14 ms·
Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”
- gfodor 7y agoSo sounds like we'll get level 4 autonomy in 2020. Once that happens the discussion around the nature of the approach to level 5 (which is probably asymptotic) will be a welcome change vs today where people are questioning if we'll ever have a consumer successfully use an autonomous vehicle.
- semiotagonal 7y agoEven if the algorithms more-or-less know how to drive, the best algorithms will eventually be chosen by natural selection. I wouldn't want to be along for the ride during this process.
- dev_dull 7y agoSame with best uber drivers.
- semiotagonal 7y agoAny human is the product of eons of natural selection honing our perception and reflexes. The process was unpleasant.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- braythwayt 7y agoI think if you look at evolution more closely you'll see that it is messy and is constantly creating dead-ends. Mammals were insignificant until an extinction event occurred. It's not like we were superior and displaced the dinosaurs. We have lots of errors and junk DNA. We make all kinds of mistakes. Perhaps not fatal ones yet, we'll see how climate change plays out. As for our perception and reflexes... I wouldn't brag that they're that good just because they haven't been bad enough to cause our extinction.
- semiotagonal 7y ago> I think if you look at evolution more closely you'll see that it is messy and is constantly creating dead-ends. That's my point. The natural selection process for self-driving automobiles is just beginning, as they meet the challenge of the real world. I'm concerned that it is going to mirror the messiness that biological evolution involves.
- bduerst 7y agoBut only two or three generations with automobiles
- Gustomaximus 7y agoSure there is ~200,000 years of natural selection. That probably 10,000 generations of learning assuming 20 years. But computers can run 10,000 simulations to learn in minutes. And obviously we are not going to create a autonomous driving ability in minutes but we can speed up the learning evolution significantly in machine world vs humans that have 10-50 years per evolutionary learning event. My view is the hard thing about autonomous driving will be the change in style of accidents. Even if autonomous driving has half of human accidents we will probably see things that to the human eye seem really obvious so people will be 'if it can't predict that why should I trust it' type thing. But we won't see the many accidents a computer avoids that a human would make or finds obvious. I'm positive about it but suspect we will see the roll out take many decades as it starts in cities with the right conditions, moves to trucking routes but will probably take some time for national metro coverage.
- Teever 7y agoI think that you overlook the fact that a tremendous amount of evolution went on before humans came onto the scene ~200k years ago.
- Gustomaximus 7y agoI was waiting for that :). Let's put it out at billions of generations for pre-human evolution. Point stands. I computer will do millions of simulations in a day. And be done across a population far greater than historic evolution. Doesn't take long to get billions of learning events. On top of which evolution pre-intelligence (as a very loose term) was somewhat random, where our systems are starting from a much more evolved position that does take advantage of existing evolution as much as humans do.
- beerandt 7y agoNot really- a single base-pair can change the entire tertiary structure of a protein. Which is something computers are not great at predicting. Depending on how you calculate it, 1 "cycle" of life can be worth trillions^2 or more cpu cycles. It's a meaningless comparison, as presented.
- Franciscouzo 7y agoIs unpleasant, natural selection hasn't magically stopped.
- richk449 7y agoWas?
- asah 7y agonor a pedestrian...
- dev_dull 7y agothe 80/20 principle says it's going to be a long, long time before level 5 autonomy is reached. That's 100% in all conditions. In fact, I would say it's more theory than attainable. There's a reason they're testing in Phoenix. It has almost no Inclement weather. Throw a little snow, mud, or sleet in there and it gets hairy fast. Level 2 is basically the 20% of effort in 80/20. It's exponential effort from then on out.
- panarky 7y agoWe shouldn't set a dramatically higher safety standard for autonomous drivers than human drivers. When autonomous drivers have the same or fewer injuries per billion miles driven as human drivers, then for all practical purposes it doesn't matter if it's level 4 or level 5.
