6 ms·

> Waymo currently operates commercial robotaxi services in Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco, Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to E

• LightBug1 3y ago
  Even in those scenarioes, I'd still trust Waymo far more than the current substandard, falsely-advertised, snake-oil alternative offerings ...
  • gfodor 3y ago
    It’s funny that you’ve got several teams of thousands of engineers working on this and you label the one as “snake-oil” that has deployed their beta to hundreds of thousands of cars. Musk Derangement Syndrome is real.
    • kotaKat 3y ago
      Cruise and Uber were equally snake oil, too, and have spilled more blood than Waymo or Tesla.
    • kranke155 3y ago
      Tesla Self Drive seems to have peaked? I follow the forums and subreddits on this topic, and no one has been talking about major improvements for a while now.
    • LightBug1 3y ago
      I see no evidence of a reliable, working product delivered as promised/advertised. For years now. What do you want me to do? Pretend? Perhaps MDS is real ...
      • gfodor 3y ago
        Do you think Tesla's approach to FSD is similarly difficult as their peers' approach, and they are just lazy and incompetent, or do you think their approach is fundamentally easier or harder? Have you thought about it at all?
        • ra7 3y ago
          Who cares about approach? Consumers only care if the product works or not. They haven't made it work and don't look like they will make it work. You don't get brownie points if you deliberately hamstring yourselves (no sensors, no maps) and make the problem harder than it already is. It's like trying to jump higher and higher to fly to moon instead of using rockets. It doesn't mean you're tackling a fundamentally harder problem.
          • gfodor 3y ago
            Consumers don't care, but observers who are trying to understand the nature of what's being developed do. Tesla's approach is not strictly about cars, just like their entire company isn't strictly about cars. They're reaching for something bigger than self-driving with FSD, and if they weren't doing it the way they're doing it, those additional wins wouldn't be in scope.
        • lern_too_spel 3y ago
          I think Musk has consistently lied about engineers' understanding of how FSD can work. https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-engineers-who-knew-removing-radar-was-a-bad-idea/ https://www.carscoops.com/2023/03/elon-musk-overruled-tesla-... He repeatedly claimed that having contradictory radar and camera data means the system won't know what data to trust. Anybody who has worked with data in any capacity can tell you that is complete nonsense. In the past, people would call combining this data "sensor fusion." These days, even high school kids know you just throw all your features into a model. You don't discard red channel data from your cameras because it might conflict with green channel data. Tesla Insurance doesn't throw away all features except driver age when calculating premiums.
    • jtr1 3y ago
      “{name} Derangement Syndrome” is a really neat tool for filtering out opposing viewpoints. Pro tip: save it as a hotkey for easy deployment.
      • gfodor 3y ago
        No, there are only two valid values for {name} where this kind of dynamic is both real and useful to observe, the rest I would agree with you.
        • jtr1 3y ago
          Nice, you keep those thought-terminating cliches locked and loaded
    • metabagel 3y ago
      It seems to be forever in beta. It’s not clear that the technology as currently implemented can ever achieve what it set out to do.
      • gfodor 3y ago
        That's true, it's still unclear if the method Tesla is taking will eventually work. That's not the definition of snake oil. They're approaching the problem differently, because they think if they solve it this way it will be a better outcome for a variety of reasons, and are working extremely hard on it.
        • djur 3y ago
          What makes people call it snake oil is the salesperson (Musk) repeatedly making false claims about both the capability (summon your car from across the country...) and availability (... by 2018!) of the technology.
        • shkkmo 3y ago
          The key part of it being "snake oil" is selling the system before it actually works. It has nothing to do with the approach to solving the problem.
  • HALtheWise 3y ago
    I initially read this as referring to human-driven vehicles as substandard, falsely-advertized, and snake-oil, which... Fair... For what it's worth, as a pedestrian walking around SF late at night I absolutely do trust Waymo more than human driven cars.
• teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Have you actually driven in SF? There’s plenty of rain in the winter and the roads can get quite interesting. Right turns that are actually 170 degrees and a 15% incline. Red lights that are way off to the side and obscured (one on market right after you turn right exiting 101). It’s honestly a pretty good stress test as far as American cities go.
  • nradov 3y ago
    As a stress test, SF is good but not great. Autonomous vehicles seem to have huge problems dealing with snow due to the obscured lane lines. It never really snows in SF (maybe a few flakes in rare conditions but not enough to stick).
