This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into autonomous driving (car manufacturers). That’s why it’s working for them. (IIUC, Cruise has pretty much also always been legit?)
Don’t even get me started on the “didn’t take psych 102: Attention and Memory”-level cluelessness required to believe a human can safely pay attention well enough in a vehicle that reliably tricks you into believing it’s autonomous to take over in the split seconds before a disaster…
I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. I mean, what are they going to say? “It’s too hard so we’re just waiting for Waymo or Cruise to license their tech once it works”?
I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…
> I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive.
The auto manufacturer approach is also showing progress. In CA and NV you can buy and operate a Mercedes with Drive Pilot, which is Level 3 certified. In the right (very restrictive conditions which essentially come down to "sitting in highway traffic on your commute") you legally do not have to pay attention to the road and can read/watch/work/etc.
There's still plenty that can go wrong in a hurry even if you are just streaming along in lane. All it takes is for something non-routine to happen such as a car ahead reacting to an animal, or swerving as the driver reaches for something or spills coffee on themself, or a wheel come off a car (I've seen it happen to a car in front of me), or a car crosses the center median in opposite direction (which left my ex-boss hospitalized for 6 months).
I'd personally never trust an autopilot unless it's either backed by human-level AI which has also had years of driving experience, or it's in some very highly constrained environment (maybe airport bus going from gate to plane). Out on a highway or public road system is the most unpredictable environment possible.
That 'level 3' is still basically lane keeping and auto cruise control, the driver still has to be ready to immediately takeover, if you don't the car will stop in it's current lane with it's blinkers on.
This is about the peak of what you can get with automated lane keeping and braking. I don't see any route from this point to anything like level 4.
What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment worthwhile… it would be glorious! An ever-expanding autonomous taxi company that just plows profits back into expansion, and then contracts programmers to improve the software, lawyers to defend its existence, and maybe even business consultants to suggest R&D or expansion ideas…
> at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company
How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?
Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?
I think you'll find it difficult, given the general attitude the legal system has had to AI anything: lots of things are defined to require a human (see the various attempts to assign copyright or patents to AIs).
Thinking about this dispelled my last bit of youthful naivete a few years ago.
Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit!
...
If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?
I think a lot of people have uncritically been repeating Waymo's marketing talking points for so long they've started mistaking it for "consensus" or even worse "truth". Waymo's tech is impressive and it works, but that doesn't mean it is the only way to make it work. The Tesla/Waymo approaches are far far more alike than they are different, so the whole debate is about very little.
The question of Camera vs LIDAR+Camera is a narrow technical question about how to construct a 3D scene. That's it. It says nothing about making sense of this 3D world for which you you have a 3D point cloud and it says nothing about how to actually navigate that world. Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says. It doesn't tell you how to drive, how fast you should go, how much space to give the guy with the sign etc. Everything AV-related which is not constructing a 3D scene is actually the same across all AV stacks, which includes the hardest part - the actual driving itself.
Camera vs Lidar+Camera is not a narrow question. Cameras lack sufficient dynamic range to work in many situations, and therefore cannot alone be used for a real self-driving solution where the driver naps.
Your example of needing to read a stop sign isn't a great example. At least in North America, a hexagonal sign is always a stop sign. A better example of your point would be a speed limit sign.
> Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says.
But Waymo never said you don't need cameras. Hell, they have 29 cameras in each vehicle compared to Tesla's 8.
Your point about their approaches being more alike than different is somewhat true, but you wrongly attribute the LiDAR vs camera debate to Waymo marketing. It's Elon and Tesla fans who started it and incessantly repeat it even to this day. Most rational folks say use whatever you can to get it working (which Waymo did) and optimize later.
The whole thing is largely probabilistic in many ways/parts, and it seems like more sensors, especially more sensors that operate in different modalities, is better, assuming your sensor fusion is working properly so that each additional sensor adds certainty to your predictions.
There are atmospheric conditions and obstructions that lidar can see through that cameras can't.
