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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
- supperburg 5y agohttps://youtu.be/SuZYACWhYSI https://youtu.be/SuZYACWhYSI
- joelbondurant 5y agoSucks the communist tyrant city of dystopian social authority is the first to get anything but a nuclear bomb.
- ulisesrmzroche 5y agoWhat if self-driving cars develop personalities? Like, let's say to be able to drive, you need x level of intelligence or whatever, and just happens to be the level where consciousness emerges I'm sure I got all the science wrong but do we really want cars with souls? Do they become non-human humans? Do they get the right to vote? Are they considered slaves? Even if its just horse-level smarts, that's still enough to develop consciousness, maybe. Let's just say sure. But then, what kinda relationship do you have with your car then? Another thing is that, now that everyone's working from home, there's a lot less incentive to buy cars. Who are the going to sell these cars too? Maybe they'll all be self-driving taxis. And that's a whole can of proverbial worms on its own. Politically, self-driving taxis are dead ducks.
- dorianmariefr 5y agoWhy not have a remote driver? Like call centers but for driving?
- defaulty 5y agoThe entire entire leadership team just quit and then they announce this? That makes me worried this was rushed
- bowl 5y agoWhat do you mean? It was just 1 person, albeit the CEO, who left
- gpsx 5y agoAre there any plans for a Mountain View trial? I live there.
- cgrealy 5y agoI feel like people here are missing the other factor that will drive adoption of self driving vehicles: economics. Safety is obviously important, but we already accept a decrease in safety over money and convenience (otherwise, we would have a 30kph speed limit everywhere). But most people use their car for commuting, groceries, dropping the kids to sports, etc. They may make one or two road trips a year for vacations or business. To facilitate this, a middle class family will often own two vehicles, pay tax, insurance and maintenance on said vehicles, pay for parking, etc. If that suddenly wasn't necessary, that would be a massive saving for most people. You no longer need the capital investment in something that loses value. Even better, you don't need to bring little Suzy to football, you can put her in a waymo instead (once she's old enough obviously). And when you want to go drive to see grandma, you rent a car for the longer trip. All of that depends on affordable self driving transport of course.
- danpat 5y agoEconomics has also already given us lots of information on how much money people are prepared to sink into transportation - the owners of the self-driving cars/rental companies will attempt to extract that value. I don't doubt there will be a shift in the overall economic picture, but it may not be as large for the car _user_ as we would hope. It will need to be better/cheaper in some dimension for it to get adopted, but the rent-seeking vultures are always circling, spoiling the utopia :-(
- throwaway2037 5y agoI'm confused why many people automatically assume robot taxis will be cheaper. Financial Times (Alphaville Blog): The questionable economics of autonomous taxi fleets: https://www.ft.com/content/aa05823d-e58f-33ee-a99c-d50f2fd0cb7b https://www.ft.com/content/aa05823d-e58f-33ee-a99c-d50f2fd0c... ... quotes this Harvard/MIT study: Autonomous Taxis and Public Health: High Cost or High Opportunity Cost?: https://psyarxiv.com/6e94h https://psyarxiv.com/6e94h <<<Drawing on a wealth of publicly available data, Ashley Nunes and his colleague Kristen Hernandez suggest that the price for taking an autonomous taxi will be between $1.58 to $6.01 on a per-mile basis, versus the $0.72 cost of owning a car. Using San Francisco’s taxi market as its test area, the academics examined a vast array of costs such as licensing, maintenance, fuel and insurance for their calculations.>>> I can imagine that as the world grows more urbanised, and wealth concentrates in urban areas, that people will want to pay for the convenience and safety of a robot taxi.
- robotburrito 5y agoWould getting hit by one of these things basically mean you won the lottery?
- mleonhard 5y agoDoes the Waymo One app require a Google account? If Google arbitrarily freezes my Google account, will I be unable to use Waymo and unable to talk to any human about it?
- sschueller 5y agoIf Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this. It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.
- supperburg 5y agoActually FSD works better than waymo. It hasn’t fulfilled promises of robot taxis but it’s the best and most advanced self driving system in the world, not to mention the most widely deployed, and so accusations of blatant dishonesty don’t really hold water. https://youtu.be/SuZYACWhYSI https://youtu.be/SuZYACWhYSI
- ffggvv 5y agoif they don’t have fsd then they are just an electric car company. if they are just a car company their stock should be at 50 dollars right now. hence why he’d never admit it and instead will double down with his robot that will never materialize
- panick21 5y agoNonsense. Go look at some of the models by different analyst. Even if you include no software revenue at all, you can justify a much higher stock price then you suggest. Some never include anything for FSD in the first place. And even if they don't reach FSD, they could still generate a lot of software revenue from Autopilot features. And beyond that Tesla still does more then final assembly of EV and selling them to dealerships.
- burnished 5y agoTheir current assist packages are already incredible even though they come short of full self driving. EDIT: In case my point isn't clear, if your position is predicated on the idea that anything less than full self driving is worthless garbage, you should know that is a pretty hot take. If you are instead having an emotional reaction and feel deceived I don't know what to tell you, you might have a very valid point but that doesn't appear to figure into evaluating whether a stock is under or over priced.
