8 ms·
Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistak
by jedberg 7mo ago
Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans.
The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time.
I would rather be in an area where only Waymo's are allowed than an area where they are banned.
- crudgen 7mo ago[flagged]
- bloppe 7mo agoYa and they're the only ones I can count on being polite during rush hour
- Retric 7mo agoWaymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it. I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.
- mtklein 7mo agoI am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.
- gfody 7mo agoenshitification should be a new certainty along with death and taxes
- bombcar 7mo agoIt’s just death and taxes combined.
- Animats 7mo agoThat worries me. Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance. Yet there's nothing like the FAA to enforce a minimum equipment list, maintenance intervals, or signoffs by approved mechanics. Is there a scratch or chip in the scanner dome? Are both the primary and backup steering actuators working? Is there any damage to the vehicle fender sensors? Is dispatch allowed with some redundant components not working? If so, for how long? Here's the FAA's Minimum Equipment List for single-engine aircraft.[1] For each item, you can see if it has to be working to take off, and, if not, how long is allowed to fix it. There's nothing like that for self-driving land vehicles. What's the fleet going to look like at 8 years of wear and tear? [1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/MMEL_SE_Rev_2_Draft.pdf https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/MMEL_SE_Rev_2_Draft....
- jfoster 7mo ago> Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance. That's a hyperbolic false equivalence. Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. As long as a self-driving car can detect when it is degraded, it can just stop with the blinkers on. Usually with 0 - 2 people inside.
- Animats 7mo agoThe question is how broken can a car be when dispatched. What's the safe floor? See the other article today about a Tesla getting into an accident because of undetected sensor degradation.
- 7mo ago
- kirubakaran 7mo agoThe self-driving software could detect that the unmaintained car isn't responding correctly to the controls and refuse to drive.
- VBprogrammer 7mo agoWe're not even a decade beyond some poorly conceived software crashing two otherwise functional aircraft into the ground and now it's going to save us all...
- Dylan16807 7mo agoYeah it does lead to silly conclusions if all vehicle software of any kind is treated as a homogeneous blob.
- pferde 7mo agoWe all know it would end up just as rigged and as useless as Google's Play Integrity system for Android phones.
- jeffbee 7mo agoWaymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.
- Retric 7mo agoNot tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc. Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.
- jeffbee 7mo agoThe only thing an autonomous system should do with janky modified cars is drive them very slowly to the state police barracks for destruction.
- Retric 7mo agoPerhaps, but you can do a lot to a car while it remains street legal.
- maxerickson 7mo agoI suppose owners will be motivated to have the thing do the driving (and so seek defeat devices and such), but at least the software can have "do nothing" as a safety mode if it manages to detect that the vehicle is not configured as expected. And maybe the software can be designed to be coupled to a vehicle dynamics model that can be updated.
- cucumber3732842 7mo agoI don't think the vehicle performance really matters in the typical case. They're using like 20% of what the vehicle "can" do. They're probably hedging against the long tail of variance on the road somehow. Kinda like how private people can tow whatever the f they want with their pickups but in a work setting you need to keep it fairly stupid proof.
- rcxdude 7mo agoIt's not obvious that will exist in the near future, anyway. Waymo aren't planning on selling their cars, and the economics and liability structure of self-driving strongly bias towards just running a taxi service.
- Clamchop 7mo agoThe way I see it, self-driving cars have the potential to deliver us from the burden of ownership altogether--maintenance, insurance, liability, parking, and all the rest. This hinges on availability, quality of service, pricing, and a rather large shift in the culture around cars and driving but I have hope that we can get there with time. Cars are very expensive things to buy and own.
- fellowniusmonk 7mo agoI ride my bike and rollerblade around Austin. If only Waymo's were on the road I wouldn't worry about bike path dividers at all. I sometimes pace them to act as a moving shield. Nothing else comes close, not even eye contact and being waved on by a human. The other autonomous cars that have been introduced are at least just as scary to be around as people.
- ajp-stl 7mo agosounds like you enjoy the predicability of Waymo vehicles. humans are unpredictable.
- Mawr 7mo ago> I sometimes pace them to act as a moving shield. Yep, similar concept to using pedestrians crossing the road as shields. Cars reliably yield for them, not so much for cyclists. > not even eye contact Okay, DO NOT rely on eye contact. Look at what the vehicle and particularly its wheels, are doing. > being waved on by a human That's a potential death trap too. Just because one vehicle is yielding to you doesn't mean every other vehicle you're supposed to yield to is.
