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I think most people who specialize in this area on HN know that L5 (or even L4) on existing vehicles on the road today is unlikely to happen. Waymo is by far th

I think most people who specialize in this area on HN know that L5 (or even L4) on existing vehicles on the road today is unlikely to happen. Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush. Autonomous cars are coming. They just will come first to specific areas where the cars are more experienced, like waymo does in Phoenix, and the cars themselves will be purpose built. As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers. It’s crazy irresponsible that Tesla switched on what they did and marketed it as FSD, and it’ll set back self driving cars years when people start getting into collisions.

cozzyd 6y ago
Is waymo (or anyone) working on autonomous buses? Seems more practical for a first deployment (~fixed route, higher capital cost, operator salary is the greatest cost).
- H8crilA 6y ago
  That sounds like a good idea/question, but a side question from me - driver salary is really the main cost? I'd imagine fleet depreciation to be the main (non-cash) expense.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    I'm no expert, but it's what I heard. But back of the the envelope, a bus costs O($500k) and lasts O(20 years), but you have to pay for multiple FTE operators per bus. Obviously maintenance and fuel also cost money but not as much as a (typically unionized) operator. If an autonomous bus costs twice as much I think it still wins out. Maybe you still need a conductor to make sure people pay and don't act antisocially but such a person can probably be much cheaper/less skilled.
    - zdw 6y ago
      Fleet maintenance is also a huge fixed cost, and improvements to bus technology that reduce maintenance are a neutral impact when it comes to driver/driverless as options.
    - throwawayboise 6y ago
      It doesn't take that much skill to drive a bus. College kids and retirees do it for part time income. I'd think the conductor/security guard would be as expensive if not more expensive than the driver.
    - simion314 6y ago
      >but not as much as a (typically unionized) operator. Why do you need to specify the "unionized" drivers? Do they cost more? Why? because they are paid fair(like paid extra if they have to work on Christmas or extra hours)? Or maybe they union negotiated to keep the salary in sync with inflation?
      - cozzyd 6y ago
        Yes, because they get paid more compared to e.g. an Uber driver, and also there are typically things like minimum shift lengths and required breaks. It's not a bad thing, but helps explain why operator costs tend to be dominant.
- aeternum 6y ago
  It's pretty crazy how much city buses cost. I think I saw that NC hybrid busses cost 800k each. You can buy a lot of cars/vans for that much and probably have more capacity and happier riders since the trips will be more frequent and more direct.
  - codyb 6y ago
    More capacity than a bus in cars seems unlikely given that they probably wouldn’t be packed to capacity most times. I guess if you purchased say, 40 honda civics? There’s a lot of other considerations to consider here as well. Cars and vans would both take up more space for the same amount of people which means more traffic which leads to slower speeds and more noise and air pollution. Cleaning all these cars and vans would require more workers than cleaning the equivalent number of busses either by capitol or by riders. Cars and vans require more space to park. There’d be far more maintenance for cars and vans than busses. Busses are equipped with handicap ramps, bike racks, and seats to accomodate the differently abled, as well as payment processors. These features all drive up costs. Tech only solutions can prevent access to transportation for indigent and differently abled populations. More cars and vans means more road wear. And of course the lifetimes of the vehicles may differ adding in other costs.
    - cozzyd 6y ago
      Other than road wear, I think you're right about everything else (pretty sure the road wear is much worse from a bus than any number of cars).
    - perl4ever 6y ago
      It's really hard to fill buses to capacity too. If you want people to be able to rely on the buses, then they have to go everywhere all the time. But if they go everywhere, there will be enough of them that are mostly empty that the average efficiency might be less than cars. In reality, they compromise. I live in a not-very large city. I used to rent an apartment in a suburb to the southeast just a few miles out, and the bus only made one trip in the morning to the city and one trip in the afternoon back, and if you didn't work the exact hours that you could catch the bus, like my job was 9-6 or 2-11, etc., you were out of luck. Now, I live within city limits, in the southwest, but there is no bus route going north-south to where I work (or did before covid), because most of the traffic goes east to downtown and back, so that's how all the routes go. There aren't many routes or stops to the north and west. When I was living in an apartment in a slightly different suburb, there were more frequent buses, but they were almost empty when I rode them. You can't assume that they're saving resources in any circumstance.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Is waymo (or anyone) working on autonomous buses? Las Vegas had autonomous buses for a while, but they're gone. Too slow and the routes were very limited for some reason.
- berkes 6y ago
  Is operator salary the highest cost? I'm honestly curious, and it sounds logical. But it also sounds like a statement that just keeps being repeated without it being confirmed, or universally true.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    This is where I heard it, from a transit consultant: https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html
- einarfd 6y ago
  The transport authority in Oslo (Ruter#), has been running self driving services for a few years now and there is some info about it at https://ruter.no/en/about-ruter/reports-projects-plans/autonomous-vehicles/ https://ruter.no/en/about-ruter/reports-projects-plans/auton... . I don't live in a part of town they've been experimenting in. But what I've seen indicates that what they are doing is running slow moving, small self driving busses in areas where it would not be cost efficient to use a bus with a driver. Since they are slow driving, the self driving problem is a lot easier, you don't have to see that far off, and stopping is faster so you don't need to model the future far out to be safe. In addition low speed collision are safer, which makes failures safer aswell.