- tofuahdude 5y agoThis is both incredibly exciting and a little terrifying. As a pedestrian, I'm still a little weary around these cars.
- mikebonnell 5y agoAs a pedestrian, I’m terrified of all cars.
- azornathogron 5y agoLanguage tangent: I have seen this a lot recently from many different people, and I don't know if it's caused by typing on a phone or what, but I think you mean "wary" (cautious), not "weary" (tired).
- tofuahdude 5y agoIndeed I do! I am not tired of self driving cars at all and in fact look forward to more of them. Thanks for pointing out.
- boulos 5y agoDisclosure: I work at Waymo. At least the current fleets of AVs (Waymo, Cruise, etc.) are "obviously" potentially autonomous. I'm honestly more cautious now as a pedestrian when I see a Tesla coming after the FSD videos. I wish I could know "Is that Tesla owner using the FSD mode?"...
- supperburg 5y agoWhat is it about FSD that makes you fear for your safety? It seems a lot more capable than waymos solution. Edit: can’t reply because “rate limiting” That video is almost half a year old. Here’s a video from the same channel that’s 6 days old rather than 6 months old. Tesla pushes updates very frequently… https://youtu.be/y85oGY02gtg https://youtu.be/y85oGY02gtg Here’s a video where the title says it all. https://youtu.be/tdHlKhKKOgQ https://youtu.be/tdHlKhKKOgQ I read one of the latest waymo blog posts and was surprised to see how directly you guys reference Tesla. It felt like the whole thing was written for people at tesla… You differ in choice of hardware but could you tell me more about how you differ on software? Is there any meaningful difference?
- jeffbee 5y agoLast week Waymo said they are driving 100,000 miles per week in San Francisco. That figure is just bonkers. SF MTA only operates about 450,000 miles per week, and that was before COVID-19 shut them down. When one is on the streets of San Francisco does a Waymo Jaguar just drive by every couple of minutes? I honestly haven't been over there in a few months.
- seehafer 5y agoThey’re all over Potrero Hill. I see at least one daily.
- taylorlapeyre 5y agoI see them in my neighborhood at least twice a day. They don't bother me, to be honest. Just like any other car.
- specktr 5y agoThey’re also in my neighborhood - I generally see one every time I do an errand. They tend to drive 5-10 mph under the rest of traffic which can be frustrating. They also tend to be slow when making lane changes and turns to the point where it holds up other vehicles.
- genericone 5y ago5-10mph under while within the city limits, on streets where things pop out at you all the time, sounds really nice actually. It's one of the things that happen all the time that drivers ignore the possibility of.
- genericone 5y agoLong story short, yes, you do indeed see the white jaguar crossover with the spinning lidar sensors every few minutes while you are out and about. Always a different person sitting in the driver seat, yes I've checked because I didn't believe the number of Waymo cars at first either.
- 5y ago
- ecommerceguy 5y agoWaymo helps widen the gap between haves and have-nots. Lets see the next test in St Louis, Detroit or Baltimore - places where accessibility is orders of magnitude less than SF or PHX.
- cycrutchfield 5y agoThey don’t have Uber in STL, Detroit or Baltimore?
- ecommerceguy 5y agoActually getting an Uber in some parts of STL is very difficult. If you ever visited you'd find out first hand.
- purple_ferret 5y agoelon in shambles
- rpmisms 5y agoWaymo and Tesla have very different approaches to autonomy. I think both are valid avenues, but it's fascinating to watch them develop in parallel. You don't have to make it into a spiteful contest.
- purple_ferret 5y agoMost people in the Tesla camp (like George Hotz) believe Waymo is destined to fail.
- rosetremiere 5y agoWhy is that? and what are the two approaches?
- rpmisms 5y agoWaymo is trying to solve the environment. They're HD mapping every centimeter of areas they operate in, so that they can let their vision systems focus on deviations from that single source of truth. It's a reasonable approach, but it has some significant limitations, especially in terms of infrastructure. Tesla, on the other hand, is trying to make their cars work anywhere. It's a larger problem space, but the end goal is a far more robust product, with much lower long-term infrastructure spending. I personally like the robust approach, but I think both approaches are long-term viable, albeit for different use-cases.
- machinelearning 5y ago> but the end goal is a far more robust product What about Tesla's approach makes you think it is inherently more robust?
- Yajirobe 5y agoCue the haters who said Waymo is a money dump
- pavlov 5y agoExpanding to new markets and being a bottomless money dump are not mutually exclusive?
- cobookman 5y agoWaymo has raised 5.5B so far. How much does it cost to add a market and how long will it take to recoup those costs? How much are Waymo vehicle operational costs vs rider revenue? How long do Waymo vehicles last? Even with this announcement, we do not know if Waymo has a clear path to profitability.
- michaelbuckbee 5y agoI'm surprised the numbers for Phoenix are so low (10's of thousands of rides). I'm not sure if that fleet is just very small or my sense of how many rides/day a major metro can generate.