Cameras also seem prone to being blocked by a small splash of mud/dirt. Is anyone on this thread knowledgeable enough in the domain to know if that's an issue? I thought of it while moving my head sideways to see around a temporary sight obstruction on my windshield. Luckily the windshield is big, and I can move my head. Cameras are small. I guess you just put several so you have an effectively large camera array? It does mean more redundancy is necessary than I would have initially thought.
Tesla and Wayno are so unalike that Tesla could have to start from scratch if a detailed 3D map and the sensors to sense one's position in that map prove to be required. Tesla hasn't got, and can't retrofit that hardware. Tesla hasn't got the mapping data. Tesla hasn't got the many years of steady progress toward thousands of uneventful trips per day with no human touching the wheel.
I've put tens of thousands of miles on a comma.ai. it's just hands free lane keep assist. it solves my hand/shoulder fatigue issues over long drives. it's not autonomous driving and doesn't pretend to be.
if you want to drive across the ultra straight highway flyover states it's game changing. if you don't do that, it's not that useful.
>pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla)
I have watched enough recent Tesla self-driving ride along videos on YouTube to suspect you might be mistaken on this point. Tesla intends to launch a cybertaxi fleet and their software looks like it will be good enough to get them there without lidar or additional sensors.
There are no Teslas that have ever taken a trip without an operator behind the wheel. The idea that there will be a near-future discontinuity after which a Tesla will be able to serve as a robotaxi is pretty ridiculous.
I just watched the latest video from AIDRIVR on YouTube. AIDRIVR is a TSLA pumper-and-dumper who has dedicated their channel to uncritical praise of FSD. In the first third of the video FSD v12 runs two stop signs, once directly into oncoming traffic in a 1-way traffic control and once at a stop where the cross traffic does not stop. This stuff is not even a little bit ready for fully supervised operation. https://youtu.be/fpoXr_z_6a4?t=565
Just a timeline of how Musk predicts that FSD will be solved in the next year every year since 2015: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/.
It is one thing to cherry-pick flawless drives on a sunny day and upload it to YouTube while having someone behind the wheel ready to take over the glorified driving assistant system. It is another to run a commercial driverless service open to the public 24/7 in one of the biggest urban areas, knowing that riders will record everything, assuming accident liability, and keeping a nice safety record without someone behind the wheel.
Well Mercedes-Benz apparently has gradually improved lane keeping all the way into autonomous driving. The Drive Pilot system is only at level 3 while Waymo is up at level 4, but consumers can actually buy the Mercedes product today and use it nationwide. It will be interesting to see how far they can push it.
They can not use the incredibly restrictive level 3 system nationwide, it can only be enabled on very specific highways in nevada or california in very specific situations (day time, clear weather, less than 40 mph, behind a lead car). Calling it level 3 is a marketing gimmick that you fell for.
> I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…
I have a comma.ai in our minivan and it works great. Much better than Honda's built in lane following tech
Lol Tesla has made significant progress and doesn't show much sign of slowing down. There's no reason to think there approach can't work at this point. People go weeks without intervention.
https://www.teslafsdtracker.com puts miles to disengagement at 30 and miles to critical disengagement at 300 for all v12.x.y versions. Note: this is crowdsourced data and the users themselves get to decide what's critical and what's not.
As far as numbers required to make it fully self driving, it's at least 3 orders of magnitude worse than the big players. Waymo and Cruise routinely had 30,000+ miles per disengagement during their California testing. That's one disengagement for roughly 3 years of driving.
Well, being as how people get to pick and choose when they use it, and that the driver has to remain vigilant at all times, I'm not surprised.
But this is easy to test: stick random people in the car and go to random locations with FSD, see how it works. Why haven't they demonstrated this yet?
I am very skeptical of the "weeks without intervention". It's cool technology, but I never had a single trip where I didn't need to intervene at least once.
It would regularly blow through school zones, failing to read the posted sign.
On a couple of occasions it veered off the road on to the shoulder.
My thinking is the car will never be level 4. It doesn't have sufficient sensors or NN compute power.
I don't know why people are so triggered by bottom up approach vs top down by Waymo vs Tesla.