    • VBprogrammer 3y ago
      I don't see why not being able to see lane lines would be a the problem, at least for the full-fat Waymo solution. My understanding is they are using lidar sensors to correlate their exact position in addition to GPS which can be accurate to sub-meter level. In fact, they would have much more information to go on than most wet-wear drivers, assuming they can correlate the position of street furniture etc. The bigger problem I would imagine is finding the car not responding to inputs in a predictable way. I would image at a certain point they are going to give up. Even a human driver might need a push in some conditions.
    • danans 3y ago
      > It never really snows in SF (maybe a few flakes in rare conditions but not enough to stick). It never snows, but between the fog and strong winter storms directly off the Pacific, visibility can often be near zero in SF. I've lost sight of lanes and surroundings many times.
  • lm28469 3y ago
    I lived in SF and besides the occasional annoyance of parking my motorcycle in heavily inclined streets I don't remember anything remotely problematic. I remember plenty of waymo cars glitching though but that was a long time ago. tbh waymo's ceo said what I said here: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-autonomous-cars-wont-ever-be-able-to-drive-in-all-conditions/ https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo...
• cagenut 3y ago
  hell you don't even have to go to old europe, lets see them make it to and from newark airport
• askonomm 3y ago
  I'm hoping they work up to the complexity of European roads eventually. Start small and iterate, y'know.
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    I’m waiting to see how it will handle Chinese roads. A few self driving startups in China actually, although I haven’t heard anything from them recently. It would be the gold standard for a self driving car to handle Beijing roads, drivers, and pedestrians.
    • School-Cotton 3y ago
      Beirut and Manila are both crazier than Beijing from what I remember.
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        I’ve never been to Beirut but Manila, I just remember being stuck in traffic all the time. It didn’t seem worse than China, just a complete lack of infrastructure causing everything to seize over. China has more traffic deaths per capita (15/100k) than the Philippines (10/100k), in any case.
        • dmoy 3y ago
          I haven't been to Beirut, but I have been to Beijing a bunch, and by brother has been to Beirut I think at least twice. From what he tells me, Beirut is crazier driving than Beijing. In like all respects. The traffic fatalities are higher (18 > 15), the lack of lanes is more egregious (and people will dive across three lanes more aggressively), the amount of driving the wrong way down busy multi lane roads is more (which still happens in Beijing, but like not as often). Beirut (or at least the outskirts) also has things Beijing doesn't: civilian enforcement of traffic etiquette via brandishing automatic rifles, traffic intersections primarily controlled by tanks instead of signals, and the annoying practice carried over from Saudis of doing that stupid angled drive-with-the-car-tilted-on-two-wheels thing in thd middle of traffic. It's similar to Beijing in it always being slow though, so that's probably why the fatality rate isn't 30+ lol.
• culopatin 3y ago
  Have you seen the streets of SF? Sometimes you can’t even see what’s ahead because you’re going from a 15% up to a 15% down and all you see is the horizon
• ramraj07 3y ago
  SF is a fairly tricky place to drive. I mean it’s no Boston but it’s no mean feat. Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self driving cars in more “feral” places where anything goes as traffic rules go. In those places, what I’ve observed, is that you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is). This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
  • ocschwar 3y ago
    Boston is the IDEAL place to test out autonomous driving. The narrow roads, lined as they are with trees, rocks, and parked cars, mean that when an autonomous car makes the wrong decision, the damage will be primarily to property, Waymo's and the other guy, and Waymo can just cut a check, learn some lessons, and move on. (BTW, Boston's reputation as a place for aggressive driving is undeserved. Insurance companies pay a lot for fender repair for the reason above, making the city look bad, but for injuries against a person, insurers just pay the limit, which an injured pedestrian can run up in the first 24 hours in a hospital. Anything beyond that doesn't show up in car insurance statistics. Houston and Austin have far more aggressive drivers, for instance.)
    • ghaff 3y ago
      It's also true that the old elevated central artery was really bad and pretty much required aggressive behavior because of how many ramps there were and the fact that you had to navigate a confusing network of crowded surface streets to access the harbor tunnels. I've admittedly lived in the area a long time but between the Big Dig and GPS, I don't think Boston is uniquely bad these days.
• masto 3y ago
  Arizona maybe, but I wouldn't say San Francisco is straight lines. I've seen a few of these videos pop up on YouTube. This one I watched recently is full of construction, double-parked trucks, pedestrians, complicated traffic, etc. https://youtu.be/5wXO05s-pLc?si=5W-SW5zGXIwgnQpG https://youtu.be/5wXO05s-pLc?si=5W-SW5zGXIwgnQpG It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again. Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively. Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place with weather.
