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Waymo granted a permit to operate as a Transportation Network Company in Arizona

178 points by nopinsight 9y ago

fastball 9y ago
I'm just excited for the time when I can purchase a self-driving big rig and stick a living space in the back of it. Work remotely while traveling all over North America. Maybe even all over Europe!
- Numberwang 9y ago
  Wow, never thought about it that way. That would be awesome. Why limit it to US And Europe. The world might soon be a better place. Imagine Starting out in Berlin Then over a couple of months go to Turkey, then India, Vietnam and beyond and then back without ever driving a single km. Just let it drive while you sleep.
  - thanksgiving 9y ago
    Is anyone even talking about let alone demoing self-driving in a seemingly chaotic urban driving in India and elsewhere? My uneducated guess is we are decades away from being able to navigate anything real world like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA If you zoom out, you'll see that there's a method to the madness but a lone driving car that's not a part of a fleet doesn't have such luxuries. I don't think the problem is solely image processing and machine learning. I just don't get self driving and how we're supposed to wow the logic. You have to be aggressive to drive in a city or people will constantly cut you off for hours. This means you will hold up traffic making the situation worse for everyone. However, you can't be too aggressive. Imagine the damage we will cause to the "optics" of self driving if we run over (at a slow 10 mph) stubborn people who cut us off. That will just look like murder.
    - avip 9y ago
      The idea that a self-driving car would even make it to Turkey in the first place is laughable. Let's see how it goes in Italy or the Balkans first. But it's ok to dream...
      - ggggtez 9y ago
        I don't think it can pump it's own gas lol.
        xiphias 9y ago
        Tesla is working on self-charging, but a simpler option is to contract the gas stations and have the workers there fill up the tank
        purple-again 9y ago
        I have one less coffee than I had at the start of your post but it seems my mechanical keyboard survived so still worth!
    - cornholio 9y ago
      Considering the route takes you through Iran and Pakistan, and a few 100s Km from Afghanistan, Indian trafic is the least of your worries. I'm considering driving the same trip but it seems a detour through Caucasus is a much safer choice.
    - moosekaka 9y ago
      haphazard traffic flow due to lack of traffic safety awareness and road discipline by pedestrians and drivers alike are not exclusive to just India. we have a large Indian population in Malaysia and Singapore... go to their Little India enclaves and you see the same free for all situation... perhaps just a little better then shown in the video.
    - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
      Having driven in similar "chaotic" traffic, it's not different that how we move on feet in a crowded area. This explains it better: https://highwayflocking.github.io/ https://highwayflocking.github.io/ A self driving car can have much better "perception" of the surrounding area and reaction times under 100ms, making it potentially very good at flocking safely.
    - majani 9y ago
      there are many examples of countries that have been able to leapfrog certain steps in development. Case in point: most 3rd world countries skipped over desktop computing, straight into mobile. Maybe self driving cars will somehow take over the world exponentially like smartphones have, and developing countries skip over human policing of traffic into a majority self-drive reality.
    - kjksf 9y ago
      Based on economics, self-driving cars are not necessarily attractive in India. Consider that in US the cheapest ZipCar is ~$8/hr. Adding even the cheapest human driver working at minimum wage is ~$15/hr. Adding a human driver in US makes the trip 3x more expensive. Or to put it another way: a self-driving trip can be 3x less expensive. Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices. I don't know what is the minimum wage in India, but per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India per capita income is $1670 / year which is probably less than $1 per hour. In other words: self-driving cars only make economic sense in countries where humans are expensive.
      - thanksgiving 9y ago
        > Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices. I looked up BART because of what you said and it looks pretty bad. https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-all.csv https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-a... 175 people make six figures in base pay. The total cost of employment is ridiculously high. I don't know anything about BART but they clearly need to lay off a lot of people. This is ridiculous.
  - sharpercoder 9y ago
    It seems that the most "developed" areas in combination with predictable weather gets roll-out first. This means that non-western countries will get them later; or, depending on the situation, maybe never at all at 100% area coverage. I can totally imagine robotic car software parking right after a the highway intersection and subsequentially handing over driving to a human. Traffic in lesser developed countries may be too complex to ever have self driving cars to ride on.
    - mtgx 9y ago
