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Personally, I prefer to see Google/Waymo start deport 1-2 thousand self driving cars/minivans in Silicon Valley near Google and FB's headquarters. The near tea
by srcmap 9y ago
Personally, I prefer to see Google/Waymo start deport 1-2 thousand self driving cars/minivans in Silicon Valley near Google and FB's headquarters.
The near team (in 1-2 years) goal should be getting 20, 50, 95% of their own employees off the personal cars for the daily commute.
Their parking lot should be empty after 2 years.
- notyourwork 9y agoI feel like this is too short sighted. That will inherently happen if they are able to tackle different terrain in different weather conditions. Google has offices in more than just Silicon Valley.
- secfirstmd 9y agoYeah, I really want to see them handle the mess of Dublin roads and traffic!
- wtvanhest 9y agoWhere would the cars go once they drop people off?
- srcmap 9y agoBecome Uber car and start make $. Or charge themselves if it is really idle.
- cbhl 9y agoGetting tech employees off cars doesn't need self-driving cars. Google is perfectly happy to have shuttle buses, and pay for them, provided that housing is sufficiently dense, and there is a place where the buses can legally pick up and drop off employees.
- barrkel 9y agoProbably the biggest problem with using mass transit is latency; having to wait around doing nothing until your transport arrives. It's a constraint on your schedule and adds a certain amount of stress to your day. And if your desired departure or arrival time don't coincide closely with the schedule, you're going to waste a bunch of time even if the transport is quick. Subways solve this problem by running every couple of minutes. Buses generally don't solve this problem well because traffic and alighting / loading delays cause them to bunch up. But on-demand self-driving cars can solve this problem, as long as there are enough of them close enough. (It's also the problem Uber solved.)
- darethas 9y agoStreet cars and trains. I don't know why we ever stopped building them.
- maxerickson 9y agoThe level of service that can be justified in low population density areas is abysmal and can't compete with relatively inexpensive personal vehicles.
- askvictor 9y ago*Inexpensive if you don't factor in the costs of building and maintaining roads.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- waqf 9y ago> Subways solve this problem by running every couple of minutes. Similarly, in many transport corridors intercity rail runs several times an hour (not so much in the US) and shuttle flights run every hour or two. Which are also sufficient in those contexts, in that it becomes reasonable to show up at the station/airport without checking the timetable.
- 9y ago
- stale2002 9y ago> provided that housing is sufficiently dense LOL! What magical fairly land is this? Convincing local governments to allow more housing to be built, so as to solve the housing crisis? That's crazy talk! Building self driving is an easy problem compared to the impossibility of THAT.
- DaiPlusPlus 9y agoMany local governments are very happy to build more housing: more housing = more residents = more local tax income. The problem is everyone else who votes against rezoning.
- meatmodule 9y agoThis is not true anywhere in California. Because of Prop. 13, all local governments hate housing.
- stale2002 9y agoNot the ones in the bay area.
- DrScump 9y agomore housing = more residents = more local tax income That's the formula San Jose followed for two generations and is exactly why it's less successful than its neighbors, who pursued industrial development plus "big box" retail (both of which provide a better local tax base). Sunnyvale, Mountain View, etc. used San Jose as a "bedroom community" and instead welcomed a more industrial base.
- lhorie 9y agoI'd much rather they figure out snow conditions. Driving in a snowstorm is challenging even for experienced human drivers, and I'd feel far safer in a autonomous car that has been shown to handle snow well than one that merely dogfoods with employees in sunny California.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoWhy? If the cars never leave the Bay Area why would you feel safer knowing they have snow capabilities? I’d rather they get them working maximally safely in a confined environment than pretend to be universally safe when they’re obviously not.
- lhorie 9y agoBecause snow conditions are inherently more dangerous and more likely to yield data for the cases we really care about, i.e. accidents and near accidents. Getting commute data in California is likely to just give you a ton of boring repeat data going to and from googleplex and a few locations. As far as I understand, the technology is already good enough to handle that sort of 80% reliability stuff. It's the last 20% - the hard stuff - that needs to be hammered on from now on.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> snow conditions are ... likely to yield data for the cases we really care about That’s not intuitive to me. I don’t see why snow conditions would teach us about likely accidents in Pali Alto.
- lhorie 9y agoSomeone had a good example in this thread, for example, you're more likely going to run into issues with clogged sensors in detroit than you are in palo alto. Another thing that happens way more in snow is automatic torque rebalancing in 4WD systems. Rainy days aren't nearly as common in Palo Alto as snowy days are in Detroit but both share the property of poorer visibility and an increase in pedestrian distraction levels. Etc, etc. A lot of technology only exists because their original problem set was extreme in nature (e.g. things out of NASA or military research). I think a lot of "easier" problems in autonomous driving could benefit from a breakthrough solution that got discovered in the course of solving a harder problem.
- bitmapbrother 9y agoPersonally, I'd like to see these self driving cars routinely tackle more challenging climates than those that you can suntan in for the majority of the year. The snow covered streets of Detroit should yield some interesting data.
- linkregister 9y agoThis sounds like a nightmare. Employees who would have walked, biked, or bused would now be added to traffic. It sounds way more convenient to be picked up by a company car than to bike, especially if it’s raining. Google having full parking lots doesn’t harm Mountain View and Sunnyvale traffic as much as extra trips do.
- meatmodule 9y agoTech companies in the Bay Area already have minorities of their employees driving to work alone. Only the last of your goals would be relevant at Google.