  • ghaff 3y ago
    It may not get snowstorms but I would say significant areas of San Francisco are absolutely not particularly easy to drive in. Understanding someone directing traffic is probably one of the harder problems. To another point, to the degree that it's predictable ahead of time, I'd be perfectly happy with a car that only could self-drive in some conditions. Only highway for some subset of weather conditions? That would still be super-useful for some of us.
• Rebuff5007 3y ago
  Yes, its good engineering practice to solve the easier problems before solving the hard ones.
• renewiltord 3y ago
  It was raining yesterday and the Waymos were out but it doesn't matter that much. You won't get self-driving cars in your streets in Europe and that's okay. It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25% market share there but they're one of the most successful companies in the world, without Romania. Some markets can be irrelevant.
• ocschwar 3y ago
  An autonomous system doesn't just put together classifications of what it sees in the environment. It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European towns should be doable.
• hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I don't understand the point of comments like this, and I see them all the time when it comes to autonomous vehicles. First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365 days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue. And, of course, wouldn't one expect an autonomous vehicle to start in places with better conditions vs yolo'ing it in a blizzard whiteout?
  • unregistereddev 3y ago
    It is not just bad weather. Here in the midwest it's common for the road lines to be worn and barely visible. There are many more potholes and other problems with the pavement. My 2023 car with cameras and radar usually cannot activate lane centering - even in good weather - because it cannot tell where the lanes are. Having driven in both San Francisco and throughout the midwest, I agree with the parent commenter that San Francisco is a much easier environment for self-driving cars.
    • hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      I don't really disagree, but again, I don't understand the point about complaining about "Pfft, Waymo can only operate in good conditions". I mean, it wasn't that long ago when Google's autonomous vehicle tech was first announced and everyone thought it looked like magic. More and more I believe in Louis CK's bit about "everything is amazing and nobody's happy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
      • Spivak 3y ago
        Because there's two things going on. There's the autonomous driving technology which is god damn amazing and a huge technical achievement even if it only works in ideal conditions. Then there's the sheisters trying to sell that technology and convince governments that "for safety" people should be required to buy their product. Poking holes in the technology is people's natural response to the very real fear that their ability to operate a vehicle that isn't literally controlled by a huge corporation will be taken away. The technology is amazing, humans suck. You see the same thing with EVs, rather than it being a purely positive thing that the market has more options for people with different driving patterns you have governments committing to banning the sale of new ICE cars when the deployment is literally in its infancy
• fooblaster 3y ago
  I took a waymo last night in the rain in union square in SF. I assure you it wasn't easy, many merges, people walking in the road, cars to pass, etc.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• jfoster 3y ago
  Getting commercial robotaxis working in even just one city is an amazing achievement. It's important to note that Uber currently operates in more than 10,000 cities, though. Even if Waymo were to launch one new city each week, it would be more than 192 years before they catch up to Uber.
• bmitc 3y ago
  They did try in the upper midwest, and they failed completely. When the sensors are covered by rain, ice, snow, salt, and other road grime, the cars are basically useless.
• cameronh90 3y ago
  Obviously you roll out a safety critical system like this in the simplest scenarios first as you build confidence. Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog because your options are basically drive too fast and risk hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined limits where they won't fly. Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with a safe priority system. Priorité à droite is a silly rule, and it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
• notatoad 3y ago
  people love to say this like it's some sort of "gotcha" claim, and waymo is cheating at safety by only rolling out their service in places where they're certain they can operate safely. how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and responsible.
• rajup 3y ago
  I read comments along this vein every time an article on Waymo (or self driving cars) comes out, and my question is who cares? Even if it is just the sunny easy locations that get this advance, that’s hundreds of deaths and injuries avoided every year. I understand being pragmatic and practical but we should celebrate this news IMO.
• minwcnt5 3y ago
  Waymo drives better in San Francisco than I do, and I live here. And it drives an order of magnitude better than I did during my first few months in the city. I have friends who live in the South Bay who are still reluctant to drive when they visit SF.
• sib 3y ago
  I recently took a Waymo test ride through a bunch of neighborhood streets in LA. Not straight lines, lots of traffic, cars parked on both sides of roads, plenty of human drivers seemingly unable to cope. (Admittedly, mostly sunny weather.)