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From my perspective, as a relatively early adopter of Waymo (60+ rides). I have zero gripes with the driving itself. In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no

• gcampos 3y ago
  That is actually an interesting question. We track how many accidents the automated cars cause, but I'm not sure how many accidents they prevent are tracked.
  • jimnotgym 3y ago
    They should let an accident happen occasionally, and then show how it had the data to avoid it if humans had just trusted them.
  • olex 3y ago
    That metric is tracked indirectly, by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles.
    • reneherse 3y ago
      It would be interesting if some kind of active/inductive measurement could be made. As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky. No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!
    • delfinom 3y ago
      I still want that metric restricted to geographical area. The average across the entire country seems many times outright malicious to use.
    • CSMastermind 3y ago
      > by the lower number of accidents that AVs are involved in per distance travelled compared to human-driven vehicles Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty. Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement. Welch Labs has a good introductory video to this topic: https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM
      • Steltek 3y ago
        Can someone summarize the video? That was my first thought as well: crash data for humans is clearly underreported. For example, police don't always write reports or human drivers agree to keep it off the books.
        • serial_dev 3y ago
          And I'm not even sure how reliable is the "miles driven" metric. I mean I'm sure you can estimate it somehow, but what's the margin of error there?
          • viraptor 3y ago
            Odometers are pretty well regulated and insurance companies will often have a good record of the readings over long periods. I'm not sure how the org doing the data collection does it precisely, but pretty accurate data is out there.
        • CSMastermind 3y ago
          The probability of a human driver causing a fatality on any given mile driven is 0.00000109% (1.09 fatalities occur per 100 million miles driven). Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly. This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years. And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver. Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on. Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents. Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.
    • Mathnerd314 3y ago
      Not sure that's fair - the number of accidents in human-driven vehicles varies significantly by the human driving it. Do you compare with the teen that just obtained their license and is more interested in their phone than in driving properly, or the 65-year old doctor who's been driving for work and other purposes every day for the past 40 years? According to https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-driver/ https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/overview/age-of-dr... it's at least a 6x difference.
      • saagarjha 3y ago
        Teens who’ve just gotten their license are often quite good drivers. It’s after that when they drive poorly. (This also applies to adults, to a lesser extent.)
      • hcurtiss 3y ago
        I think you compare it to the average as that's who you are encountering when on the road. You have no way of selecting the other drivers to bias toward the doctor.
      • a_wild_dandan 3y ago
        You compare what matters — mean accidents per mile driven. And like any actuary, you can compare distributions with finer granularity data (location, tickets, ages, occupations, collusion severity, etc). None of this is new or intractable. We can have objective standards with confident judgements of what’s safe for our roads. As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.
    • stouset 3y ago
      Although things are changing, the overwhelming majority of AV miles are generally-safer miles on protected highways. And yet their statistics are typically compared against vehicle miles on all road types. Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way. It’s not really a fair comparison.
      • l33t7332273 3y ago
        > most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.
        • stouset 3y ago
          I’m lumping things like Tesla FSD. But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.
          • Zanni 3y ago
            Human drivers "disengage" also, though we don't think of it that way. I have aging friends who refuse to drive at night. I'll stay home in bad weather. When I was younger, I'd sometimes ask a passenger to back out of tricky parking space for me.
            • stouset 3y ago
              Yes, but we’re still comparing a highly selected set of AV miles vs the massive variety of human-driven miles.
      • xnx 3y ago
        It's not too useful to lump Tesla, Cruise, and Waymo together here. Tesla is years behind Cruise and cruise is years behind Waymo in terms of driving capability. Waymo doesn't even drive on highways, so we don't know how safe it would be (probably very safe).
    • Guy_w_Keyboard 3y ago
      Well, obviously the number of autonomous vehicles involved in accidents is going to be lower, but that's because barely any of them exist compared to the vast majority of people driving their cars. If you had statistics on proportions though, that might be a different story.
      • viraptor 3y ago
        You missed "per distance travelled" - that partially normalises the results. You still have to adjust for situation and road type (which Tesla conveniently doesn't do in their advertised numbers) for a better result.
  • dron57 3y ago
    The companies do track that data internally. It would be nice if the DMV mandated it's release to the public. But of course this type of data is a counterfactual, so much more subjective.
  • thesz 3y ago
    The same applies to regular drivers. We do not track accidents they prevent.
