Fortune magazine talked to John Krafcik at Waymo and penned this article — The Driverless Moonshot is Over — https://fortune.com/2020/01/07/waymo-driverless-car-tech-ceo-daily/

Problem here is what “over” means. The article isn’t about a demise but a shift from overly aggressive to less aggressive. To move incrementally and “scale”. Said differently some reality has set in. Or more specifically pretty much everyone missed their dates and has very little to show for all the years and tens of billions of dollars spent. Other than Elon Musk, who is still in a reckless and obvious pied piper driven lalaland, the AV industry has had to accept at least some of the obvious and shift the hype to try to avoid the public, press, government and the investors figuring out it’s far, far, far worse than folks are admitting. The incremental epiphanies have three more stages to go through. Before that though Waymo and others want folks to be OK with it now taking decades so people can get used to and desensitized to hundreds of billions being lost as well as more needless safety driving deaths to come. Of course, it’s worse than this. Which brings me to those other epiphanies.

· Epiphany 1 — Reliance on public shadow and safety driving can never result in L4. the lives that capability would save will not be saved and we will take thousands of needless safety driver and associated deaths trying. It is simply not possible to drive and redrive, stumble and restumble on enough scenarios to finish. No one has the time or money. (Most of this is due to the insistence on relying on Deep Learning and the massive inefficiency of Machine Learning.)

· Epiphany 2- The solution is to move most of this to simulation. However, that is another problem. The gaming-based simulation this industry uses is nowhere near capable of producing the all model type physics based digital twin needed.

· Epiphany 3 — The solution is to use DoD simulation and modeling technology, informed and validated by the real world.

Please find more in my articles here

Proposal for Successfully Creating an Autonomous Ground or Air Vehicle

Autonomous Vehicles Need to Have Accidents to Develop this Technology

Simulation can create a Complete Digital Twin of the Real World if DoD/Aerospace Technology is used

Why are Autonomous Vehicle makers using Deep Learning over Dynamic Sense and Avoid with Dynamic Collision Avoidance? Seems very inefficient and needlessly dangerous?

Using the Real World is better than Proper Simulation for AV Development — NONSENSE

SAE Autonomous Vehicle Engineering Magazine — End Public Shadow/Safety Driving

Relevant Biography

Former system engineer, engineering and program manager for Lockheed Martin. Including aircraft simulation, the software engineering manager for all of NORAD and the Aegis Weapon System.

Key Autonomous Vehicle Industry Participation

- Lead — SAE On-Road Autonomous Driving (ORAD) Simulation Task Force

- Member SAE ORAD Verification and Validation Task Force

- SME — DIN/SAE International Alliance for Mobility Testing & Standardization group to create sensor simulation specs

- Stakeholder for UL4600 — Creating AV Safety Guidelines

- Member of the IEEE Artificial Intelligence & Autonomous Systems Policy Committee

- Presented the IEEE Barus Ethics Award for Post 9/11 DoD/DHS Efforts

My company is Dactle — We are building an aerospace/DoD/FAA level D, full L4/5 simulation-based development and testing system with an end-state scenario matrix to address all of these issues. We can supply all of the scenarios, the scenario matrix tool, the data, the integrated simulation or any part of this system. A true all model type digital twin. If someone would like to see a demo or discuss this further please let me know.