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This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts o

This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.

NullHypothesist 11mo ago
Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?
terminalshort 11mo ago
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
- jordanb 11mo ago
  There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
  - xnx 11mo ago
    Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.
    - razingeden 11mo ago
      they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed: construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around. the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver. it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but- i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire. it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
      - jordanb 11mo ago
        > sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident. The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading). Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- repsilat 11mo ago
  "Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
  - andy99 11mo ago
    Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
- QuadmasterXLII 11mo ago
  It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing. Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.” And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
  - terminalshort 11mo ago
    It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.
- CPLX 11mo ago
  I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
0_____0 11mo ago
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving. The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
- notatoad 11mo ago
  the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
- xnx 11mo ago
  Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day. On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
  - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    Those constraints apply to humans too. So it seems likely that: - it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets - it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      to wit, http://comma.ai http://comma.ai has the freeway part solved, if you can get your hands on one.
lumens 11mo ago
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
- eloncuck 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lumens 11mo ago
    Truly curious - have you tried it recently?
    - eloncuck 11mo ago
      Daily. I'm still unable to leave my culdesac without phantom leaves causing phantom braking. There was a time when I believed in the hype, I'm less skeptical than most. But the evidence now is incontrovertible.
      - lumens 11mo ago
        I assume this is not a HW4 vehicle? I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either). That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
        eloncuck 11mo ago
        2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
        11mo ago
sjducb 11mo ago
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph. The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system. Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
kappi 11mo ago
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
ddp26 11mo ago
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights. I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
- toast0 11mo ago
  When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed. So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
- philistine 11mo ago
  If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
dlsfjke 11mo ago
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
creer 11mo ago
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
dekhn 11mo ago
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway-south-sf-rescue-13807046.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
- asdff 11mo ago
  There's videos of waymos absolutely decking delivery robots
  - TulliusCicero 11mo ago
    Robot on robot violence.
svat 11mo ago
The article has a couple of quotes from Waymo leads on the topic: > “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said and > While many assume freeway driving is easier, it comes with its own set of challenges, principal software engineer Pierre Kreitmann said in a recent briefing. He noted that critical events happen less often on freeways, which means there are fewer opportunities to expose Waymo’s self-driving system to rare scenarios and prove how the system performs when it really matters. Both point to freeway driving being easier to do well, but harder to be sure is being done well.

NullHypothesist 11mo ago

Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?

terminalshort 11mo ago

Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.

jordanb 11mo ago
There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
- xnx 11mo ago
  Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.
  - razingeden 11mo ago
    they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed: construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around. the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver. it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but- i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire. it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
    - jordanb 11mo ago
      > sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident. The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
- bluGill 11mo ago
  Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading). Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
repsilat 11mo ago
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
- andy99 11mo ago
  Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
QuadmasterXLII 11mo ago
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing. Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.” And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
- bluGill 11mo ago
  The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
- terminalshort 11mo ago
  It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.
CPLX 11mo ago
I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.

0_____0 11mo ago

Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving. The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.

embedding-shape 11mo ago

> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.

notatoad 11mo ago
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
xnx 11mo ago
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day. On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago
  Those constraints apply to humans too. So it seems likely that: - it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets - it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
  - fragmede 11mo ago
    to wit, http://comma.ai http://comma.ai has the freeway part solved, if you can get your hands on one.

lumens 11mo ago

Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).

eloncuck 11mo ago
[flagged]
- lumens 11mo ago
  Truly curious - have you tried it recently?
  - eloncuck 11mo ago
    Daily. I'm still unable to leave my culdesac without phantom leaves causing phantom braking. There was a time when I believed in the hype, I'm less skeptical than most. But the evidence now is incontrovertible.
    - lumens 11mo ago
      I assume this is not a HW4 vehicle? I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either). That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
      - eloncuck 11mo ago
        2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
      - 11mo ago

sjducb 11mo ago

Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph. The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system. Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.

kappi 11mo ago

This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.

ddp26 11mo ago

I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights. I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.

toast0 11mo ago
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed. So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
philistine 11mo ago
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.

dlsfjke 11mo ago

Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.

creer 11mo ago

Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.

dekhn 11mo ago

This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway-south-sf-rescue-13807046.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.

asdff 11mo ago
There's videos of waymos absolutely decking delivery robots
- TulliusCicero 11mo ago
  Robot on robot violence.

svat 11mo ago

The article has a couple of quotes from Waymo leads on the topic: > “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said and > While many assume freeway driving is easier, it comes with its own set of challenges, principal software engineer Pierre Kreitmann said in a recent briefing. He noted that critical events happen less often on freeways, which means there are fewer opportunities to expose Waymo’s self-driving system to rare scenarios and prove how the system performs when it really matters. Both point to freeway driving being easier to do well, but harder to be sure is being done well.