zelon88 6y ago
> As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers. So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Let's not. If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  > So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Most of America has no public transit, and cars are mandatory to transit any appreciable distance (Texas, Florida, most of California, for example). That is unlikely to change, and therefore it is reasonable to discuss efforts and resources into improving environment attributes for self driving vehicles of all manufacturers. Roads are already governed by safety and regulatory standards, there is no reason those standards setting bodies should not take input from developers of self driving vehicles. > If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference. Sure, that stop sign (or rather, the roadway segment attributes necessary for the vehicle to infer that a stop is required) should be in OpenStreetMap anyway, which should be used as canonical digital ground truth for roadway intents by automakers, regulators, and roadway O&M alike.
  - zelon88 6y ago
    You want everyone to invest in a technology that currently only benefits a select few. Why don't we invest that money in making current technology economical before we go asking single mothers driving clapped out Ford Taurus's to pay for it.
    - toomuchtodo 6y ago
      How else is the technology going to benefit everyone if not for spending resources on it and scaling up? That is the investment. No one donated Tesla the capital required for a $600 million global Supercharger network; their Model S and X buyers ("wealthy consumers of goods") paid for that (out of vehicle margins). Self driving vehicles will be no different, and those capabilities will trickle down as most technology does over time, from only the wealthy paying for it ($10k is a hard pill to swallow for Autopilot) to mass adoption.
fractionalhare 6y ago
Speaking as someone outside the autonomous vehicle industry, can you provide sources or reputable commentary on how Waymo is furthest ahead? And maybe a rough ranking of the rest of the major players?
- nemothekid 6y ago
  The only public data is California's safety reports over the last couple years, which show Cruise and Waymo having millions of miles driven with Waymo having fewer "disengagements" than Cruise. There is also the fact that Waymo has ride sharing service in "production". As someone who is also outside the AV industry that is the closest I've gotten to a source, everything else is just hearsay by various Hacker News engineers about how Waymo is the best. The ranking as I understand it is Waymo, Cruise, then everyone else.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    > The ranking as I understand it is Waymo, Cruise, then everyone else. Waymo (Google) drives around in the same circle every day in sunny Mountain View, Calif. Those "millions of miles" are worthless regulatory padding - it's the same 3 miles over and over.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  You might want to have a look into the public output of George Hotz. Obviously he is a little biased towards his own efforts, but he is very open about limitations and the actual reality of the self driving business. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuU5L2MEII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuU5L2MEII Note: He regularly runs a Twitch livestream coding stuff in the space, recordings are on YouTube, very high signal low noise stuff there.
pasquinelli 6y ago
the infrastructure will gradually shift from making roads safe for humans to making it safe for robots, meaning it will gradually become hostile to humans. as it gradually gets hostile to humans, they will have to use robots to get around, and so private capital will be able to extract rent from public infrastructure, and the public will still be responsible for maintaining and upgrading that infrastructure, at least until the body is killed by its parasites. isn't that the vision of über, and why so much investment has gone to it? isn't that all big tech does?
- frenchy 6y ago
  That sounds like a good business model if you ask me!
  - berkes 6y ago
    It sounds like 'public transport' to me. Which I consider a great idea, and something valuable. But certainly not a good business model.
- lalaithion 6y ago
  Roads are already hostile to humans. We need to make human islands, areas where the roads have been converted into gardens or grassy areas, where people can walk freely without cars. And then make safe, robot friendly ways to transport humans between them.
  - JKCalhoun 6y ago
    Sounds like trains, street cars.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Geezus_42 6y ago
      "train good, car bad"
andrewtbham 6y ago
waymo can't scale. If you're interested in the state of fsd listen to this andrej karpathy podcast. Not Ford's PR department https://twitter.com/pabbeel/status/1374450544475992064?lang=en https://twitter.com/pabbeel/status/1374450544475992064?lang=...
- mdorazio 6y ago
  You're telling people not to listen to Ford PR, and instead pointing them to a podcast by a higher-up at Tesla with a very clear bias and incentive to talk shit about competitors? Dude... Waymo can scale as fast as they want to via partnerships like the one they have with Chrysler already. Other companies will build the vehicles and add the hardware, Waymo will handle the software. Not everyone has to do everything in-house like Tesla does.
  - arcanon 6y ago
    No, they’re directing you to an engineering expert rather than someone in marketing.
    - mdbug 6y ago
      ... who nevertheless works for Tesla and has the stated incentives.
- chubot 6y ago
