13 ms·

Waymo expands its rider-only territories

185 points by edward 4y ago

wpietri 4y ago
Does anybody know how much this is currently backed with human intervention? My understanding is that Waymo is bridging the gap between their current level and full automation with having humans on tap via the network. But I'd love to know more about the frequency and circumstances of remote interventions.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Waymo has to do SAE Level 4 because there literally is no human driver in the vehicle. You aren't allowed to sit in the seat where the pedals and wheel are, this isn't assistance, it's a driver, like in a taxi. Remote humans can correct the machine's model of the world, to a limited extent. A human looking at the data might conclude that's a life-size cardboard cut out of Luke Skywalker, not Mark Hamill stood motionless in the road in costume for no reason, and so it's OK for the Waymo to squeeze past it, whereas driving very close to humans is unacceptable. They don't have any means to remotely drive the car, if for any reason that's the solution to a problem, the Waymo will stop somewhere, a vehicle with Waymo employees in will turn up in a few minutes, then a human driver gets into your car and takes over. This does not seem to happen very often.
nosefrog 4y ago
Has anyone gotten off the wait-list in SF? I've been able to ride a Cruise taxi, but not Waymo.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  Nope. Cruise, yes. Waymo, no. I'm off the waitlist in Phoenix, but can't book one here.
- snug 4y ago
  Yes, I got on the trusted riders list. I usually only use ride shares to go to the airport, and sadly it doesn't go there yet, so I've only used it a few times
lopkeny12ko 4y ago
Having tried Tesla FSD many times, I'm very bearish on self driving technology. Genuinely alarmed how Waymo was able to get a permit for rides without human supervision. If I had not intervened multiple times when I tried FSD in a Model S for just a 30 minute trip, I certainly would have crashed.
- rmorey 4y ago
  Waymo Driver and Tesla FSD are leagues apart
- darkwizard42 4y ago
  This would be like saying “I refuse to eat all leafy greens because of one poorly managed farm didn’t stay up on its health standards and had E Coli” Waymo’s approach is so different from Teslas in both tech and safety I’m not even sure you could compare or generalize.
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  You can’t compare Tesla FSD with Waymo, they are using fundamentally different techniques. Specifically, Tesla decided to do everything based on video images, while Waymo uses LIDAR. Additionally, there’s a cultural difference where Tesla doesn’t care about quality/safety as much as Waymo does.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  Tesla FSD should be illegal. It's a complete joke that should really tarnish the brand value of a company. Doesn't mean other companies with better sensors and better data don't have a FAR, FAR, FAR better experience.
- mrshadowgoose 4y ago
  If your only sample has been Tesla "FSD", your bearishness is appropriate. However, Tesla's level of development is infantile compared to Waymo's. It's clear that Waymo has run into some costs/limits in physically scaling their operations, as the software side of things appears to already be "good enough" and is not the limiting factor.
- 4y ago
gibsonf1 4y ago
This will not end well as ml/dl has no intelligence, and given the ever changing world we live in, intelligence is needed for safe driving. Phoenix has less variation than many places, but statistics on the past won't help when something unexpected arises as it always will in time. My guess is they are only doing this now to convince investors (or google itself) that the technology is viable, when in fact, is simply is not. Best to just shut all these companies down until machine intelligence has been achieved rather than waste so many resources.
- moeris 4y ago
  > intelligence is needed for safe driving... won't get when something unexpected arises as it always will in time I don't think that's true. While unexpected situations do arise, I don't think people use much "intelligence" to handle them. When an elephant falls out of the semi truck in front of you, your response is to hit the breaks. You don't spend a minute thinking about the likelihood of the event, or question whether allowing the elephant to hit your car might improve the likelihood of it surviving (and whether that justifies sacrificing yourself.) The fact is that most accidents aren't very atypical. They're everyday things that happen, and people aren't paying attention, or they make a mistake. Handling just these scenarios will result in net saved lives. In other words, autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
nullc 4y ago
Does this mean that DoubleClick might finally diversify out of the advertising business?
coolspot 4y ago
Just couple days ago I have seen Waymo white Jaguar in Los Angeles driving on I-10 towards Santa-Monica. I hope they will open service here soon.
notatoad 4y ago
without knowing phoenix, it's hard to get a sense of how much area is actually covered from this blog post. is this just an expansion to a couple neighbourhoods, or is this getting towards covering most of the city?
