The other side of the coin as that they hobble 5-20 years behind tech possibilities. If you want to push boundaries, you sometimes have little choice.
Self-driving cars in the next 10 years have been a serious possibility for the last decade or so, yet governments and insurers don't have a policy ready and won't until a couple of years after the first self-driving cars are available.
Tesla, Google et all are not little startups but huge corps with plenty of cash and the ear of any politician or CEO. If they can't get a policy enacted, maybe there's a reason for it.
Pushing boundaries is fine when there are no life-threatening implications.
Self driving is all about convenience and costs[1] and as such it's not necessary, nor is it advisable, to inflict the bleeding edge on the general public. Waymo's geofenced approach is less bad than Tesla's, and it's something that regulators can readily work with also.
1. But teh safeties!1! No. Just no. ADASes (advanced driver assistance systems), particularly autonomous emergency braking, remove the safety argument for self driving. With ADASes you have 95% or more of the (asserted) safety of self driving, and ADASes are available today, on a large and increasing range of cars. There are even retrofit kits.
There is nothing like self driving in current regulations, much less 10-15 years ago when people seriously started working on it. So, in your views, even starting working on this stuff should be criminal offense?