Tesla already silently abandoned the "just over the AIR one day" approach with a dedicated car announcement.
However the camera+ultra-sonic radars but no lidar is not only Tesla vision, but other companies too.
We don't know what it costs Waymo to operate their car. The fact that they charge money doesn't make them a real business, just as people paying for FSD doesn't make it a real business.
Both are promises until a breakthrough occurs. Waymo is starting small-scale but for a full setup, even if guided by humans here and there. Tesla starts with millions of cars and multiple countries but with far modest functionality.
Waymo is scaling up; Tesla FSD finally starts to look like the promise, with a high chance of a ride with 0 disengagements still on the scale of many countries and launching it also on a different continent right now.
It's interesting to observe how companies with radically different approaches are about to arrive at the same goal almost simultaneously.
Tesla is still years behind Waymo: "FSD 12.3 seems superior to Waymo’s technology circa 2018, it’s not as good as Waymo’s technology at the end of 2020"
I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems.
I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip.
Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.
Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.
>Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.
Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven (i.e., frustration at the driver in front, wanting to take the more scenic route, being undecided about stopping at that cafe halfway).
I'm all for self driving in highly populated areas. In a perfect world I'd like to see it integrated into all vehicles, and when entering specific areas you are told your car will enter self-driving mode. Arguably this makes the most business sense for Waymo, licence the underlying tech to manufacturers that already have capacity to produce vehicles vs compete.
I have video from my dashcam of a Waymo taxi doing a sudden three lane change, in moderately heavy traffic, to do a left turn to enter a freeway. This was a month or so ago. I really hope a human was involved in that. If not, there’s no way I would consider riding in one. If an officer had seen it, they would likely have written a ticket to a human.
After two of my (women) friends were assaulted by Uber/Lyft drivers, a weird smell is the least of my fears. If I'm sending someone on a ride late a night, Waymo's lack of driver is a huge reason to prefer them over Uber/Lyft. But only if the destination is in a safe neighborhood. A human driver's going to be able to make a better assessment of if it's safe to let someone off somewhere, vs Waymos will randomly drop you off blocks away from your destination.
As far as humans suck at driving, it's not that they suck on average, but that the ones who do suck at it don't always have a sticker saying that they suck.
Maybe if you're under 25 and have always lived in a dense city this seems like a valid take. Taxis aren't new, they have always existed. Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans).
No one with kids wants to ride in taxis with kids all the time. Ditto for anyone with hobbies that require transporting large things, like kayaks, bikes, etc. Or people with large pets. Or grocery shopping for more than 1-2 people. Or any of the dozens of other conveniences that Americans have come to expect from owning a car over the past century.
I have kids and don't like Taxis, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with your take. The idea of a humanless Taxi showing up to my house sounds way more appealing to me.
I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver.
I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft.
I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more.
I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.
Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.
I used to live in China where taxi usage was much more ubiquitous, and…you really live to live in a world where you aren’t expected to live in a car, be it with public transit (Europe, Japan) or public transit + lots of taxis (China) or tuktuks or whatever. But yes, your hobbies tend to be different and adapted, bikes, for example, get you places, and are not taken places, or you get them on the train which actually hits the trail head you want to use. You rent the kayak on site, and there is always a place to do that because lots of other people are in the same car-less boat as you are.
You mention American at the end of your comment, but the rest of the world isn’t the same. Waymo doesn’t really have to limit itself to the states once they get the concept worked out.
I think you’re wrong about most of the scenarios on your list. And once the market is mature, I can imagine it would be great to be picked up in a minivan after a days cycling somewhere new and not on a loop route.
Americans have become emotionally attached to cars because of what they enable them to do. That might take a while to die. But in Europe cars are more of a pita to own and run because we have less space. I don’t have any great love for mine. As soon as waymo gets here and is reasonably priced I’ll get rid of my car.
I don’t know… I think a very big reason why people don’t take taxis is because they are very expensive especially for longer rides. This seems like a thing robo taxis might change. If the driver goes away, they shouldn’t be much more expensive than e.g. car rentals.
