6 ms·

A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

139 points by ra7 1mo ago

p-o 1mo ago
They really are the impressive tech, it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight. I don't know if we'll get there eventually, but if we do, I won't be surprised if it's because of Waymo.
- kilroy123 1mo ago
  Riding in one is pretty mind-blowing at first. But what's more shocking is how fast you get used to it. After a while it's just a boring car ride. I wish more people would experience it and see that the future is now.
  - SeanAnderson 1mo ago
    It's beyond boring after a bit. It reminds me of putting on noise-cancelling headphones in an already quiet room. You suddenly gain an appreciation for just how much quieter things could've been thanks to the contrast. Similarly, having a vehicle accelerate/decelerate consistently, always taking turns with the same sharpness, etc.. all of it builds to this subtle feeling of the car ride fading into the background of the experience. You didn't realize those were features of a drive you could appreciate until experienced.
- derektank 1mo ago
  >it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight This does seem at least a bit intentional on Waymo’s part. They appear to have adopted an under promise, over deliver mindset (unlike some other robotaxi alternatives that come to mind). They’ve seen a lot of their competitors (Uber, Cruise, etc) capture a lot of ultimately negative attention and folded as a result; I would probably try to avoid the limelight if I were them too. The tech speaks for itself.
  - jerlam 1mo ago
    Every Waymo on the street is already an advertisement, especially since they're so distinctive with their LIDAR units and now they're driving Chinese cars. Every time a Waymo is remotely associated with anything bad, the media jumps on them anyway, like the times they've "hit" a pedestrian but literally after a human driver hit that same pedestrian. Tesla Robotaxis need to hog the media spotlight because they're trying to prop up the stock price, not because they work.
    - fragmede 1mo ago
      How many times have you ridden a Tesla Robotaxi? They work fine, in my limited but actual real world experience, the problem is they don't like you giving rides to other people, vs Waymo you can call them for other people and they're fine with that. Tesla Robotaxis hog the media spotlight because it's Tesla and every tiny thing they do gets blown up because in the attention economy, a Tesla mention is a giant shiny distraction to go off and everyone piles on their opinion of Elon because blah blah blah lidar Elon stupid no he's not and media sites get all that rage engagement and that juicy ad revenue. Who outside of the industry can name Waymo's co-CEOs off the top of their head? I can't.
      - ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
        [dead]
- skybrian 1mo ago
  It's been 16 years since Google announced they were working on driverless cars. Waymo's been offering service to the public for six years. There's been plenty of news coverage and people already know about them. Being in the spotlight all the time just wears people out.
hollow-moe 1mo ago
Compute is under the trunk ??? Noted. At the price of RAM nowadays it's like the new copper !
- red75prime 1mo ago
  I hope such persons will be met with a spray of indelible paint.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]
xnx 1mo ago
Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.
- liliumregale 1mo ago
  Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.
  - xnx 1mo ago
    Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.
    - egypturnash 1mo ago
      Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop. The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.
      - pnw 1mo ago
        I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.
belinder 1mo ago
Would love to get them in nyc
- arjie 1mo ago
  I thought that was stalled because the mayor didn't like it?[0] Any new developments? > New York abandoned its proposal to allow self-driving taxis earlier this year. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would heavily weigh the interests of taxi drivers in deciding on rules for the technology. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverless-taxis-politics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverle...
- xnx 1mo ago
  Contact you mayor
- cco 1mo ago
  I'm very open to being wrong about this, but will they actually work in NYC? Waymo requires some grace from other drivers and pedestrians in order to function and I just can't imagine New Yorkers will offer it. Do you think they will?
  - fragmede 1mo ago
    I've been cut off by a Waymo before, so the real question is if they Waymo backend is designed is such a way that the NYC Waymo driver can run with different aggression settings from the one in Phoenix Arizona and Tokyo.
htrp 1mo ago
they now are doing a 5nm asic, what did they have before this?
- red75prime 1mo ago
  Waymo has never disclosed this information.
arjie 1mo ago
Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it. It would just be cool to see what these guys have cooked up dev tools wise since Google has always been famed for good developer experience (often to such a degree that Xooglers are useless outside the exosuit).
- buildbot 1mo ago
  Downside of the MTIA chips is no open backend - so quite a lift to get them working if possible at all :(
- ACCount37 1mo ago
  REing Meta's custom AI HW to get it running with something would be one hell of a project, and one hell of a flex. It would rely on them being nice enough to leave at least some binaries on the thing though. Because I'm not sure how would one even get an in on how to boot the things without.
ACCount37 1mo ago
It really doesn't say much. Tesla had more detailed talks on their HW and AI stack. This reads like a glorified marketing blurb.
- dima55 1mo ago
  That's exactly what this is, a marketing blurb. Was this unclear?
- maxlin 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- slashdave 1mo ago
  Recruiting
tehnoslow 1mo ago
The more I think about it the more autonomous cars look like extremely demanding edge computers. You have limited power and cooling, unreliable connectivity and very strict latency requirements. It's probably one of the few places where designing the hardware around the workload makes more sense than trying to make a general purpose platform do everything
- ACCount37 1mo ago
  A self-driving car is an "AI robotics" platform. Both self-driving car and general purpose AI robots are emerging technologies right now. My bet is that eventually, the HW will converge accordingly.
trhway 1mo ago