      And what does that tell us? It tells us that Waymo is nowhere close to "Level 5" or even to the levels Google and the latest cherry-picked "tests" (where they don't count "disengagements" as a problem) would like you to believe it is at. Level 5 is supposed to be virtually perfect self-driving in any environment or on any type of road, for which we haven't even properly tested in simulations yet, let alone in the real-world. I said it before, because of marketing and an incentive to be misleading about their capabilities, "Level 5" will be the "4G" wireless of 2011 (and by that I mean "3G+", in case it wasn't clear). That's actually held true since "Level 2" self-driving. For every level carmakers have been patting themselves on the back for reaching, they're at least one level behind in the real-world. They quickly discover this, too, after trying out their "Level X" cars in the real-world for a while, but they "forget" to tell us about it, after making the big announcement previously, or it doesn't get as much attention in the media. So, I guess I'll wait for Level 6 or Level 7, before I get into one of these. Level 7 will probably be Level 6 cars that actually can't get hacked, unlike all the cars progressing through the previous levels. Carmakers won't even care that much about security and will only prioritize getting to adequate self-driving capabilities first and will "deal with security later", because we all know it's so much easier to fix security issues and redesign architectures later.
      - pnut 9y ago
        Meh... Insurance considerations practically guarantee you are statistically safer in one of these vs. a human operated vehicle, and that advantage will only multiply as the ratio of autonomous to human operated vehicles increases. As a resident of a first-world country, it's not really my problem if India needs to wait a few decades or modernize their urban transport infrastructure to see the benefit of this technology. I haven't seen it in person, but the reputation is that Street-level activity in those environments is deadly and chaotic, regardless of whether you are a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorist. Not exactly a situation worth preserving from anyone's perspective...
  - flexie 9y ago
    Would be awesome! I do fear that he political hurdles humanity would have to overcome for that route to be safe are larger than the technical ones, though.
  - kaybe 9y ago
    Maybe it would be a good idea to only allow this technology if it entirely powered by renewable energy.
    - fastball 9y ago
      I mean, Tesla has already announced / demoed an electric semi-truck that will probably be able to drive itself pretty soon, so I don't think that's much of a worry.
  - arbuge 9y ago
    It will be even better once the Bering Strait is bridged (again).
  - make3 9y ago
    good luck going through all those places with different legislations on self driving cars without getting arrested a billion times, even twenty years from now, I'm sure
- jbot29 9y ago
  Invest in RV parks now.
  - madengr 9y ago
    Or not. You won’t need to park overnight and sleep. Sleep while on the road.
    - foobarian 9y ago
      I don't think many people know how expensive RVs are to drive. It is much cheaper to park for extended periods of time.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Yeah, if the RV is driving itself, say, 10 hours a day that's 500 miles. Call it $2/mile to operate--cars today are about 50 cents on average--that's $1,000/day. Maybe that's a bit high, call it $500/day. You can live as a digital nomad today easily for that kind of money and aren't limited to being on the road or parked at RV parks. I'm not sure I see the attraction of being isolated and on the road all the time even if something else is doing the actual driving.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Once those exist why would the transport companies need you? Would probably make more sense for them to buy big fleets of self driving trucks to use at scale.
  - azernik 9y ago
    I think the idea was to not do delivery runs, but just use the cargo capacity to lug around a mobile office. Finish work every day, and go outside to a different city.
    - fastball 9y ago
      Exactly. I'm not really sure why my dream has always been a retrofitted big rig rather than an actual purpose-built mobile home, but there it is. Either way, the self-driving aspect is the most important bit. I also thought about doing this with a blimp, but the logistics are a lot harder with that route.
      - CPLX 9y ago
        A big rig is just a mobile home that doesn't have any windows.
        fastball 9y ago
        Yes and no. I guess I like the idea of the living space being separable from the vehicle. That way I could even try out different spaces by just swapping out the trailer. Could have a new living space built while I'm still using the old one.
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  Let’s say you’re wealthy enough to do this. Why can’t you do it today? I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind. Couldn’t you get a mega-RV and hire a team of human drivers, retrofit the RV with a collision avoidance system like OnGuard, and live in the RV? I’m sure it’d be expensive, but I imagine the wealth needed to do either in of the same order of magnitude. right? Sometimes people talk about how worried they are about human consumption and sustainability and sometimes people talk about sticking their office on a truck, taking to congested roads and generating metric tons of CO2 for a daily change of scenery. We sure are a varied crowd.
