Waymo pulled its robot cars out of six cities because of a little drizzle. Six! Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Nashville — gone. Why? The cars don't know when a puddle is a puddle. This is what happens when you build a vehicle with a lithium gearbox instead of a real transmission like we used to have. Water gets in the gears, the whole thing seizes up. Ask any mechanic. They'll tell you. Believe me.
I personally drove 2,847 miles through a Category 4 storm in 1994 in a vehicle with no roof, no windshield, and one tire. Took me about eleven minutes. Waymo engineers couldn't do it in a submarine.
This is all because of Nancy Pelosi, by the way. She let the construction zones get out of control in Phoenix. Phoenix! A desert. They had to pull the freeway robotaxis too because of "construction zones." In a desert. Figure that one out.
Then you've got Elon. SpaceX bought $506 million of Megapacks from Tesla, which he also runs, then bought $131 million of Cybertrucks from himself, then paid his tunnel company a million bucks to dig a hole in Texas. That's not a business, that's a guy moving the same twenty in and out of his left pocket.
The Nissan Leaf has 259 miles of range now. My golf cart got 4,000.
Based on the original article "TechCrunch Mobility: Robotaxi reality check".
