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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 collec

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.
      - piotrkaminski 3y ago
        > Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving That's what I thought too, but apparently it's not that clear cut. Their manual says that the driver must be ready to take over not only when prompted by the system but also "due to obvious circumstances". It's not clear what that means — cue the lawsuits. https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-will-not-take-blame.html https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-w...
    - ra7 3y ago
      Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.
      - gibolt 3y ago
        Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does). Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.
- panopticon 3y ago
  I paid for a month of FSD over the summer to try it out, and it was an extremely stressful experience. It was very twitchy and jarring at stop signs, there are several uncontrolled T-intersections around my house that FSD just flew through (almost striking another car one time), and I didn't like how it always tried to get into the slowest lane on the highway during rush hour. Maybe I'll try it again this summer to see how it's improved, but some of the close calls last time soured me on the experience. It felt more like I was babysitting a new driver and less like I was being chauffeured around.
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)

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.
    - piotrkaminski 3y ago
      > Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving That's what I thought too, but apparently it's not that clear cut. Their manual says that the driver must be ready to take over not only when prompted by the system but also "due to obvious circumstances". It's not clear what that means — cue the lawsuits. https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-will-not-take-blame.html https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-w...
  - ra7 3y ago
    Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.
    - gibolt 3y ago
      Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does). Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.
panopticon 3y ago
I paid for a month of FSD over the summer to try it out, and it was an extremely stressful experience. It was very twitchy and jarring at stop signs, there are several uncontrolled T-intersections around my house that FSD just flew through (almost striking another car one time), and I didn't like how it always tried to get into the slowest lane on the highway during rush hour. Maybe I'll try it again this summer to see how it's improved, but some of the close calls last time soured me on the experience. It felt more like I was babysitting a new driver and less like I was being chauffeured around.

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)