As a resident of New Mexico I can tell you that it is a miracle that we can afford to launch this program at all. Perhaps when the long-term economic benefits begin to pay out, we'll be able to pay people to support their personal preferences. As it stands, while I don't have kids at home anymore, I can see the long-term economic benefit to the state, and am very pleased that my tax dollars are helping to get this done.
And if you've ever worked for 'em, even in a department related to neither Chrome nor Ads, you'll soon know the influence of the Ads team. Prestige, high-pressure jobs, top people, and influence everywhere.
I like that theory. It may explain why the Google Workspace (/G Suite/Google Apps) icons are now so indistinguishable. If one looks nice, why not make the others look just as nice?
I don't think anybody's sanctioning the use of driver assist features on small twisty roads the snow yet, are they? If so please share what you were driving - that would be interesting even if it didn't work well at the time. Most of these things, AFAIK, are in the LKAS, ACC, LDW range and meant for highways and there are mutterings about that in the manual. I sometimes use ACC and/or LKAS on country roads but only with very low expectations.
Teslas at least get better over time. If it got confused over a fork in the road, there's a decent chance that after a near-future firmware update that same car will no longer be confused. A few folks have acknowledged that they're now smart enough to slow down for curves (even sometimes a bit generously), and they are among the few that work pretty well off-highway (most of the time).
Goodness gracious doesn't anyone in the auto industry ever even look at how the word "autopilot" has been used in the aviation and marine industries? It has _never_ meant that the vehicle operator gets to abandon their responsibilities.
However I agree that the mixed messaging is sad and irresponsible, and this article's author could have been more circumspect.
The government could also simply pay for the whole deal, from the design of production facilities to their eventual removal, and tack on a nice profit for the vendor. That's called "cost plus" and with the appropriate performance bonuses, other incentives, and some redundancy would probably solve.
We've demonstrated this repeatedly with military spending and NASA contracts. It doesn't always go well but if made sufficiently lucrative and performance-based (think wartime footing), with appropriate oversight, it certainly can get results.
We just don't have leadership at the moment, it seems, that has the intellectual capacity to consider these levers and pull them.
Placing blame is far less interesting, IMO, than considering this story in the context of our much-needed next-generation power grid.
One thing such a grid, and our management approach to it, has to do is not fail catastrophically, showering everything around it with sparks and cutting power to who knows how many customers. I assert that this is not a good thing regardless of whether a huge fire is started and people die as a result.
If you look at PG&E's outage map, it has a way of putting a smiley face on failure. You'll find it at https://m.pge.com/#outages, but of course you will have to look below the fold.
When you do that you will see the "CUSTOMERS AFFECTED" key. If less than 50 customers are affected by a power outage, PG&E calls that "green". There are always many green dots on their map in the Bay Area, whenever I've looked. That's another symptom of simply running things until they fail, and another indicator of the current state of our electrical infrastructure, and certainly an artifact of the culture at PG&E and the politics that allow it to exist.
As we reinvest in and modernize our grid, we need financial incentives for operators around reliability, and standards for both construction and monitoring that support their efforts to improve that. That could begin at the federal level, if we had a functioning federal government, in much the way the largely-successful things we did prior to 2016 have done (the NASA commercial crew program, what-used-to-be-the-CDC, NIST, etc.).
If we could put the right incentives in place and then take one more step - prioritize modernization of the grid in fire-prone areas - then we can look forward to a point in time when we're not shutting off people's power because the wind blows.
Sure, fires start for other reasons and we're living through them now. That's no excuse for keeping our profit motivations in the wrong place. Fewer fires is helpful and reliable power is helpful. Let's start paying businesses for reliability (and efficiency, and renewability while we're at it).
We're getting what we have because we're paying pretty much exclusively for the number of kilowatt hours delivered to where. A lot of things have changed since somebody came up with that. Seems we should blow that bit up, insert ways to measure additional things, and pay for performance.