- ra7 5y agoThey operate in only a small area of Phoenix metro – Chandler and some parts of Tempe. That's why the numbers are small. My guess is Chandler is purely a testing ground for them to learn to operate a robotaxi service. Things like remote assistance, customer support, emergency protocols, fleet maintenance etc.
- judge2020 5y agoThe drivable area isn't huge[0] so it seems like it's not a choice in many situations, especially not for commuting from a further-out home. 0: https://i.redd.it/4rsg9pui55531.jpg https://i.redd.it/4rsg9pui55531.jpg
- poopypoopington 5y agoI'll never forget I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out.
- jeffbee 5y agoI discovered a few years ago that a Cruise will stop dead if it hears a horn. My bicycle happens to have an electric horn from a motorcycle. This provided some occasional amusement. I wonder if they still do that.
- chrisco255 5y agoDon't worry, the later terminator models are much more effective.
- ThePadawan 5y agoHe really does do all his own stunts.
- useful 5y agoYea it is terrifying, I had a reflective vertical zipper on a jacket while out for a run and saw a Cruise swerve towards me after it crested a small hill. I guess I looked like the new lane
- aix1 5y ago> I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out. I had to google "Cruise". To save others a moment or two, Cruise is a self-driving startup unrelated to Alphabet. In the quoted sentence, "they" != "Waymo" (I wasn't sure).
- t0rt01se 5y agoCan't wait for these to be launched in my city! Love from Dhaka.
- pm90 5y agoConsidering the Density of Dhaka, it would be much better served with public transportation/metro. While the US has a lot of Urban Sprawl, dense Asian cities have the option to invest and reap the benefits of public transportation instead. Eg im incredibly excited about all the metro lines in India, HSR in China etc.
- stickfigure 5y agoWhy did they pick Jaguar for the platform? That seems like an obscure choice.
- lifekaizen 5y agoMost likely Jaguar is involved financially and it's not a straight purchase. From Wired: "Jaguar, for its part, gets a large chunk of guaranteed sales and a chance to look like it’s at the forefront of this emerging technology." - Waymo Expands Its Robo-Fleet with Electric Jaguar SUVs, https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-buys-jaguar-suvs/ https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-buys-jaguar-suvs/
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoProbably got them for free/really cheap. Waymo has regularly looked for partnership deals with car manufacturers, driven by the push to make Waymo look good on the budget sheets. Also, companies pushing their own self-driving or ADAS solutions may be hesitant to partner with Waymo, excluding some of the large players.
- michaelt 5y agoWell, as long as the tech isn't ready to sell to consumers, 'partnering' with Waymo doesn't have all that much upside for automakers. It's not like Waymo is handing over the secret sauce or promising them exclusivity. I also suspect over the past decade Waymo has found fewer and fewer automakers fighting to make a deal with them. Jaguar doesn't have a high-profile competing autonomy effort of their own, that would create a conflict of interest and/or invite spying. The i-pace is electric, which makes integration easier and won't hurt for PR purposes. And it's luxurious enough that no matter who you're showing the tech off to, it won't be a big step down from their personal car.
- willvarfar 5y agoI can’t wait for truly autonomous cars. I live in the countryside and have to drive to collect and deliver kids, or abstain as a designated driver and so on. Self driving will change this. The aspect I dislike is the move towards hiring cars on demand instead of owning them, though.
- bluGill 5y agohiring cars on demand makes sense in dense cities where most trips would not be by car even if you owned one (walk, bike, transit...). When most trips are by car anyway you are better off owning your own car.
- travisporter 5y agoActually, if the cost of hiring is less than insurance, maintenance and fuel, I'm all for it. Don't have to be sober, find parking. Don't know if that will happen in rural areas though
- ra7 5y agoIt's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering more insights into their tech and generally seem to have increased their PR game. I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency.
- Groxx 5y agoSF is unpleasant to drive as a human, but slow, dense traffic seems like a near ideal scenario for autonomous. SF needs lots of social calculations if you don't want to get honked at, which is mentally taxing, but they're far from necessary for safety. Even fairly simple autonomous tech will have better peripheral vision at near-to-mid range than one human can manage, so for all those bikers, crazy walkers, and chaotic 15mph cars you shouldn't hit, it stands a pretty good chance of being better. And when it's not, come to a stop and you're fine (barring some honks) - few are moving fast enough to hit you dangerously hard in those human-complex areas, and you don't need to stop instantly, just fast enough. --- Honestly, I'd put SF at dramatically easier than either residential or highway roads. Residential (and adjacent) has fast-moving cars ignoring signs with obstructed vision, and inattentive humans at relatively high speed (bikers used to low traffic and swerving, kids and animals running literally through bushes adjacent to roads, general lack of care around vision-blockers like fences due to perceived low risk, etc). Who's-at-fault doesn't matter - in car vs human, humans lose, and people rightfully get upset. Highways also seem harder, if highly specialized: accurate decisions 100+ feet in advance are absolutely critical due to the speeds involved, computer vision at that range has fairly low detail compared to humans, and lidar is practically braille for "car". Radar has trouble distinguishing stopped cars from the road because neither are moving. Ultrasonics as an ultimate backup really only work up to around 10m (and that's about the distance to stop a car at 25MPH, which you'll regularly encounter in dense city traffic). I'll also point out that more people have died due to Tesla's autopilot on highways than Waymo, Uber, Cruise, heck all self-driving companies I'm aware of at any size combined. They're riding all the terminology lines they can to get away with it, and they may very well have an order of magnitude or two more miles, but I believe the point still stands - highways are hard.
