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I speak to VCs quite a bit and recently I was hanging around with a bunch of them, they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid indust

by pjs_ 3y ago

I speak to VCs quite a bit and recently I was hanging around with a bunch of them, they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever. But to me it's strange, if you go to San Francisco today you can see cars driving around with nobody inside. They drive around, they pick people up, they mostly don't crash into shit. There's nobody behind the wheel. I know that everyone is incredibly quick to point out their flaws and relative safety rating and remote interventions and so on but can we just take a step back, even for a moment, and acknowledge that they freaking did it, they basically did the thing that a lot of people said would never happen - the car drives around all day with nobody inside, of it's own volition!! It's amazing! Am I a deranged silicon valley optimist for thinking this? I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second. The only real reason that would make sense to me is if this is actually just a giant fraud and they are driving the things over LTE/4G a much larger fraction of the time than I have been led to believe. Anyone know the realistic ratio of self-driving to remote control? The fact that the safety statistics are 100X worse or whatever is obviously deadly serious but on a scale of six or so orders of magnitude it remains meaningfully impressive to my dumb brain.

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago
> I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second. They're victim of the self-driving hype machine, which is not entirely Waymo's fault. Lots of people and companies were really promising the world with self-driving cars after making the initial "novelty" proof of concept stuff possible. But now they're in the nitty gritty of actually making it safe, dependable, reliable, and trusted, in less than ideal conditions (or in non sunny California conditions at all) and people and companies are finding that it's far harder to follow through on that. To Waymo's credit, they have been steadily plugging along without crazy marketing or PR to overhype their product. They just have to win the long-game, if they can.
- GeneralMayhem 3y ago
  > or in non sunny California conditions at all It does at least rain in San Francisco, and I've taken Waymo in the rain. It did more than fine. Plus, you know, night time.
  - NegativeLatency 3y ago
    Having lived in SF and elsewhere, even heavy SF rain is nothing compared to further up the West coast. I remember parts of the infra in SF failing when it rained more than one inch.
duped 3y ago
> they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever. As Sinclair said, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something on which his salary depends on him not understanding." The road to self driving cars is a capital intensive and entrenched in regulatory quagmire. Those two things are enough to keep VCs away. But if you think about it, every trip that someone takes in a self-driving vehicle is a trip that they didn't take their own car or a taxi. Most trips are not complex, and most problems are with other human drivers. As the market grows the difficulty of the problem domain will shrink. If you can reach critical mass, infrastructure can be adjusted to specialize for self-driving cars. That said, the illusion of self driving cars is that you can provide mass transit at affordable prices using existing infrastructure and specialized hubs/depots/fuel/roads for the vehicles. But we already have that, they're called busses. But busses are for poor people, so we don't invest in them.

by pjs_ 3y ago

beezlebroxxxxxx 3y ago

> I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second. They're victim of the self-driving hype machine, which is not entirely Waymo's fault. Lots of people and companies were really promising the world with self-driving cars after making the initial "novelty" proof of concept stuff possible. But now they're in the nitty gritty of actually making it safe, dependable, reliable, and trusted, in less than ideal conditions (or in non sunny California conditions at all) and people and companies are finding that it's far harder to follow through on that. To Waymo's credit, they have been steadily plugging along without crazy marketing or PR to overhype their product. They just have to win the long-game, if they can.

GeneralMayhem 3y ago
> or in non sunny California conditions at all It does at least rain in San Francisco, and I've taken Waymo in the rain. It did more than fine. Plus, you know, night time.
- NegativeLatency 3y ago
  Having lived in SF and elsewhere, even heavy SF rain is nothing compared to further up the West coast. I remember parts of the infra in SF failing when it rained more than one inch.

duped 3y ago

> they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever. As Sinclair said, "it is difficult to get a man to understand something on which his salary depends on him not understanding." The road to self driving cars is a capital intensive and entrenched in regulatory quagmire. Those two things are enough to keep VCs away. But if you think about it, every trip that someone takes in a self-driving vehicle is a trip that they didn't take their own car or a taxi. Most trips are not complex, and most problems are with other human drivers. As the market grows the difficulty of the problem domain will shrink. If you can reach critical mass, infrastructure can be adjusted to specialize for self-driving cars. That said, the illusion of self driving cars is that you can provide mass transit at affordable prices using existing infrastructure and specialized hubs/depots/fuel/roads for the vehicles. But we already have that, they're called busses. But busses are for poor people, so we don't invest in them.