4 ms·

Self driving is going the way of fusion power. Always just a couple years away. I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile ha

• neaden 3y ago
  That just seems like a train to be honest, and runs into the same problems of who is going to pay for the infrastructure and handle priority.
  • crazygringo 3y ago
    Trains are nowhere near as flexible. There simply aren't tracks going to and from every truck's origin and destination. It's not a replacement. I don't think divided lanes are required either. The problems with self-driving trucking aren't about following the lane.
• jessriedel 3y ago
  1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands. 2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.
  • tahoeskibum 3y ago
    I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.
    • tw04 3y ago
      So do your regular drives just not include any tree lined roads, or have they done some mapping to fix phantom braking in your area? And that’s a serious question, because the stress of trying to anticipate the next phantom brake event completely defeats the purpose in my mind. I’d much rather just drive myself.
      • eclipxe 3y ago
        I never experience phantom braking in FSD Beta on HW4.
      • gibolt 3y ago
        Phantom braking has been almost entirely eliminated in the past year. Plenty of others have noted the same experience. Used to happen to me once every ~100 miles. This year, it only happened once the whole year, and the drop was maybe ~10mph.
    • adrr 3y ago
      Its not self driving though. I have to pay attention when using it. Tesla doesn't have a Level 3 or higher cars on the road.
      • gibolt 3y ago
        Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving) Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.
        • adrr 3y ago
          Tesla doesn't have self driving though. Its level 2. Mercedes has level 3 cars on the road where the driver can legally watch a movie or read a book. Level matters but it dictates what the driver can legally do. Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving, Tesla makes the driver 100% liable. There's a huge difference.
  • unclad5968 3y ago
    Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.
    • NewJazz 3y ago
      Most of the US population lives on the coast, which is quite temperate generally. I suspect large portions of North America will be easily serviceable by robotaxi.
    • lorstic 3y ago
      Waymo seems to work the same in pretty heavy rain as a clear day in SF. They're testing snow a lot more now, no idea how good it is yet.
    • xnx 3y ago
      San Francisco seems pretty tricky: narrow streets, heavy pedestrian traffic, fog, hills, street cars, etc
    • adrr 3y ago
      SF doesn't seem like an ideal place, it rains and is foggy which both degrade lidar performance.
    • mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y ago
      Yeah have fun when it's snowing so hard that all the sensors get covered if you stand still for too long at a light or something. And I do wonder what hail would do to it. Could cause a lot of... interesting input data. And subsequently a lot of interesting driving.
      • gibolt 3y ago
        Sensors can already handle rain. Heating elements are not hard to add (if not present now).
    • joshe 3y ago
      Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great. Even if it didn't work in snow (and it's unlikely to do worse than humans), all the west coast, desert west, and south have basically zero snow all year long.
  • foooorsyth 3y ago
    > and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service Waymo isn’t profitable and has been a massive money loser over the past several years. See “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s earnings. Where does this claim come from?
    • jessriedel 3y ago
      It's based on public comments about the per-mile cost of Cruise and Waymo, and the fact that Waymo is currently operating in only a tiny number of areas. Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs, and iterating on the hardware will drive down the marginal/capital costs. Amazon made no profit for many, many years, but that's because they were re-investing all their revenue. No one doubted that they could have turned a profit if they wanted. (Tbc, there is not yet a component of Waymo that is profitable because, as mentioned, they are just operating in a handful of cities.)
      • foooorsyth 3y ago
        >Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs Where is the actual evidence of this, though? I'm not trying to be snide -- genuinely curious. Waymo is expanding -- their service areas (and operating times) have expanded in SF and Phoenix. There's a waitlist in LA and Austin. Yet Waymo's financials are still buried in Alphabet's "Other Bets" line, which lost $1.2 billion in Q3 2023. You think Google, which has been catching heat endlessly for falling behind in AI, has not only won the self-driving race from a technical standpoint (the claim by many in this thread), but has also found a way to make it both profitable and scalable to arbitrary locations, and they're hiding this reality in their earnings statements? Seems unlikely to me. Why bother with waitlists and slow rollouts in favorable climates? Why not blitzscale this thing to all markets and disclose the numbers to investors and send the stock to the moon?
        • rcxdude 3y ago
          Waymo generally seem to be extremely cautious: they have invested the most effort into the safety design of their systems and they don't shout very loudly for being the leader of the pack. I think this extends to their expansion as well: autonomous car companies are only one or two serious incidents away from severe backlash (see Cruise), and the more you operate the more likely it is that one occurs. Expanding slowly and dealing with each expansion of near-miss edge cases as you do so is a rational strategy in that case, even if you have already beaten human drivers. (Also Google is bad at full commitment, and I don't know how much that extends to Alphabet, but they as a company seem pathologically incapable of putting even a majority of their weight behind anything, which is a significant source of failures for them)
• gertlex 3y ago
  Is that "same direction travel divided between autonomous trucks and all other traffic"? Or "only on highways where traffic directions are separated by a median"? The former sounds like a massive (understating it probably) infrastructure investment. Trains sound better (as other comment while I was typing notes). The latter doesn't solve the issues noted in the recent article here: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-rideshare/ https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri... Am curious to hear more thoughts/insights.
  • azlev 3y ago
    Interesting article, thanks.
• atleastoptimal 3y ago
  I rode in a Waymo and it feels safer, easier, and was more enjoyable than Uber.
• dexwiz 3y ago
  Waymo appears to be the real deal. Last night I saw one navigate a situation with a hesitant pedestrian better than most human drivers. And before people chime in with "ideal conditions," it was at night in the rain. I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.
  • tw04 3y ago
    How is waymo doing with snow covered roads?
    • ra7 3y ago
      They are testing, but don’t offer a service in snowy areas yet.
  • gibolt 3y ago
    Waymo and Tesla are the only real competition left in the U.S. The deciding factor is how fast Waymo can roll out to more locales before Tesla gets closer to level 5 over the next 3-5 years. After that, vehicle production and operations cost will be the main factor in the race to $0