- jjmarr 7mo agoWaymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over. Most human drivers would've t-boned the car at 50+ km/h. Maybe they would've braked and reduced the impact, which would be the right move. A human swerving probably would've overshot into oncoming traffic. Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely. Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall.
- Taek 7mo ago> Unfortunately, the Waymo only supported Spotify and did not work with my YouTube Music subscription, so I was listening to an advertisement at the time of my near-death experience. 4.5 stars overall. This detail sent me, it's crazy that we can pay $25 to have a life saving robot take us across the city yet Spotify is going to blast ads at us the whole time for the sake of making an extra $0.18 (yes that's the actual number) per hour of listening time.
- himata4113 7mo agoThat's around 44.64 (0.18831) per month, no wonder ads are preferrable to companies over subscriptions! That's actually a lot for people that listen to music all day every day at work.
- kulahan 7mo agoGoogle was famously really resistant to ads at first. They wanted to do a subscription service of some kind, but honestly ads just brought in so much more revenue even back then that it was a nigh-inevitable decision. It produces a crazy amount of economy. I still loathe ads though.
- 7mo ago
- whyenot 7mo agoThere is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. I know, it's all very far fetched, and Uber/Lyft drivers are almost always nice, courteous and professional, but I have experienced a few times when that hasn't been the case. With Waymo, it's not even an issue.
- 0x3f 7mo agoThere are second order effects though. Once Waymo kills the Uber driver/taxi jobs, what are the chances your Waymo is attacked by a roving band of jobless drivers? It's surely nonzero.
- hmartin 7mo agoUsing "second order effects" because big words sound cool without understanding the whole point of "second order"...
- whyenot 7mo agoThis seems a little silly. Did mobs of jobless taxi drivers attack the Uber drivers who took their jobs? No. No offense, but if you have a girlfriend, wife, or female friend, you might want to ask them about safety and security of ride sharing services. I suspect their answer will be an eye opener for you.
- 0x3f 7mo ago
- fainpul 7mo ago> They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans. You're absolutely right! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0W5v8GOPc&t=520s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0W5v8GOPc&t=520s
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- motbus3 7mo agoWhen it happens, who will go to jail?
- jedberg 7mo agoWhen a piece of construction equipment falls over and kills someone, the person or company who owns the equipment is liable. I image it would be the same thing here. Sometimes that person then counter-sues the manufacturer of the equipment if they think it was faulty. I image that would also happen here if there were personal ownership of self driving cars.
- meindnoch 7mo agoNobody. But you will be offered a voucher.
- bloppe 7mo agoNobody will. In fact, most car fatalities that are caused by humans involve zero criminal charges for anybody involved. In America, everybody from the courts to the media to society at large is primed to think of car accidents as normal. If you want to murder somebody in the middle of town in broad daylight, you can actually get away with it, as long as you do it with your car. At least with Waymo, it's much less frequent.
- qwerty_clicks 7mo agoCrashes are not accidents. Language matters. People should go to jail for harming others
- bloppe 7mo agoWell with an autonomous system, you can actually audit what the machine was "thinking" and how it came to think that way, so you actually can distinguish between an accident and criminal negligence better than a he-said-she-said situation with humans
- ranger207 7mo agoThe one major mistake I've seen is where they recently repainted a road from 2 lanes to 1 with some somewhat nonstandard markings indicating a merge, and the Waymo just drove through the merge as if the 2nd lane was still there
- jasonfarnon 7mo ago"The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they hit the child at a lower speed than a human would have because of the reaction time." Was this the case that was featured on here a few months ago? Where they voluntarily "disclosed" it? I seem to remember noticing at the time that they never said this was the only time they hit a child/someone. Which made me wonder how representative this case was. I might be mis-remembering though.
- rao-v 7mo agoRiding a motorcycle or even a bicycle around Waymos feels surprisingly safer. You can reliably predict so many things about how it will behave and to an extent even its traffic calming effect on other cars.
- konschubert 7mo agoYea. Cycling around self-driving cars is obviously much safer and many more people will be encouraged to do it.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo agoThere was however a detail that explained the car was in a school area during pickup time and should have been on high alert exactly for that
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoThe one case where they hit a kid, they should have been driving slower to begin with. Their stopping distance exceeded their visibility in a school zone during pickup time. They might have done better than a bad human driver, and had good reflexes on the brakes, but a good human driver would have evaluated the conditions and not have been going that fast.
- johnbarron 7mo ago[dead]
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- johnbarron 7mo ago[dead]