  I agree Waymo can't scale, but I think that was apparent 5 years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632588 -- comment a year ago on the end of Starsky Robotics (good blog post) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633543 -- further down in the thread quoting Chris Urmson from March 2016, and also Bill Gurley from 2018 Sure things could have changed, but by all accounts they haven't, given the lack of deployment. They took 5 years to get to 90%, another 5 to get to 99%, and will take roughly the same amount of time to get to 99.9%, etc. And that doesn't mean they're done. (I have been following this for at least 10 years, and I also worked on a college project in autonomous vehicles 21 years ago. It was not good, but the deployment and philosophical issues are identical to the ones back then IMO.)
mlindner 6y ago
Waymo isn't selling cars to customers though and has no plans to. They want to run a taxi service like Uber. They don't want the liability of customers owning the vehicles and maybe modifying them and then getting bad press exactly like Tesla gets over it's system. Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  It makes lots of sense to me that they would target miles transported vs owners. When I lived ~10 miles outside of a town, I would have been fine not having a car if I could reliably summon cheap transport. In a small town, all the same. The amount of waiting matters, but not that much.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Why does the US need car ownership? wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Owning a car means you get the exact 2 hours you need rather than waiting for the 2 hours a taxi company will sell you. It means you can use the car as 24 hour storage for all the things you keep in your car. It means sometimes you can use the car for way more than 2 hours in a day. You can share the car with other people at minimal additional cost. It means you can live in a rural place 2 hours from the nearest taxi company and not have to pay for 2 hours of additional time as the empty taxi comes to you and 2 hours more when it returns after you're done with it. For many people a robot taxi is a viable alternative to car ownership, but for plenty of people owning a car is always going to be a better option.
  - mxschumacher 6y ago
    The trouble with this capacity utilization argument is that the driving happens roughly at the same time. One could also argue that we can get rid of 2/3 of beds because humans sleep only 8 out of 24 hours on average. Aside from many practical limitations, the trouble is that the majority of people sleep in the same timeframe.
perl4ever 6y ago
I have one of the cheaper cars that has some of the newly standard assistance tech, and after about six months, I think the best of it is the adaptive cruise control. I didn't think it was more than a gimmick at first, but I've started using it, and it transfers a significant mental burden so that I feel more relaxed on the highway, almost as if I was a passenger. It complements a hybrid very well; somehow it's psychologically easier to follow someone slow when the car automatically keeps its distance. However, the lane keeping assist does not seem like a good idea to me. It sort of works, but I never know if it will lose track of the lane suddenly. When there is an exit or something that breaks the lines, I think of the Tesla crash I read about. When there is a curve in the road, it seems like there is a threshold beyond which it doesn't try to follow. So it amounts to an unpredictable resistance of the power steering, and doesn't reduce the driver's workload at all, in my opinion. Maybe it's supposed to be used on straight highways, but if it worked without attention for a while, that seems even more hazardous. I wonder if that could be a direction to go in - future cars could let the driver steer, but mostly figure out going and stopping on their own.
- j4yav 6y ago
  I don’t think I could feel relaxed enough to be like a passenger after seeing the crash videos. The failure state seems to be suddenly doing something completely insane, and I’m not sure if I was relaxed I could assess and correct the situation quickly enough.
- sunsipples 6y ago
  I have a 2020 Hyundai, top spec but still just a Hyundai. It has great lane departure warning and it's very accurate. It picks up the difference between solid/double/broken white lines and lane changing/merging/splitting. We took it around a local race track and it followed the track markings on everything but a hairpin which it applies brakes and took us to a complete stop. If it wasn't for the driver attention settings (no steering wheel feedback from driver, the car will also stop) it could have almost been an unassisted drive. Still won't trust it though
  - mahkeiro 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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Marazan 6y ago
"Full self driving cars" that require a seperate set of infrastructure to operate are not "Full self driving cars" This is a fundamental thing. Robot cars that can't interact with humans without killing them at a greater rate than humans do are not self driving.
- grey-area 6y ago
  Tesla cars (for example) already interact with humans without killing them at a greater rate than human drivers. That is not the bar to pass here, as robot drivers have already surpassed it. L5 is way beyond that.
  - thebruce87m 6y ago
    Is there any independent data to support the claim in your first paragraph?
    - grey-area 6y ago
      I don’t think so, and it would be hard to collect truly independent data on miles driven for example, though the data from Tesla is pretty convincing and no public data I can find contradicts it. They’re not safe in all conditions and I wouldn’t personally pay for their ‘FSD’ product but they’re safer than the average human in average conditions (a very low bar).
      - rcxdude 6y ago
        The data says Tesla's autopilot is in the safest conditions better than the average human in average conditions. It does not say that it is safer than the average human in the safest conditions, nor that it is safer when in average conditions.
  - Marazan 6y ago
    Not in "full self driving" mode. Because they don't have a full self driving mode.
  - 6y ago
elisharobinson 6y ago
I still dont understand how why waymo is still in the FSD discussion. Its a science project on wheels, Which will never make it to market.
- mdbug 6y ago
  You're probably trolling, but in case you're not aware, Waymo is the only company that offers a level-4 robotaxi service, albeit only available in a small region.
