Have they significantly reduced the challenge though? I don't think the core task of driving is significantly easier than these problems that they have elided.

Have they significantly reduced the challenge though? I don't think the core task of driving is significantly easier than these problems that they have elided. I know it is a bit of a fallacy to say "we can fly to the moon, so we should be able to have a self-driving car", but it's also not clear that the tools we have (ML, simulators, planning algorithms, etc) are not up to the tasks that have Drive.ai have engineered around. It's a reasonable strategy to elide things you can and focus on the "core" hard task, but if solving these other difficult problems is also meaningful product-wise (and it clearly is meaningful), there's no reason you can't have people working on both. And given Waymo seems to be gearing up for a large launch, I have a hard time believing that these additional tasks are as hard as Drive.ai want to make out.