    • throw310822 3y ago
      Easy, humans prevent nearly 100% of the accidents. A car without a driver invariably crashes in a few seconds. The question is how many accidents (if any) self driving prevents with respect to average human drivers.
      • bumby 3y ago
        This is such an odd take I don’t know if it’s trolling. Both can be measured against similar metrics (an AV model against the avg AV/avg human or vice versa.
      • thesz 3y ago
        Self-driving cars are used in a very controlled environment. They will not function in high grass, I guess from my experience with different parktronics. The best "off road" demonstration of self-driving and/or AI assistance I've found is this: https://media.jaguarlandrover.com/news/2016/07/jaguar-land-rover-demonstrates-all-terrain-self-driving-technology https://media.jaguarlandrover.com/news/2016/07/jaguar-land-r... Note they avoid going into grass. Human can deduce trails from grass profile, AI? I don't think so. Will you count an inability to reach a lakeside as an accident? I guess, no.
        • RecycledEle 3y ago
          We have not trained AIs to deduce trails from grass. AIs need training before they can do things.* *They just might be learning to do things without being trained based on the emergency behavior I see in LLMs.
          • thesz 3y ago
            My point was not about discerning track from grass, but about driving in acttual grass. Current self-driving tech uses sensors that are useless in high grass. As for "emergency behavior" (emergent behavior, I guess) - we do not know how LLMs are trained. Thus, what you consider "emergency behavior," could very well be a part of training.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    I’ve had several low-light situations where my Tesla identified a pedestrian and applied the brakes before I did (typically dark clothing on a dark street).
    • ajross 3y ago
      Ditto, FWIW. The car may not always behave like a human does in those circumstances[1], but at this point it's objectively much better at the attention and recognition side of the task. [1] It tends to be more conservative than human drivers, and in weird ways. If a pedestrian seems at all to be moving in the direction of traffic, even if they're on a sidewalk and just meandering a bit, the car will try to evade (not violently, but it will brake a bit and pull to the outside of the lane).
      • fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
        Yeah, if anything, my Tesla’s issues seem to stem from being overly concerned about accidents than being recklessly dangerous.
    • mikeryan 3y ago
      This is low hanging fruit I had this feature in my 2015 Volvo.
      • fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
        Sure, it’s just more evidence that these automated systems improve overall safety vs. an unassisted driver. (Although I worry a bit about automation-induced inattention negating these benefits)
        • lemming 3y ago
          There are also issues like phantom braking which Teslas are prone to (or were, I'm not sure if that's better these days). That's part of a whole class of problems which the AVs suffer from which humans don't. I think the main problem is that those problems are really unpredictable to human drivers, whereas good defensive drivers will take into account what another lousy human driver might do based on lots of experience.
  • jsemrau 3y ago
    Maybe of interest. There has been research by SwissRe on this topic. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/paper-review-comparative-safety-performance https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/paper-review-comparative-saf...
    • twoWhlsGud 3y ago
      That's behind a paywall. Do you have a link to the SwissRe paper by chance? (Which might also behind a paywall, of course ; )
      • microtherion 3y ago
        Seems to be this one: https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.01206.pdf https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/2309/2309.01206.pdf
      • xnx 3y ago
        Waymo also talks about its work with SwissRe here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g
  • xnx 3y ago
    Waymo thinks about this a lot and has posted a good video about it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Qu6HNZu8g
• brianbreslin 3y ago
  I rode in an Argo car (RIP) and it avoided an accident where everyone in the car was like "where did that guy come from". It saw at an awkward angle around the corner before any human could have.
• Lonestar1440 3y ago
  Eyes and ears open in the city... I think a lot of humans would have spared the skater too. Waymo vehicles impress me, I've seen them perform skillfully like you describe.
• choppaface 3y ago
  I’ve been nearly hit by a Waymo as a pedestrian when the thing could see me well before it passed. I hate that they use giant SUVs, really inappropriate car for small city streets even if people love SUVs.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    If this ever happens to you or anyone else here, drop them a message with the date/time/place that it happened, and they will watch the footage and probably adjust stuff to not be scary in the future. Without human feedback, it's really hard to program a machine to understand "scary", even if the machine has calculated that it won't hit you. https://waymo.com/contact/ https://waymo.com/contact/ is the place to go.
    • blub 3y ago
      You’re subtly gaslighting the parent poster by implying the car couldn’t have hit them and that it was just being “scary”.