  - arcanon 6y ago
    How many of them are there? 600? Whats their manufacturing roadmap look like?
    - mdbug 6y ago
      I don't know. You can probably figure that out on your own if you want to.
      - arcanon 6y ago
        I save up my reputation so I can spend it on threads like this ;)
  - elisharobinson 6y ago
    No im not trolling actually ... its about as feasible as running a taxi service with Ferrari's all while having comparable revenue to a uber driver .. it just wont work , it can not scale capex is to high.
- arcanon 6y ago
  Furthermore their CEO just had to step down.
bobthepanda 6y ago
> As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers. At least in the US, my major concern would not really be building it right the first time (though there are plenty of places where we don't even do that), but maintaining it over time. Many jurisdictions can barely keep the paint legible on the roads, so autonomous cars are just going to have to deal with poor or deferred maintenance.
chakhs 6y ago
If you're gonna have to build infrastructure for it, trains would be better
- Closi 6y ago
  The infrastructure required for trains is many times more expensive than road, so ends up being impractical. Trains can't pass each other, so you will need multiple lines with lots of trains, and they don't serve all transport needs unless you manage to get rail outside all shops for instance.
  - ganafagol 6y ago
    And that difference is also what makes self driving on roads so much harder that on rails.
  - belorn 6y ago
    Where I live and based on what I can find, train is cheaper per km and per personkm that get traveled. Roads outside of shops is a small minority of all roads, and we are currently undergoing a change in how city planning is handling commercial districts, with movements towards the edges or online. There are however major problems with train networks, one being that lack of redundancy. With road maintenance you can shutdown a major highway and redirect traffic temporary to smaller roads with significant reduction in speed. With trains you either have the option to go around the maintenance, or you replace the train temporarily with road based travel. A second big problem with train infrastructure is the lack of an obvious upgrade path. With roads you build a new highway when security, air pollution and noise become too severe for smaller towns around the old road, and the better road also adds higher capacity and faster allowed speeds for transportation. There are so many incentives to upgrade old roads, and with an increasing population it makes traffic heavier for old roads, speeding up demand for better and bigger roads that runs outside the towns. For rails, there is mostly just an economic argument in favor of building more. The reduction in car travel is not significant enough compared to building a new road outside the limits of the smaller towns.
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
I can't decide if Elon Musk and Tesla believe the claims he's been saying, or knows that he can't deliver anytime soon but has some end game planned. Surely the AI developers understand the issues that still have be resolved for safe driverless operation. They must have seen their own and the customer test videos that look terrifying. There's a 1000 fold increase in ability needed from 'intelligent lane assist' to your car dropping your kids off at hockey practice then picking you up from work by itself. Will the definition of FSD be slowly reworded, or are they careful to never state the delivery date for it in contracts. Or will Tesla rely on traffic authorities not approving the technology, so they can say that they've delivered but government won't let customers use it.
- Ambolia 6y ago
  I don't think he does, like the "Mars by 2024" thing. He is good at hype, not judging, but not buting it either.
- mike_d 6y ago
  He is an "idea guy." At this point most companies shove the founder off to be Chief Innovation Officer or something and let them keep coming up with ideas, but bring in an adult to run things day-to-day. SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.
  - 987yghj 6y ago
    He's an engineer who actively participates in the design of several wildly successful products AND he runs several extremely successful companies AND has successfully founded, ran and sold companies in the past, e.g. PayPal. We need more people like him in charge.
    - deleted 6y ago
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Shivetya 6y ago
Waymo works like a rail shooter. You cannot go where they have not built detailed maps down to curbs and such. It says so on their site. That is not FSD but instead a theme park ride. While I own a Tesla model 3 with FSD I am more impressed by what is shown on youtube by beta testers than by anything my car can do. Simply put, Telsa only recently changed their entire FSD suite to include maintaining an active awareness of all labeled objects which in itself is greatly improved as my car clearly does not see everything. Think of it this way, current versions work on a very short moment of time so and don't have labels for everything it can see which leads to missing parked vehicles (as in how did that survive this long) and more. My favorite example is my car rendering cones around a parked cable/phone truck but not the damn truck! It also had fun with a garbage truck doing a great job rendering the guy and cans and with the truck not always there but immediately real once it moved. As for buying FSD, don't. Regular autopilot provides the driver assistance people can actually use on long trips. Which is, keeps you safe if you get distracted or worse. Plus there is still an issue with trade ins to Tesla, pretty much they were assigning ZERO dollars for FSD. So until Tesla provides a transfer fee or puts FSD at the account level I am never buying another one. FSD needs to be at the account level. It would actually make Tesla more money as they could then sell a subscription for those who only need it for trips.
calyth2018 6y ago
> Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush. You're absolutely correct, but there are far more people who want to make the argument that Tesla's ahead because they're "beta" on roads and "don't need LIDAR". There's optimism, and there's reality-distortion field. I think a lot of people bought into the latter.

