know. The source of my skepticism, however, is that all of the incentives are there for them to not be transparent about this, and to make the cars appear "smarter" than they really are.
Even if it's just a high level instruction set, it's possible that that occurs often enough to present scaling issues. It's also totally possible that it's not a problem, only time will tell.
What I have in mind is the Amazon stores, which were sold as being powered by AI, but were actually driven by a bunch of low-paid workers overseas watching cameras and manually entering what people were putting in their carts.
Can you name any of the specific regulations that robot taxi companies are lobbying to get rid of? As long as robotaxis abide by the same rules of the road as humans do, what's the problem? Regulations like you're not allowed to have robotaxis unless you pay me, your local robotaxi commissioner $3/million/year, aren't going to be popular with the populus but unfortunately for them, they don't vote, so I'm sure we'll see holdouts and if multiple companies are in multiple markets and are complaining about the local taxi cab regulatory commision, but there's just so much of the world without robotaxis right now (summer 2025) that I doubt it's anything mure than the technology being brand spanking new.
But it seems the reason for that is that this is a new, immature technology. Every new technology goes through that cycle until someone figures out how to make it financially profitable.
This is a big moving of the goalposts. The optimists were saying Level 5 would be purchasable everywhere by ~2018. They aren’t purchasable today, just hail-able. And there’s a lot of remote human intervention.
Hell - SF doesn’t have motorcyclists or any vehicular traffic, driving on the wrong side of the road.
Or cows sharing the thoroughfares.
It should be obvious to all HNers that have lived or travelled to developing / global south regions - driving data is cultural data.
You may as well say that self driving will only happen in countries where the local norms and driving culture is suitable to the task.
A desperately anemic proposition compared to the science fiction ambition.
I’m quietly hoping I’m going to be proven wrong, but we’re better off building trains, than investing in level 5. It’s going to take a coordination architecture owned by a central government to overcome human behavior variance, and make full self driving a reality.
I'm in the Philippines now, and that's how I know this is the correct take. Especially this part:
"Driving data is cultural data."
The optimists underestimate a lot of things about self-driving cars.
The biggest one may be that in developing and global south regions, civil engineering, design, and planning are far, far away from being up to snuff to a level where Level 5 is even a slim possibility. Here on the island I'm on, the roads, storm water drainage (if it exists at all) and quality of the built environment in general is very poor.
Also, a lot of otherwise smart people think that the increment between Level 4 and Level 5 is the same as that between all six levels, when the jump from Level 4 to Level 5 automation is the biggest one and the hardest to successfully accomplish.
Yes, but they are getting good at chasing 9s in the US, those skills will translate directly to chasing 9s outside the US, and frankly the "first drafts" did quite a bit better than I'd have expected even six months ago
I’m rejecting the assertion that the data covers a physics model - which would be invariant across nations.
I’m positing that the models encode cultural decision making norms- and using global south regions to highlight examples of cases that are commonplace but challenge the feasibility of full autonomous driving.
Imagine an auto rickshaw with full self driving.
If in your imagination, you can see a level 5 auto, jousting for position in Mumbai traffic - then you have an image which works.
It’s also well beyond what people expect fully autonomous driving entails.
At that point you are encoding cultural norms and expectations around rule/law enforcement.
You're not wrong on the "physics easy culture hard" call, just late. That was Andrej Karpathy's stated reason for betting on the Tesla approach over the Waymo approach back in 2017, because he identified that the limiting factor would be the collection of data on real-world driving interactions in diverse environments to allow learning theories-of-mind for all actors across all settings and cultures. Putting cameras on millions of cars in every corner of the world was the way to win that game -- simulations wouldn't cut it, "NPC behavior" would be their downfall.
This bet aged well: videos of FSD performing very well in wildly different settings -- crowded Guangzhou markets to French traffic circles to left-hand-drive countries -- seem to indicate that this approach is working. It's nailing interactions that it didn't learn from suburban America and that require inferring intent using complex contextual clues. It's not done until it's done, but the god of the gaps retreats ever further into the march of nines and you don't get credit for predicting something once it has already happened.
