I live inside the original area in Phoenix where they did their training. I have to give kudos where it's due. I originally _hated_ their cars constantly driving around our neighborhood, but I was persuaded to try one a few weeks back. It completely changed my mind. They are now my favorite way to get around. I am a very happy, frequent customer and hope they keep adding coverage and more cars. This is absolutely the future I want to live in.
I live downtown PHX (Roosevelt Row) and beyond riding in them I MUCH prefer them driving around on the streets than actual human drivers. There isn't a day goes by that I don't see drivers make up 4-way stops, disregard the 4-way stops, flip a youey in the middle of an intersection, etc. Contrast that to the ever predictable Weymo, just quietly going about their little self-driving existence.
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
I have never tried to spell the phrase "flip a youey" before.
It might be the only word I use that I have never considered spelling, so I am grateful that you included it your comment.
That said, I think you are wrong and it should be "uey", "uie," "u-ie," or any other spelling that emphasizes the "u" after which the term is named.
Also "I do not know the answer but I am sure you are wrong" is the most internetish comment I've ever made, so that's two striking experiences for me today.
>they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
There's something adorable and HHGTG about that whole thing! Reminds me of the robotic Star Liner that refused to take off because of the peanuts hadn't been delivered thus its checklist was incomplete. It had waited eons as its passengers withered to corpses securely locked into the cabin only stating that it was 'statistically likely a new civilisation with peanut packages will arise on this planet'.
> If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
I've had humans do this, when I had no intention of crossing the street because I was just standing at the corner waiting to meet somebody. At least the humans give up after a few seconds, with exacerbated expressions like I'm the one who did something wrong. It would be pretty funny to see a robot car sit there for minutes.
Waymo feature request: self-driving car waiting for a pedestrian for period of time, it screams "fool, I'm about to drive, so if you step in front of me, I'm driving right through your dumbass". Needs some little robot hands for deaf people. For those who simply aren't looking, it should use a water pistol.
Same here (downtown Phoenix area) -- the driverless Waymos have been awesome. Occasionally they get confused but it seems pretty rare. They're better than a lot of the other drivers on the road out here.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
It blows my mind that someone living downtown in a city the size of Phoenix (relatively large) needs to use a car at all. It’s really a shameful failure of urban planning.
For those of us not located in areas where Waymo is available, do you mind elaborating on why this is your favorite way to get around? As compared to Uber, Lyft, etc.
- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers
- The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell
- You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.
- They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive
For me in SF using cruise, I find them to be much safer and smoother drivers than Uber/Lyfts. I don't get car sick and I don't have to worry for my safety.
A hopefully not-too-annoying reminder that this isn’t a future that is sustainable or desirable to live in compared with alternatives. It’s really just better than the automotive hellscape you are used to.
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
What you’re saying is probably true, but are you proposing razing Phoenix and rebuilding it as a less car-focused place? My sense is that that proposal wouldn’t be too popular with the people whose homes you’re tearing down, nor would necessarily the change in lifestyle they would be forced to undergo (after I’m sure what would be decades of rebuilding…).
>> The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning
By the criteria I would use, Phoenix is a massive success in urban planning. The criteria I would use would be the willingness of people to move there.
In 1950, Phoenix was in the top 100 biggest US cities...barely. It was 99th, with a little over 100,000 people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2000, Phoenix was the 6th largest city in the US with 1.3 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2022, Phoenix was the 5th largest city in the US with 1.6 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8.5 million. And NYC has been losing population for the last few years.
The people who moved to Phoenix didn't have guns to their heads. They moved there because out of all the cities in the US, Phoenix worked best for them. To me that points to an incredible urban planning success. They might have failed at building a city that you like. They might have failed at building a city that was hostile to people who want a single family home with a two car garage. But they didn't fail at building a city that people choose to move to.
A future with all autonomous vehicles is about the best transportation future I can imagine! Go directly point-to-point in private transportation quickly, quietly, safely and efficiently. In a fully-autonomous future, infrastructure needs are dramatically reduced: no parking, fewer lanes of traffic, minimal road surface (could even just be 2 "rails" of pavement for the tires). Fully-autonomous vehicles could also reduce domestic flights dramatically (and all the associated fuel consumption and noise).
