20 ms·

Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

296 points by ra7 8mo ago

ZuLuuuuuu 8mo ago
"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs" Nice abbreviation.
- plmpsu 8mo ago
  I loved it.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  You can tell they're enjoying their job.
garbawarb 8mo ago
I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
- xnx 8mo ago
  As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out. Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
  - jessriedel 8mo ago
    Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again. Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
    - xnx 8mo ago
      Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
      - jessriedel 8mo ago
        If that were really the risk they would spin them out.
  - helge9210 8mo ago
    I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
  - garbawarb 8mo ago
    Cruise was always run as a separate business from GM until they shut it down. I think they got too nervous about committing to the Silicon Valley investment style: high capital, high risk, long time horizon, high reward.
- Hawkenfall 8mo ago
  Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved. GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cruise-pay-penalty-failing-report-san-francisco-crash-involving-pedestrian/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru... [2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed-some-pioneering-and-important-innovation-only-to-fumble-it-and-have-to-catch-up-later-like-a-chump/comment-page-1/# https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
- ibejoeb 8mo ago
  Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
- kjkjadksj 8mo ago
  It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
- syntaxing 8mo ago
  Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO. (Also former Cruise employee)
  - sja 8mo ago
    Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary. (Another former employee)
    - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
      I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways. (Another former).
- someonehere 8mo ago
  I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart. Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving. I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience. If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
  - Rohansi 8mo ago
    Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
- RivieraKid 8mo ago
  This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing. Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
  - soperj 8mo ago
    What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.
    - RivieraKid 8mo ago
      1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world. 2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
      - soperj 8mo ago
        Tesla has already done a geofenced system in Austin (in the shape of a penis). It went poorly.
  - ForHackernews 8mo ago
    What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero. That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
    - anonymous908213 8mo ago
      I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?
- lacker 8mo ago
  It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work. It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
  - Alive-in-2025 8mo ago
    Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down. At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements. Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter. There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there. What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work. Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day). This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
- KenSF 8mo ago
  We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0] [0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/ https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/
  - UltraSane 8mo ago
    replacing a gas engine with an electric motor and installing a battery pack is not hard. The EV1 was a pretty bad car. The real secret sauce of modern electric cars is cheap Lithium Ion battery packs.
    - SoftTalker 8mo ago
      That and making them look like normal cars not futuristic golf carts.
    - KenSF 8mo ago
      The EV1 predated the Roadster by a decade. Had GM been improving the EV1 for those 10 years, including Lithium Ion batteries, GM would have been far ahead of everyone . . . had they just kept going with a technology that was inevitable. Where would Cruse be today had they continued with this new technology that is inevitable?
- cortesoft 8mo ago
  One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior) He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
  - torton 8mo ago
    That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.
    - red75prime 8mo ago
      Yep. Participants of Waymo's early rider program are under NDA.
    - cortesoft 8mo ago
      Sure, but he test drove with them until they shut down, and they never improved (according to him)
- rangestransform 8mo ago
  “Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349
- hypercube33 8mo ago
  Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course. Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
- Eridrus 8mo ago
  Cruise seemed to have a significantly inferior product based on observed safety and what Cruise employees have said on HN.
tgrowazay 8mo ago
Elon in shambles > Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
- xnx 8mo ago
  Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.
  - willio58 8mo ago
    Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
    - jcalvinowens 8mo ago
      > humans only use vision to drive I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving? As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
      - xnx 8mo ago
        > hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections.
dweinus 8mo ago
[flagged]
- Rudybega 8mo ago
  There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
  - badgersnake 8mo ago
    Directing the movements of a car is now “fleet response”, not “driving”. Give them a fucking innovation award or something.
    - Rudybega 8mo ago
      If a passenger says to you, "go around this car by using that private driveway", are they driving the car?
rainbowresource 8mo ago
[dead]
ilaksh 8mo ago
The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time. It's weird how many people there are like that still. But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
- hnuser123456 8mo ago
  Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-the-philippines-to-assist-its-self-driving-cars https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago
    Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself: Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week". They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
nutjob2 8mo ago
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens." Nice dig at Tesla.
- qwerpy 8mo ago
  I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
  - rhubarbtree 8mo ago
    Tesla’s approach is smarter than Waymo. Maybe Tesla won’t win, perhaps a Chinese firm, but the winner will follow a vision based system and not a micro-mapping LIDAR system. “Vision is all you need.”
    - vortegne 8mo ago
      Any evidence for this claim?
      - rhubarbtree 8mo ago
        I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.
        moooo99 8mo ago
        > But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road. Human drivers also have a brain that computers have struggled to replicate for decades. Also, many of the Chinese vehicle makers already include LIDARs in their vehicles for their current ADAS
devmor 8mo ago
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
- nradov 8mo ago
  Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.
  - devmor 8mo ago
    Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them.