>high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the same lens size as my Fuji) If it is really a showcase of their visual pipeline than it makes sense that they are still so reliant on lidar - which is pretty expensive because of the number of rays you have to support to maintain good situation-awareness and which is still hard and expensive to scale to get good resolution. That also means that their tech can't really be put onto other platforms like drones for example.
- gf000 1mo ago
  Absolutely not an expert on this, but I would imagine that they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image suddenly might cause a discontinuation in the pipeline that is harder to account for versus the ML machinery being trained to do this job as well. Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine. But I'm really just guessing in the dark here.
  - trhway 1mo ago
    >they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image of course, whatever "bettering" algorithm makes sense, the neural network would probably emerge it inside itself as a result of training. My comment was more about hardware in the sense that "garbage in - garbage out", and so you'd want to have a decent hardware which is available and pretty cheap today while Waymo seems to be using, i'm stating it politely :), very-very-commodity level. >Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine. the kernels of the first layers of visual CNNs (at least the ones i looked at) converge to the Gabor-like kernels what are in the first layers of the human visual cortex. Bunch of years ago, before deep-learning CNN, etc. i saw an article (in neurophysiology field) proving an optimality of such kernels for those visual tasks. Of course things may and probably diverge a lot in the deeper layers, yet deep dreaming, etc. suggests to me that the nature of the divergence may be less severe than expected.
munificent 1mo ago
Interesting that the article uses "ML" everywhere instead of "AI". I'm sure some marketing person chose that term deliberately, and I wonder what went into that decision.
- nxc18 1mo ago
  All of the industry leaders of AI can’t stop bragging about how their AI is committing what would be felonies if a human did it, warning that it’s about as likely as not that AI will literally lead to human extinction, and threatening that it will erase all white collar work (or not depending on the day) and investing resources in a manner that will only be worthwhile if it actually does. I don’t think there’s any mystery as to why AI is not a good marketing term.
  - MostlyStable 1mo ago
    I find the juxtaposition of "can't stop bragging" and "is not a good marketing term" to be fascinating. Have you considered that they know these recent reports aren't a good look for them but that they feel compelled (either because they know it would be far worse when it inevitably got out on it's own or maybe even from some moral sense) to report somewhat truthfully?
    - nxc18 1mo ago
      Two different audiences. Unfortunately for them, messages cross streams. I think it is a good message if you’re trying to scare people into giving you money (or else they lose out on unlimited profits down the road).
      - MostlyStable 1mo ago
        Who is this audience that thinks unasked-for and un-controllable felonies is a good message, or who wants to fund that?
        nxc18 1mo ago
maxlin 1mo ago
Custom silicon while it still looks like they've got multiple gaming PC's worth of compute gear mass isn't a flex when you remember what Tesla has with their FSD computer comparably just sipping power, while processing signals that are less straightforward as unscalable LiDAR
cfferrys 1mo ago
like it.
novia 1mo ago
> Redundant: Because there is no human to take over, proactive safety and redundancy are natively built in. Our compute is designed like two independent engines. While they normally operate as one unit running full parallel workloads, if one experiences a fault, the other seamlessly takes over. uhhh i've been in a situation where a remote human took over before it's rare but it can happen (or at least it could 1.5 years ago-ish) the specific situation was a tight alleyway with cars parked on either side and people doing things like opening car doors and crossing randomly. the waymo obviously wanted a much wider safety margin than what was available and stopped to wait for things to clear up. the remote human driver instead drove more aggressively towards the pedestrians so they would clear the road.
- Chirono 1mo ago
  They mean no human at the wheel to take over if the hardware dies. If you are driving full speed down the highway and your gpu packs up, you’d better have a backup to bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
- ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
  Waymo has zero "remote human drivers". It is literally impossible to "drive" a Waymo by remote commands. The Waymo agents are constantly monitoring the fleet for exceptions. When an exception is raised, a human reviews the footage and the situation. They can send commands to the car and suggestions about which way to branch or a course of action to choose. So ultimately, it is the Waymo Driver doing the actual driving. If a Waymo gets really jammed up, they can indeed send in a human driver, who will appear in person, disengage the Waymo Driver automation, and drive the car normally. This has happened to me only once in 3,000 miles. The Waymo Driver, in my experience, is pretty good about keeping passengers informed when it's a bit delayed or confused by a complex situation. And the CSR will call in if they need to. But no, it is a misconception that people have: Waymos cannot be "driven remotely" by any means.
  - novia 1mo ago
    > Waymo has zero "remote human drivers". It is literally impossible to "drive" a Waymo by remote commands And yet? A guy phoned into our waymo with a thick indian accent and told us to hold on just one moment and steered us around the obstacles and then let the waymo get back to it. I know I'm just some person on the internet but this is what happened. Edit: I think I was wrong and the parent comment is right, although this is indeed what it seemed like happened to me, that human on the other end of the line was most likely a member of Fleet Response. More details here: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ Also I was confused because now-a-days the word "agent" in my circles more often than not no longer refers to a human.
kotaKat 1mo ago
Odd. I didn’t see any photos in the trunk or the compute bays, did anyone else?
fragmede 1mo ago
I've been wanting to start the hashtag #gohomewaymoURdrunk for when it gives me stupid routes like circling the block pointlessly or when dropoff is stupidly far from my destination. (firstworldproblems except for when I sprained my ankle). Anyone else on board?