- dilippkumar 5y ago> We can’t wait to hear from more San Franciscans as they experience the Waymo Driver themselves. Beginning later today, San Franciscans can sign up for the Trusted Tester program and help us shape the future of mobility in this city. Just download the Waymo One app to get involved. Anyone else got this to work? I only see a message that says "It looks like you're not in our service area..."
- zachberger 5y ago"beginning later today"
- jjulius 5y agoPerhaps they really do mean, "Beginning later today" and it will be available for your area later today?
- dilippkumar 5y agoI skimmed past that detail. Thanks!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lifekaizen 5y agoI was able to complete the signup process: requires a gmail account, email link to a qualtrics survey which asks things like name, age, where you live (if SF proper, neighborhood?). (I do live in SF and gave it location access)
- mostdataisnice 5y agoDelete the Waymo One app and reinstalling worked for me when I saw this bug.
- gfodor 5y agoKind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes: - Self driving is not possible - Self driving is not possible anytime soon - Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR - Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon if ever. I wonder which of their assumptions is wrong, if this ends up being successful.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThe big concern is that driving as a human skill is reactive and adaptive, whereas ML (and software in general) models are pre-baked. If something happens outside the car's model, it will react unpredictably, and strange circumstances can arise while driving. AGI, as based on human cognition, would have the capability to adapt to as-yet-unseen circumstances.
- XorNot 5y agoI would suggest visiting r/idiotsincars sometime. Humans are terrible at reacting to situation outside of their experience, and essentially do random things all the time. If an AI system's default response is "come to a stop safely" then it's going to be way ahead of a lot of human "unexpected situation" handling in cars.
- beaconstudios 5y agoThere are many situations where "come to a stop safely" is the worst possible thing you could do. Yes, people are bad at driving, because they don't pay attention, panic, make mistakes etc. But ML models tend to freak out at slight variations on mundane circumstances; a cyclist crossing the road at just the right angle and the wrong colour of bike, that sort of thing. The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad daylight for no discernable reason, and that seems like the kind of thing that you'd need a mind for. It's the same issue as with adversarial image manipulation to fool image recognition; if changing 3 pixels can turn a frog into a toaster, you aren't really "seeing" the frog at all in a symbolic way, and not seeing a road symbolically seems like a recipe for disaster.
- eachro 5y agoSF seems like not the best place to pilot this from a risk management perspective (ex: homeless people messing with the cars).
- pm90 5y agoIt says they will have a human onboard at all times.
- eachro 5y agoI remember this one bit from a video on self driving cars back a few years ago where someone basically said that self driving cars would not work well in cities because people will always want to mess with the cars just because they can. Consider how in the early 2000s when people would mess around with AIM's smarterchild chat bot and gave it outlandish scenarios just to see how it would react. I have to imagine you might see something similar here with these cars but you're right that having a human onboard would probably curtail these interactions.
- yupper32 5y agoIs everyone forgetting that they have a ton of cameras, sensors, lidar, etc on their cars? Messing with the cars means they have a full 3D video of you doing it.
- enahs-sf 5y agoI guess all that driving around the avenues in the middle of the night paid off.
- dotBen 5y agoYes and the marketing copy that says "grab a bite in Sunset or visit Golden Gate Park" kind of implies the Ave's will the service area. I don't think it's going to be downtown and Soma, yet.
- matchbok 5y agoGreat, they built a smaller, more expensive, less flexible, and less useful BUS. No city should be encouraging this. Every trip that this would solve for is also solved for by public transit. So silly.
- kevinkimball 5y agoIf buses were a better alternative, people would take the bus. Unfortunately MUNI does not seem willing or able to compete on convenience
- lifekaizen 5y agoPoint to point goes where you want, when you want. Buses can be better for taking more people at once, cheap to the riders (if subsidized), but here in SF the service is so erratic it is difficult to use for anything on a schedule, and then with Covid-19 people want more space than mass transit provides
- matchbok 5y agoCities don't have the room for everyone to be driving a single occupancy vehicle point-to-point. There just isn't room.
- neil_s 5y agoI agree with smaller and more expensive. But less flexible? How is a fixed bus route that needs to run on a fixed schedule, reasonably invariant to current demand, more flexible than a car that can take you point-to-point on-demand? I see this as the future of public transport, where you'd have a combo of smaller and bigger vehicles (including self-driving minibuses and buses) running autonomously, with options to pay more in order to walk less, but only running where people actually need them . Similar to Uber and Lyft Pool before the pandemic, where you could pay less to be picked up on a main street intersection instead of your front door.