I've gone over to Chandler to check them out - was also really impressed, very smooth ride! I'm on the wrong side of I-10 unfortunately for getting regular rides from my house :/
I'll contrast this with Cruise, which are driving autonomously in San Francisco.
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
Visualizing this situation happening in New York City, where I live, is causing me to chuckle out loud.
It’s hard not to envision the nearest construction vehicle casually lifting the thing into the east river while a couple NYPD guys laugh and take pics for their friends.
In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to
a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too
far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to
indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey
this.
Yeah that tracks. My last run in with Cruise was towards the end of April when their vehicle (Gnome) decided to just wait for the light to turn green… in the fucking crosswalk. This was on Market, so it's not like it's a small, easy to miss crosswalk.
In these cases, bus vs cruise vehicles, the bus is often helpless to fix the problem, and a stalemate ensues. As I understand it, bus drivers in SF are not allowed to backup without the presence of a supervisor (it makes sense that you'd want someone watching the back of the bus) so it is up to the cruise vehicle to backtrack if they somehow meet up head-to-head. Of course the cruise vehicle is like an Uber driven by Spock--perfectly logical and without emotion--and will just is sit waiting until the path ahead is clear.
It seems to have recently gotten worse too. I'd never had a bad experience driving near them until recently, and all of a sudden every time I'm near one it's doing something annoying/worrying.
Driving in a chaotic dense urban environment like San Francisco is much harder than driving in a giant suburb like Phoenix, which is among some of the most car-optimized, easiest places to drive in the world.
Cruise also operates in Phoenix; it would be interesting to contrast its performance with Waymo there.
I walk my dogs twice a day and the cars are constantly driving by with their array of sensors. Made me feel like I was being constantly filmed and recorded... which as I understand them to work I certainly was/am. Outside of that, I resented being involuntarily part of a science experiment that is objectively pretty dangerous all things considered. For example, I would never cross the street when one was coming down the road. I didn't trust them.
> What about the experience of using the service changed your opinion?
The UX is really incredible. The car handled driving very, very well. Much better/safer than most Uber/Lyft's I've been in. Made me realize how freeing this technology will be for those that don't have the ability to drive. If you don't have a car / don't have the ability to drive in Phoenix, you're going to have a bad time. Walkability here is typically very poor.
For folks that are interested, the discussion at /r/selfdrivingcars [1] picked out some of the salient numbers. Brad Templeton also did his own write up at [2].
I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.
I really hope that I can get access in San Francisco soon. The closest grocery store to me in Bayview is a 30 minute walk across one of SF's riskiest pedestrian intersections and my neighborhood's only bus service is a corporate shuttle. Cruise just announced coverage for the "entire city" but it won't actually include my neighborhood. I've been well aware of Waymo for a long time, and been on the waiting list for over a year now! I've actually seen people getting in and out of Waymos near my apartment, and my limited experiencing riding the Cruise beta has me really excited to someday traverse SF in self driving vehicles. Can't wait.
How well does this scale? At some point do you just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country, or are you reliant on ongoing large amounts of support for the cars which means that the costs for expansion make it currently non viable?
Not OP, but I work in the industry. It's not as simple as opening the tap for three primary reasons: 1) localization, 2) operations, 3) cost.
Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-driving companies slowly expanding availability areas after their test cars have been running around for many thousands of miles in the area.
Operations is all the stuff that's not the car driving itself around. The cars need a home base where they can park when not in use, recharge, get cleaned, have sensors checked and calibrated, and get maintenance when needed (scales linearly with number of vehicles). The cars are also not 100% flawlessly handling every situation and rider issue - there still needs to be human support in the loop, both in terms of a dedicated remote support team (scales linearly with number of rides) and in terms of local rescue people to get cars when they're really stuck (scales linearly with number of vehicles).
