4 ms·

That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.

by jefftk 8mo ago

jeffbee 8mo ago
70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.
- jefftk 8mo ago
  I wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.
  - minwcnt5 8mo ago
    You can probably infer the average number of active cars from trips and utilization metrics, which are out there (at least for California I believe they report this). E.g. 450,000 trips/week * 15 min/trip / 0.56 loaded:empty miles / (24760) ~= 1200.
- ameliaquining 8mo ago
  But presumably most of the 3,000 cars are on the road at any given time? In which case the point stands, namely, that their remote operations people can't be the ones driving the cars because there aren't enough of them on duty at any given time; therefore, the cars really do drive themselves. (Which I would have thought was never in doubt, but I suppose some people are really determined to be skeptics.)
altairprime 8mo ago
They’re not “no human in the loop” driverless. They’re just on autopilot, same as any airliner. We don’t call planes that takeoff and land themselves “pilotless”, because there’s humans in the loop. Waymo must be rather defensive about being called out for merely having autopilot cars, which is weird because that’s rather miraculous in historical terms — but certainly the generic term “autopilot” is a much less distinctive claim to success than “driverless”.
- estearum 8mo ago
  They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time. If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless. Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."
- AlotOfReading 8mo ago
  Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times. The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
- nearbuy 8mo ago
  Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.
  - empressplay 8mo ago
    787s can both takeoff and land on autopilot. They can't handle taxiing to and from the gate, however.
  - e44858 8mo ago
    Some planes can land automatically without the pilot's input: https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reported-safe/ https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reporte... Takeoff is probably easier to automate than an emergency landing.
    - altairprime 8mo ago
CobrastanJorji 8mo ago
The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.
- netsharc 8mo ago
  Plenty of people believe since Covid is a virus, just like software viruses it was being transmitted by 5G base stations. I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...
- Noumenon72 8mo ago
  What is their claim about latency here? > Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad. That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
  - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
    Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
  - xnx 8mo ago
    They had to throw something in about speed even though the gating factor is the RA's ability to interpret the situation and decide a course of action. I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.
  - gruez 8mo ago
    >That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds? Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
kakapo5672 8mo ago
I've got people in my social network who firmly believe that every car is, in fact, "driven by Indonesians". Apparently a widespread belief. I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.
- Ygg2 8mo ago
  After stunt Amazon pulled off, with its shop, being skeptical is warranted. I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.
actinium226 8mo ago
70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison. Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical). So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.
- oceliker 8mo ago
  I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections. Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
  - hawaiianbrah 8mo ago
    I see what you did there…
- toddmorey 8mo ago
  Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.
  - AlotOfReading 8mo ago
    It's tricky to give a number for "RA required" that isn't wildly misleading, or contextualize one you're given. The common case for most AV RAs is confirmation of what the vehicle already has planned. Does that count as "required"? An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability). Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).

That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.

by jefftk 8mo ago

That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.

jeffbee 8mo ago

70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.

jefftk 8mo ago
I wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.
- minwcnt5 8mo ago
  You can probably infer the average number of active cars from trips and utilization metrics, which are out there (at least for California I believe they report this). E.g. 450,000 trips/week * 15 min/trip / 0.56 loaded:empty miles / (24760) ~= 1200.
ameliaquining 8mo ago
But presumably most of the 3,000 cars are on the road at any given time? In which case the point stands, namely, that their remote operations people can't be the ones driving the cars because there aren't enough of them on duty at any given time; therefore, the cars really do drive themselves. (Which I would have thought was never in doubt, but I suppose some people are really determined to be skeptics.)

altairprime 8mo ago

They’re not “no human in the loop” driverless. They’re just on autopilot, same as any airliner. We don’t call planes that takeoff and land themselves “pilotless”, because there’s humans in the loop. Waymo must be rather defensive about being called out for merely having autopilot cars, which is weird because that’s rather miraculous in historical terms — but certainly the generic term “autopilot” is a much less distinctive claim to success than “driverless”.

estearum 8mo ago
They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time. If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless. Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."
AlotOfReading 8mo ago
Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times. The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
nearbuy 8mo ago
Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.
- empressplay 8mo ago
  787s can both takeoff and land on autopilot. They can't handle taxiing to and from the gate, however.
- e44858 8mo ago
  Some planes can land automatically without the pilot's input: https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reported-safe/ https://avbrief.com/autoland-saves-king-air-everyone-reporte... Takeoff is probably easier to automate than an emergency landing.
  - altairprime 8mo ago

CobrastanJorji 8mo ago

The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.

netsharc 8mo ago
Plenty of people believe since Covid is a virus, just like software viruses it was being transmitted by 5G base stations. I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...
Noumenon72 8mo ago
What is their claim about latency here? > Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad. That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?
- AlotOfReading 8mo ago
  Their claim is talking about latency, not bandwidth. What you're talking about is throughput, which can usually be solved by throwing more money at the problem.
- xnx 8mo ago
  They had to throw something in about speed even though the gating factor is the RA's ability to interpret the situation and decide a course of action. I wouldn't be surprised if actions required agreement between decisions by two independent RAs.
- gruez 8mo ago
  >That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds? Their earlier blog post has screenshots (?) of the UI that the "fleet response" people have access to. It seems to be a video feed combined with yes/no questions, along with some top-down UI to direct where the vehicle should go. https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response

kakapo5672 8mo ago

I've got people in my social network who firmly believe that every car is, in fact, "driven by Indonesians". Apparently a widespread belief. I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.

Ygg2 8mo ago
After stunt Amazon pulled off, with its shop, being skeptical is warranted. I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.

actinium226 8mo ago

70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison. Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical). So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.

oceliker 8mo ago
I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections. Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.
- hawaiianbrah 8mo ago
  I see what you did there…
toddmorey 8mo ago
Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.
- AlotOfReading 8mo ago
  It's tricky to give a number for "RA required" that isn't wildly misleading, or contextualize one you're given. The common case for most AV RAs is confirmation of what the vehicle already has planned. Does that count as "required"? An AV company can also tune how proactive vehicles are in reaching out to RA for confirmation, which is a balancing act between incident rate, stoppages, RA availability, and rider metrics. There's other ways to tune RA rate by also adjusting when and where the vehicles operate, which comes down to standard taxi fleet management tools (e.g. price and availability). Waymo chooses a target that they're comfortable with and probably changes it every so often, but those numbers aren't the only possible targets and they're not necessarily well-correlated to the system's "true" capabilities (which are themselves difficult to understand).