foruhar 4y ago
Have Waymo announced which cities they will work on in 2023/2024? One of the comments in here mentions their vehicles in Los Angeles. Any guesses on when they may start service in New York City?
Animats 4y ago
"For those of you in San Francisco, join the waitlist today." Aw. Not quite yet. But getting steadily closer. What's pricing? When the service turns on as a commercial service in San Francisco, autonomous vehicles will really be here. Phoenix is the easy case. SF is moderately hard. NYC will be tough.
- snug 4y ago
  In SF, It's the same price as a Lyft or Uber. About $11 for a 12 minute ride
Fricken 4y ago
It's been a good year for machine learning overall, and that includes autonomous vehicles. There's more optimism this year, the survivors are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.
bushbaba 4y ago
At this rate will be 2060 before waymo is profitable. Curious how long the shareholders are going to tolerate such a large expense over dividend/share repurchases
- WilTimSon 4y ago
  From a consumer's standpoint, is that bad? I'd rather wait longer and know for a fact that the product is 100% safe and tested. This isn't something I would be willing to take a risk on, getting into a car crash because I was really anxious to try a driverless taxi seems embarrassing.
- KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
  I find it interesting how deeply downvoted this comment is. This is pretty much what TCI Management, a not insignificant investor in Alphabet, has said in a note that they published recently [0]: TCI also pointed out that Alphabet's Other Bets division – which houses operations including Waymo, Nest, Access, Calico and more – generated $3 billion in revenues in the past five years but incurred operating losses of $20 billion. "Other Bets have been unsuccessful" and operating losses estimated at $6 billion in 2022 should be reduced by 50 percent. "The biggest component of Other Bets is Waymo," TCI added. "Unfortunately, enthusiasm for self-driving cars has collapsed and competitors have exited the market. Ford and Volkswagen recently decided to shut down their self-driving venture" saying that achieving profit in the short term was not likely. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/16/tci_fund_google_cut_costs_waymo_compensation/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/16/tci_fund_google_cut_c...
- absentmoon 4y ago
  Pressumably things will start to snowball if these smaller scale trials demonstrate adaquate safety
  - ghaff 4y ago
    One question is to what degree safety is dependent on testing in these specific good weather areas for literally years. And even the SF public self-driving area excludes what is almost certainly the somewhat harder area of SF for self-driving (though opening up much of SF is more impressive than Phoenix generally).
mabbo 4y ago
Many years ago, as an intern at Google, one of my mentors said to me "Google found a hose that money pours out of, and it's name is 'online advertising'. All we do now is improve that hose and desperately search for another one". I would love to see Waymo become another hose. I'd love to see it launch in my city (whenever the laws are amended to allow such things). (Yes, I know arguably they've had a few other successes.)
- mbesto 4y ago
  > I would love to see Waymo become another hose. Waymo is just another way to add more water to the hose. More leisure time not focusing on the road = more eyeballs. What percent of our lives do we spend driving?[0] "Our best guess? Six percent of our waking hours are spent in a car, en route. There are 4.12 million miles of road in the United States, and that’s a lot of ground for the 222 million drivers in this country to cover." [0] - https://short-facts.com/how-many-hours-does-the-average-american-spend-driving/ https://short-facts.com/how-many-hours-does-the-average-amer...
  - mrshadowgoose 4y ago
    It's both. Moving people and things (Waymo Via[1] is their autonomous trucking and delivery subdivision) via roadways is worth (in revenue) hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Even capturing a fraction of that market, and carving out profit (by displacing expensive, accident-prone and sleep-needing humans), is a money hose on its own. [1] https://waymo.com/waymo-via/ https://waymo.com/waymo-via/
  - dougmwne 4y ago
    I disagree. There’s a ton of profit margin on the table selling driverless rideshares and licensing the tech to other automakers. While Google will be able to serve a few ads during the ride, that will amount to a few cents of ad revenue vs. several dollars of transportation services. Tesla is already setting a price for full self driving that does not even work or exist at 15k, so the actual retail price could easily be tens of thousands, absolutely dwarfing the 5 year ad revenue per user, let alone the incremental increase from a few extra hours of screen time a week.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
