The milestone to mark is the day when you or I can, at least theoretically, download the the fricken app and request a ride in an autonomous vehicle that has no safety driver.
I think that line is going to a bit more blurry than you think. Waymo has already done fully driverless testing during the early rider program, with plans to roll that out to Waymo One in the future[1]:
> We’re never done learning, and our early rider program will continue as a way for a select group to give us ongoing insights. They’ll help test early features before those new capabilities graduate to Waymo One. For example, we’ve already offered fully driverless rides to some of our early riders.
And the number of people with access to Waymo One is going to steadily increase over time[1]:
> We’ll first offer Waymo One to hundreds of early riders who have already been using our technology. Over time, we hope to make Waymo One available to even more members of the public as we add vehicles and drive in more places.
So with that in mind, let's imagine if, for example, at some point in the near future 10,000 people have access to Waymo One and 1% of Waymo One rides are being completed without a safety driver. Would that satisfy your milestone? What about 100,000 people with 10% driverless rides? If Waymo eventually reaches a point where 95% of rides are fully driverless, and 1 million people have access to the app, would Waymo opening the app up to everyone _really_ seem like that significant of a milestone anymore?
I've been following the industry so closely for so long that I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge to commemorate the day that a publicly accessible, fully driverless pilot project opens up somewhere in the world, and that bottle has been in the fridge for 3 years now.
However anticlimactic it may be when it arrives, that day is nonetheless the day when, in my mind, self driving cars have officially gone from zero to one. There will be no apprenticeship this year.
Assuming you are the same Fricken from reddit, it has been interesting watching your demeanor become more and more...realistic as time has gone on.
And it's still unclear to me if everybody is having their NDAs lifted, as they are making a distinction between early riders and Waymo One but not specifying if everybody is making the transition or just a handful of people (or hell, even any).
As always, time will tell - the rollout of this technology has been slow to those of us who have been following it over the years.
Right, the real milestone was when they set Waymo cars with no safety drivers on the streets a few months ago. This milestone realistically is just that the riders don't have an NDA anymore, unlike the previous ones. It's still a cool step forward, but it's still a "private beta". At least now we can start getting photos and videos from the users though which is cool.
That car would probably be called Windows Car (not to be confused with your car's windows), stop irregularly at weird places to allow for mandatory updates, and report your height and weight to Microsoft.
"Oh shit I'm late to the airport!" Get in car, car says, "Critical Updates required before start, please wait 5 minutes". Then 30 minutes goes by, update is at 99%, "Finalizing".
When its done, you say, "Ok car, get me to the airport ASAP!". Car says, "Sorry, why we optimize the download, speed is limited to 30mph, The ETA to your destination, the airport, is NaN"
Probably foolishly, I updated the firmware of my van (a Pacifica PHEV, same as Waymo is using) while driving a while back. Since the update was for the infotainment system, the vehicle continued operating just fine (other than temporarily losing access to settings such as climate control, automatic wipers, etc.).
