Not the critical aspect of this announcement, but they are explicitly expecting autonomous food delivery. That makes sense in principle, but in practice… This will be all the wrong kinds of exciting for a while.<p>If you are a designer with a taste for spilling soup, cold pasta, and involuntarily calzone pizza, I recommend you start looking at options there, because:<p>- Restaurants operators do not want to leave their kitchen; if there’s a terrasse, waiters already go near the street, but it’s not true for everyone: drive through probably aren’t close enough without the car having an articulated arm.<p>- Food is messy at any conceivable temperature, and anything that looks even slightly gross is a huge No-No: human drivers have to deal with so many ways to preserve the food not to get yelled at, and all that knowledge is going out of the window without them.<p>- Customers do not want to leave their sofa. Period. Sometimes, they can’t. Always, they don’t want to — “playing video games” is the traditional excuse for “I can’t right now!” but bowel movements, or other reasons for priority hip movements, or just plain not paying attention. Your car will wait while the food gets cold. And losing money because hangry people inexplicably can’t pay attention to their notifications is not the worst part: their expectations will always be worse. The worst Karens are not the ones at Starbucks, upset that their name is spelled wrong: it’s those you haven’t seen yet because they can’t go to Starbucks because their lack of emotional balance keeps them at home most of the time.<p>Anyway: exciting concentration event (Alphabet is buying what’s left of Uber for pennies in a year), but there are still miracles to pull off. I, for one, will bow in silence when I finally get to see how one of the few geniuses we have left will fix this.