I took a Waymo in Phoenix the other night. Works like magic. I’m honestly fine waiting four times as long for one because it’s fun, and it’s cheaper. Even when they had to send out a manual driver, the experience was smooth and fast.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Could you say more about the "they had to send out a manual driver" bit?
  - IshKebab 4y ago
    I'm curious too. I assumed they'd just use manual remote control for situations that the AI can't handle. Actually sending out a driver sounds anything but smooth and fast.
    - TexanFeller 4y ago
      Remote control sounds unsafe because radio signals are so easily disrupted?
    - jcampbell1 4y ago
      I find it funny imagining an army of ex-tuktuk drivers working from home on a simulator and using their expertise to get the world’s self-driving cars out of tricky situations. If the AI ever learns their ways, it will be terrifying but we will get to work 30% faster.
      - toast0 4y ago
        > If the AI ever learns their ways, it will be terrifying but we will get to work 30% faster. Only if they don't stop off at a tourist trinket store.
    - haliskerbas 4y ago
      I'd much prefer that as the failure scenario instead of someone trying to operate my vehicle through a computer screen.
dslowell 4y ago
It's interesting how different the rollout of autonomous cars has been from what people were expecting a decade ago. Not just the speed of things, but also the way they're being adopted. So far, we don't seem to be anywhere close to the nationwide mass layoffs of truck and taxi drivers that people were predicting would happen when self-driving cars started to take of. Instead, current trends seem to be for an additional form of transportation within limited geographic areas. One can imagine a scenario where, for instance, we have a number of cities where self-driving cars are the dominant form of transportation in the center, but traditional cars are still owned and operated by the people who live on the periphery, and most cities don't have self-driving networks at all. Something similar to how the subway functions in Manhattan New York, perhaps. Or maybe not. But I think this all shows that it's not just difficult to predict which pieces of future technology we will have, but also how a particular piece of technology will actually be implemented and impact society.
- jchw 4y ago
  It feels like there's always an imminent threat of computers and technology replacing more human jobs, but it might wind up being harder than it looks for one reason or another. I think in the past, technology mostly threatened to replace and eliminate jobs nobody really wanted, or merely assist people in their jobs to make them more effective. AI is really doing a number on us, though. I really like programming, and I have plenty of friends who really like drawing. It would be a shame if the main incentive to be good at those things in society were to disappear due to the job market being partially eaten, but it does seem like that's what is going to happen eventually. Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth fighting it, as it seems like it's just another inevitable mess that winds up the same either way because people with more money than I can fathom have a pretty good incentive to make it so. Either way, driving seems somewhere down the middle. I think automating driving would be great, but I also assume plenty of truckers do enjoy the job, and would be lost without it. It's good that this transition is taking a while. I don't think we're equipped to handle it.
- colordrops 4y ago
  If what you are describing turns out to be true in the long term, it would have to mean that there is something fundamentally different and harder about self-driving outside of cities.
amelius 4y ago
LIDAR makes implementing FSD so much simpler. And you can still harvest data so you can use it as a stepping stone for video-only based FSD.
- Zigurd 4y ago
  That's a very important difference. If it turns out that LIDAR (and maybe other sensors) are needed in addition to machine vision for level 5 automation, all the data Tesla cameras have been gathering may be worth much less than the 3D models Google is building.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Waymo is doing level 4 automation. Level 5 is still very far away, and will require more than just LIDAR. https://www.synopsys.com/automotive/autonomous-driving-levels.html https://www.synopsys.com/automotive/autonomous-driving-level...
    - rafaelero 4y ago
      > Level 5 is still very far away, and will require more than just LIDAR. I don't think that's true. In my view, by scaling these AI models we will arrive there. But even if I am wrong, we don't need level 5 for this technology to be revolutionary. I am mostly interested in using Waymo as my new Uber, so if it can decently navigate cities costing half the price, then sign me in.
      - mlyle 4y ago
        The problem is the definition of level 5 is amorphous. That is, "everywhere in all conditions" exceeds what any human will do. If I won't drive in a blizzard or specific cities, does it make a car level 4 if it punts under these conditions? I think we need a better definition that encompasses the different capabilities of things calling themselves level 4, and avoids an impossible standard for level 5.
        4y ago

