In the US if you tip less than 15% you run the risk of comments being passed in front of you. All that friendliness is fake and off-putting. I remember one smiley waitress even asked if me and the wife were from "out of town" and handed us a "it is customary to tip 15% card" to us printed in about 12 languages. So fucking insulting. The absolute nadir of tipping is going to the toilet in some places and having some guy standing there in the toilet waiting to turn the tap on for a tip.
For example, my car is behind a bus. The bus stops to pick up passengers. I can see from the length of queue whether I'll be there for several minutes and determine if its worth pulling out safely into the oncoming lane to pass the bus. Does the self drive car have a special bus queue length algorithm? Is it going to wait forever? Or a minute? Two minutes? Forever? Can it tell a bus from a truck? Can it tell if the bus has even stopped because it is picking up passengers or because it has broken down?
Or perhaps a road is partially flooded. There is a 50m stretch where the road is only passable by one car in each direction by travelling in the centre where the camber is highest. Drivers in each direction take turns according to how many cars there are behind and oncoming. Does the self drive car just plough through the water? Does it even see the water? Or does it nudge to the centre of the road? Does it act like an asshole and just pull out without waiting its turn? How does it know that it's turn is next? How does it signal intent to the other guy and vice versa? What happens if just starts driving when the other guy is half way up? Will it reverse back or just block the increasingly angy other guy?
Or there are two guys standing on either side of a roadworks with Stop/Go signs. Only one direction can pass at a time. Can your car figure out there are roadworks? Can it read that sign? How does it know when it is safe to go?
Or a road has a new road layout. The lanes have moved around. Perhaps a two way street has become a one way street. This is clearly signposted. Can your car read these signs? Will it just dumbly drive up the street the wrong way until someone thinks to update the map?
The answer for all these examples and hundreds of others is that it highly unlikely it will do the right thing. It has to have an override mode and a competent, unimpaired driver to extricate it from these situations. There are plenty of positives about advanced driving modes and even self drive in some situations. But the time when cars will be able to drive themselves outside of very controlled situations with no override is a long way off.
So yeah Google or whomever could claim their car is really safe. It doesn't make it necessarily practical. At the very least it requires a human to extricate it from situations like those above and many more. The only way you will see a driverless vehicle with no form of controls any time soon is in controlled conditions and even then it will need some kind of override. e.g. I could imagine a transport system which used a dedicated lane in airports to move people between terminals. I can't imagine such a thing working on a public road.
There are any number of every day scenarios where a self drive car would stop because it had no idea what to do.
If these become shuttles or taxis it would have to be in carefully controlled conditions where it is highly unlikely that some event would occur that leaves the vehicle stuck and unable to move. And even there, it's possible that there would have to be a a human sitting in a booth nearby who could override the system if it became stuck.
And yes it's a no brainer. It was a feature that virtually nobody used that posed a major attack threat to their platform and their revenues. Of course they were going to remove it. Anyone put in their position would have done exactly the same. Even console owners (at least the honest ones) should have been glad the hole was closed presuming they like playing good games instead of shovelware.
That's why OtherOS was removed. It may have been put in for other reasons but I suspect it would have lasted longer if not for the imminent threat. I actually used OtherOS (I doubt many people who did the complaining ever did) and it was cool to be able to run Linux but it was a no brainer to Sony to remove it when it put billions of dollars at risk if they didn't.
Happiness is twin floppies.