This will boil down to availability and price. Taxis are generally just too expensive to use often and also waits are too long. Of course, I'm comparing cost of frequent taxis vs buying a used car.
That is because the choice is own car or taxi: the automobile is the *only* supported choice for mobility in much of the United States, to the detriment of any other mode of transport.
People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.
My family has a couple cars but we still ride with our kids in taxis all the time, for example to the airport or into/out of the city. Even hauling bikes isn't insurmountable -- we've taken weeklong bike camping trips with friends and because biking in a big circle isn't as much fun we hire a bigger vehicle that can haul a dozen bikes to the starting point.
> Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans).
Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around.
If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1.
I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.
All these examples are casual rides, while the context was about taking the taxi daily to work. Of course you can keep your car for the weekend drive to the mall, or to the slopes, or if you're a soccer mom, but most employed people will definitely save the daily commute. Expectations change in face of convenience.
The only problem with Taxis is that they are expensive und possibly not available. Both of these issues are very much the kind of thing a robotaxi might fix.
I've said this on HN before as well, but I've turned into a full-on Waymo evangelist (Los Angeles user here). Couple of things to add to Jake's comment...
The driving experience itself is on par with the "best" drivers I've ever ridden with (things like stopping at actual stop signs, for instance, and not racing from one traffic light to the next, and being courteous to bikes and pedestrians), not to mention just the peace and tranquility of being in a car solo when you're not having to drive (I know, I know, mass transit is better for countless reasons and this is actually doubling down on human isolation which is probably not great long term). Anyway, I have zero interest in getting into an Uber at this point. I'd wait longer and pay more for a Waymo if given the choice. And I'm fully aware people will, if this works more broadly, lose jobs bc of it. I'm not insensitive to that, but I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle barring catastrophic incidents by Waymo et al that cause regulators to kill self-driving cars altogether. Note that I did witness an incident where on a road with no lane markings the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane. It's an intersection I transit often and normal drivers have great trouble with and frankly makes me uneasy every time I turn left there as well. The Waymo was definitely perplexed by it.
For those who talk about how Phoenix's roads are straight and wide... This is not true in Los Angeles (nor in SF though SF is more of a compact grid than LA). For those of you unfamiliar, a lot of the streets in LA where Waymo operates today are very narrow, with cars parked on both sides and so there's inadequate room for two cars to go down them without waiting for another car to pass. These same streets have zero lane markings on them. I've experienced this several times in Waymo to date where the car just "gets it," though it's almost too cautious when it needs to get over to let another car pass when there's not enough space for both. And if you read all of that and say "what about the weather?" It's obviously an issue and I fully agree it will delay the rollout "everywhere."
All that said, I cannot wait until I can jump in one of these things, from Waymo or any other company, and safely go up to the mountains or some other road-trip destination. The economics of longer trips, particularly to rural areas, are likely tricky bc of the inability to count on a return fare, but, man, I do think self-driving cars are a radically important technology that will vastly change how we transit and, really, how we live. That is, if they don't fuck up too much en route to getting there.
Honest question out of curiosity, since you seem genuine and open to discussion…
I agree with all of your points about Waymo vs. Uber-like ridesharing—the average Uber ride is so much less safe that it’s hard to argue for.
But I also agree with your aside about the growing isolation of society—the longer term implications of every event, meal, and errand being separated by autonomous journeys are staggering.
So the question is, how do the societal isolation factors play into your decision making? (Honest question, not a gotcha, I’m curious how others think about these tradeoffs.)
Can you just clarify in the situation where, 'the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane', whether the behaviour of the Waymo was 'safe' although obviously incorrect for multiple reasons?
> I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time
I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk and I've never even seen a self-driving car. Anywhere. I don't even think such a thing exists on public roads in my country. That Gibson quote about the future not being evenly distributed, etc.
Waymo is basically unique in offering Level 4 Self Driving (hence this article) and they only do this in a small number of locations in the US, such as (parts of) Phoenix - so, yes, you're correct that in the UK, or indeed anywhere outside of those few locations, there aren't real "Self Driving" cars.
