Waymo can absolutely drive at night, I’ve seen them do it. They rely heavily on LIDAR, so the time of day makes no difference to them.

And apparently they only disengage and need human assistance every 17,000 miles, on average. Contrast that to something like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (ignoring the controversy over whether it counts or not), where the most generous numbers I could find for it are a disengagement every 71 city miles, on average, or every 245 city miles for a “critical disengagement.”

You are correct in that Waymo is heavily geofenced, and that’s pretty annoying sometimes. I tried to ride one in Phoenix last year, but couldn’t get it to pick me up from the park I was visiting because I was just on the edge of their area. I suspect they would likely do fine if they went outside of their zones, but they really want to make sure they’re going to be successful so they’re deliberately slow-rolling where the service is available.

They’re still working on it. All the dev is by a single guy, who also runs Pixelfed. He says he’ll be open-sourcing the code soon so more people can contribute and help get things going, but he wants to finish getting the web interface working first. And apparently he’s been spending a lot of time keeping everything online during the surge of interest, which has slowed everything down.

I’m in the Discord for Loops, but not affiliated with it. The dev said they’re rate-limited by their email provider, so it does take a long time to go through the queue. The queue is also split between Pixelfed and Loops, since they have the same developer, so that slows things down even more.

It took about three days to get my invite as well, but it may be a bit faster now since I think the initial surge of signups has tapered off a bit.