They exist now as what amounts to fancy amusement park rides. Wake me up when I can get sloppy drunk and catch one home. Only I was drunk and didn’t provide the exactly correct drop off address and need to somehow communicate to the robo-Uber where exactly it should drop me off... (how will I do that, by the way? talk to it? What if it doesn’t understand my accent?)

Also, I’m at a wedding and the pickup is in a grass field in front of the venue. Can’t pick me up on pavement... it’s a two lane road 50mph road with no shoulder to pull over in. Also the entrance to the venue is a poorly marked dirt road. Also, the “pin” I told the robo-Uber to pick me up at has it at the street ‘cause that is the address.

I’ll wait for the robo-Uber to call me on how the hell it should pull into the lot. I did mention cell sucks here, so hope you’ve got that all offline, right?

And I fully expect my use case to be waved away as “edge case” and “doesn’t matter”. Except it does. Every trip that isn’t a pre-planned, set route amusement park ride is an edge case. Until you can meet my use case, a common one for an Uber driver, self driving cars are empty hype.