You won't know if people have Level 3 "Self Driving" cars because unlike Level 4, the Level 3 cars always have a human sat in the driving seat, it's just that maybe the human isn't paying attention and maybe the car is driving anyway. It may be difficult to gauge (beyond guessing) how many people you see are bad drivers and how many aren't actually driving at all under L3...
L1 (the machine does some of the work but a human driver is always doing much of the driving) is certainly something you see and don't even think about. Intelligent Cruise control (ie it won't smack into the car ahead but instead slow down) on a motorway, maybe automatic lane keeping on somebody's fancier or newer car, it's not "Self driving" as you'd understand it, but it's something.
The way these "Levels" work is L3 to L4 is the point where we transition from "The human is legally driving but the machine is offering more and more assistance" to "The machine is legally driving and the human is asked less and less often to do anything at all". As a result a person who is literally blind and thus couldn't possible drive the car or obtain a license to do so - can (and they do) use a Waymo, just like they'd use an Uber, but they cannot do the same with Tesla "Full Self Driving".
Humans are astonishingly and unreasonably good at driving. There are, indeed, a lot of traffic deaths but this is because we drive a mind-boggling amount so even a very low rate of fatalities adds up to a substantial number.
A significant portion of traffic deaths also occur in special conditions-- at night, with intoxicated persons, in bad weather.
Existing self driving cars won't even drive in those more difficult conditions.
In terms of the passenger miles driven if you compare to non-intoxicate humans the expected number of deaths for self driving cars is still below 1 if they were as safe as non-intoxicated human drivers.
Safer cars are an excellent goal but they're not automatically a given result for self driving.
> Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
And introduces new ones like being dropped off blocks from your destination because the car refuses to drive on perfectly fine roads, service being unavailable in poor weather, and extending Google's tracking of everything you do online to offline.
:D
Aside, you can just ask uber drivers to turn off the radio.
> Humans are astonishingly and unreasonably good at driving. There are, indeed, a lot of traffic deaths but this is because we drive a mind-boggling amount so even a very low rate of fatalities adds up to a substantial number
To put some numbers on it in the US cars are driven about 3.2 x 10^12 miles per year, and around 4 x 10^4 people are killed in car accidents (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists).
That's one death per 8 x 10^7 miles.
There are around 2 x 10^6 people non-fatally injured in car accidents per year in the US. That's an injury every 1.6 x 10^6 miles.
There are around 4 x 10^6 non-injury car accidents per year in the US, which is one every 8 x 10^5 miles.
If we assume all miles driving are equally risky and that we drive 40 miles per day 365 days a year, then we would expect to be in a non-injury car accident around once every 55 years, be injured in a car accident around once every 110 years, and be killed in a car accident around once every 5500 years.
Of course almost no one drives all their miles at times and in conditions when the risk per mile is average so when estimating your personal risk you need to take that into account.
We handle both dense fog and heavy rain on the latest vehicles. The best blog post is probably https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ but you can find a lot of videos in the rain.
In the same vein, I don't ride uber often but when I do I often find that drivers leave their windows closed and car's air circulation turned off completely. When I ask for "a bit of airflow" they apparently hear it as "I'm too hot", so they turn AC to maximum power.
I'm not sure whether this reflects their own preferences, what they think customers want, or if they are just completely oblivious.
The olfactory problem with waymos is that if someone gets in one dirty or foul smelling there isn't a driver to kick them out. Waymos are starting to get more ridership and some of those people are going to be absolute pigs. I gave feedback to Waymo about a recent ride where the entire car smelled like a fat, unwashed ass and the best case scenario there is that they took the car out of rotation immediately, the rider right before me left it that way and that the rider will be identified after several instances of those reports. The reality is probably that the car picked up several riders after me until one reported a problem mid-ride.
> I gave feedback to Waymo about a recent ride where the entire car smelled like a fat, unwashed ass
Knowing BigCo reputation, I think it’s equally possible that Waymo and/or BigCo accounts will be banned for actual perp, complainant or random rider in-between… what a world…
Waymo is currently under investigation for multiple incidents, not all of which it had previously disclosed to the NHTSA [0]. The recent light pole incident also doesn't help [1].