cozzyd 6y ago

Is waymo (or anyone) working on autonomous buses? Seems more practical for a first deployment (~fixed route, higher capital cost, operator salary is the greatest cost).

H8crilA 6y ago
That sounds like a good idea/question, but a side question from me - driver salary is really the main cost? I'd imagine fleet depreciation to be the main (non-cash) expense.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  I'm no expert, but it's what I heard. But back of the the envelope, a bus costs O($500k) and lasts O(20 years), but you have to pay for multiple FTE operators per bus. Obviously maintenance and fuel also cost money but not as much as a (typically unionized) operator. If an autonomous bus costs twice as much I think it still wins out. Maybe you still need a conductor to make sure people pay and don't act antisocially but such a person can probably be much cheaper/less skilled.
  - zdw 6y ago
    Fleet maintenance is also a huge fixed cost, and improvements to bus technology that reduce maintenance are a neutral impact when it comes to driver/driverless as options.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    It doesn't take that much skill to drive a bus. College kids and retirees do it for part time income. I'd think the conductor/security guard would be as expensive if not more expensive than the driver.
  - simion314 6y ago
    >but not as much as a (typically unionized) operator. Why do you need to specify the "unionized" drivers? Do they cost more? Why? because they are paid fair(like paid extra if they have to work on Christmas or extra hours)? Or maybe they union negotiated to keep the salary in sync with inflation?
    - cozzyd 6y ago
      Yes, because they get paid more compared to e.g. an Uber driver, and also there are typically things like minimum shift lengths and required breaks. It's not a bad thing, but helps explain why operator costs tend to be dominant.
aeternum 6y ago
It's pretty crazy how much city buses cost. I think I saw that NC hybrid busses cost 800k each. You can buy a lot of cars/vans for that much and probably have more capacity and happier riders since the trips will be more frequent and more direct.
- codyb 6y ago
  More capacity than a bus in cars seems unlikely given that they probably wouldn’t be packed to capacity most times. I guess if you purchased say, 40 honda civics? There’s a lot of other considerations to consider here as well. Cars and vans would both take up more space for the same amount of people which means more traffic which leads to slower speeds and more noise and air pollution. Cleaning all these cars and vans would require more workers than cleaning the equivalent number of busses either by capitol or by riders. Cars and vans require more space to park. There’d be far more maintenance for cars and vans than busses. Busses are equipped with handicap ramps, bike racks, and seats to accomodate the differently abled, as well as payment processors. These features all drive up costs. Tech only solutions can prevent access to transportation for indigent and differently abled populations. More cars and vans means more road wear. And of course the lifetimes of the vehicles may differ adding in other costs.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    Other than road wear, I think you're right about everything else (pretty sure the road wear is much worse from a bus than any number of cars).
  - perl4ever 6y ago
    It's really hard to fill buses to capacity too. If you want people to be able to rely on the buses, then they have to go everywhere all the time. But if they go everywhere, there will be enough of them that are mostly empty that the average efficiency might be less than cars. In reality, they compromise. I live in a not-very large city. I used to rent an apartment in a suburb to the southeast just a few miles out, and the bus only made one trip in the morning to the city and one trip in the afternoon back, and if you didn't work the exact hours that you could catch the bus, like my job was 9-6 or 2-11, etc., you were out of luck. Now, I live within city limits, in the southwest, but there is no bus route going north-south to where I work (or did before covid), because most of the traffic goes east to downtown and back, so that's how all the routes go. There aren't many routes or stops to the north and west. When I was living in an apartment in a slightly different suburb, there were more frequent buses, but they were almost empty when I rode them. You can't assume that they're saving resources in any circumstance.
reaperducer 6y ago
Is waymo (or anyone) working on autonomous buses? Las Vegas had autonomous buses for a while, but they're gone. Too slow and the routes were very limited for some reason.
berkes 6y ago
Is operator salary the highest cost? I'm honestly curious, and it sounds logical. But it also sounds like a statement that just keeps being repeated without it being confirmed, or universally true.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  This is where I heard it, from a transit consultant: https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html https://humantransit.org/2011/07/02box.html
einarfd 6y ago
The transport authority in Oslo (Ruter#), has been running self driving services for a few years now and there is some info about it at https://ruter.no/en/about-ruter/reports-projects-plans/autonomous-vehicles/ https://ruter.no/en/about-ruter/reports-projects-plans/auton... . I don't live in a part of town they've been experimenting in. But what I've seen indicates that what they are doing is running slow moving, small self driving busses in areas where it would not be cost efficient to use a bus with a driver. Since they are slow driving, the self driving problem is a lot easier, you don't have to see that far off, and stopping is faster so you don't need to model the future far out to be safe. In addition low speed collision are safer, which makes failures safer aswell.

