It’s interesting that they only have 70 people for this - I can understand the outside the US ones for nighttime assistance and they need to be able to scale for other countries too in the future.

What I’m still wondering is what is limiting the scaling for Waymo - just cars or also the sensor systems? They’ve had their new test vehicles in SF for a while but I still think that most customers only get their Jaguars right now (and still limited on highway driving to specific customers in the Bay Area).

Waymo is level 4 self drive. Level 4 is required to autonomously handle all situations it might encounter (they are geofenced, so outside the geofence is not something it's expected to encounter) safely. That does not preclude stopping and calling for help, it just requires that it be able to safely stop itself.

Why do I feel like this whole bit is being stirred up by Tesla to distract from the fact that they aren't making it at level 4?

(I would recommend that we put the unit back in operation and let it fail. It should then be a simple matter to track down the cause. We can certainly afford to be out of communication for the short time it will take to replace it.)

To be clear, I think Waymo meets my bar. They appear to be working mostly autonomously and are clear about having assistance. They seem to have stated that from the very start and has been the response to many public questions.

But we waste so much time and money because of that fraud. It breeds distrust in our society and frankly I just don't understand why it's legal or fines are so small. Fraud kills legitimate businesses. It kills those playing fair. It makes people doubt those that do play fair so it just reinforces more fraud.