- aRandomCynic 5y agoIt is heartwarming to see that Google is doing its part to solve San Francisco's homelessness problem.
- reaperducer 5y agoWhen it's cheaper and easier to summon a Waymo than to find a public toilet in San Francisco, expect need to find solution.
- judge2020 5y agoWell, yes https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/1-billion-investment-bay-area-housing/ https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/1-bi...
- cyberlurker 5y agoThat announcement was from 2019. Honest question, how can I see the progress made from this investment? Did they build any, some or all of these homes yet? It does sound great though, I hope they did.
- judge2020 5y agoSkimmed, this is probably the San Jose page on it: https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-offices/planning-building-code-enforcement/planning-division/projects-of-high-interest/google-project https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-office...
- cyberlurker 5y agoThank you for that. Looks like no ground has been broken and Google is still cutting through bureaucracy.
- 0xy 5y agoWhoosh.
- 5y ago
- espadrine 5y agoWaymo is currently the only SAE Level 4[0] self-driving car in use, right? The wheel must not be used. Even though it is limited to two cities. Their technology seems an order of magnitude above the rest, although factoring in its cost could make it look worse. (Can it turn a profit, when including the development costs?) Tesla FSD is at best SAE level 3 (can need human fallback), and at worst level 2 (needs constant human monitoring). [0]: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/revealing-our-approach-to-safety.html https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/revealing-our-approach-to-saf...
- tshaddox 5y agoThose SAE levels apparently don’t specifically mention the geographic range the vehicle can operate in [0], but at some point that’s pretty important. Having “full automation” on a very tiny section of roads is hardly what I would call “orders of magnitude above the rest.” [0] edit: that's incorrect, L4 and L5 are primarily defined by differences in geography range.
- ericye16 5y agoThe difference between SAE level 4 and 5 is explicitly whether the autonomy is geographically limited or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#SAE_Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#SAE_Classific...
- chrisseaton 5y agoWhy does Waymo use a niche British luxury car for their platform? Must be very expensive and what are the benefits?
- judge2020 5y ago- They likely were able to get a commercial volume purchase discount - if that's the car their devs are testing on, it's going to be the fleet car, at least at first - Alphabet has $135B cash on hand[0] 0: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings_release.pdf#page=4 https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings...
- kjksf 5y agoI'm guessing they want to start with premium feel to give people good first impressions. That's why their other car is $60k Pacifica minivan and not $25k Honda Civic. I'm also guessing that they want an electric car. At the time they made a deal to purchase those cars (was quite a while ago) Jaguar i-Pace was one of few premium electric cars available (if you exclude Teslas, which obviously Waymo wouldn't want as it's a competitor). At this stage cost is not a big problem.
- ra7 5y agoElectric and manufactured by the same company that does upfitting for Waymo vehicles (and also a Waymo investor) – Magna International.
- keewee7 5y agoIs Jaguar still a niche brand? Most taxis in Denmark and Germany are Mercedes-Benz so it's not uncommon for the taxi industry to use luxury brands.
- chrisseaton 5y agoNiche in that they only sell a hundred thousand or so a year, yes. If Waymo are planning to seriously scale up they'll be using every Jaguar they're making!
- MontyCarloHall 5y ago“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5, since it is still heavily geofences and requires those remote safety monitors. I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. Would love to be proven wrong!
- moralestapia 5y ago>I still think that true level 5 [...] requires AGI. Oh, but of course! I'm still surprised by people who think otherwise. The amount of corner cases that you have to solve while driving is pretty much limitless, you cannot "train" something on that, heck, some humans are not even fit for that. We are *FAR* from truly autonomous vehicles.
- jillesvangurp 5y agoAll that tells you is that they are cautious in the famously litigious California yet confident enough to actually launch their service there. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, even if it is not their fault, they had a person onboard. It's the difference between that being just a minor incident or getting a class action lawsuit with millions/billions in damages. The law is by far the biggest obstacle to level 4 and 5 driving. So, launching in San Francisco is kind of a big step for them. Once it has proven itself for a bit of time and they know how to set up their geo-fences and which streets to avoid, they can probably get rid of the person. That would be evident by that person never actually doing anything long before that. The remote safety monitoring is a smart feature but it's not going to help much for the type of accidents people worry about most where something unexpected happens very rapidly. AIs are actually really good with dealing with those situations. Arguably better than humans for whom this is probably a leading cause of traffic fatalities. The way Waymo operates without hands on the wheel (i.e. level 3 & 4), basically means they have safety nailed already in those kind of situations. There's no way a remote person would be quick enough to intervene. That person is there for other reasons. It's complex traffic situations that cause AIs to get stuck occasionally that require human intervention. Usually this is less of a safety concern and more of an annoyance. The key metric of interventions per hundreds of thousands of miles of distance traveled is the key metric that both Tesla, Waymo, and other companies use for this. Both companies boast some pretty impressive statistics for that. Though of course it's hard to confirm those independently. It's interesting the way Tesla and Waymo approach this problem in different ways. Waymo goes for level 4 but only in areas they've thoroughly vetted. It's taken them many years to start moving to new areas other than relatively safe and easy Phoenix. Tesla on the other hand offers their AI features just about anywhere they can but positions it as level 2 that is really aspiring to be a level 4 but with a requirement for hands on the wheel just in case (which means it's level 2). Level 2 is a legal tool to dodge a lot of legislation and bureaucracy. It basically means that if anything goes wrong, the driver is at fault. It will stay in place a long time for that reason. Liability, not safety, is the key concern here. Arguably, Teslas would probably do pretty well in the areas that Waymo has vetted as well. But they are not in the ride sharing market and need to sell cars world wide and not just in specific geofences in Phoenix and San Francisco. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla offer a similar ride sharing service in similarly geo-fenced areas at some point to get to level 4 & 5. I suspect that race is a lot closer than some people seem to think.
