3 ms·

I was really excited, until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all. They moved the safety employee from the front to the

I was really excited, until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all. They moved the safety employee from the front to the back.

Bartweiss 9y ago
Less dramatic, but it makes a lot of sense. If nothing else, a human presence is probably still useful for common cases like a human rear-ending the car. I haven't really seen anyone with a plan for handling all the non-driving issues cars regularly face.
- TillE 9y ago
  Yeah good point. Until they have the full infrastructure set up for handling exceptional situations remotely, it's probably a lot easier to have someone there at all times just in case.
Ajedi32 9y ago
> until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all Where does it say this? Going by this article, it sounds like the only employees involved will be those using the service themselves during the trial period. (And those working in the customer service call center.)
r00fus 9y ago
Why is that not exciting? It means Waymo is confident enough to have the driver seat unoccupied. It's really a "look ma, no hands... I can do this all day" kind of moment.
ilaksh 9y ago
Yeah, I have been waiting for them to announce that everyone in Chandler could download the Waymo app and hail a Waymo when they wanted and there would be no employee in the car. I think they are just doing all of the incremental announcements and steps that they can think of though. I would guess that the next step would be to remove the employee entirely from the car and just have a remote human monitor all the time. Then after that they would remove the continuous remote monitoring, and then the next one would be to maybe open it up to the public via the app. If its 600 or 900 cars or whatever, I can imagine people will be so curious to try it out that they might be swamped. If its cheaper than Uber or Lyft then that will almost certainly be the case barring some major incident. The fleet could be fully booked almost all of the time. Anyway I think that the truly open to public no safety driver service will come in the next month or so unless there is a setback or someone talks Krafcik out of it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

I was really excited, until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all. They moved the safety employee from the front to the back.

Bartweiss 9y ago

Less dramatic, but it makes a lot of sense. If nothing else, a human presence is probably still useful for common cases like a human rear-ending the car. I haven't really seen anyone with a plan for handling all the non-driving issues cars regularly face.

TillE 9y ago
Yeah good point. Until they have the full infrastructure set up for handling exceptional situations remotely, it's probably a lot easier to have someone there at all times just in case.

Ajedi32 9y ago

> until I read that the change they made is not to have no employee in the car at all Where does it say this? Going by this article, it sounds like the only employees involved will be those using the service themselves during the trial period. (And those working in the customer service call center.)

r00fus 9y ago

Why is that not exciting? It means Waymo is confident enough to have the driver seat unoccupied. It's really a "look ma, no hands... I can do this all day" kind of moment.

ilaksh 9y ago

Yeah, I have been waiting for them to announce that everyone in Chandler could download the Waymo app and hail a Waymo when they wanted and there would be no employee in the car. I think they are just doing all of the incremental announcements and steps that they can think of though. I would guess that the next step would be to remove the employee entirely from the car and just have a remote human monitor all the time. Then after that they would remove the continuous remote monitoring, and then the next one would be to maybe open it up to the public via the app. If its 600 or 900 cars or whatever, I can imagine people will be so curious to try it out that they might be swamped. If its cheaper than Uber or Lyft then that will almost certainly be the case barring some major incident. The fleet could be fully booked almost all of the time. Anyway I think that the truly open to public no safety driver service will come in the next month or so unless there is a setback or someone talks Krafcik out of it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]