      • hoseja 3y ago
        Well, has it hit them? Fully automated intersection would be very "scary" for a slow meatbag, yet without accidents.
  • __loam 3y ago
    Waymo uses pretty small jaguar crossovers. Zoox uses suvs.
    • choppaface 3y ago
      The Jaguar iPace is a full 4-door SUV, not a hatchback or a Rav4. Just because the rear hatch tapers down doesn't make the car smaller from a safety standpoint. Jaguar iPace: 4800lbs, 79inch wide, 183 inches long Pacifica: 4500lbs, 79inch wide, 204 inches long Toyota Highlander: 4400lbs, 76inches wide, 194 inches long Chevy Bolt: 3500lbs, 69inches wide, 163 inches long The iPace might be great for LA but for SF it's totally inappropriate.
• brightball 3y ago
  I finally decided to turn on the Tesla full self driving this month and it’s been a mixed bag. Some over-cautious stuff like mentioned above but also some lane changes and adjustments that were better than what I would do. I still prefer to drive myself so I’ll probably turn it back off at the end of the month, but I’ve got high hopes for when I’m older.
  • ajross 3y ago
    That's my experience, having been on FSD beta for almost two years now. It's still "un-human-driver-like" in a bunch of surprising ways, but the actual meat and potatoes "does it do more or less stupid stuff" is I think ahead of my own driving at this point. At this point I trust its microdriving (lanekeeping, distance management, speed control, collision/obstacle avoidance, etc...) more than my own for sure. The higher level stuff is still a mixed bag (will it get stuck at that merge, can it make this lane change in time, does it understand that this other car is going to yield or will it stop, etc...).
    • Dylan16807 3y ago
      Can it detect stationary obstacles at freeway speeds? Do we have good evidence? Because autopilot couldn't.
      • ajross 3y ago
        Meh, we've been here before. That's a vague and impossible point to argue. I mean, sure, yes it does. Does it for all possible obstacles? Probably not? I certainly haven't tested. This kind of "$SYSTEM must have feature $X which is possessed by $COMPETITOR or else it will fail" is just plain bad analysis. It's possible for a Tesla to (1) be a better driver than you on the whole while still (2) doing weird stuff that you're sure you never would. FWIW: Stationary junk in the freeway causes accidents with human drivers every day, all the time. People are absolutely terrible at dodging crap in the road. But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd *never* drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would. Basically: no, you'll never get the evidence you want to "prove" the logical construct you've created. So Teslas, to you, will never be "safe". But in the real world they obviously are.
• fhub 3y ago
  Since it seems people are interested. I had one situation which this sort of thing made me a bit uneasy (So one gripe actually). I was sitting back right seat. Waymo was waiting to make an unprotected left turn over two lanes. There was a vehicle waiting to also make an unprotected left in the other direction. Behind it was a truck. Waymo made that turn where I wouldn't have. I thought it through after and it had at least two advantages over a human here. 1. It knew the car situation behind truck well before a driver would have considered it. 2. It's front lidar could see around that truck earlier than a driver could. I still provided feedback that I'd have preferred it to not make that turn even if it was safe to do so. At the end of the day I'm the customer and I want to feel safe at all times not just be safe. This was the turn - https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7337193,-122.4350752,3a,75y,85.91h,81.51t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1szwm9w2VmkdzzoqaIChiibg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7337193,-122.4350752,3a,75y,...
  • pbarnes_1 3y ago
    I've been in this situation, and it's something that seems to get tweaked every week. They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month. I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger. Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.
    • ethbr1 3y ago
      One huge advantage sensor-equiped vehicles have is knowing velocity and acceleration of traffic around them. Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle. We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know. If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and still be perfectly safe.
      • patrick451 3y ago
• bartread 3y ago
  > no human would be able to do. You say this but as a motorcyclist I've learned to have my eyes everywhere. I suspect many others would say the same. You acclimate to the vehicle you most often control: if that's some woolly handling sluggish SUV then I suspect, no, you probably wouldn't have done well in this situation, but if you were more used to driving a vehicle that requires more attention I suspect you'd do better.
  • fhub 3y ago
    Fair point. For more context the waymo just made the right turn and there was a line of cars in front moving slowly or still. The skateboarder was crouched down and going fast between the cars and the gutter (against traffic). Perhaps from the driver's seat you'd get a glimpse of the skateboarder but it would be very late. No other cars in front made any adjustments. I did hear the skateboarder as it went by.