zelon88 6y ago

toomuchtodo 6y ago
> So we subsidize the cost of high end luxury items? Most of America has no public transit, and cars are mandatory to transit any appreciable distance (Texas, Florida, most of California, for example). That is unlikely to change, and therefore it is reasonable to discuss efforts and resources into improving environment attributes for self driving vehicles of all manufacturers. Roads are already governed by safety and regulatory standards, there is no reason those standards setting bodies should not take input from developers of self driving vehicles. > If the technology is ready, a faded stop sign shouldn't make any difference. Sure, that stop sign (or rather, the roadway segment attributes necessary for the vehicle to infer that a stop is required) should be in OpenStreetMap anyway, which should be used as canonical digital ground truth for roadway intents by automakers, regulators, and roadway O&M alike.
- zelon88 6y ago
  You want everyone to invest in a technology that currently only benefits a select few. Why don't we invest that money in making current technology economical before we go asking single mothers driving clapped out Ford Taurus's to pay for it.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    How else is the technology going to benefit everyone if not for spending resources on it and scaling up? That is the investment. No one donated Tesla the capital required for a $600 million global Supercharger network; their Model S and X buyers ("wealthy consumers of goods") paid for that (out of vehicle margins). Self driving vehicles will be no different, and those capabilities will trickle down as most technology does over time, from only the wealthy paying for it ($10k is a hard pill to swallow for Autopilot) to mass adoption.

fractionalhare 6y ago

Speaking as someone outside the autonomous vehicle industry, can you provide sources or reputable commentary on how Waymo is furthest ahead? And maybe a rough ranking of the rest of the major players?

nemothekid 6y ago
The only public data is California's safety reports over the last couple years, which show Cruise and Waymo having millions of miles driven with Waymo having fewer "disengagements" than Cruise. There is also the fact that Waymo has ride sharing service in "production". As someone who is also outside the AV industry that is the closest I've gotten to a source, everything else is just hearsay by various Hacker News engineers about how Waymo is the best. The ranking as I understand it is Waymo, Cruise, then everyone else.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  > The ranking as I understand it is Waymo, Cruise, then everyone else. Waymo (Google) drives around in the same circle every day in sunny Mountain View, Calif. Those "millions of miles" are worthless regulatory padding - it's the same 3 miles over and over.
dna_polymerase 6y ago
You might want to have a look into the public output of George Hotz. Obviously he is a little biased towards his own efforts, but he is very open about limitations and the actual reality of the self driving business. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuU5L2MEII https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxuU5L2MEII Note: He regularly runs a Twitch livestream coding stuff in the space, recordings are on YouTube, very high signal low noise stuff there.

pasquinelli 6y ago

the infrastructure will gradually shift from making roads safe for humans to making it safe for robots, meaning it will gradually become hostile to humans. as it gradually gets hostile to humans, they will have to use robots to get around, and so private capital will be able to extract rent from public infrastructure, and the public will still be responsible for maintaining and upgrading that infrastructure, at least until the body is killed by its parasites. isn't that the vision of über, and why so much investment has gone to it? isn't that all big tech does?

frenchy 6y ago
That sounds like a good business model if you ask me!
- berkes 6y ago
  It sounds like 'public transport' to me. Which I consider a great idea, and something valuable. But certainly not a good business model.
lalaithion 6y ago
Roads are already hostile to humans. We need to make human islands, areas where the roads have been converted into gardens or grassy areas, where people can walk freely without cars. And then make safe, robot friendly ways to transport humans between them.
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Sounds like trains, street cars.
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  - Geezus_42 6y ago
    "train good, car bad"

andrewtbham 6y ago

waymo can't scale. If you're interested in the state of fsd listen to this andrej karpathy podcast. Not Ford's PR department https://twitter.com/pabbeel/status/1374450544475992064?lang=en https://twitter.com/pabbeel/status/1374450544475992064?lang=...

mdorazio 6y ago
You're telling people not to listen to Ford PR, and instead pointing them to a podcast by a higher-up at Tesla with a very clear bias and incentive to talk shit about competitors? Dude... Waymo can scale as fast as they want to via partnerships like the one they have with Chrysler already. Other companies will build the vehicles and add the hardware, Waymo will handle the software. Not everyone has to do everything in-house like Tesla does.
- arcanon 6y ago
  No, they’re directing you to an engineering expert rather than someone in marketing.
  - mdbug 6y ago
    ... who nevertheless works for Tesla and has the stated incentives.
chubot 6y ago
I agree Waymo can't scale, but I think that was apparent 5 years ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632588 -- comment a year ago on the end of Starsky Robotics (good blog post) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22633543 -- further down in the thread quoting Chris Urmson from March 2016, and also Bill Gurley from 2018 Sure things could have changed, but by all accounts they haven't, given the lack of deployment. They took 5 years to get to 90%, another 5 to get to 99%, and will take roughly the same amount of time to get to 99.9%, etc. And that doesn't mean they're done. (I have been following this for at least 10 years, and I also worked on a college project in autonomous vehicles 21 years ago. It was not good, but the deployment and philosophical issues are identical to the ones back then IMO.)

mlindner 6y ago

Waymo isn't selling cars to customers though and has no plans to. They want to run a taxi service like Uber. They don't want the liability of customers owning the vehicles and maybe modifying them and then getting bad press exactly like Tesla gets over it's system. Waymo and Uber seem to be of the opinion that car ownership is going to disappear which continues to boggle my mind. The US absolutely needs car ownership for anyone not living downtown in a city, which is over 50% of the US population. People shouldn't be looking at them as examples.

