The challenges Google thinks will take decades to overcome are those posed by streets that aren't new, extra wide, well marked, and with low traffic in an area that almost always has excellent weather conditions.
Basically, they have a solution that they are willing to put into limited testing in certain parts of Arizona, just as Apple has decided to do limited testing with autonomous employee shuttle vans between their campuses.
So Google has moved from "this is our moonshot program that we will solve in a couple of years" to "this will take decades of incremental progress".
Given that Google and Apple have both come to the concision that this is a long range incremental software problem, and given that you say that this represents an enormous failure on the part of Apple, how is this not also an enormous failure on the part of Google?
Basically, they have a solution that they are willing to put into limited testing in certain parts of Arizona, just as Apple has decided to do limited testing with autonomous employee shuttle vans between their campuses.
So Google has moved from "this is our moonshot program that we will solve in a couple of years" to "this will take decades of incremental progress".
Given that Google and Apple have both come to the concision that this is a long range incremental software problem, and given that you say that this represents an enormous failure on the part of Apple, how is this not also an enormous failure on the part of Google?