Cost is the cost of vehicles, tech (ADKs), and operations. Waymo and Cruise are currently operating at absolutely massive loss and will continue to do so for years. It's generally not a great idea to open the faucet on a money-losing business until you at least have a solid way to get to profitability. Yes, I know, Uber and other giant startups basically never made money, etc. etc. but the market has changed and owners are looking to decrease costs of tech and operations before really scaling up. It's going to take a couple years still.
This claim in the Forbes article doesn't make sense to me: "It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for."
Alphabet has been pressured to show more tangible financial results by activist shareholders[1]. Waymo has 2,500 employees. Waymo's annual budget for headcount alone include stock based compensation is over $1B by my estimate.
We currently only operate the public service in Phoenix and San Francisco. There isn't a wait list in Phoenix, anyone can ride, but there is in San Francisco. So... technically they're currently independent.
But our goal in any new area would be to focus on the people that live there, because they would use the service regularly. Of course, the broader goal is no waitlist anywhere :).
Seems to be waitlist per city. But they only have a waitlist in SF currently. Phoenix is fully open to the public and LA is employee-only so far, so no waitlist open there yet.
Really love what waymo have been achieving with a relatively small team, but more importantly, they’ve had their heads down working and solving hard problems instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises (e.g. delivering robotaxies that make you $30k/yr by next year!), getting into ideological (sensor) wars, etc.
(How many people know the name of their CEO? And yet they’re slowly and steadily marching along, hitting one milestone after another.)
> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises
Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]
Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.
Definitely. The big picture is that they are very careful and conservative with their statements about the future, but if you look hard enough you can always find something. With Tesla it's the polar opposite.
Yup, I very much liked the broader approach of solving the general problem, but this actually seems to be doing better.
The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.
Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.
> The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
That's certainly the intent with Waymo Via for trucking, and we drive multiple routes today including say Dallas <=> Houston for beer [1]. The video at [2] includes some footage of the trucks on a highway.
Google has a strong foundation for estimating this effort because they already do it at lower fidelity with streetview. I would assume they are considering these questions regularly as part of whatever long term planning goes into the rollout.
Interesting question. I'm guessing the information density of 100 miles of standard American interstate is less than that of 1 city block in Manhattan.
I've had access in SF for the past few months and have been really impressed! The Waymo rides I've taken have been confident + a bit conservative (e.g. driving at the speed limit when traffic is flowing more quickly), but overall the team's done a great job with the experience. It's free for now so I've been using it regularly during commuting/rush hour and casual drives. Some quick thoughts:
Advantages over Uber/Lyft:
- Privacy - having the car to yourself is nice!
- Safety - My friends who are women have almost universally said they feel uncomfortable taking Ubers/Lyfts at night and would prefer the Waymo
- Ride matching happens almost instantly
- Estimated pickup times are consistently accurate
- Trunk is open for use and the car will prompt you to grab your items and open the trunk at the end of a ride
- Extra legroom in backseat because there's no driver
- No driver/car confusion - you can set your initials to be displayed on top of the car at pickup
Parity with Uber/Lyft:
- Drives surprisingly confidently/well - can handle complex urban traffic, pedestrians, cyclists without doing anything obviously "dumb"
- First-class native app experience
- Rides are priced upfront
- Rides can be multi-stop
Disadvantages (today) vs Uber/Lyft:
- Driving is conservative - nothing above the speed limit
- Driving is sometimes a little bit jerky (e.g. at stop signs, while inching on a right turn at a red light)
- Routes can sometimes be odd / longer (usually within 25% of the most direct route)
- Rarely (<5% rides), car will stop for pickup somewhere odd (middle of lane when there's an available curb, right turn lane)
- No driver if you leave something behind (there's a support form online, but I left my phone once and a good samaritan happened to call using the emergency number)
- Pickup times can be longer today than Uber/Lyft as they roll out more cars
Honestly, if they fix the occasional indirect routing and eventually are able to let the cars flow at the same speed as traffic, I'd pick the Waymo almost every time.
Did you get access from the public beta sign-up list, or some other channel? I've been on the waitlist for over a year and have seen people utilizing Waymo near my apartment, but nothing's budged for me. I did get into the Cruise beta, and that just made me positive Waymo will almost completely replace other forms of car transit for me once it's available, but Cruise is very limited.