- jstx1 5y agoWhat's the biggest technical challenge that they have right now? And how much time and effort will it take to overcome? I feel like there is a lot of disconnect between the different media pieces and opinions I come across specifically when it comes to Waymo's self-driving - from "we're already there" to "it won't happen in the next 10 years".
- jeffbee 5y agoIf Waymo has a 10-year lead, the people who get paid by the word to write about the horse race don't get paid. That's why you'll often see articles on self-driving cars that don't even mention Waymo.
- exikyut 5y agoMaybe I'm just out of the loop on corporate presentation overload (I don't watch TV at all, and it's mildly jarring watching advertisments and whatnot), but this video feels so... formula-driven and lacking in depth and interestingness that would give me the room to explore the concept and form/own my own view about the service's safety, efficiency and relevance... that it just feels boring. I love tech and self-driving, but the way this is presented, I'm completely turned off the idea. And then there's the fact that there's a shot of a driver in the front seat shown for like 400 milliseconds. What's up with that? Why is a token driver required to be in the front seat? I thought the foundation of the service was automated self-driving that obviates that...? If for whatever reason it is required, alright, then own up to it and properly integrate it into the video so it doesn't feel so awkward. Overall this presentation feels like it's hiding something, simply because it's so poorly put together.
- noneeeed 5y agoAs someone who lives in Bath, an old european city with roads (and other drivers) that can give experienced human drivers a nervous breakdown I'm rather more interested in how they do in SF than their current deployment in Phoenix. From what I've heard repeatedly, SF sounds much more irregular and messy than Phoenix, so it should be something of a stepping stone to making them usable more widely if they can crack it. I've been expecting it to happen for literally decades, but always been disappointed.
- Ftuuky 5y agoSame with Coimbra, Portugal. Would love to see a Waymo car trying to navigate those old intricate roads.
- whimsicalism 5y agoI wonder if Waymo can use street mirrors.
- noneeeed 5y agoI hadn't even considered those. It would be interesting to see how confused Telsa FSD got when confronted by something like that.
- noneeeed 5y agoJust checked it out on google. What a beautiful place. My scepticism around SD cars in places like that and Bath is not even the roads themselves, but the traffic. The are quite a lot of roads around me that are quite narrow and frequently drop to single lanes. I feel like any self-drive system will need to develop quite an advanced theory of mind to perform the weird silent negotiation that happens when I'm driving a long, with three cars behind me, and come face-to-face with a bus coming the other way, and somehow we have to either backup en-masse, or perform the squeeze dance as we edge past each other with inches to spair.
- mosdl 5y agoYeah SF is very messy configuration wise and is more "european" in that way.
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoI wonder if the cars will always have a human chaperone. Not as a safety driver, but to prevent riders from trashing the car.
- WalterSear 5y agoIf you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect when it's being thrashed.
- lotsofpulp 5y agoUnless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?
- khc 5y agoyou automatically charge $500 to the passanger's credit card, and self-drive back to the depot to be cleaned
- lotsofpulp 5y agoThe cost to clean (and repair damage) and opportunity cost of not earning money in the meantime would be far more than $500, and far more than how much most people could afford to pay.
- caskstrength 5y ago> Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help? System locks all doors and calls police?
- lotsofpulp 5y agoI highly doubt police would care. People trash hotel rooms all the time, and they might escort people out of the hotel, but recouping any costs is a civil matter for the business. And good luck breaking even via that avenue.
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- lhorie 5y agoI'm curious how Waymo deals with the human aspects of cab hailing. With a human driver, you can say "hey looks like traffic is bad between where the car currently is and the pick up spot, can I meet you at X instead and save us both 10 minutes?" To "good morning dear, do you think you could help me load my bag in the trunk" All the way up to completely degenerate scenarios like "my friend was drunk and tried to take over command of the car to see if it would work" or "I had to call customer support because when my ride arrived to pick me up, there was a homeless guy hogging the backseat and cursing at me". Surely there's more to commercializing the tech than just not killing pedestrians. The absence of a driver should create some new weird dynamics. IIRC Uber et al spend a considerable amount on customer support. I wonder if Waymo can break free from Google's bad reputation on that front.