If they are doing 50k rides a day, then they would appear to have a remarkable safety record.
It will be interesting to see if these investigations lead to a repeat of the Cruise debacle or if this will become the price of doing business.
Anecdata, but watching the Waymo cars compared to Cruise (preban) was night and day. Before Cruise was banned in SF, I would often see them violate traffic laws and fail to navigate basic intersections. Waymo isn't perfect, but its better than Cruise and the average SF driver, which is good enough for me.
> The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries.
> Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident.
> According to former Google executives, in Project Chauffeur’s early years there were more than a dozen accidents, at least three of which were serious. One of Google’s first test cars, nicknamed kitt, was rear-ended by a pickup truck after it braked suddenly, because it couldn’t distinguish between a yellow and a red traffic light. Two of the Google employees who were in the car later sought medical treatment.
It was a long time ago, but Larry Page was well aware of it, and imagine if that incident received fair coverage and investigation.
I am having trouble imagining this scenario in a way that makes Waymo look as bad as you imply. It sounds like the human-driven vehicle if it was "boxed in" on an on-ramp needed to slow and merge, rather than racing to pass on the right, running off the road, and causing a spectacular single-vehicle wreck. The way it's described in that paragraph seems to be ironclad proof of the need to promptly relieve humans of driving tasks.
Levandowski stole Waymo trade secrets, and only escaped the full consequences of his actions because of a Trump pardon. He is not representative of anything about Waymo in 2024.
As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.
Self driving buses will be such a boon for public transportation. Now you can have 24 hour buses, that operate on holidays as well, or even dynamic, short term routes based on demand (eg: after a concert or sports event), without being dependent on the availability of pre-allocated human drivers.
No need to be afraid. Public transport will evolve to include small autonomous vehicles. The economies of scale you get by packing people in larger vehicles mostly have to do with the cost of fuel and staffing.
Electrical autonomous vehicles don't have a need for a driver and electricity is relatively cheap. So you don't get much economies of scale by making them bigger. Most city journeys would be under a kwh. Even at current grid pricing that's cheap.
Eventually, cheap autonomous vehicles could be mass produced at low cost and would have very low operational cost. So the ride cost would be comparable to, or lower than, current public transport options.
> The economies of scale you get by packing people in larger vehicles mostly have to do with the cost of fuel and staffing.
Trains (and train-like options such as metros) are vastly more efficient than cars in number of people moved per unit of time per area used. That might not be a big deal in suburbia, but in dense inner cities it's one of the most important drivers of public transport.
If you are not paying for the conductor, can’t you make trains much more appealing? They could run every five minutes, and last mile can be solved with autonomous car that is waiting for you when you arrive.
I'm sorry but good public transit in the US isn't going to happen. Passenger rail has never been profitable anywhere since its very inception. With the rise of remote work, and declining ratios of working-age populations putting increasing pressure on public finances, we're just never going to see a widespread expansion of public transit.
AVs give us a path toward a world where very few people need to own their own car. We can put all those parking spaces to better use. We can improve equity by giving more people access to safe, reliable, affordable, and convenient point-to-point transportation. Being able to consistently get a ride to where you need to go is something we consistently under-appreciate. It means being able to get a better paying job on the other side of town. Or not having to worry about missing a dialysis appointment, or a meeting with your parole officer or therapist. When the marginal cost of a robotaxi/robobus ride is close to zero is when the AI economic boom will really begin.
> Passenger rail has never been profitable anywhere since its very inception.
Interestingly, no one ever argued for the profitability of cars, so all we can do now is to calculate the overall economic costs and societal benefits and that's where public transport clearly and easily wins.
And the day the Google bot decides to close your account for obscure reasons, with no recourse, all you can do is stay in bed and starve cause all these things are now inaccessible to you ? Even if self driving actually happens, it'll be the ultimate surveillance-ridden, enshitiffied service that will ruin not just the internet but our whole lives and cities.
Technically they are, yes, because they're open to the public.