- standardUser 8mo ago
  Maybe the menace is the drivers. That's indisputable when you look at injuries per mile.
  - devmor 8mo ago
    I don’t see many injurious car accidents in dense inner-city streets.
- jayd16 8mo ago
  You mean double parking waiting for passengers? Its a taxi, so I doubt it. Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?
  - devmor 8mo ago
    In some cases, yes. This morning, though, I was stuck behind one that just decided to stop and turn on the hazards in the middle of a two-lane, bidirectional street with no parking. This has happened more than once. I believe they are waiting for passengers - they usually have some kind of LED display with what looks like initials on the topmost sensor when they're doing this.
mlsu 8mo ago
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile. The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
- harikb 8mo ago
  Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber. What you envision might happen in 2100+
  - raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
    Google was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching” https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weapon-in-its-gigabit-comeback-has-failed/ https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap... https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-... And the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745
- AlotOfReading 8mo ago
  Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
SeanAnderson 8mo ago
Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this (https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet-with https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...) new vehicle design? I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
- giobox 8mo ago
  Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.
  - SilverBirch 8mo ago
    They already have a partnership with Geely to make their peeople carrier type thing and Hyundai for Ioniqs. I think what they're really saying here is they're standardizing on this so they could theoretically in future put it in any car - or atleast any car manufacturer could adopt it.
- azernik 8mo ago
  From the post: "Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency." ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on. My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  The zeekr vehicle mentioned here is made in an almost entirely dark factory in China. It has very few humans on the floor and spits out 800 cars per day. It’s literally dark in there.
abraxas 8mo ago
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t [EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment: "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
- mclau153 8mo ago
  Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?
  - abraxas 8mo ago
    No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.
kccqzy 8mo ago
I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?
- RupertSalt 8mo ago
  The latter. They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE. The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5. This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla. From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
  - kccqzy 8mo ago
    I know it’s the latter. I was just critiquing the writing style.
YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago
This is a lie: >> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens. Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers. Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver. In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations. From: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path. In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
nielsbot 8mo ago
I wonder how much of this tech is being sold to or planned to be sold to the military.
LoganDark 8mo ago
Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS... The image caption reads: Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions. but the image itself for me is blank.
- arjie 8mo ago
  It's a video, mate. Look here: https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/5ZEkKDR8uqlAfiQW7fROQ5/7a7dea64db1f8fd1764cf7eeb68dc10e/Waymo_6th_Gen_Cameras.mp4 https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/5ZEkKDR8uqlAfiQW7f...
  - LoganDark 8mo ago
    Thank you so much!
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  I’ve had this issue with other Google posts as well. The first video/image on the page doesn’t show up.
socalgal2 8mo ago
When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws? Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo. I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.
- IsTom 8mo ago
  As somebody very far away from any even partially autonomous cars, what kind of laws do they break?
  - fragmede 8mo ago
    I've been in a Waymo that's run a red light.
- fragmede 8mo ago
  I don't. There's the written rules of the road, and then there's reality. I'd rather they drive like humans do.
- cucumber3732842 8mo ago
  >When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws? When the general public does. Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public. As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
ewuhic 8mo ago
There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".
- shimman 8mo ago
  This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  Everything you’ve mentioned don’t do anything to diminish the magnitude of this achievement in the slightest. It’s clearly just FUD and most people see it as that. There are dozens of refutations of everything you’ve pointed out in this thread already. Maybe besides DoorDash, what’s that about?
throw310822 8mo ago
My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems. This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
- TulliusCicero 8mo ago
  The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem. Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.
  - throw310822 8mo ago
    Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
    - TulliusCicero 8mo ago
zellyn 8mo ago
For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument: If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it. A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
- seanhunter 8mo ago
  Agree. Also, you have a general intelligence and a pair of eyes, not just a pair of eyes. In the absence of an artificial general intelligence, we need better sensors than a human has if we are to hope to approximate human performance.
madduci 8mo ago
[flagged]
dyauspitr 8mo ago
Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.
- TulliusCicero 8mo ago
  Waymo already has a teen mode for this.
  - dyauspitr 8mo ago
    Yeah but I mean consumer versions I can use in my semi rural area. I doubt we will have a Waymo taxi service out here anytime soon.
MagicMoonlight 8mo ago
Tesla really messed up going for cheap cameras only and no lidar or radar.
kittikitti 8mo ago
Congratulations to the Waymo team! I was excited reading through the overview. What I'm monitoring in the self-driving space is Lidar and Radar integration. There are leaders like Elon with Tesla who insist that they're not necessary yet Waymo has devoted effort for them in their 6th generation. My personal perspective is that Lidar and Radar are a core requirement for self-driving because "These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases."
nickpinkston 8mo ago
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens" - sick burn Waymo haha From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
heisenbit 8mo ago
This almost sounds as if Waymo pivots from taxi service to automated driver OEM?
matada_ 8mo ago
There is plenty of people saying that Tesla has unsupervised Robotaxis comparable with Waymo, however someone did a research https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 , turns out their cars are limited to a single Geofenced Bus Route.