Just public beta sign-up list as far as I know! I don't remember doing anything special besides signing up for the waitlist and filling out a survey, so I guess I just got lucky.
The Waymo approach has proven itself. Targeted testing, running the driver in hard mode as much as possible, is better than the Tesla approach. Tesla’s plan was essentially “machine learning underpants gnomes”. Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ??? -> profit. Didn’t work and now Tesla is recognized as being dead last in the game, behind dozens of no-name Chinese players.
Now what I wonder is whether Waymo has a durable lead over Cruise, or if Cruise succeeds alongside them.
I have always been a huge proponent of Waymo and obviously Tesla doesn't have something comparable to them now.
But if you look at videos of recorded Tesla autopilot drives on Youtube you will see a huge amount of success in terms of getting people to their destination without crashing or killing anyone. And there is constant gradual improvement.
If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service. The trick will probably be that you need to have a driver's license and sit in the front seat at first. But after X months they will probably allow sitting in the back, especially for certain vetted trip regions.
> If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service.
2-3% improvement in what metric exactly? Disengagement rate? Tesla has a long way to go there in anything but highway driving.[1]
YouTube videos are not proof of the safety of an autonomous vehicle. Tesla autopilot is currently very optimistically at level 2.5. 2-3%, even across all metrics won't get them to level 3, much less level 5.
I don't blame the people working in their self-driving program. The expectations that have been placed upon them are unreasonable given the constraints on equipment cost and aesthetic design.
Tesla's advanced-driving systems (AP and FSD) lead the world in terms of deaths. It's not even close: Tesla has more fatalities than every other advanced-driving system in the world, combined.
Even massaging the data in the light most favorable for Tesla, a Tesla is still 3x more likely to be in an accident resulting in injuries than the next worst advanced-driving system, and is more than 50x more likely to be in an accident causing injuries than Toyota's or GM's advanced driving systems.
A 2-3% improvement still means that Tesla is the most dangerous advanced driving system on the roads.
The baby steps makes sense, but you gotta admit Phoenix has to be thr easiest metro area to test with: Little inclement weather, little terrain change, newer infrastructure, streets mostly laid out in an east-west, north-south grid with consistent naming and numbering.
Tesla approach is to grief their customers into paying for feature they have no concrete plans to ever deliver on (in the absence of lidar/radar sensors it’s a crapshoot) -> profit. Worked pretty well
The argument was more that to do it generally you need vision to work, lidar will always be a narrow solution and redundant when you have vision.
It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case.
Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attaching some general intelligence to vision can probably do it. Likely will be bigger issues then though.
Last based on what metrics? I've never seen anything better than the Tesla FSD except for the LIDAR robo taxis, but they are solving a very different problem with different constraints. Most recent cost estimate I can find shows a cost per vehicle of $130-150K for Waymo vs the Tesla system that needs to go in a vehicle costing $40-50K which makes using a Waymo style sensor suite impossible. Would be interesting to see how the Tesla software would perform with the sensor input of something like the superior Waymo suite, but we won't ever find out unless costs come down by a massive amount.
Your numbers are very outdated. Exact figures and targets aren't usually announced, but both Waymo has talked about their upcoming vehicle being designed around a cost/mile ratio lower than consumer vehicles. That's not possible without very reasonable production costs. Cruise has also announced a target production price for their vehicle of $50k at scale, which is around the price of a new Tesla. That's not apples to apples, but it's close enough.
Sensors are following a really great learning curve, rapidly getting both more capable, more reliable, and cheaper. It's reasonable to expect they could be a few hundred dollars per unit soon.
What does “running the driver in hard mode as much as possible” mean?
Why do you think Tesla’s approach “didn’t work and they are now dead last in the game?”
Maybe that’s just an opinion because you provided nothing to back it up - but I can tell you not only does AutoPilot/FSD Beta work, the latest FSD Beta stack (I’m driving 11.3.6) works extremely well.