  - jlebar 9y ago
    > I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind. That's certainly not what I would expect to happen in the long run in a competitive market. For example -- in the early days of computing, I would believe you if you told me that computers had a high premium, reflecting the work savings computers offered. But these days computers are certainly not priced to reflect their cost savings. They're priced to reflect supply and demand. Indeed, computers (or, say, cars) have become so ubiquitous that to talk about their marginal cost savings relative to the alternative is kind of meaningless. Imagine a world where self-driving cars are in the same category. I think it's coming, and soon.
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      What indication is there that they’re coming soon, or that commercial applications will be commoditized? Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day. Technology can run your assembly line at X units per day costs more if X is high, and even more if less people are involved in making X. It’s just technology got cheaper as a whole. But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today, and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs). All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.
- makewavesnotwar 9y ago
  Why use a big rig? Why not an RV? Or a van conversion on something like a Sprinter? The entire premise you're proposing seems very wasteful and morally irresponsible if you care about stuff like global warming and believe in physics, but why try to optimize waste? Seems shortsighted.
  - fastball 9y ago
    Big rig for the same reason that I think repurposed cargo containers can be cool. They're not really that practical, but I just like the idea of repurposing things. Also, you might be interested in electric cars, that might address your concerns about global warming. Don't worry, we'll have electric big rigs before we have fully autonomous ones. Tesla has already unveiled one, in fact. Not sure what a "belief in physics" [sic] has to do with anything either, but live your best life buddy.
    - makewavesnotwar 9y ago
      Big rigs and repurposed cargo containers don't make sense as a comparison. All production costs of cargo containers are a sunk and they don't generate any waste on their own. Vehicles do. It's not just impractical - it's wasteful. Apples and oranges. Electric cars are still massively wasteful. You could make ~250 e-bikes batteries with the same amount of lithium it takes to make one Tesla Model S battery. Then there's efficiency. In general - an e-bike goes around 100 miles per kWh where as a Tesla goes around 3-4 miles per kWh. So you're talking about massive waste in terms of material and energy efficiency. An electric bike is around 6300x more efficient than a Model S. Most of the time people are just using their big ass cars/trucks to haul their big asses - it's unnecessary. Telsa's powerwalls also use lithium. Cobalt supplies are heavily bottlenecked now and for the foreseeable future. Just because Musk wants to market his company as a solution to global warming doesn't make it at all true but I guess his advertising was effective on you. You suggesting that somehow utilizing an entire electric big rig for yourself seems even more preposterous though. Tesla's electric big rig has a battery somewhere around 1200 kWh putting it at ~14 times more wasteful in terms of production resources than a Model S (assuming we're just talking about transporting <5 people). So you're essentially talking about offsetting 13 of your world saving cars or 3600 electric bikes worth of batteries just to haul yourself around at around 0.5 miles per kWh (putting your around 5-6 times less efficient than if you drove a Model X with a trailer). To the belief in physics point - there is more to pollution than just the gasses created. There is also heat pollution. Most electricity in America still comes from coal. Even though you're not burning anything while you're running the vehicle doesn't mean the energy you're using isn't coming from something being burnt. While Tesla might also be working on stuff like Solar City - it doesn't change the fact that his solution is grid tied - meaning the infrastructure has to be built by existing power companies to deal with the load which they have no inherent incentive to do. Not to mention every ~21 hours or 1260 miles of driving you'd be using enough energy to power my 3 story house for a year. Also - common sense check - what's the point of a road trip if you're going to try to be in the trailer the whole time? If you're going to skip all the scenery and stops anyway, you might as well fly. And have you tried doing a road trip in a big rig? They're not legal on a lot of roads and they're a major pain to find parking for unless you really enjoy camping at rest stops. To your condescension - don't worry, I am, and have fun playing with your "Big Rig". You're probably right about electric cars magically fixing global warming. Enjoy your magic kingdom, pal.
unicornporn 9y ago