• pbarnes_1 3y ago
  I saw a Waymo come to a screeching halt in a split second as a... less than intelligent individual... skateboarded in front of a bus, into the extremely busy road. If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question. Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?" The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time. Magic.
  • mike_d 3y ago
    Waymo is amazing, knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety - I would feel safer riding in a Waymo than driving myself. My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.
    • qeternity 3y ago
      > knowing some of the stuff they do behind the scenes to ensure safety Any info on this? I would love to learn more about what they're doing.
      • xnx 3y ago
        https://waymo.com/safety/ https://waymo.com/safety/ is probably your best resource. You can follow the links from there to learn about all the things they're doing with simulation, etc.
    • ehsankia 3y ago
      Absolutely. Glad California DMV is taking the more level headed approach here and evaluating them case by case based on merit.
      • startupsfail 3y ago
        In the case of that particular incident, it seems that the pedestrian was “thrown” into the lane with Cruise when it was hit by another (human) driver.
• paganel 3y ago
  Based on this recent-ish YT [1] video Waymo is also crap, just as Cruise is, as any car that stops at a green light, on the left-lane, is a danger to all the other drivers it shares the road with. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rxvl3INKSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rxvl3INKSg
  • Dylan16807 3y ago
    That looks like a big annoyance, but I wouldn't call that stop dangerous.
    • paganel 3y ago
      Have you ever driven in a congested city? Someone stopping out of the blue when green is on is definitely a danger to all those around the car he/she/it is driving. Granted, that might not be the case somewhere in the middle of the US where there's a car passing every 5-10 minutes or so.
  • hnbad 3y ago
    There's a lot of legitimate criticism in that short video but the presenter is also extremely dishonest and biased. E.g. they end the video saying that they started with "a lot of optimism" when at the beginning of the ride they literally said that they expected the car to be unsafe. They also seem to mock the AI for obeying traffic laws like speed limits and stop signs, which is a bad start for a video like this. Someone in the comments also mentions that the destination was in a dead end street, which may be the reason the drop-off is a 5 minute walk away. The 5 minute walk was also apparently indicated when she entered the destination. This along with the pick-up location being on the other side of the road feels like it might be the result of the AI being overly cautious. I'd find that acceptable for an "autonomous car" but not one advertised as a replacement for taxis (which as the presenter mentions are also used as accessibility aids where a 5 minute walk uphill can be unacceptable). There's no footage of the car stopping at the green light, just her saying it's come to a full stop and then an external shot where it's already stopped. That's not enough information to call the stop "unsafe", even if it was impeding traffic. It also stopped with flashing hazards, assuming Waymo doesn't flash hazards during the entire ride (which I hope they don't). It's not clear why it stopped there but based on the little footage we have it doesn't seem very abrupt so any traffic behind it would have had plenty of time to notice and react the decelerating car in front of them. The stop seems unnecessary and because it's AI and Waymo didn't provide additional information, it's impossible to say what caused it. The message she saw also indicates it was caused by an error, presumably a navigation issue. Although it is impossible to tell based on the editing, the issue seems to have been resolved within a few seconds. A human driver would have probably decided to just follow the direction of traffic for that amount of time, or change lines to come to a full stop at the side of the road but in an urban environment (not at highway speeds) the behavior is not completely unreasonable. What's more concerning to me is that the AI ran into a problem while in traffic that required the car to come to a complete halt and presumably wait for external (human?) intervention, green light or none. I'd prefer a car that slowly comes to a full stop at a green light because of a software issue over one that keeps dragging a pedestrian it ran over for several seconds to avoid impeding traffic but the bigger issue with Waymo here is that the car runs into a software issue at all while in traffic.
• fhub 3y ago
  Another fun anecdote. When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way - the windshield wipers swipe once (I'm not sure they still do this). But it wasn't implemented very well at some point since the Waymo I was in was behind another one for many blocks. The wipers went at least 17 times. As an earlier adopter I provided lots of feedback. Even little things like I tried working on a laptop in the back* and when I went to type in my 1password password I reached up to cover the camera that is positioned perfectly to see my keystrokes. * Not recommended in SF. But I imagine on the 280 it would be great one day.
  • School-Cotton 3y ago
    > When a Waymo is in the vicinity of another Waymo they acknowledge each other in a whimsical/cute way I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.