139 points by ra7 1mo ago

p-o 1mo ago

They really are the impressive tech, it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight. I don't know if we'll get there eventually, but if we do, I won't be surprised if it's because of Waymo.

kilroy123 1mo ago
Riding in one is pretty mind-blowing at first. But what's more shocking is how fast you get used to it. After a while it's just a boring car ride. I wish more people would experience it and see that the future is now.
- SeanAnderson 1mo ago
  It's beyond boring after a bit. It reminds me of putting on noise-cancelling headphones in an already quiet room. You suddenly gain an appreciation for just how much quieter things could've been thanks to the contrast. Similarly, having a vehicle accelerate/decelerate consistently, always taking turns with the same sharpness, etc.. all of it builds to this subtle feeling of the car ride fading into the background of the experience. You didn't realize those were features of a drive you could appreciate until experienced.
derektank 1mo ago
>it's really a shame that they aren't the one capturing all the media spotlight This does seem at least a bit intentional on Waymo’s part. They appear to have adopted an under promise, over deliver mindset (unlike some other robotaxi alternatives that come to mind). They’ve seen a lot of their competitors (Uber, Cruise, etc) capture a lot of ultimately negative attention and folded as a result; I would probably try to avoid the limelight if I were them too. The tech speaks for itself.
- jerlam 1mo ago
  Every Waymo on the street is already an advertisement, especially since they're so distinctive with their LIDAR units and now they're driving Chinese cars. Every time a Waymo is remotely associated with anything bad, the media jumps on them anyway, like the times they've "hit" a pedestrian but literally after a human driver hit that same pedestrian. Tesla Robotaxis need to hog the media spotlight because they're trying to prop up the stock price, not because they work.
  - fragmede 1mo ago
    How many times have you ridden a Tesla Robotaxi? They work fine, in my limited but actual real world experience, the problem is they don't like you giving rides to other people, vs Waymo you can call them for other people and they're fine with that. Tesla Robotaxis hog the media spotlight because it's Tesla and every tiny thing they do gets blown up because in the attention economy, a Tesla mention is a giant shiny distraction to go off and everyone piles on their opinion of Elon because blah blah blah lidar Elon stupid no he's not and media sites get all that rage engagement and that juicy ad revenue. Who outside of the industry can name Waymo's co-CEOs off the top of their head? I can't.
    - ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
      [dead]
skybrian 1mo ago
It's been 16 years since Google announced they were working on driverless cars. Waymo's been offering service to the public for six years. There's been plenty of news coverage and people already know about them. Being in the spotlight all the time just wears people out.