- thinkharderdev 5y agoFor the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you somewhere else. If there's no driver, then there's nobody to ask to help with bags. For various degenerate situations I'm not sure being driverless really changes the situation all that much. A drunk passenger can grab the wheel of a manned vehicle as well. With a self-driving car you might even be able to avoid that situation entirely by preventing the passengers from using any controls without authorization. They can grab the physical steering wheel but can't turn it until they punch in an authorization code (which they don't have). Likewise you prevent unauthorized passengers from entering the car by keeping the doors locked until the authorized passenger gets there. And if someone does manage to sneak in you just shut down the vehicle and call the cops (just like if someone jumps in a cab without permission). But humans are great at flummoxing countermeasures like that so it will be an interesting thing to watch for sure.
- dave5104 5y ago> For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you somewhere else. To add on, maybe even Waymo tells/asks you if you'd like to change pickup locations to save X minutes off your trip. Feels somewhat in line with how Google Maps will ask you if you want to save X minutes by taking a new route that was previously not as good as when you started using directions.
- ANDREWB0SE 5y agoLol. Out of all the vehicles they could have chosen. Why the Jaguar?
- ryan93 5y agoProbably cut a good deal since jaguar could use the marketing.
- ahnick 5y agoAre there any thought pieces on how cities can adapt roads to accommodate SAE level 4 cars to facilitate rolling out a wider deployment more quickly? I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations and also only allow the service to be operational during clement weather conditions. It seems it would be beneficial to have fully automated routes to and from specific spots even today, for example an airport to a downtown location, for many cities to help reduce transportation costs and safety issues as compared with Uber/Lyft.
- zimprop 5y ago> I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations I always find it interesting that the further down the road of self-driving we go the more it seems like its a techy version of a known but morre low tech paradigm. This if taken without the self driving part just sounds like a bus lane with bus stops. In fact the driving of a car would be a less efficient mode of transportation considering that they usually only carry one person at a time. I used to be very pro self-driving cars, but tthte moree I explored urbanism and transportation the more it became apparent that, self-driving is over optimization of an already bad paradigm that is car-centric development. You could cut out the middle man of needing a self driving car if you didn't live far away from the things you needed or if the public transit was efficient and reliable, that seems way easier than trying to figure out how to make cars drive themselves!
- TillE 5y agoThe optimistic vision of self-driving vehicles is as a publicly run transit system, where you have a fleet of automated vehicles of varying sizes able to dynamically, collectively route based on demand. A hyper efficient, fully electric bus system. That would be a pretty exciting development even in, eg, European cities with decent public transit.
- bkor 5y ago> A hyper efficient, fully electric bus system. Cars aren't efficient. The zoning should be such that things are close by enough. Then with proper cycling infrastructure you can just go by bike. As a result you'll need way less road. As cycling infrastructure is cheap and road maintenance is costly, it'll reduce expenses for e.g. cities. > European cities with decent public transit. I'd rather have the mix of public transport, bicycles and roads. Combined with proper zoning. Loads of electric cars just increases demand for a highly inefficient transportation method.
- tzm 5y ago> All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now If you drive a Tesla w/ FSD, is it chic to refer to yourself as an Autonomous Specialist?
- Animats 5y agoThis is encouraging. But it's only for "Trusted Testers". Do you have to have a Google account?
- Shank 5y agoThis is a clever reuse off a little known thing Google used to have called “Trusted Testers” for friends and family of Google employees to test new features. However, I don’t think it requires a Google account. The TT program would just NDA you heavily and required an invite from a Google employee. This is likely to be more open, but again, requiring NDA.
- miratom 5y agoOne of these things almost sideswiped me the other day. I wish they'd go away.
- criloz2 5y agoSelf-driving is not the solution and will show its crack in the future, the solution is probably a cloud service administrate by the city that feed direction to the cars and rules (that reduce or increment the degree of freedom of choices), do optimization and sort many other things, cars probably will still need cameras to take small decisions, but this can be made optional.
- dexter89_kp3 5y agoKudos to the Waymo team. I was a self driving skeptic 2-3 years back. Now given the advances in both hardware and NNs, I do see possible solutions in the next decade.
- leesec 5y agoWow, 12 years in and they've spent about 6 billion and achieved a limited ridership Uber competitor in 2 fair weather cities. I'm sure the full solution they're pursuing is right around the corner though.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y agoI just signed up and actually skimmed the privacy policy (because hey, it's Alphabet). They record video of you during the ride and didn't mention anything that I caught about ever deleting it. I get that they need video in case I do bad stuff in the back, but it's really disappointing that they didn't bother reassuring you like "we delete it after a month" or something. I'm hoping I just missed that line. But I signed up anyway, so I guess that says more.
- switch007 5y agoEverything to do with more tech in cars is a privacy nightmare.