> Waymo has been running a pilot program that lets people hail rides in its cars, at first with safety engineers riding in the driver’s seat, but fully driverless since November 2017. Perhaps a stupid question... Does that mean that when the service starts the car will be devoid of any human (except for the paying customer/customers)?
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  I think so, although apparently it's possible for Waymo to control the car remotely. Not sure if that means fully driving the car remotely, or just giving it higher level instructions.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    wouldnt it be simpler and cheaper to just have an emergency driver in?
    - monk_e_boy 9y ago
      I think they have considered that Remote driver with xbox controller who controls a car every 1,000 miles.... one person per 1,000 cars? Or your idea of 1,000 drivers for 1,000 cars. Hm....
      - ghaff 9y ago
        Well, that assumes that solving whatever problem can be handled by a remote driver with no situational awareness of what's going on can plug in 5 minutes later and deal with things. That's not necessarily unreasonable for handling rare and non-urgent events but it's a lot different from having an alert backup driver. (Of course, if you need an alert backup driver, there's no benefit to autonomous systems once you get past the testing stage.)
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - 9y ago
nopinsight 9y ago
This appears to go against Rodney Brooks' (former director of MIT's CSAIL, member of NAE, and a robotics expert) predictions, which was just published last month: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ "NET (No Earlier Than) 2022" "First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day." "The pick up and drop off points will not be parking spots, but like bus stops they will be marked and restricted for that purpose only" A possible resolution is in the case that he meant somewhere more ‘major’ than Phoenix, AZ (1.6 million population; 5th largest city in the US), but that is a bit hand-waving. Any insight or comment for this?
- jostmey 9y ago
  I have no expertise with self driving cars. I'm not even an engineer. But this is a case where a lot of experts might be wrong. I think there are many paths to a self-driving car, and an expert might only be familiar with their particular research. That is why there are so many vocal voices saying it can't be done. But these voices only know what doesn't work--they don't know what does work
- ggggtez 9y ago
  My insight is some guy tried to predict the future and was wrong. He'll join a long line of other prognosticators, it seems.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    Oh, Rodney Brooks is hardly "some guy". His wikipedia page is a start, but you can find more information on him in AI - A Modern Approach (the standard AI introductory course textbook).
- dgacmu 9y ago
  Yes. This definition of his: "My milestone predictions below are not about demonstrations, but about viable sustainable businesses. Without them the deployment of driverless cars will never really take off." In particular, he's predicting when a company does this profitably, not at a loss as part of research. (Btw, thanks for linking - that prediction list was a great read.)
zerostar07 9y ago
Anyone here from phoenix who has tried them?
- kyle_martin1 9y ago
  I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons.
kyle_martin1 9y ago
I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons. Gotta say though...it's quite amazing to see 5-10 SDCs/day.
- drawkbox 9y ago
  Yeah in Phoenix/Tempe/Chandler I see them all the time, multiple companies here with Waymo being the most seen and having the actual self-driving ones. Arizona/Phoenix metro is a great place for self-driving because the relatively flat, square mile based road grid and the fact that we have both lots of college students and older people that live here that need it. Most of the self-driving ones are in and around ASU. When both college kids and seniors are testing these out, it will also be good for word of mouth, for the older crowd especially which will be a big consumer of self-driving transportation. Since so much SDC data is being collected in Arizona, it is great for being early as a robust product for Arizona. Colder areas with more complex roads, obstructions and traffic may take much longer.
  - VVyattPrentice 9y ago
    LiDAR becomes a liability in inclement weather. If you can't drive without LiDAR, then you can't drive in rain, snow,or fog.
- jakobegger 9y ago
  Are they already fully driverless or do they still have a safety driver?
  - kyle_martin1 9y ago
    Safety driver still there in my experience.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Google moving them out of driver seat. So not possible to fake it. https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-driverless-self-driving-cars/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-dri... Waymo Finally Takes the Driver Out of Its Self-Driving Cars | WIRED
jacksmith21006 9y ago
Bring it on. Can't wait until this is common.
nopinsight 9y ago
If Waymo launches the service this year according to plan, how that will affect the upcoming Uber IPO in 2019 will be interesting to see. It obviously depends on whether Uber has a similar service ready or imminent before their IPO. They have great AI and robotics people recruited from top places. However, such a feat takes time.
- VVyattPrentice 9y ago
  "recruited" They basically hired away Carnegie Mellon's entire SDC research team.

