A VLM (a vision-language model) is already being used by Waymo[1]. It's useful for scenarios that require reasoning and general knowledge.

[1] https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto...

Fast forward to me sitting at a Green Light waiting for my usage to reset for the week so I can get to where I’m going

In a sense, they already are. The giant leap in self driving cars we've seen in the last handful of few comes from using transformer models.

I remain worried about prompt injection style attacks against self-driving cars.

Imagine if someone finds a weird image pattern that gets misinterpreted as instructions and hangs that off a bridge over a freeway.

It's not a coincidence that Waymo started becoming viable after GPT-3.

GPT-6 is multimodal, LLMs alone have no vision capability

To my understanding gemma is shipped with waymo, in a highly modified fashion.

I'm skeptical, tho. Cost will push for right sizing, much like we have right sized a lot of things about modern cars.