185 points by edward 4y ago

Does anybody know how much this is currently backed with human intervention? My understanding is that Waymo is bridging the gap between their current level and full automation with having humans on tap via the network. But I'd love to know more about the frequency and circumstances of remote interventions.

tialaramex 4y ago
Waymo has to do SAE Level 4 because there literally is no human driver in the vehicle. You aren't allowed to sit in the seat where the pedals and wheel are, this isn't assistance, it's a driver, like in a taxi. Remote humans can correct the machine's model of the world, to a limited extent. A human looking at the data might conclude that's a life-size cardboard cut out of Luke Skywalker, not Mark Hamill stood motionless in the road in costume for no reason, and so it's OK for the Waymo to squeeze past it, whereas driving very close to humans is unacceptable. They don't have any means to remotely drive the car, if for any reason that's the solution to a problem, the Waymo will stop somewhere, a vehicle with Waymo employees in will turn up in a few minutes, then a human driver gets into your car and takes over. This does not seem to happen very often.

nosefrog 4y ago

Has anyone gotten off the wait-list in SF? I've been able to ride a Cruise taxi, but not Waymo.

renewiltord 4y ago
Nope. Cruise, yes. Waymo, no. I'm off the waitlist in Phoenix, but can't book one here.
snug 4y ago
Yes, I got on the trusted riders list. I usually only use ride shares to go to the airport, and sadly it doesn't go there yet, so I've only used it a few times

lopkeny12ko 4y ago

Having tried Tesla FSD many times, I'm very bearish on self driving technology. Genuinely alarmed how Waymo was able to get a permit for rides without human supervision. If I had not intervened multiple times when I tried FSD in a Model S for just a 30 minute trip, I certainly would have crashed.

rmorey 4y ago
Waymo Driver and Tesla FSD are leagues apart
darkwizard42 4y ago
This would be like saying “I refuse to eat all leafy greens because of one poorly managed farm didn’t stay up on its health standards and had E Coli” Waymo’s approach is so different from Teslas in both tech and safety I’m not even sure you could compare or generalize.
stingraycharles 4y ago
You can’t compare Tesla FSD with Waymo, they are using fundamentally different techniques. Specifically, Tesla decided to do everything based on video images, while Waymo uses LIDAR. Additionally, there’s a cultural difference where Tesla doesn’t care about quality/safety as much as Waymo does.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Tesla FSD should be illegal. It's a complete joke that should really tarnish the brand value of a company. Doesn't mean other companies with better sensors and better data don't have a FAR, FAR, FAR better experience.
mrshadowgoose 4y ago
If your only sample has been Tesla "FSD", your bearishness is appropriate. However, Tesla's level of development is infantile compared to Waymo's. It's clear that Waymo has run into some costs/limits in physically scaling their operations, as the software side of things appears to already be "good enough" and is not the limiting factor.
4y ago

gibsonf1 4y ago

This will not end well as ml/dl has no intelligence, and given the ever changing world we live in, intelligence is needed for safe driving. Phoenix has less variation than many places, but statistics on the past won't help when something unexpected arises as it always will in time. My guess is they are only doing this now to convince investors (or google itself) that the technology is viable, when in fact, is simply is not. Best to just shut all these companies down until machine intelligence has been achieved rather than waste so many resources.

moeris 4y ago
> intelligence is needed for safe driving... won't get when something unexpected arises as it always will in time I don't think that's true. While unexpected situations do arise, I don't think people use much "intelligence" to handle them. When an elephant falls out of the semi truck in front of you, your response is to hit the breaks. You don't spend a minute thinking about the likelihood of the event, or question whether allowing the elephant to hit your car might improve the likelihood of it surviving (and whether that justifies sacrificing yourself.) The fact is that most accidents aren't very atypical. They're everyday things that happen, and people aren't paying attention, or they make a mistake. Handling just these scenarios will result in net saved lives. In other words, autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

nullc 4y ago

Does this mean that DoubleClick might finally diversify out of the advertising business?

coolspot 4y ago

Just couple days ago I have seen Waymo white Jaguar in Los Angeles driving on I-10 towards Santa-Monica. I hope they will open service here soon.

notatoad 4y ago

without knowing phoenix, it's hard to get a sense of how much area is actually covered from this blog post. is this just an expansion to a couple neighbourhoods, or is this getting towards covering most of the city?

foruhar 4y ago

Have Waymo announced which cities they will work on in 2023/2024? One of the comments in here mentions their vehicles in Los Angeles. Any guesses on when they may start service in New York City?