178 points by nopinsight 9y ago

I'm just excited for the time when I can purchase a self-driving big rig and stick a living space in the back of it. Work remotely while traveling all over North America. Maybe even all over Europe!

Numberwang 9y ago
Wow, never thought about it that way. That would be awesome. Why limit it to US And Europe. The world might soon be a better place. Imagine Starting out in Berlin Then over a couple of months go to Turkey, then India, Vietnam and beyond and then back without ever driving a single km. Just let it drive while you sleep.
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  Is anyone even talking about let alone demoing self-driving in a seemingly chaotic urban driving in India and elsewhere? My uneducated guess is we are decades away from being able to navigate anything real world like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUm3Q-7iZA If you zoom out, you'll see that there's a method to the madness but a lone driving car that's not a part of a fleet doesn't have such luxuries. I don't think the problem is solely image processing and machine learning. I just don't get self driving and how we're supposed to wow the logic. You have to be aggressive to drive in a city or people will constantly cut you off for hours. This means you will hold up traffic making the situation worse for everyone. However, you can't be too aggressive. Imagine the damage we will cause to the "optics" of self driving if we run over (at a slow 10 mph) stubborn people who cut us off. That will just look like murder.
  - avip 9y ago
    The idea that a self-driving car would even make it to Turkey in the first place is laughable. Let's see how it goes in Italy or the Balkans first. But it's ok to dream...
    - ggggtez 9y ago
      I don't think it can pump it's own gas lol.
      - xiphias 9y ago
        Tesla is working on self-charging, but a simpler option is to contract the gas stations and have the workers there fill up the tank
      - purple-again 9y ago
        I have one less coffee than I had at the start of your post but it seems my mechanical keyboard survived so still worth!
  - cornholio 9y ago
    Considering the route takes you through Iran and Pakistan, and a few 100s Km from Afghanistan, Indian trafic is the least of your worries. I'm considering driving the same trip but it seems a detour through Caucasus is a much safer choice.
  - moosekaka 9y ago
    haphazard traffic flow due to lack of traffic safety awareness and road discipline by pedestrians and drivers alike are not exclusive to just India. we have a large Indian population in Malaysia and Singapore... go to their Little India enclaves and you see the same free for all situation... perhaps just a little better then shown in the video.
  - eeZah7Ux 9y ago
    Having driven in similar "chaotic" traffic, it's not different that how we move on feet in a crowded area. This explains it better: https://highwayflocking.github.io/ https://highwayflocking.github.io/ A self driving car can have much better "perception" of the surrounding area and reaction times under 100ms, making it potentially very good at flocking safely.
  - majani 9y ago
    there are many examples of countries that have been able to leapfrog certain steps in development. Case in point: most 3rd world countries skipped over desktop computing, straight into mobile. Maybe self driving cars will somehow take over the world exponentially like smartphones have, and developing countries skip over human policing of traffic into a majority self-drive reality.
  - kjksf 9y ago
    Based on economics, self-driving cars are not necessarily attractive in India. Consider that in US the cheapest ZipCar is ~$8/hr. Adding even the cheapest human driver working at minimum wage is ~$15/hr. Adding a human driver in US makes the trip 3x more expensive. Or to put it another way: a self-driving trip can be 3x less expensive. Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices. I don't know what is the minimum wage in India, but per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_in_India per capita income is $1670 / year which is probably less than $1 per hour. In other words: self-driving cars only make economic sense in countries where humans are expensive.
    - thanksgiving 9y ago
      > Or to put it another way: a $30 trip from SF downtown to airport becomes $10 trip which is competitive with BART prices. I looked up BART because of what you said and it looks pretty bad. https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-all.csv https://github.com/enjalot/bart/blob/master/data/bart-comp-a... 175 people make six figures in base pay. The total cost of employment is ridiculously high. I don't know anything about BART but they clearly need to lay off a lot of people. This is ridiculous.
- sharpercoder 9y ago
  It seems that the most "developed" areas in combination with predictable weather gets roll-out first. This means that non-western countries will get them later; or, depending on the situation, maybe never at all at 100% area coverage. I can totally imagine robotic car software parking right after a the highway intersection and subsequentially handing over driving to a human. Traffic in lesser developed countries may be too complex to ever have self driving cars to ride on.
  - mtgx 9y ago