- truthwhisperer 5y agowatch out for the homeless people please avoid inner sin city
- plussed_reader 5y agoDoes Waymo plan to chisel it's drivers like Uber and Lyft did with Prop22?
- crackercrews 5y agoDoes anyone know what the cost of Waymo rides is?
- gibsonf1 5y agoYou cannot predict the future with patterns from the past, regardless of how many patterns you crunch - the world is always changing. ML can just never solve FSD - conceptual understanding and causality is needed to achieve human level driving capability. We instantly classify things conceptually from our perception, instantly understand how those things may behave, and then learn the specifics of what that thing is doing to instantly predict what might happen and how it is interacting with other causally connected things in the environment. If ML could predict the future, there would be some very rich stock brokers right now. Autonomous driving efforts need a major pivot to start working with concepts, causality, and the integrated space time model of the world we humans use.
- fyrn- 5y agoI think you uave some major misconceptions about how this stuff works. Most vision models output the current state of the world, to be integrated with other sensor data like lidar that is then used for planning. There are models that try to guess things like the crossing intent of pedestrians, but even those models just output a confidence of them crossing. I work for a different self driving company, but this high level stuff is pretty much the same everywhere.
- gibsonf1 5y agoExactly, that is how that stuff works. Past patterns in the Ml neural net generated from massive data and training try to figure out the label of things from various sensors, and then given that label, try to figure out other things that might happen based on the label and event stream. These patterns can recognize with a certain probability similar patterns, but they have no way to cope with brand new patterns. Those brand new patterns, although they may only occur 1 out of 100 experiences - or lets say 3 days a year when your're driving, something fully novel occurs, this will kill you if you are relying on FSD. Until the systems try to think like humans, they simply wont.
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- thkm 5y agoI'll know that we've achieved full self driving when it can brave thru the streets of a South American city :)
- eastof 5y agoHow do I get an invite!? Do you just have to know someone at Waymo?
- ketzo 5y agoMany comments in this thread are variations on a theme of "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human drivers, who aren't actually all that great." I think it would be nice if this were true, and I suppose it is from an actuarial perspective, but it's also an extremely flawed point. From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth, even one one-hundredth as often as human drivers. If you see a self-driving car cause an accident, particularly a lethal one, in a situation that almost any human driver would have avoided, you've totally destroyed any and all confidence in this car's driving ability, because "I would never, ever have crashed there." As we've seen, there are lots of scenarios like this. The Tesla crash from last year, where the car simply didn't see a white truck against a light background. Or imagine an adversarial image attack, where some tiny insignificant detail is placed onto a stop sign or a "do-not-enter" that turns it into nothing from the perspective of the AI driver. These kinds of scenarios obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, because intuitively, you immediately realize that you're "a much better driver" than this car! Even if that's untrue 99/100 times, it only takes one visceral example to drive this kind of wedge. Self-driving cars don't just have to be better than human drivers. They have to be as close to perfect as is possible, because that's what people will expect.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoHere's a particularly spicy viewpoint: It doesn't matter if you obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, or if there are lethal accidents that would've been avoided. As t approaches infinity, what are the chances that self-driving cars won't take over the world?
- thereare5lights 5y agopretty high if people won't use them because they don't trust them.
- dougmwne 5y agoIf you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive in the service of corporate profits or what's "best for them", you haven't read the news lately.
- bitsoda 5y agoI'm happy for their efforts and hope my kids never have to drive unless they want to, but I still think we're 20+ years out from level 4+ autonomy. Maybe when Waymo tests in a city that has weather -- like anywhere in the Northeast -- I'll be more enthusiastic.
- dougmwne 5y agoGiven the number of people here saying self-driving cars require AGI (a.k.a. sand that thinks a.k.a. fairy magic), I would say we have definitely hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. But since Waymo is launching in a second city, this is perhaps the very start of the slope of enlightenment.
- dylan604 5y ago>start of the slope of enlightenment that would be more like staircase of enlightenment. or up the down escalator to enlightenment
- s09dfhks 5y agoInteresting timing given this article which was just posted a day or so ago on HN https://www.autoblog.com/2021/08/22/waymo-is-99-of-the-way-to-self-driving-cars-the-last-1-is-the-hardest https://www.autoblog.com/2021/08/22/waymo-is-99-of-the-way-t...
- CyberRabbi 5y agoDoes anyone know what city official is responsible for approving this?
- nemonemo 5y agoI can think of a few milestones in the future for AVs: * the first accident between two fully automated AVs. * the first such accident within AVs from the leading company. * the first fatality in fully automated AVs * when uber or lyft or any similar company starts to use AVs more than human drivers in a metropolitan. * when a city gets half the driving hours in AVs. * when human drivers no longer get insurance coverage by a major insurance company. I wish the order in reverse.
- boulos 5y agoDisclosure: I work at Waymo. This is big news, and I encourage you to apply if you're in San Francisco. For the HN crowd, I'd also recommend last week's blog post [1] which includes some more technical material on "how" we're driving. [1] https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/MostExperiencedUrbanDriver.html https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/MostExperiencedUrbanDriver.ht...