The article you linked to indicates that places with good weather and good roads could see the technology in 3 years. For all places in all conditions it may take 30 years: "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations."
Even in the Bay Area, there is periodically bad to less than perfect weather - we had 30+ straight days of rain about 15 years ago in one of the El Nino years, and that would have killed Waymo's steering wheel-less cars' useability. It's almost like none of the people who made that decision were here when that happened.
Yes the Bay Area is probably not ideal, yet still much better than Jakarta or New Delhi.
But even an area that was unsuitable for self-driving cars half the time would see huge demand for self driving cars: half the time the car would drive itself, the other half it would be a regular taxi driven by a human being.
The Bay Area only has a lot of self-driving cars because the engineers are there, note that WayMo is letting people take rides in Phoenix, not the Bay.
Thanks for the clarification. I see them on San Antonio and in out of the way neighborhoods in Los Altos all the time but I guess from this article they are simulating more novel situations for the self driving AI and doing real world regression testing. It was only last year I saw one Waymo slow at every pedestrian crosswalk on San Antonio and there were no pedestrians nearby and the crosswalk lights were not blinking so definitely a necessary step.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...