    And what does that tell us? It tells us that Waymo is nowhere close to "Level 5" or even to the levels Google and the latest cherry-picked "tests" (where they don't count "disengagements" as a problem) would like you to believe it is at. Level 5 is supposed to be virtually perfect self-driving in any environment or on any type of road, for which we haven't even properly tested in simulations yet, let alone in the real-world. I said it before, because of marketing and an incentive to be misleading about their capabilities, "Level 5" will be the "4G" wireless of 2011 (and by that I mean "3G+", in case it wasn't clear). That's actually held true since "Level 2" self-driving. For every level carmakers have been patting themselves on the back for reaching, they're at least one level behind in the real-world. They quickly discover this, too, after trying out their "Level X" cars in the real-world for a while, but they "forget" to tell us about it, after making the big announcement previously, or it doesn't get as much attention in the media. So, I guess I'll wait for Level 6 or Level 7, before I get into one of these. Level 7 will probably be Level 6 cars that actually can't get hacked, unlike all the cars progressing through the previous levels. Carmakers won't even care that much about security and will only prioritize getting to adequate self-driving capabilities first and will "deal with security later", because we all know it's so much easier to fix security issues and redesign architectures later.
    - pnut 9y ago
      Meh... Insurance considerations practically guarantee you are statistically safer in one of these vs. a human operated vehicle, and that advantage will only multiply as the ratio of autonomous to human operated vehicles increases. As a resident of a first-world country, it's not really my problem if India needs to wait a few decades or modernize their urban transport infrastructure to see the benefit of this technology. I haven't seen it in person, but the reputation is that Street-level activity in those environments is deadly and chaotic, regardless of whether you are a pedestrian, cyclist, or motorist. Not exactly a situation worth preserving from anyone's perspective...
- flexie 9y ago
  Would be awesome! I do fear that he political hurdles humanity would have to overcome for that route to be safe are larger than the technical ones, though.
- kaybe 9y ago
  Maybe it would be a good idea to only allow this technology if it entirely powered by renewable energy.
  - fastball 9y ago
    I mean, Tesla has already announced / demoed an electric semi-truck that will probably be able to drive itself pretty soon, so I don't think that's much of a worry.
- arbuge 9y ago
  It will be even better once the Bering Strait is bridged (again).
- make3 9y ago
  good luck going through all those places with different legislations on self driving cars without getting arrested a billion times, even twenty years from now, I'm sure
jbot29 9y ago
Invest in RV parks now.
- madengr 9y ago
  Or not. You won’t need to park overnight and sleep. Sleep while on the road.
  - foobarian 9y ago
    I don't think many people know how expensive RVs are to drive. It is much cheaper to park for extended periods of time.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Yeah, if the RV is driving itself, say, 10 hours a day that's 500 miles. Call it $2/mile to operate--cars today are about 50 cents on average--that's $1,000/day. Maybe that's a bit high, call it $500/day. You can live as a digital nomad today easily for that kind of money and aren't limited to being on the road or parked at RV parks. I'm not sure I see the attraction of being isolated and on the road all the time even if something else is doing the actual driving.
TulliusCicero 9y ago
Once those exist why would the transport companies need you? Would probably make more sense for them to buy big fleets of self driving trucks to use at scale.
- azernik 9y ago
  I think the idea was to not do delivery runs, but just use the cargo capacity to lug around a mobile office. Finish work every day, and go outside to a different city.
  - fastball 9y ago
    Exactly. I'm not really sure why my dream has always been a retrofitted big rig rather than an actual purpose-built mobile home, but there it is. Either way, the self-driving aspect is the most important bit. I also thought about doing this with a blimp, but the logistics are a lot harder with that route.
    - CPLX 9y ago
      A big rig is just a mobile home that doesn't have any windows.
      - fastball 9y ago
        Yes and no. I guess I like the idea of the living space being separable from the vehicle. That way I could even try out different spaces by just swapping out the trailer. Could have a new living space built while I'm still using the old one.
BoorishBears 9y ago
Let’s say you’re wealthy enough to do this. Why can’t you do it today? I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind. Couldn’t you get a mega-RV and hire a team of human drivers, retrofit the RV with a collision avoidance system like OnGuard, and live in the RV? I’m sure it’d be expensive, but I imagine the wealth needed to do either in of the same order of magnitude. right? Sometimes people talk about how worried they are about human consumption and sustainability and sometimes people talk about sticking their office on a truck, taking to congested roads and generating metric tons of CO2 for a daily change of scenery. We sure are a varied crowd.
- jlebar 9y ago