Animats 4y ago

"For those of you in San Francisco, join the waitlist today." Aw. Not quite yet. But getting steadily closer. What's pricing? When the service turns on as a commercial service in San Francisco, autonomous vehicles will really be here. Phoenix is the easy case. SF is moderately hard. NYC will be tough.

snug 4y ago
In SF, It's the same price as a Lyft or Uber. About $11 for a 12 minute ride

Fricken 4y ago

It's been a good year for machine learning overall, and that includes autonomous vehicles. There's more optimism this year, the survivors are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

bushbaba 4y ago

At this rate will be 2060 before waymo is profitable. Curious how long the shareholders are going to tolerate such a large expense over dividend/share repurchases

WilTimSon 4y ago
From a consumer's standpoint, is that bad? I'd rather wait longer and know for a fact that the product is 100% safe and tested. This isn't something I would be willing to take a risk on, getting into a car crash because I was really anxious to try a driverless taxi seems embarrassing.
KKKKkkkk1 4y ago
I find it interesting how deeply downvoted this comment is. This is pretty much what TCI Management, a not insignificant investor in Alphabet, has said in a note that they published recently [0]: TCI also pointed out that Alphabet's Other Bets division – which houses operations including Waymo, Nest, Access, Calico and more – generated $3 billion in revenues in the past five years but incurred operating losses of $20 billion. "Other Bets have been unsuccessful" and operating losses estimated at $6 billion in 2022 should be reduced by 50 percent. "The biggest component of Other Bets is Waymo," TCI added. "Unfortunately, enthusiasm for self-driving cars has collapsed and competitors have exited the market. Ford and Volkswagen recently decided to shut down their self-driving venture" saying that achieving profit in the short term was not likely. [0] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/16/tci_fund_google_cut_costs_waymo_compensation/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/16/tci_fund_google_cut_c...
absentmoon 4y ago
Pressumably things will start to snowball if these smaller scale trials demonstrate adaquate safety
- ghaff 4y ago
  One question is to what degree safety is dependent on testing in these specific good weather areas for literally years. And even the SF public self-driving area excludes what is almost certainly the somewhat harder area of SF for self-driving (though opening up much of SF is more impressive than Phoenix generally).

mabbo 4y ago

Many years ago, as an intern at Google, one of my mentors said to me "Google found a hose that money pours out of, and it's name is 'online advertising'. All we do now is improve that hose and desperately search for another one". I would love to see Waymo become another hose. I'd love to see it launch in my city (whenever the laws are amended to allow such things). (Yes, I know arguably they've had a few other successes.)

mbesto 4y ago
> I would love to see Waymo become another hose. Waymo is just another way to add more water to the hose. More leisure time not focusing on the road = more eyeballs. What percent of our lives do we spend driving?[0] "Our best guess? Six percent of our waking hours are spent in a car, en route. There are 4.12 million miles of road in the United States, and that’s a lot of ground for the 222 million drivers in this country to cover." [0] - https://short-facts.com/how-many-hours-does-the-average-american-spend-driving/ https://short-facts.com/how-many-hours-does-the-average-amer...
- mrshadowgoose 4y ago
  It's both. Moving people and things (Waymo Via[1] is their autonomous trucking and delivery subdivision) via roadways is worth (in revenue) hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Even capturing a fraction of that market, and carving out profit (by displacing expensive, accident-prone and sleep-needing humans), is a money hose on its own. [1] https://waymo.com/waymo-via/ https://waymo.com/waymo-via/
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I disagree. There’s a ton of profit margin on the table selling driverless rideshares and licensing the tech to other automakers. While Google will be able to serve a few ads during the ride, that will amount to a few cents of ad revenue vs. several dollars of transportation services. Tesla is already setting a price for full self driving that does not even work or exist at 15k, so the actual retail price could easily be tens of thousands, absolutely dwarfing the 5 year ad revenue per user, let alone the incremental increase from a few extra hours of screen time a week.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