- ipython 7y agoSo it’s ok to have 1+ million dead per year? [0] If so why go through all this trouble to creat autonomous vehicles? I, for one, am glad this was not the prevailing attitude when commercial airliner regulatory bodies were set up. [0] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/ https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
- triceratops 7y agoYes, even if autonomous vehicles are on average exactly as safe as human drivers, they're still worth the effort. Here are some reasons: 1. They're cheaper. This sounds crude, until you realize that this makes things like buses and shared rides far more viable. Meaning millions of people have a better commute and collectively save many lifetimes worth of time. It can also mean less air pollution, due to less traffic congestion (this only applies if congestion pricing is done), which will also save lives. 2. They can always get better over time. Humans can't. 3. Fewer parking lots are needed, which makes cities far more pleasant to live in. 4. Disabled, elderly people and children have better mobility, and aren't dependent on others to drive them everywhere.
- mdorazio 7y agoOperating domain is the key concept with Level 4 and Level 5. Level 4 any time anywhere is not a 2020 goal, but Level 4 in specific locations and conditions is on the way. Same with Level 5. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Waymo car without a steering wheel driving people around Phoenix in 2025, but a Chicago winter is a different story.
- Judgmentality 7y agoThis sounds familiar. Here's an article from 2 years ago saying the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-driving-safety-driver-chandler-autonomous https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-drivi... Hopefully this time it's the real deal. I remain skeptical.
- anoncareer0212 7y agoThe difference here is that now the "public paying customers" and "full self-driving" customer groups are merged - so this means there's genuinely a paid full self-driving service launched as of today! A miracle
- Judgmentality 7y agoCalling this service public is misleading, especially since Waymo created the bifurcation between Waymo One (no NDA) and Early Riders (NDA). Both of these programs you have to apply for and be accepted, so neither is public. And Waymo has made no claim of merging these. The upcoming driverless rides Waymo refers to in this article could very well be for the Early Riders still under an NDA - which theoretically could already be happening based on their past announcements (although the abundance of cell phones strongly suggests this is not the case). This announcement is just a repeat of what they've said before. If they actually do it this time then that's great, but they haven't actually said anything new here.
- anoncareer0212 7y agoThe article says it's paying customers. Sorry you felt that was disingenuous! You're right, it's not public in that anyone can take a ride, your account has to be approved.
- tigershark 7y agoWait, what? Waymo does also some rides hailed via lyft, or are you saying that you have to apply also in lyft? If this is not a public service with paying customers then I don’t know one... https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/waymo-starts-self-driving-pick-ups-for-lyft-riders/amp/ https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/way...
- persistent 7y agoWaymo is so far ahead in this game. Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count. Uber has a dead pedestrian and a major lawsuit. Cruise has a lot of people on staff but virtually nothing to show for it. Lyft exists. Waymo is in production revenue service.
- grecy 7y ago> Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count I don't think you're being very accurate there. There are lots of videos of people commuting 50+ miles to and from work every day without touching anything while on the interstates, including interchanges. It's doing a lot more than just lane keeping.
- mdorazio 7y agoI disagree. It’s completely fair. Handling basic tasks on nice freeways is exactly what adaptive cruise control + lane keeping is for. Last I checked, autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode” claims.
- alasdair_ 7y ago>Last I checked, autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode” claims. Perhaps you should check more frequently? Here is a video of a Tesla on Autopilot stopping for a stop sign: https://electrek.co/2019/05/29/tesla-autopilot-stop-sign-making-turn/ https://electrek.co/2019/05/29/tesla-autopilot-stop-sign-mak...
- danso 7y agoBased on the description in that article, it doesn’t seem that the Tesla autonomously reacted to the stop sign, so much as it slowed to a stop before making a right turn based on its navigation system. The driver says he had to manually start AutoPilot after the stop for it to initiate the right turn: > “The car always stops at the end of a highway exit since Navigate on Autopilot. At the stop, you just need to touch the accelerator to start Autopilot again without Navigate on Autopilot. I didn’t accelerate, you just need to touch the accelerator for less than a second and the car will do the rest at the intersection.”
- an4rchy 7y agoGood to see this finally happening. I wonder how they're going to scale this out though -- AVs are still pretty expensive to build/operate (COGS/TeleOps/Maintenance etc) Haven't seen a recent study/article around cost/ROI (not sure if these have gone down significantly) -- any recommendations?