  > I imagine self driving trucks will be priced with the cost savings over decades of driverless service in mind. That's certainly not what I would expect to happen in the long run in a competitive market. For example -- in the early days of computing, I would believe you if you told me that computers had a high premium, reflecting the work savings computers offered. But these days computers are certainly not priced to reflect their cost savings. They're priced to reflect supply and demand. Indeed, computers (or, say, cars) have become so ubiquitous that to talk about their marginal cost savings relative to the alternative is kind of meaningless. Imagine a world where self-driving cars are in the same category. I think it's coming, and soon.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    What indication is there that they’re coming soon, or that commercial applications will be commoditized? Commercial technology generally reflects cost savings to this day. Technology can run your assembly line at X units per day costs more if X is high, and even more if less people are involved in making X. It’s just technology got cheaper as a whole. But I don’t think self-driving trucks will ever be that much cheaper since the computing power they use is on the same waning cost curve that brought us cheap computing today, and even if it does get exponentially cheap, the duty cycle of commercial applications will prevent savings from trickling down to commercial vehicles quickly (Just compare depreciation on normal cars vs big rigs). All that being said, it’s intresting how quickly most people I see talk about this have gone from thinking about safety wins of self-driving cars to how much easier it will make driving. I think we’re headed for something ruinous if self-driving cars do come out and instead of solving the problem of excessive vehicles despite them, we all start thinking of fanciful new ways to constantly have more vehicles on the road.
makewavesnotwar 9y ago
Why use a big rig? Why not an RV? Or a van conversion on something like a Sprinter? The entire premise you're proposing seems very wasteful and morally irresponsible if you care about stuff like global warming and believe in physics, but why try to optimize waste? Seems shortsighted.
- fastball 9y ago
  Big rig for the same reason that I think repurposed cargo containers can be cool. They're not really that practical, but I just like the idea of repurposing things. Also, you might be interested in electric cars, that might address your concerns about global warming. Don't worry, we'll have electric big rigs before we have fully autonomous ones. Tesla has already unveiled one, in fact. Not sure what a "belief in physics" [sic] has to do with anything either, but live your best life buddy.
  - makewavesnotwar 9y ago
    Big rigs and repurposed cargo containers don't make sense as a comparison. All production costs of cargo containers are a sunk and they don't generate any waste on their own. Vehicles do. It's not just impractical - it's wasteful. Apples and oranges. Electric cars are still massively wasteful. You could make ~250 e-bikes batteries with the same amount of lithium it takes to make one Tesla Model S battery. Then there's efficiency. In general - an e-bike goes around 100 miles per kWh where as a Tesla goes around 3-4 miles per kWh. So you're talking about massive waste in terms of material and energy efficiency. An electric bike is around 6300x more efficient than a Model S. Most of the time people are just using their big ass cars/trucks to haul their big asses - it's unnecessary. Telsa's powerwalls also use lithium. Cobalt supplies are heavily bottlenecked now and for the foreseeable future. Just because Musk wants to market his company as a solution to global warming doesn't make it at all true but I guess his advertising was effective on you. You suggesting that somehow utilizing an entire electric big rig for yourself seems even more preposterous though. Tesla's electric big rig has a battery somewhere around 1200 kWh putting it at ~14 times more wasteful in terms of production resources than a Model S (assuming we're just talking about transporting <5 people). So you're essentially talking about offsetting 13 of your world saving cars or 3600 electric bikes worth of batteries just to haul yourself around at around 0.5 miles per kWh (putting your around 5-6 times less efficient than if you drove a Model X with a trailer). To the belief in physics point - there is more to pollution than just the gasses created. There is also heat pollution. Most electricity in America still comes from coal. Even though you're not burning anything while you're running the vehicle doesn't mean the energy you're using isn't coming from something being burnt. While Tesla might also be working on stuff like Solar City - it doesn't change the fact that his solution is grid tied - meaning the infrastructure has to be built by existing power companies to deal with the load which they have no inherent incentive to do. Not to mention every ~21 hours or 1260 miles of driving you'd be using enough energy to power my 3 story house for a year. Also - common sense check - what's the point of a road trip if you're going to try to be in the trailer the whole time? If you're going to skip all the scenery and stops anyway, you might as well fly. And have you tried doing a road trip in a big rig? They're not legal on a lot of roads and they're a major pain to find parking for unless you really enjoy camping at rest stops. To your condescension - don't worry, I am, and have fun playing with your "Big Rig". You're probably right about electric cars magically fixing global warming. Enjoy your magic kingdom, pal.