296 points by ra7 8mo ago

ZuLuuuuuu 8mo ago

"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs" Nice abbreviation.

plmpsu 8mo ago
I loved it.
fragmede 8mo ago
You can tell they're enjoying their job.

garbawarb 8mo ago

I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)

xnx 8mo ago
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out. Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
- jessriedel 8mo ago
  Cruise was being operated as a separate company though. As a default, GM could have just not done anything and let Cruise operate as if it were independent. Any synergies (personnel, manufacturing expertise, etc) would have just been a bonus. And if they didn't want the financial exposure, they could have spun it out again. Instead they chopped it up for spare parts, specifically, sending some Cruise personnel to work on deadend GM driver assistance tech and firing the rest. Baffling.
  - xnx 8mo ago
    Reputational risk to GM from the cavalier/shameful way Cruise/Kyle Vogt operated. Tried to hide the fact they dragged a person.
    - jessriedel 8mo ago
      If that were really the risk they would spin them out.
- helge9210 8mo ago
  I remember GM cars in Herzliya, Israel with cables and cameras held by duct tape circa 2019 after Andrej Karpathy already presented end to end neural network training for Autopilot in Tesla. Looked like very late to the party.
- garbawarb 8mo ago
  Cruise was always run as a separate business from GM until they shut it down. I think they got too nervous about committing to the Silicon Valley investment style: high capital, high risk, long time horizon, high reward.
Hawkenfall 8mo ago
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved. GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball. [1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cruise-pay-penalty-failing-report-san-francisco-crash-involving-pedestrian/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru... [2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed-some-pioneering-and-important-innovation-only-to-fumble-it-and-have-to-catch-up-later-like-a-chump/comment-page-1/# https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
ibejoeb 8mo ago
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
kjkjadksj 8mo ago
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
syntaxing 8mo ago
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO. (Also former Cruise employee)
- sja 8mo ago
  Was always unclear to me whether DanA was truly pushed out, or if the board (largely comprised of GM execs) wanted to take the company in a different direction than Dan wanted to go, and Dan decided to leave rather than stick around. Ie. IPO vs keep it a majority owned subsidiary. (Another former employee)
  - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
    I got the impression that it was a conflict with Mary Barra specifically, not so much the board as a whole. They simply went along with her. The tone of the notice was indicative of being pushed out, not a mutual parting of ways. (Another former).
someonehere 8mo ago
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart. Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving. I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience. If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
- Rohansi 8mo ago
  Waiting for someone to be ready to (actively) monitor it?
RivieraKid 8mo ago
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing. Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
- soperj 8mo ago
  What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.
  - RivieraKid 8mo ago
    1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world. 2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.
    - soperj 8mo ago
      Tesla has already done a geofenced system in Austin (in the shape of a penis). It went poorly.
- ForHackernews 8mo ago
  What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero. That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...
  - anonymous908213 8mo ago
    I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant players like BlackWolf. Do you think people saying "winner-takes-all" in business contexts mean one company with literally 100% marketshare globally?
lacker 8mo ago
It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work. It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
- Alive-in-2025 8mo ago
  Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down. At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements. Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter. There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there. What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work. Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day). This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.
KenSF 8mo ago
We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0] [0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/ https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/
- UltraSane 8mo ago
  replacing a gas engine with an electric motor and installing a battery pack is not hard. The EV1 was a pretty bad car. The real secret sauce of modern electric cars is cheap Lithium Ion battery packs.
  - SoftTalker 8mo ago
    That and making them look like normal cars not futuristic golf carts.
  - KenSF 8mo ago
    The EV1 predated the Roadster by a decade. Had GM been improving the EV1 for those 10 years, including Lithium Ion batteries, GM would have been far ahead of everyone . . . had they just kept going with a technology that was inevitable. Where would Cruse be today had they continued with this new technology that is inevitable?
cortesoft 8mo ago
One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior) He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
- torton 8mo ago
  That is true for all algorithmic iterative learning. I'm sure early models from Tesla, Waymo, Zoox, etc. were also driving a few hundred feet before the operators had to take over at first as well.
  - red75prime 8mo ago
    Yep. Participants of Waymo's early rider program are under NDA.
  - cortesoft 8mo ago
    Sure, but he test drove with them until they shut down, and they never improved (according to him)
rangestransform 8mo ago
“Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349 https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349
hypercube33 8mo ago
Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course. Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
Eridrus 8mo ago
Cruise seemed to have a significantly inferior product based on observed safety and what Cruise employees have said on HN.

