The arrival of Waymo, Google’s autonomous car service, in Boston in May generated a flood of attention on social media, as locals took to posting sightings of the company’s sensor-laden Jaguar electric SUVs all over town.
Unfortunately for self-driving car fans, the Waymo cars were only deployed as part of a six-week mapping mission, all with drivers behind the wheel. People posting on Reddit observed the Waymos from Dorchester to the Back Bay and even navigating Medford’s Wellington Circle, aka the “Medford Supercollider.”
“Can I do the Dunks drive-thru in these? If so I’m sold,” a Reddit user named oots_oots asked.
“Boston traffic is proof self-driving cars are a pie in the sky dream,” user Boring_Pace5158 wrote. “Jesus Christ himself cannot program a car to handle Boston traffic.”
Waymo, which offers limited ride-hailing service in San Francisco and a few other cities, has yet to announce plans for Boston. The company did not respond to a Globe query this week.
Previously, Waymo said the trials here would include “manual driving through the densest and most complex parts of each city, including downtown areas and freeways.”
It could be a long wait before any self-driving ride service reaches our shores due to the unusual aspects of local roads, according to Ben Bauchwitz, a scientist at military AI research firm Charles River Analytics.
At the area’s many rotaries, for example, a driverless vehicle that strictly followed traffic rules for entering the rotary might wait far longer than human drivers.
“If you literally just yielded there until there was a gap, you might be sitting at the roundabout for two hours,” said Bauchwitz, who studies the self-driving car industry. “Just go out to Fresh Pond and drive around there, and you’ll see what I mean.”
Snowbanks can also be a problem because they can cause reflections and confuse car sensors, Bauchwitz said, as some Boston area Tesla drivers who used their cars’ self-driving system have experienced.
The local startup scene has also confronted challenges developing successful self-driving vehicles.
Perceptive Automata, trying to develop software to help autonomous cars understand human drivers better, closed in 2022 due to a lack of funding. That was after electric self-driving startup Optimus Ride was acquired by Canadian auto manufacturer Magna International and driverless taxi developer nuTonomy was acquired by Delphi Automotive, later becoming part of local self-driving company Motional.
Lately, there’s been some better news, however.
In April, Cambridge-based ISEE struck a deal to include its self-driving software in trucks from Georgia-based truck maker TICO for ports and freight yards.
Last month, Motional, which has had struggles of its own, promoted its chief technology officer, Laura Major, to chief executive. Major, an MIT graduate who joined Motional in 2020, previously worked at an autonomous drone startup and spent more than a dozen years at Draper Laboratory in Cambridge working on technology for astronauts and the military.
In testing in Las Vegas and Pittsburgh, Motional’s self-driving Hyundai Ioniq 5 cars have started driving on highways, the company said earlier this year.
Motional declined to comment on Tuesday, but said last month that it is on track to start offering a driverless ride-hailing service next year.
And this week, EV delivery van startup IndiGO in Woburn announced it had bought Clevon, an Estonian autonomous driving company with US operations in Fort Worth, Texas.
IndiGO chief executive Will Graylin declined to say how much he paid for Clevon, which was testing autonomous and remotely driven robots for delivering small items. “We are looking for Clevon to help indiGO EVs,” Graylin said, allowing the company to offer vehicles driven either autonomously or by a remote operator.
Clevon’s technology doesn’t include sensors to analyze road conditions and potential obstacles, so IndiGO will have to obtain that technology elsewhere, Graylin said.
For people who want rides around town, Waymo, Motional, or others could start offering a driverless service in Boston sooner or later, Charles River Analytics’s Bauchwitz said. Waymo could eventually collect enough data for its cars to accurately navigate the streets, he said, but dealing with other drivers remains tricky.
“You don’t want a situation where the cars are becoming a nuisance,” Bauchwitz said, “because they are too passive and getting taken advantage of by the other drivers around them.”
Aaron Pressman can be reached at aaron.pressman@globe.com. Follow him @ampressman.