unicornporn 9y ago

> Waymo has been running a pilot program that lets people hail rides in its cars, at first with safety engineers riding in the driver’s seat, but fully driverless since November 2017. Perhaps a stupid question... Does that mean that when the service starts the car will be devoid of any human (except for the paying customer/customers)?

TulliusCicero 9y ago
I think so, although apparently it's possible for Waymo to control the car remotely. Not sure if that means fully driving the car remotely, or just giving it higher level instructions.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  wouldnt it be simpler and cheaper to just have an emergency driver in?
  - monk_e_boy 9y ago
    I think they have considered that Remote driver with xbox controller who controls a car every 1,000 miles.... one person per 1,000 cars? Or your idea of 1,000 drivers for 1,000 cars. Hm....
    - ghaff 9y ago
      Well, that assumes that solving whatever problem can be handled by a remote driver with no situational awareness of what's going on can plug in 5 minutes later and deal with things. That's not necessarily unreasonable for handling rare and non-urgent events but it's a lot different from having an alert backup driver. (Of course, if you need an alert backup driver, there's no benefit to autonomous systems once you get past the testing stage.)
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nopinsight 9y ago

This appears to go against Rodney Brooks' (former director of MIT's CSAIL, member of NAE, and a robotics expert) predictions, which was just published last month: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/ "NET (No Earlier Than) 2022" "First driverless "taxi" service in a major US city, with dedicated pick up and drop off points, and restrictions on weather and time of day." "The pick up and drop off points will not be parking spots, but like bus stops they will be marked and restricted for that purpose only" A possible resolution is in the case that he meant somewhere more ‘major’ than Phoenix, AZ (1.6 million population; 5th largest city in the US), but that is a bit hand-waving. Any insight or comment for this?

jostmey 9y ago
I have no expertise with self driving cars. I'm not even an engineer. But this is a case where a lot of experts might be wrong. I think there are many paths to a self-driving car, and an expert might only be familiar with their particular research. That is why there are so many vocal voices saying it can't be done. But these voices only know what doesn't work--they don't know what does work
ggggtez 9y ago
My insight is some guy tried to predict the future and was wrong. He'll join a long line of other prognosticators, it seems.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  Oh, Rodney Brooks is hardly "some guy". His wikipedia page is a start, but you can find more information on him in AI - A Modern Approach (the standard AI introductory course textbook).
dgacmu 9y ago
Yes. This definition of his: "My milestone predictions below are not about demonstrations, but about viable sustainable businesses. Without them the deployment of driverless cars will never really take off." In particular, he's predicting when a company does this profitably, not at a loss as part of research. (Btw, thanks for linking - that prediction list was a great read.)

zerostar07 9y ago

Anyone here from phoenix who has tried them?

kyle_martin1 9y ago
I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons.

kyle_martin1 9y ago

I live in Phoenix and applied to their beta program. Haven't heard a word since but I've seen a few passengers riding in them. My guess is that they're hand picking people with compelling stories for marketing reasons. Gotta say though...it's quite amazing to see 5-10 SDCs/day.

drawkbox 9y ago
Yeah in Phoenix/Tempe/Chandler I see them all the time, multiple companies here with Waymo being the most seen and having the actual self-driving ones. Arizona/Phoenix metro is a great place for self-driving because the relatively flat, square mile based road grid and the fact that we have both lots of college students and older people that live here that need it. Most of the self-driving ones are in and around ASU. When both college kids and seniors are testing these out, it will also be good for word of mouth, for the older crowd especially which will be a big consumer of self-driving transportation. Since so much SDC data is being collected in Arizona, it is great for being early as a robust product for Arizona. Colder areas with more complex roads, obstructions and traffic may take much longer.
- VVyattPrentice 9y ago
  LiDAR becomes a liability in inclement weather. If you can't drive without LiDAR, then you can't drive in rain, snow,or fog.
jakobegger 9y ago
Are they already fully driverless or do they still have a safety driver?
- kyle_martin1 9y ago
  Safety driver still there in my experience.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Google moving them out of driver seat. So not possible to fake it. https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-driverless-self-driving-cars/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-google-arizona-phoenix-dri... Waymo Finally Takes the Driver Out of Its Self-Driving Cars | WIRED

jacksmith21006 9y ago

Bring it on. Can't wait until this is common.

nopinsight 9y ago

If Waymo launches the service this year according to plan, how that will affect the upcoming Uber IPO in 2019 will be interesting to see. It obviously depends on whether Uber has a similar service ready or imminent before their IPO. They have great AI and robotics people recruited from top places. However, such a feat takes time.

VVyattPrentice 9y ago
"recruited" They basically hired away Carnegie Mellon's entire SDC research team.