tgrowazay 8mo ago

Elon in shambles > Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.

xnx 8mo ago
Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.
- willio58 8mo ago
  Elon cult members still to this day will tell me that because humans only use vision to drive all a Tesla needs is simple cameras. Meanwhile, I've been driven by Waymo and Tesla FSD and Waymo is by far my pick for safety and comfort. I actually trusted the waymo I was in, while the Tesla I rode in we had 2 _very_ scary incidents at high speeds in a 1 hour drive.
  - jcalvinowens 8mo ago
    > humans only use vision to drive I love this argument because it is so obviously wrong: how could any self aware person seriously argue that hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved in their driving? As an adult I can actually afford a reliable car, so I will concede that smell is less relevant than it used to be, at least for me personally :)
    - xnx 8mo ago
      > hearing, touch, and the inner ear aren't involved Not to mention possibly the most complex structure in the known universe, the human brain: 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections.

dweinus 8mo ago

[flagged]

Rudybega 8mo ago
There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
- badgersnake 8mo ago
  Directing the movements of a car is now “fleet response”, not “driving”. Give them a fucking innovation award or something.
  - Rudybega 8mo ago
    If a passenger says to you, "go around this car by using that private driveway", are they driving the car?

rainbowresource 8mo ago

[dead]

ilaksh 8mo ago

The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time. It's weird how many people there are like that still. But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.

hnuser123456 8mo ago
Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-the-philippines-to-assist-its-self-driving-cars https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...
- YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago
  Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself: Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week". They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.

nutjob2 8mo ago

"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens." Nice dig at Tesla.

qwerpy 8mo ago
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
- rhubarbtree 8mo ago
  Tesla’s approach is smarter than Waymo. Maybe Tesla won’t win, perhaps a Chinese firm, but the winner will follow a vision based system and not a micro-mapping LIDAR system. “Vision is all you need.”
  - vortegne 8mo ago
    Any evidence for this claim?
    - rhubarbtree 8mo ago
      I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.
      - moooo99 8mo ago
        > But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road. Human drivers also have a brain that computers have struggled to replicate for decades. Also, many of the Chinese vehicle makers already include LIDARs in their vehicles for their current ADAS

devmor 8mo ago

Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.

nradov 8mo ago
Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.
- devmor 8mo ago
  Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them.
standardUser 8mo ago
Maybe the menace is the drivers. That's indisputable when you look at injuries per mile.
- devmor 8mo ago
  I don’t see many injurious car accidents in dense inner-city streets.
jayd16 8mo ago
You mean double parking waiting for passengers? Its a taxi, so I doubt it. Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?
- devmor 8mo ago
  In some cases, yes. This morning, though, I was stuck behind one that just decided to stop and turn on the hazards in the middle of a two-lane, bidirectional street with no parking. This has happened more than once. I believe they are waiting for passengers - they usually have some kind of LED display with what looks like initials on the topmost sensor when they're doing this.

mlsu 8mo ago

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile. The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

harikb 8mo ago
Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber. What you envision might happen in 2100+
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago
  Google was struggling because it has the attention span of a crackle addled flea. Including leaving roads in ruins because of “shallow trenching” https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weapon-in-its-gigabit-comeback-has-failed/ https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/google-fibers-secret-weap... https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-experi-1833244198 https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-... And the HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38526745
AlotOfReading 8mo ago
Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.