Tesla has orders of magnitude more passenger-miles driven than any other solution, which is one quantitative way to gauge success.
Tesla’s latest FSD Beta safety record on city streets is also excellent - 10x fewer accidents per mile than Cruise for example.
This is another huge win for Tesla but it’s important to note that this is accomplished in part by requiring strict driver oversight (enforced through gaze & attention tracking in the cabin camera). So the significantly lower accident rate is not an apple-to-apples comparison of two L4 solutions, but it convincingly shows that their L2 solution is actively making the city and highway roads safer for the driver and the cars & pedestrians that they are sharing the road with.
> "we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer"
they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.
Climate yes, but air quality not by as much as you'd think. Multiple studies have come out showing that the weight of EVs puts more pressure on tires and breaks, which in turn increases the particles they dump in the air.
> As a result, total PM10 emissions from EVs were found to be equal to those of modern ICEVs. PM2.5 emissions were only 1–3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
As the quote mentioned, this can be improved. Lighter batteries, better regenerative breaking, and improvements in tire material would all help.
And noise! I will rejoice when idiots are no longer allowed to speed and operate clearly illegal (in terms of emissions and noise) vehicles on public roads.
What is the power source for charging these EVs? In Phoenix, I could imagine it might be solar but the cars probably want to charge at night during low-demand times?
If it's utility electric, from what fuel source is it generated?
Self-driving car fleets probably increase suburbization in the same way that trains created suburbs long ago.
Depending on how it breaks out, "more space per person at similar total environmental impact" is a quality of life win but not a climate-change-fighting one.
Pedestrian safety and other externalities are probably a big win, still.
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate
and the air quality.
Counterpoint: no, they wouldn't. Moving towards self-driving automobiles merely props up an inefficient mode of transportation. Imagine sinking all that money that's being blown on self-driving cars into pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. The problem with cars is cars, not drivers.
The “EV” part seems to be carrying the weight there, not the self-driving. Self-driving might even make those problems worse by decreasing the cost of driving.
It’s like saying “self-driving cars and solving the nitrogen fixation problem would be a big win for preventing famine.”
I agree but also worry about the job loss and the inevitable loss of freedoms that will inevitably be 'justifiable' when automatic driving is the norm.
Basically, if the cost can be comparable to car ownership, reducing resource use by making car buying of any kind far more difficult. Which is admittedly entirely a thought experiment. Though it is a thought experiment many authors seem to arrive at.
Edit: I wish I could say I was surprised at the downvotes for a comment that is pro-worker.
In this thread I am seeing nearly 100% positive praise for the driving abilities of these vehicles, but that is simply not always true. They are causing almost daily incidents for emergency responders in San Francisco and these companies seem unwilling to address the issue.
I wonder if they plan to test in Europe. I moved to France and one issue I struggle with as a human driver is speed limits. I live in a suburban area where most streets have 30kmh limits (19mph). Nobody respects them, not even busses. I often get honked at when driving the speed limit. What would Waymo do?
Readit News
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
It might be the only word I use that I have never considered spelling, so I am grateful that you included it your comment.
That said, I think you are wrong and it should be "uey", "uie," "u-ie," or any other spelling that emphasizes the "u" after which the term is named.
Also "I do not know the answer but I am sure you are wrong" is the most internetish comment I've ever made, so that's two striking experiences for me today.
There's something adorable and HHGTG about that whole thing! Reminds me of the robotic Star Liner that refused to take off because of the peanuts hadn't been delivered thus its checklist was incomplete. It had waited eons as its passengers withered to corpses securely locked into the cabin only stating that it was 'statistically likely a new civilisation with peanut packages will arise on this planet'.
I've had humans do this, when I had no intention of crossing the street because I was just standing at the corner waiting to meet somebody. At least the humans give up after a few seconds, with exacerbated expressions like I'm the one who did something wrong. It would be pretty funny to see a robot car sit there for minutes.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
Never seen a self-driving-car in person, but I assume it's the standard 4-seater sedan layout, right?
- The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell
- You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.