- seibelj 7y agoI guess they are fundraising right now? Not sure why they would keep promoting something that won’t happen for a decade.
- Gustomaximus 7y ago1) A decade? It's happening right now. 2) Check Alphabets/Googles bank balance. They have a few bucks they can invest for now.
- ehsankia 7y agoTechcrunch took an email sent to the customers from reddit and wrote an article from it. If they wanted to fundraise, they would've made a whole press call for it, not sent an email to their handful of users in Phoenix.
- macspoofing 7y agoIf you don't put a launch date on it, it's not real.
- harry8 7y agoHow to predict: 1) Say what but don't say when. 2) Say when but don't say what. Never, ever, ever bet tempted to say something specific will happen in a bounded time range. Flying cars are on the way! That disease you hate, a cure is coming! Next year will be a big year for other breakthroughs not mentioned here.
- mayukh 7y agoSuper. I'm going to steal this.
- p1necone 7y agoThis is the golden rule of software dev too - promise features or promise a release date, but never both.
- jonplackett 7y agoI have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter more than anything else and it will be a bumpy road to acceptance. Driverless cara will probably be safer statistically but they’ll simultaneously make errors a human wouldn’t, so some people are going to die in what will seem like really dumb ways. This will be hard to accept even though that already happens with human drivers. Probably because their mistakes will be easier to identify with and explain.
- 2bitencryption 7y agoevery now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than slam on the brakes. I know a plastic bag is not, say, a Pomeranian. Another example: I'm driving, and from beyond my plane of vision, a basketball bounces onto the road up ahead. I can't see past a building, but I know I'm near a park where kids frequently play, and I know it's possible a kid comes running into the road to grab the ball. I proactively slow down. I guess you could say a leavel-5 autonomous car would see the ball and slow down anyway, but there's still that lack of cognition that concerns me. We like to think of driving as a purely rule-based game that is simple enough to model and train against. And I believe in 99% of situations, it is. But in that 1%... the plastic bags and all that...
- mgalgs 7y ago> Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance? We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these giant meat computers inside our skulls pulling in sensory data and running pattern recognition algorithms. The $65,000 question is whether or not today's technology is sufficient (however barbaric) to be acceptable for the job.
- m3kw9 7y agoHmm no mention of level 4 or 5.
- jedberg 7y agoGiven that it is geo-fenced and they'll have staff nearby if not in the car (just not behind the wheel) I'm gonna say it's probably level 4.
- eli 7y agoIt’s gonna be a few years off for another ten years, at least
- undefined3840 7y agoI want to see the terms of service agreement. Does anyone know if you can sue for wrongful injury or death? Or do you waive your rights away to Google?
- Pxtl 7y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/678/ https://xkcd.com/678/
- hinkley 7y ago"Driverless cars are on the way" is going to be the catchphrase of a dystopian horror movie at some point. I just don't know when.
- pjdemers 7y agoThis afternoon I was driving up Alma in Palo Alto, near the Embarcadero underpass. There was a Waymo test van behind me, and another two cars in front of me. My thought was: "look at me, actually driving my car, like a sucker".
- richk449 7y agoThat’s what he waymo cars were thinking too.
- MisterTea 7y agoAt least you're not monetizing yourself with big brother google tracking all of your driving data in order to better serve you ads.
- masonic 7y agoIf you then proceeded to Castro and made a right, you can see the Waymos misread that intersection every damn time. I've also seen Waymos make panicked Lane changes near the JCC many times, willing to come to a dead stop in the right lane and wait indefinitely for a break, even though it's an easy go-down-another-block-and-Uturn
- mikelyons 7y agoJust a reminder that they're on their way. We have no idea when they'll get here, but they just wanted to say that they haven't forgotten that we were promised driverless cars. Just to remind us in case we forgot. Just wanted to make sure that we don't forget about waymo!
- c3534l 7y agoI'm starting to think driverless cars are this decade's big vaporware.