SeanAnderson 8mo ago

Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this (https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet-with https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...) new vehicle design? I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)

giobox 8mo ago
Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.
- SilverBirch 8mo ago
  They already have a partnership with Geely to make their peeople carrier type thing and Hyundai for Ioniqs. I think what they're really saying here is they're standardizing on this so they could theoretically in future put it in any car - or atleast any car manufacturer could adopt it.
azernik 8mo ago
From the post: "Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency." ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on. My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
dyauspitr 8mo ago
The zeekr vehicle mentioned here is made in an almost entirely dark factory in China. It has very few humans on the floor and spits out 800 cars per day. It’s literally dark in there.

abraxas 8mo ago

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t [EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment: "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."

mclau153 8mo ago
Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?
- abraxas 8mo ago
  No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.

kccqzy 8mo ago

I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?

RupertSalt 8mo ago
The latter. They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE. The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5. This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla. From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
- kccqzy 8mo ago
  I know it’s the latter. I was just critiquing the writing style.

YeGoblynQueenne 8mo ago

This is a lie: >> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens. Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers. Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver. In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations. From: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path. In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".

nielsbot 8mo ago

I wonder how much of this tech is being sold to or planned to be sold to the military.

LoganDark 8mo ago

Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS... The image caption reads: Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions. but the image itself for me is blank.

arjie 8mo ago
It's a video, mate. Look here: https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/5ZEkKDR8uqlAfiQW7fROQ5/7a7dea64db1f8fd1764cf7eeb68dc10e/Waymo_6th_Gen_Cameras.mp4 https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/5ZEkKDR8uqlAfiQW7f...
- LoganDark 8mo ago
  Thank you so much!
dyauspitr 8mo ago
I’ve had this issue with other Google posts as well. The first video/image on the page doesn’t show up.

socalgal2 8mo ago

When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws? Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo. I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.

IsTom 8mo ago
As somebody very far away from any even partially autonomous cars, what kind of laws do they break?
- fragmede 8mo ago
  I've been in a Waymo that's run a red light.
fragmede 8mo ago
I don't. There's the written rules of the road, and then there's reality. I'd rather they drive like humans do.
cucumber3732842 8mo ago
>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws? When the general public does. Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public. As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.

ewuhic 8mo ago

There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".

shimman 8mo ago
This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?
dyauspitr 8mo ago
Everything you’ve mentioned don’t do anything to diminish the magnitude of this achievement in the slightest. It’s clearly just FUD and most people see it as that. There are dozens of refutations of everything you’ve pointed out in this thread already. Maybe besides DoorDash, what’s that about?

throw310822 8mo ago

My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems. This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.

TulliusCicero 8mo ago
The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem. Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.
- throw310822 8mo ago
  Yeah, that's basically the opposite of what I'm saying. The problem is enormously difficult, but it won't be solved as a problem in itself, it will suddenly become solved as a side effect of better AI, exactly like numerous cognition-related problems got suddenly solved with the advent of LLMs. And we've seen that there are many players working on better AI, and the main ones all maybe one/ two years away from each other. Self driving will become commoditized much before any of the early players can make substantial amounts of money out of it. Compared to LLMs, it's even worse, as self-driving can't really get superhuman and people will happily settle for whatever works acceptably well (where acceptably means at the same level as a good human driver).
  - TulliusCicero 8mo ago

zellyn 8mo ago

For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument: If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it. A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)

seanhunter 8mo ago
Agree. Also, you have a general intelligence and a pair of eyes, not just a pair of eyes. In the absence of an artificial general intelligence, we need better sensors than a human has if we are to hope to approximate human performance.

madduci 8mo ago

[flagged]

dyauspitr 8mo ago

Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.

TulliusCicero 8mo ago
Waymo already has a teen mode for this.
- dyauspitr 8mo ago
  Yeah but I mean consumer versions I can use in my semi rural area. I doubt we will have a Waymo taxi service out here anytime soon.

MagicMoonlight 8mo ago

Tesla really messed up going for cheap cameras only and no lidar or radar.

kittikitti 8mo ago

Congratulations to the Waymo team! I was excited reading through the overview. What I'm monitoring in the self-driving space is Lidar and Radar integration. There are leaders like Elon with Tesla who insist that they're not necessary yet Waymo has devoted effort for them in their 6th generation. My personal perspective is that Lidar and Radar are a core requirement for self-driving because "These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases."

nickpinkston 8mo ago

"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens" - sick burn Waymo haha From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."

heisenbit 8mo ago

This almost sounds as if Waymo pivots from taxi service to automated driver OEM?

matada_ 8mo ago

There is plenty of people saying that Tesla has unsupervised Robotaxis comparable with Waymo, however someone did a research https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 , turns out their cars are limited to a single Geofenced Bus Route.