maxerickson 6y ago
It makes lots of sense to me that they would target miles transported vs owners. When I lived ~10 miles outside of a town, I would have been fine not having a car if I could reliably summon cheap transport. In a small town, all the same. The amount of waiting matters, but not that much.
colinmhayes 6y ago
Why does the US need car ownership? wouldn't fleets that are constantly bringing in revenue be more efficient than everyone owning a car and driving maybe 2 hours a day?
- onion2k 6y ago
  Owning a car means you get the exact 2 hours you need rather than waiting for the 2 hours a taxi company will sell you. It means you can use the car as 24 hour storage for all the things you keep in your car. It means sometimes you can use the car for way more than 2 hours in a day. You can share the car with other people at minimal additional cost. It means you can live in a rural place 2 hours from the nearest taxi company and not have to pay for 2 hours of additional time as the empty taxi comes to you and 2 hours more when it returns after you're done with it. For many people a robot taxi is a viable alternative to car ownership, but for plenty of people owning a car is always going to be a better option.
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  The trouble with this capacity utilization argument is that the driving happens roughly at the same time. One could also argue that we can get rid of 2/3 of beds because humans sleep only 8 out of 24 hours on average. Aside from many practical limitations, the trouble is that the majority of people sleep in the same timeframe.

perl4ever 6y ago

I have one of the cheaper cars that has some of the newly standard assistance tech, and after about six months, I think the best of it is the adaptive cruise control. I didn't think it was more than a gimmick at first, but I've started using it, and it transfers a significant mental burden so that I feel more relaxed on the highway, almost as if I was a passenger. It complements a hybrid very well; somehow it's psychologically easier to follow someone slow when the car automatically keeps its distance. However, the lane keeping assist does not seem like a good idea to me. It sort of works, but I never know if it will lose track of the lane suddenly. When there is an exit or something that breaks the lines, I think of the Tesla crash I read about. When there is a curve in the road, it seems like there is a threshold beyond which it doesn't try to follow. So it amounts to an unpredictable resistance of the power steering, and doesn't reduce the driver's workload at all, in my opinion. Maybe it's supposed to be used on straight highways, but if it worked without attention for a while, that seems even more hazardous. I wonder if that could be a direction to go in - future cars could let the driver steer, but mostly figure out going and stopping on their own.

j4yav 6y ago
I don’t think I could feel relaxed enough to be like a passenger after seeing the crash videos. The failure state seems to be suddenly doing something completely insane, and I’m not sure if I was relaxed I could assess and correct the situation quickly enough.
sunsipples 6y ago
I have a 2020 Hyundai, top spec but still just a Hyundai. It has great lane departure warning and it's very accurate. It picks up the difference between solid/double/broken white lines and lane changing/merging/splitting. We took it around a local race track and it followed the track markings on everything but a hairpin which it applies brakes and took us to a complete stop. If it wasn't for the driver attention settings (no steering wheel feedback from driver, the car will also stop) it could have almost been an unassisted drive. Still won't trust it though
- mahkeiro 6y ago

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Marazan 6y ago

"Full self driving cars" that require a seperate set of infrastructure to operate are not "Full self driving cars" This is a fundamental thing. Robot cars that can't interact with humans without killing them at a greater rate than humans do are not self driving.

grey-area 6y ago
Tesla cars (for example) already interact with humans without killing them at a greater rate than human drivers. That is not the bar to pass here, as robot drivers have already surpassed it. L5 is way beyond that.
- thebruce87m 6y ago
  Is there any independent data to support the claim in your first paragraph?
  - grey-area 6y ago
    I don’t think so, and it would be hard to collect truly independent data on miles driven for example, though the data from Tesla is pretty convincing and no public data I can find contradicts it. They’re not safe in all conditions and I wouldn’t personally pay for their ‘FSD’ product but they’re safer than the average human in average conditions (a very low bar).
    - rcxdude 6y ago
      The data says Tesla's autopilot is in the safest conditions better than the average human in average conditions. It does not say that it is safer than the average human in the safest conditions, nor that it is safer when in average conditions.
- Marazan 6y ago
  Not in "full self driving" mode. Because they don't have a full self driving mode.
- 6y ago

elisharobinson 6y ago

I still dont understand how why waymo is still in the FSD discussion. Its a science project on wheels, Which will never make it to market.

mdbug 6y ago
You're probably trolling, but in case you're not aware, Waymo is the only company that offers a level-4 robotaxi service, albeit only available in a small region.
- arcanon 6y ago
  How many of them are there? 600? Whats their manufacturing roadmap look like?
  - mdbug 6y ago
    I don't know. You can probably figure that out on your own if you want to.
    - arcanon 6y ago
      I save up my reputation so I can spend it on threads like this ;)
- elisharobinson 6y ago
  No im not trolling actually ... its about as feasible as running a taxi service with Ferrari's all while having comparable revenue to a uber driver .. it just wont work , it can not scale capex is to high.
arcanon 6y ago
Furthermore their CEO just had to step down.