I took a Waymo in Phoenix the other night. Works like magic. I’m honestly fine waiting four times as long for one because it’s fun, and it’s cheaper. Even when they had to send out a manual driver, the experience was smooth and fast.

wpietri 4y ago
Could you say more about the "they had to send out a manual driver" bit?
- IshKebab 4y ago
  I'm curious too. I assumed they'd just use manual remote control for situations that the AI can't handle. Actually sending out a driver sounds anything but smooth and fast.
  - TexanFeller 4y ago
    Remote control sounds unsafe because radio signals are so easily disrupted?
  - jcampbell1 4y ago
    I find it funny imagining an army of ex-tuktuk drivers working from home on a simulator and using their expertise to get the world’s self-driving cars out of tricky situations. If the AI ever learns their ways, it will be terrifying but we will get to work 30% faster.
    - toast0 4y ago
      > If the AI ever learns their ways, it will be terrifying but we will get to work 30% faster. Only if they don't stop off at a tourist trinket store.
  - haliskerbas 4y ago
    I'd much prefer that as the failure scenario instead of someone trying to operate my vehicle through a computer screen.

dslowell 4y ago

It's interesting how different the rollout of autonomous cars has been from what people were expecting a decade ago. Not just the speed of things, but also the way they're being adopted. So far, we don't seem to be anywhere close to the nationwide mass layoffs of truck and taxi drivers that people were predicting would happen when self-driving cars started to take of. Instead, current trends seem to be for an additional form of transportation within limited geographic areas. One can imagine a scenario where, for instance, we have a number of cities where self-driving cars are the dominant form of transportation in the center, but traditional cars are still owned and operated by the people who live on the periphery, and most cities don't have self-driving networks at all. Something similar to how the subway functions in Manhattan New York, perhaps. Or maybe not. But I think this all shows that it's not just difficult to predict which pieces of future technology we will have, but also how a particular piece of technology will actually be implemented and impact society.

jchw 4y ago
It feels like there's always an imminent threat of computers and technology replacing more human jobs, but it might wind up being harder than it looks for one reason or another. I think in the past, technology mostly threatened to replace and eliminate jobs nobody really wanted, or merely assist people in their jobs to make them more effective. AI is really doing a number on us, though. I really like programming, and I have plenty of friends who really like drawing. It would be a shame if the main incentive to be good at those things in society were to disappear due to the job market being partially eaten, but it does seem like that's what is going to happen eventually. Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth fighting it, as it seems like it's just another inevitable mess that winds up the same either way because people with more money than I can fathom have a pretty good incentive to make it so. Either way, driving seems somewhere down the middle. I think automating driving would be great, but I also assume plenty of truckers do enjoy the job, and would be lost without it. It's good that this transition is taking a while. I don't think we're equipped to handle it.
colordrops 4y ago
If what you are describing turns out to be true in the long term, it would have to mean that there is something fundamentally different and harder about self-driving outside of cities.

amelius 4y ago

LIDAR makes implementing FSD so much simpler. And you can still harvest data so you can use it as a stepping stone for video-only based FSD.

Zigurd 4y ago
That's a very important difference. If it turns out that LIDAR (and maybe other sensors) are needed in addition to machine vision for level 5 automation, all the data Tesla cameras have been gathering may be worth much less than the 3D models Google is building.
- nradov 4y ago
  Waymo is doing level 4 automation. Level 5 is still very far away, and will require more than just LIDAR. https://www.synopsys.com/automotive/autonomous-driving-levels.html https://www.synopsys.com/automotive/autonomous-driving-level...
  - rafaelero 4y ago
    > Level 5 is still very far away, and will require more than just LIDAR. I don't think that's true. In my view, by scaling these AI models we will arrive there. But even if I am wrong, we don't need level 5 for this technology to be revolutionary. I am mostly interested in using Waymo as my new Uber, so if it can decently navigate cities costing half the price, then sign me in.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      The problem is the definition of level 5 is amorphous. That is, "everywhere in all conditions" exceeds what any human will do. If I won't drive in a blizzard or specific cities, does it make a car level 4 if it punts under these conditions? I think we need a better definition that encompasses the different capabilities of things calling themselves level 4, and avoids an impossible standard for level 5.
      - 4y ago