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Oddly I'd trust Google more with a self-driving car than say Uber or Tesla. Kind of glad they're making progress and expanding. The industry as a whole seems re
by kuroguro 6y ago
Oddly I'd trust Google more with a self-driving car than say Uber or Tesla. Kind of glad they're making progress and expanding. The industry as a whole seems reckless to me tho.
- luckylion 6y agoI don't know, with Google I see two scenarios that are difficult: "this product has been discontinued" while you're relying on the car, and some random Youtube moderation algorithm getting triggered by a comment you wrote eight years ago and blocking your account, leaving you stranded outside your car.
- tmpz22 6y agoRealistically it won't be discontinued (if it works well), realistically you can expect to see unskippable ads in your car one day (unless you sign-up to a youtube-google-music-premium-red subscription).
- istorical 6y agoIt would be rolled into a new product line and you'd need to start paying a higher monthly service fee and take it to a dealer to have it repainted with new logo, have a new control panel with all new UX installed in the dash, and the self driving cars product would be merged with the self-driving motorcycles product and when you got your car back from the dealer you'd find it now had 3 wheels instead of the 2 of a motorcycle or the 4 of a car, satisfying the needs of both previous products inadequately. And then in another 2 years they'd deprecate your car and launch a new competing self driving bus initiative.
- rurp 6y agoI'm surprised I hardly ever see this brought up. If Waymo ever does become a breakout success the ride quality is almost sure to become a miserable ad ridden experience at some point; and of course, all passenger actions and intonations will be parsed and analyzed for tracking and ad targeting.
- tmpz22 6y agoI guess the idealists would say "Waymo will be so wildly profitable that its holding company will opt not to pursue secondary revenue streams such as advertising and data resale".
- dodobirdlord 6y agoThe “Google deprecates stuff” thing is a tired meme that’s obviously not applicable. Waymo cost a ton of money to create. The most significant thing Google has ever given up on was Google+ and that wasn’t until the product had basically been dead for 7 years. Sure, Google likes to shut down dead products and unmonitized side-projects when nobody wants to run them anymore, but there’s no basis for the idea that Google shuts down products more significant than Google+ was in its dying year.
- shaftway 6y agoAnd frankly the technologies that were built to support Google+ have evolved into the underlying technologies for almost every new project at Google. Even with the failure of Google+ as a product the value of what was developed probably still makes Google+ a net positive on the balance sheets. Source: am Google engineer
- foobiekr 6y agoI don't think this is odd at all. If you look at the space, there's the Waymo approach - which is safety and comprehensibility first - and not very many companies taking this other than Cruise. Instead, you have this pile of companies who are pursuing mostly-deep-learning solutions, including half a dozen startups of various levels of craziness and Tesla. That scheme is unlikely to actually result in a safe outcome.
- ehsankia 6y agoIndeed, it's Uber, Tesla and comma.ai which make the whole industry seem reckless. And as shown by Uber, a single accident can take down your entire project (and honestly put back the industry as a whole), so it is reckless in more way than one. Waymo figured that out very early on, and it's a lesson others may find out the hard way.
- kuroguro 6y agoComma I could forgive - it's positioned more like a toy for developers than an actual full featured product. But yeah, agree on the other points.