hollow-moe 1mo ago

Compute is under the trunk ??? Noted. At the price of RAM nowadays it's like the new copper !

red75prime 1mo ago
I hope such persons will be met with a spray of indelible paint.
deleted 1mo ago
[deleted]

xnx 1mo ago

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.

liliumregale 1mo ago
Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.
- xnx 1mo ago
  Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.
  - egypturnash 1mo ago
    Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop. The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.
    - pnw 1mo ago
      I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.

belinder 1mo ago

Would love to get them in nyc

arjie 1mo ago
I thought that was stalled because the mayor didn't like it?[0] Any new developments? > New York abandoned its proposal to allow self-driving taxis earlier this year. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would heavily weigh the interests of taxi drivers in deciding on rules for the technology. 0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverless-taxis-politics.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverle...
xnx 1mo ago
Contact you mayor
cco 1mo ago
I'm very open to being wrong about this, but will they actually work in NYC? Waymo requires some grace from other drivers and pedestrians in order to function and I just can't imagine New Yorkers will offer it. Do you think they will?
- fragmede 1mo ago
  I've been cut off by a Waymo before, so the real question is if they Waymo backend is designed is such a way that the NYC Waymo driver can run with different aggression settings from the one in Phoenix Arizona and Tokyo.

htrp 1mo ago

they now are doing a 5nm asic, what did they have before this?

red75prime 1mo ago
Waymo has never disclosed this information.

arjie 1mo ago

Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it. It would just be cool to see what these guys have cooked up dev tools wise since Google has always been famed for good developer experience (often to such a degree that Xooglers are useless outside the exosuit).

buildbot 1mo ago
Downside of the MTIA chips is no open backend - so quite a lift to get them working if possible at all :(
ACCount37 1mo ago
REing Meta's custom AI HW to get it running with something would be one hell of a project, and one hell of a flex. It would rely on them being nice enough to leave at least some binaries on the thing though. Because I'm not sure how would one even get an in on how to boot the things without.

ACCount37 1mo ago

It really doesn't say much. Tesla had more detailed talks on their HW and AI stack. This reads like a glorified marketing blurb.

dima55 1mo ago
That's exactly what this is, a marketing blurb. Was this unclear?
maxlin 1mo ago
[flagged]
slashdave 1mo ago
Recruiting

tehnoslow 1mo ago

The more I think about it the more autonomous cars look like extremely demanding edge computers. You have limited power and cooling, unreliable connectivity and very strict latency requirements. It's probably one of the few places where designing the hardware around the workload makes more sense than trying to make a general purpose platform do everything

ACCount37 1mo ago
A self-driving car is an "AI robotics" platform. Both self-driving car and general purpose AI robots are emerging technologies right now. My bet is that eventually, the HW will converge accordingly.

trhway 1mo ago

>high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the same lens size as my Fuji) If it is really a showcase of their visual pipeline than it makes sense that they are still so reliant on lidar - which is pretty expensive because of the number of rays you have to support to maintain good situation-awareness and which is still hard and expensive to scale to get good resolution. That also means that their tech can't really be put onto other platforms like drones for example.

gf000 1mo ago
Absolutely not an expert on this, but I would imagine that they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image suddenly might cause a discontinuation in the pipeline that is harder to account for versus the ML machinery being trained to do this job as well. Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine. But I'm really just guessing in the dark here.
- trhway 1mo ago
  >they would train the pipeline on a raw-ish image data to have better consistency? I would think that some kind of algorithm "bettering" the image of course, whatever "bettering" algorithm makes sense, the neural network would probably emerge it inside itself as a result of training. My comment was more about hardware in the sense that "garbage in - garbage out", and so you'd want to have a decent hardware which is available and pretty cheap today while Waymo seems to be using, i'm stating it politely :), very-very-commodity level. >Also, what looks good to us may not be "good" to a machine. the kernels of the first layers of visual CNNs (at least the ones i looked at) converge to the Gabor-like kernels what are in the first layers of the human visual cortex. Bunch of years ago, before deep-learning CNN, etc. i saw an article (in neurophysiology field) proving an optimality of such kernels for those visual tasks. Of course things may and probably diverge a lot in the deeper layers, yet deep dreaming, etc. suggests to me that the nature of the divergence may be less severe than expected.