bobthepanda 6y ago

> As we are building more infrastructure, we could endeavor to do it in ways that make it easier for cars to drive autonomously, with things like grade separated or other protected bike lanes, clearer signage, and other accommodations that will make things easier and safer for human and ML drivers. At least in the US, my major concern would not really be building it right the first time (though there are plenty of places where we don't even do that), but maintaining it over time. Many jurisdictions can barely keep the paint legible on the roads, so autonomous cars are just going to have to deal with poor or deferred maintenance.

chakhs 6y ago

If you're gonna have to build infrastructure for it, trains would be better

Closi 6y ago
The infrastructure required for trains is many times more expensive than road, so ends up being impractical. Trains can't pass each other, so you will need multiple lines with lots of trains, and they don't serve all transport needs unless you manage to get rail outside all shops for instance.
- ganafagol 6y ago
  And that difference is also what makes self driving on roads so much harder that on rails.
- belorn 6y ago
  Where I live and based on what I can find, train is cheaper per km and per personkm that get traveled. Roads outside of shops is a small minority of all roads, and we are currently undergoing a change in how city planning is handling commercial districts, with movements towards the edges or online. There are however major problems with train networks, one being that lack of redundancy. With road maintenance you can shutdown a major highway and redirect traffic temporary to smaller roads with significant reduction in speed. With trains you either have the option to go around the maintenance, or you replace the train temporarily with road based travel. A second big problem with train infrastructure is the lack of an obvious upgrade path. With roads you build a new highway when security, air pollution and noise become too severe for smaller towns around the old road, and the better road also adds higher capacity and faster allowed speeds for transportation. There are so many incentives to upgrade old roads, and with an increasing population it makes traffic heavier for old roads, speeding up demand for better and bigger roads that runs outside the towns. For rails, there is mostly just an economic argument in favor of building more. The reduction in car travel is not significant enough compared to building a new road outside the limits of the smaller towns.

helsinkiandrew 6y ago

I can't decide if Elon Musk and Tesla believe the claims he's been saying, or knows that he can't deliver anytime soon but has some end game planned. Surely the AI developers understand the issues that still have be resolved for safe driverless operation. They must have seen their own and the customer test videos that look terrifying. There's a 1000 fold increase in ability needed from 'intelligent lane assist' to your car dropping your kids off at hockey practice then picking you up from work by itself. Will the definition of FSD be slowly reworded, or are they careful to never state the delivery date for it in contracts. Or will Tesla rely on traffic authorities not approving the technology, so they can say that they've delivered but government won't let customers use it.

Ambolia 6y ago
I don't think he does, like the "Mars by 2024" thing. He is good at hype, not judging, but not buting it either.
mike_d 6y ago
He is an "idea guy." At this point most companies shove the founder off to be Chief Innovation Officer or something and let them keep coming up with ideas, but bring in an adult to run things day-to-day. SpaceX has been wildly successful despite Elon because of that adult leadership, with actual rocket engineers and doers in management. Additionally SpaceX has military contracts that bring with them actual real enforcement of penalties, like 5 years in prison just for making a single false statement.
- 987yghj 6y ago
  He's an engineer who actively participates in the design of several wildly successful products AND he runs several extremely successful companies AND has successfully founded, ran and sold companies in the past, e.g. PayPal. We need more people like him in charge.
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Shivetya 6y ago

Waymo works like a rail shooter. You cannot go where they have not built detailed maps down to curbs and such. It says so on their site. That is not FSD but instead a theme park ride. While I own a Tesla model 3 with FSD I am more impressed by what is shown on youtube by beta testers than by anything my car can do. Simply put, Telsa only recently changed their entire FSD suite to include maintaining an active awareness of all labeled objects which in itself is greatly improved as my car clearly does not see everything. Think of it this way, current versions work on a very short moment of time so and don't have labels for everything it can see which leads to missing parked vehicles (as in how did that survive this long) and more. My favorite example is my car rendering cones around a parked cable/phone truck but not the damn truck! It also had fun with a garbage truck doing a great job rendering the guy and cans and with the truck not always there but immediately real once it moved. As for buying FSD, don't. Regular autopilot provides the driver assistance people can actually use on long trips. Which is, keeps you safe if you get distracted or worse. Plus there is still an issue with trade ins to Tesla, pretty much they were assigning ZERO dollars for FSD. So until Tesla provides a transfer fee or puts FSD at the account level I am never buying another one. FSD needs to be at the account level. It would actually make Tesla more money as they could then sell a subscription for those who only need it for trips.

calyth2018 6y ago

> Waymo is by far the furthest ahead, and they are basically at a good level 4, and that’s with cars with a suite of sensors that would make any Tesla blush. You're absolutely correct, but there are far more people who want to make the argument that Tesla's ahead because they're "beta" on roads and "don't need LIDAR". There's optimism, and there's reality-distortion field. I think a lot of people bought into the latter.