What Waymo have done is not release a product for sale that can even remotely be confused for some level of autonomy. They have ensured this by not releasing a

What Waymo have done is not release a product for sale that can even remotely be confused for some level of autonomy. They have ensured this by not releasing a product. Autopilot is not autonomous. It needs human supervision, and the fact that some simplistic “autonomy scale” includes “requires human supervision” is the largest part of this problem. If it requires any supervision, it is not autonomous. Any discussion of autonomy that even mentions Autopilot is automatically null and void. I would consider it the autonomy equivalent of Godwin’s law: in any discussion about autonomy the chance of comparing the safety of an autonomous system to Autopilot or Cruise Control approaches 1 and the first person to mention the comparison automatically loses the argument.