The deepest hole humans have ever drilled into the Earth is just 12.3 kilometers, about 0.2% of the distance to the planet's core. That effort, the Soviet-era Kola Superdeep Borehole, took more than 20 years to complete. And despite decades of technological progress since, we haven't gone any deeper.
Waymo, Tesla, and others are racing to build a potentially trillion-dollar robotaxi business. But after riding in both cars, visiting Waymo's San Francisco depot, interviewing safety engineers, and activists — we discovered that nothing on the road today is truly autonomous.