    • jakefromstatecs 3y ago
      > Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor. And yet, you aren't willing to accept that they have a different sense of humor without hating them. Ironic.
      • School-Cotton 3y ago
        I don’t hate them, and never said I did. I find their childish antics annoying.
        • km3r 3y ago
          It is however, interesting to me to confirm they are aware of other AVs and can sync with them, enable better safety, and potentially could optimize routing through traffic with the combined data. Imagine if the car in front could warn the car behind of an incident, enabling it to take action before a human driver would even be aware of the incident.
• notatoad 3y ago
  >Occasionally the route selections make no sense at all. i'm sure this is sometimes true, but at least sometimes i'd guess that the route selections would make more sense if you saw the conditions and traffic on the route the car didn't take you on.
• dclowd9901 3y ago
  > no human would be able to _defensive driving has entered the chat_ Seriously, anyone here who rides motorcycles can pipe in, but some of us out there never assume anything on the road and thusly avoid a lot of trouble because of it. Assuming incorrectly is the root cause of probably 99.999% of accidents.
  • viraptor 3y ago
    There's driving without attention, there's defensive driving, and then there's ability to react to things which would be physically impossible for people to react to. You can train all you want (and yes, that will improve your survival rate significantly), but the eyes->brain->muscles->movement->car->inertia pipeline has delays we will never be able to work around.
    • Fricken 3y ago
      In the real world reacting effectively is less about reflexes and more about situational awareness, anticipating what might happen, and reacting not just quickly but properly when something sudden does occur.
      • viraptor 3y ago
        I think in that space ML will beat us completely. It's basically a simple optimisation problem of: these rules improve safety, here's the situation you're in, maximise rules applied and minimise changes required to apply them, repeat. The number of ideas ML can remember, test and execute is not going to be comparable with what people can do. It all relies on getting appropriate data from sensors though.
• nonethewiser 3y ago
  > It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. Wonder what it would have done if it didnt have room to pull into the left lane without hitting a car. Or perhaps another skateboarder.
• rapind 3y ago
  Maybe this is a fluke, but a few months ago an ABC reporter documented her Waymo ride and it had a couple goof ups. https://youtu.be/-Rxvl3INKSg https://youtu.be/-Rxvl3INKSg Ultimately, I don't think the driving screw ups were that big of a deal (just my opinion). The big deal though is the moronic lack of customer support. How hard is it really to have a customer support staff a phone call away that can reassure the customer and either debug the issue to get them sorted out or at least offer alternatives. It would do so much to improve the users perception. So, typical Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service. Maybe it was a just hit piece though and they cut out some contextual video? No idea.
  • screye 3y ago
    > Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service How can a company with THAT MUCH MONEY be THAT plagued with an issue that everyone has been shouting about for more than a decade ?? I wonder if there is a business model in contracting in Google's customer care. I'm sure someone could do a lot better with Google's customer budget. Google can start off with a few departments, and then have performance based expansion. If it goes too well, they can always get acquired in.
    • MaxikCZ 3y ago
      Because Google doesn't exists for you, it exists for shareholders. They calculated that not having customer support is more profitable, end of story.
      • screye 3y ago
        Being a losing member of the cloud race after inventing every modern systems paradigm is profitable ? Missing the entire LLM/Diffusion cycle despite having laid the groundwork for it is profitable ? Their peer tech companies - MSFT, AAPL, AMZN all managed to become industry leaders into a completely different sector while maintaining their moat in their original revenue sources. Google is still only makes money on ads. Google has created a monster products in B2C search, ads and software platforms. But, their B2C services are lagging far behind, and customer service really helps here.
• jprete 3y ago
  I’m reasonably sure I’ve done things like that. I wouldn’t need the mirror check because I would already know what’s there during the right turn. However I would personally aim to stay dead center in lane to reduce the skateboarder’s uncertainty during their own tricky maneuver. This isn’t to say the Waymo car did a bad job. It sounds like a good choice in the situation.
• amelius 3y ago
  > In fact I've seen Waymos do things that no human would be able to do Waymo has way more sensors. Most importantly, it has Lidar.
• bmitc 3y ago
  I have doubts of the claim you have made. The Waymo just turned up a hill and moved out of the way of a downhill skateboarder? What is it about that that makes it something that no human could do? Was the Waymo's vision blocked before making the turn? As that's the time to determine the turn is safe. Also, isn't there an implicit assumption that all Waymo "drivers" would perform in exactly the same way?