[its_down_again]

The San Francisco marathon is this weekend and I think it’s going to break the city for this Robotaxi launch.

There's major road closures for key arteries like Market st, Embarcadero, fisherman’s wharf, and the Presidio. Traffic always crawls and downtown will become a maze. Even 'human' drivers struggle because you can't cross large boundaries of the city.

Waymo launched in the city about a month before last year’s race. I took one to the starting line, but it couldn’t reach the actual drop-off. It stalled about 0.3 miles away and I had to run the rest. The issue wasn’t the route, but the chaos. Dense foot traffic, impromptu street closure re-routes, and unpredictable crowd behavior were hard to autonomously solve.

Tesla's robotaxi launch will have to overcome the same challenging mix of realtime conditions: limited access to closure data, learning of impromptu re-routing logic, unpredictable human crowds.

Definitely it’s a bold move to launch this weekend. If it works, great PR.