- They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive
- You get to play your own music
* They are very safe and you’re not at the mercy of the Uber/Lyft driver’s driving skills.
* Their cars are pretty good (Jaguar I-Pace fleet) and generally very clean. You know what you’re getting every time.
* You don’t have to interact with a driver.
* No tipping.
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
By the criteria I would use, Phoenix is a massive success in urban planning. The criteria I would use would be the willingness of people to move there.
In 1950, Phoenix was in the top 100 biggest US cities...barely. It was 99th, with a little over 100,000 people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2000, Phoenix was the 6th largest city in the US with 1.3 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2022, Phoenix was the 5th largest city in the US with 1.6 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8.5 million. And NYC has been losing population for the last few years.
The people who moved to Phoenix didn't have guns to their heads. They moved there because out of all the cities in the US, Phoenix worked best for them. To me that points to an incredible urban planning success. They might have failed at building a city that you like. They might have failed at building a city that was hostile to people who want a single family home with a two car garage. But they didn't fail at building a city that people choose to move to.
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
It’s hard not to envision the nearest construction vehicle casually lifting the thing into the east river while a couple NYPD guys laugh and take pics for their friends.
Cruise also operates in Phoenix; it would be interesting to contrast its performance with Waymo there.
Staying in the overtaking lane is against the rules in Britain; is that the case in California too?
In Italy this would be resolved by the passengers getting out of the bus, lifting and moving the car out of the way.
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I walk my dogs twice a day and the cars are constantly driving by with their array of sensors. Made me feel like I was being constantly filmed and recorded... which as I understand them to work I certainly was/am. Outside of that, I resented being involuntarily part of a science experiment that is objectively pretty dangerous all things considered. For example, I would never cross the street when one was coming down the road. I didn't trust them.
> What about the experience of using the service changed your opinion?
The UX is really incredible. The car handled driving very, very well. Much better/safer than most Uber/Lyft's I've been in. Made me realize how freeing this technology will be for those that don't have the ability to drive. If you don't have a car / don't have the ability to drive in Phoenix, you're going to have a bad time. Walkability here is typically very poor.
I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/137hr3l/wa...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/05/04/waymo-...
The beta coverage is sunset to pacific heights and only 10pm to 530am - making it effectively useless.
Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-driving companies slowly expanding availability areas after their test cars have been running around for many thousands of miles in the area.
Operations is all the stuff that's not the car driving itself around. The cars need a home base where they can park when not in use, recharge, get cleaned, have sensors checked and calibrated, and get maintenance when needed (scales linearly with number of vehicles). The cars are also not 100% flawlessly handling every situation and rider issue - there still needs to be human support in the loop, both in terms of a dedicated remote support team (scales linearly with number of rides) and in terms of local rescue people to get cars when they're really stuck (scales linearly with number of vehicles).
Cost is the cost of vehicles, tech (ADKs), and operations. Waymo and Cruise are currently operating at absolutely massive loss and will continue to do so for years. It's generally not a great idea to open the faucet on a money-losing business until you at least have a solid way to get to profitability. Yes, I know, Uber and other giant startups basically never made money, etc. etc. but the market has changed and owners are looking to decrease costs of tech and operations before really scaling up. It's going to take a couple years still.
This claim in the Forbes article doesn't make sense to me: "It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for."
Alphabet has been pressured to show more tangible financial results by activist shareholders[1]. Waymo has 2,500 employees. Waymo's annual budget for headcount alone include stock based compensation is over $1B by my estimate.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6daa5d29-8595-4630-a633-eb1f8b138...
But our goal in any new area would be to focus on the people that live there, because they would use the service regularly. Of course, the broader goal is no waitlist anywhere :).
Kudos to the hardworking waymonauts!
2,800 employees on Linkedin
> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises
Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]
Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-p...
Definitely. The big picture is that they are very careful and conservative with their statements about the future, but if you look hard enough you can always find something. With Tesla it's the polar opposite.
Tesla has 130k.
The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.
Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.
That's certainly the intent with Waymo Via for trucking, and we drive multiple routes today including say Dallas <=> Houston for beer [1]. The video at [2] includes some footage of the trucks on a highway.