- Causality1 7y agoNowadays I hope it takes a very long time. As Elon Musk pointed out, once cars can independently generate income as autonomous taxis, there's no reason to sell them to the public at all. Self-driving cars isn't the death of personal driving because they'll be too convenient; it's the death of personal driving because we won't be able to buy a car at a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs.
- esoterica 7y agoWhy would companies not sell autonomous cars if customers exist who are willing to pay a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs? The fact that autonomous taxis are viable doesn’t preclude personal car ownership.
- Causality1 7y agoBecause they would make far more money adding the car to their own fleet. Why sell a car for $40,000 when it could generate $300,000 in revenue over a decade? Tesla has already said they'll stop selling to the public after they have autonomous driving completely safe and working.
- repsilat 7y ago> ...when it could generate $300,000 in revenue over a decade? If markets are competitive the profits will be lower. If markets are not competitive (not many companies can make or license self-driving AI) the rest will sell cars with steering wheels. The variable that is actually important is demand. If lots of people want their own car, or want to drive their car, the market will provide those things. If most people are content to rent, ownership might become an unusual luxury.
- esoterica 7y agoBecause more than 1 company exists on the planet. If you won’t sell a car for $40,000 because you’re afraid of cannibalizing your taxi business then someone else will.
- 7y ago
- mikerg87 7y agoThis is cool. One thing that always bothers me me with these announcements, you never hear of them testing in the rain or fog in London or Boston in February or string winds in Kabaaa.
- yourapostasy 7y agoI wonder when rental car buses at airports will adopt autonomous driving. On the surface it might seem ideal because it is repeatedly the same route, but the density, diversity and loose rules of vehicular and pedestrian traffic would make it a very challenging environment for machine learning, and I speculate whether or not that might accelerate building the "dense urban environment" corpus.
- stubish 7y agoDriverless, but they didn't say autonomous (yet). I think this means the safety driver will be remote, teleoperating. It is the obvious next step, and if things go well they can start lowering the ratio of operator:car in the way that drone operations already do.
- choppaface 7y agoWill they be the current cars, or cars with the new next-gen hardware that are substantially safer? The cars that end up driving could signal a lot to the industry. New lidar was spotted a few months ago and more recently on the Jaguar cars and the CEO said it’s an order of magnitude better: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/04/21/new-waymo-lidar-spotted/ https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/04/21/new-waymo-... https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-iaa-frankfurt-2019-b3cca36d8479 https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-iaa-frankfurt-2019-b3cca36d84... One would imagine this early announcement comes in reaction to their recent “valuation” cut: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percent-by-morgan-stanley-to-105-billion.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percen... If Waymo starts driving without safety drivers en-masse, even on small fixed routes, it will signal certain takeover metrics have been hit. It will be interesting to see if Waymo uses existing cars (the ML and planners just got better) or if they use new hardware and signal a certain lidar improvement is necessary for achieving a viable takeover rate. The signal won’t be clear but should be there. And then it’s up to the rest of the industry to show how fast they can react to the change.
- colorincorrect 7y agoI know this is a big task, but could someone give/link me an overview of the state of self-driving cars and the issues they currently face? I know its a hard problem but very bright minds have been doing this for a while, so I'd like to know what is the issue, since we've been told for a very long time that the technology is right on the horizon.
- just42 7y ago(throwaway account to protect friends at Waymo) data points of 2: 1. took a ride, at one point a sudden violent sewering and breaking for no apparent reason - explanation from the backup driver - the truck in the next lane was too close. Then it couldn't take a left turn into the parking lot in front of Waymo HQ and was just stuck even though the maneuver was simplest to anyone. remote driver couldn't do it anything and backup driver had to do the 'normal driving'. 2: spoke to someone (again a waymo employee and her friend) just after the ride and the friend was visibly shaken and verbatim expression "worst ride of my life". This is all around the MV campus and in the last couple of months. So Waymo's claim seems way off unless they are talking about absolutely fixed paths, much like a public transit and maybe, just even then, a big maybe.
- baron816 7y agoI just need it to take me to the bar and back. Is that really so hard?