munificent 1mo ago

Interesting that the article uses "ML" everywhere instead of "AI". I'm sure some marketing person chose that term deliberately, and I wonder what went into that decision.

nxc18 1mo ago
All of the industry leaders of AI can’t stop bragging about how their AI is committing what would be felonies if a human did it, warning that it’s about as likely as not that AI will literally lead to human extinction, and threatening that it will erase all white collar work (or not depending on the day) and investing resources in a manner that will only be worthwhile if it actually does. I don’t think there’s any mystery as to why AI is not a good marketing term.
- MostlyStable 1mo ago
  I find the juxtaposition of "can't stop bragging" and "is not a good marketing term" to be fascinating. Have you considered that they know these recent reports aren't a good look for them but that they feel compelled (either because they know it would be far worse when it inevitably got out on it's own or maybe even from some moral sense) to report somewhat truthfully?
  - nxc18 1mo ago
    Two different audiences. Unfortunately for them, messages cross streams. I think it is a good message if you’re trying to scare people into giving you money (or else they lose out on unlimited profits down the road).
    - MostlyStable 1mo ago
      Who is this audience that thinks unasked-for and un-controllable felonies is a good message, or who wants to fund that?
      - nxc18 1mo ago

maxlin 1mo ago

Custom silicon while it still looks like they've got multiple gaming PC's worth of compute gear mass isn't a flex when you remember what Tesla has with their FSD computer comparably just sipping power, while processing signals that are less straightforward as unscalable LiDAR

cfferrys 1mo ago

like it.

novia 1mo ago

> Redundant: Because there is no human to take over, proactive safety and redundancy are natively built in. Our compute is designed like two independent engines. While they normally operate as one unit running full parallel workloads, if one experiences a fault, the other seamlessly takes over. uhhh i've been in a situation where a remote human took over before it's rare but it can happen (or at least it could 1.5 years ago-ish) the specific situation was a tight alleyway with cars parked on either side and people doing things like opening car doors and crossing randomly. the waymo obviously wanted a much wider safety margin than what was available and stopped to wait for things to clear up. the remote human driver instead drove more aggressively towards the pedestrians so they would clear the road.

Chirono 1mo ago
They mean no human at the wheel to take over if the hardware dies. If you are driving full speed down the highway and your gpu packs up, you’d better have a backup to bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
ButlerianJihad 1mo ago
Waymo has zero "remote human drivers". It is literally impossible to "drive" a Waymo by remote commands. The Waymo agents are constantly monitoring the fleet for exceptions. When an exception is raised, a human reviews the footage and the situation. They can send commands to the car and suggestions about which way to branch or a course of action to choose. So ultimately, it is the Waymo Driver doing the actual driving. If a Waymo gets really jammed up, they can indeed send in a human driver, who will appear in person, disengage the Waymo Driver automation, and drive the car normally. This has happened to me only once in 3,000 miles. The Waymo Driver, in my experience, is pretty good about keeping passengers informed when it's a bit delayed or confused by a complex situation. And the CSR will call in if they need to. But no, it is a misconception that people have: Waymos cannot be "driven remotely" by any means.
- novia 1mo ago
  > Waymo has zero "remote human drivers". It is literally impossible to "drive" a Waymo by remote commands And yet? A guy phoned into our waymo with a thick indian accent and told us to hold on just one moment and steered us around the obstacles and then let the waymo get back to it. I know I'm just some person on the internet but this is what happened. Edit: I think I was wrong and the parent comment is right, although this is indeed what it seemed like happened to me, that human on the other end of the line was most likely a member of Fleet Response. More details here: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ Also I was confused because now-a-days the word "agent" in my circles more often than not no longer refers to a human.

kotaKat 1mo ago

Odd. I didn’t see any photos in the trunk or the compute bays, did anyone else?

fragmede 1mo ago

I've been wanting to start the hashtag #gohomewaymoURdrunk for when it gives me stupid routes like circling the block pointlessly or when dropoff is stupidly far from my destination. (firstworldproblems except for when I sprained my ankle). Anyone else on board?