[1] https://www.ttnews.com/articles/waymo-ch-robinson-driverless...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lon1vRv2wQ8
CEOs (plural)
Advantages over Uber/Lyft:
Parity with Uber/Lyft: Disadvantages (today) vs Uber/Lyft: Honestly, if they fix the occasional indirect routing and eventually are able to let the cars flow at the same speed as traffic, I'd pick the Waymo almost every time.Imagine if all (or even most!) SF drivers decided they would come to a complete stop at each stop sign and at each red light!
Now what I wonder is whether Waymo has a durable lead over Cruise, or if Cruise succeeds alongside them.
But if you look at videos of recorded Tesla autopilot drives on Youtube you will see a huge amount of success in terms of getting people to their destination without crashing or killing anyone. And there is constant gradual improvement.
If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service. The trick will probably be that you need to have a driver's license and sit in the front seat at first. But after X months they will probably allow sitting in the back, especially for certain vetted trip regions.
2-3% improvement in what metric exactly? Disengagement rate? Tesla has a long way to go there in anything but highway driving.[1]
YouTube videos are not proof of the safety of an autonomous vehicle. Tesla autopilot is currently very optimistically at level 2.5. 2-3%, even across all metrics won't get them to level 3, much less level 5.
I don't blame the people working in their self-driving program. The expectations that have been placed upon them are unreasonable given the constraints on equipment cost and aesthetic design.
1. https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1458169941128097800
Even massaging the data in the light most favorable for Tesla, a Tesla is still 3x more likely to be in an accident resulting in injuries than the next worst advanced-driving system, and is more than 50x more likely to be in an accident causing injuries than Toyota's or GM's advanced driving systems.
A 2-3% improvement still means that Tesla is the most dangerous advanced driving system on the roads.
Rental cars? Lame.
It's actually
Profit -> Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ???
It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case.
Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attaching some general intelligence to vision can probably do it. Likely will be bigger issues then though.
It's no surprise that it's easier to get to Level 4 if you have a 50-100k sensor suite, HD maps and a geofence.
However, I wouldn't be shocked if, even if Tesla robotaxis arrive many years later, Tesla achieves profitability before Waymo does.
Why do you think Tesla’s approach “didn’t work and they are now dead last in the game?”
Maybe that’s just an opinion because you provided nothing to back it up - but I can tell you not only does AutoPilot/FSD Beta work, the latest FSD Beta stack (I’m driving 11.3.6) works extremely well.
Tesla has orders of magnitude more passenger-miles driven than any other solution, which is one quantitative way to gauge success.
Tesla’s latest FSD Beta safety record on city streets is also excellent - 10x fewer accidents per mile than Cruise for example.
This is another huge win for Tesla but it’s important to note that this is accomplished in part by requiring strict driver oversight (enforced through gaze & attention tracking in the cabin camera). So the significantly lower accident rate is not an apple-to-apples comparison of two L4 solutions, but it convincingly shows that their L2 solution is actively making the city and highway roads safer for the driver and the cars & pedestrians that they are sharing the road with.
they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate and the air quality.
> As a result, total PM10 emissions from EVs were found to be equal to those of modern ICEVs. PM2.5 emissions were only 1–3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
As the quote mentioned, this can be improved. Lighter batteries, better regenerative breaking, and improvements in tire material would all help.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
If it's utility electric, from what fuel source is it generated?
Self-driving car fleets probably increase suburbization in the same way that trains created suburbs long ago.
Depending on how it breaks out, "more space per person at similar total environmental impact" is a quality of life win but not a climate-change-fighting one.
Pedestrian safety and other externalities are probably a big win, still.
It’s like saying “self-driving cars and solving the nitrogen fixation problem would be a big win for preventing famine.”
Basically, if the cost can be comparable to car ownership, reducing resource use by making car buying of any kind far more difficult. Which is admittedly entirely a thought experiment. Though it is a thought experiment many authors seem to arrive at.
Edit: I wish I could say I was surprised at the downvotes for a comment that is pro-worker.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-departmen...