But the impact of taxis on road traffic in a dense city is comparable to the impact of private cars - perhaps even more so as they're often travelling empty between rides. If every journey which was previously done with a car is done with a taxi, there's no reduction in vehicle traffic - meaning the same problems of congestion and pedestrian safety.
Driverless cars can probably drive closer on highways to increase throughput, but that doesn't really help in cities or residential areas. Ultimately if lots of people shift to driverless taxis to get around, there will be far more vehicles on our streets.
Major differences of Bus/Tram/Metro vs Car (robo or not) is number of passengers that can be transported per "time"/"dolar/"citi space used". And my feeling is that cars are not on the wining side here. And remember Bus/Tram/Metro can also be driverless.
Robotaxis are "a real business"? Maybe in the future, but not yet. From the article:
> But even the most bullish believers in autonomous transportation acknowledge the tech still has a ways to go before it’s reliable enough for widespread deployment on U.S. roads.
I was blown away going around Tempe/Scottsdale - Waymos everywhere with people walking around, crossing streets randomly to get to a spring training game, doing bar crawls (it was st patricks day) and what blew me away was they pulled up in front of hotel and even made a quick u-turn to get out of the parking lot. I mean this is really impressive stuff. The future is now imho.
I will give tempe/scottsdale credit though - they have their roads around the major tourist hubs in GREAT shape - the lines crisp and the lights bright and new - I think it makes it much easier for a waymo to get around.
Waymos do the same thing in SF where the streets are much denser, traffic is weirder, hills are way steeper, and the roads aren't in perfect shape by any means. The amount of impressive navigation I've seen around delivery trucks, weird construction patterns, etc has been pretty wild. They seem way ahead of the other options on the road.
They're the present here in SF, driving every day and more safely than the humans do. And as a human driver, I can testify that these streets are not particularly easy to drive on.
They are here in the Phoenix area too and I have not seen and issues with them. However, we are blessed by sunny weather 99% of the time. I think the biggest challenges will be having them drive in adverse weather conditions present throughout the rest of the country, such as blizzards, hail, torrential rain, dense fog.
Does a business have to be widely deployed or profitable to be real? The public and private capital markets say "no". If you were to ignore any business that isn't widely available you'd miss the beginning of both Apple and Facebook.
Waymo is a real business serving 50,000 rides each week delivering paying customers to their destination. If you haven't tried it yet, the product is amazing. Private, doesn't cancel, safe, and smooth. I will never take Uber again if I have the choice.
Profitability is my definition of "real business" vs. for example, a lot of SV unicorns: if the business cannot sustain itself financially from its core revenue stream, and needs cash injections from "investors" then it's a pyramid scheme, not a business.
How many humans are involved in this so-called driverless service? Waymo won’t say, but Cruise admitted [1] that about 1.5 people were actively monitoring and ready to take over control for every Cruise car. That’s not a sustainable business.
How much money is Waymo bleeding every quarter? Maybe the investors don’t care, but it’s relevant if you want to call it a real business.
I took one in Chandler last year, and it was amazing. Especially in combination with my Tesla and its "Full Self Driving". It kept up with traffic, turned confidently, yielded to pedestrians, etc.
The biggest (only?) complaint I had is that it would not pickup/dropoff at the curb at our hotel. So if it was raining, we'd have had to walk out in the rain to meet the car in a parking spot.
Cars are a real business despite being unable to navigate open water. What matters is that it’s profitable, not whether it works everywhere. Waymo appears to be unit profitable on a cash basis. (It’s far from recouping its investment into R&D.)
The 1% worst human drivers are really quite unpredictable. You're never certain with any human driver whether they're going to drive like a maniac, but you do know you're not getting that with a Waymo.
"Robo taxis" as they currently exist are pretty obviously not the long term goal, it's not an interesting business, it's just an easy test platform that recoups some costs.
The real business is an entire transit system, with purpose-built vehicles of various sizes, centralized routing, etc.
Fortune is where you go to buy fantasy headlines. If Fortune says it out loud, you know, it's almost certainly false, but someone somewhere really wants you to be fooled.
Has it though? They've come an impressively long way to have 50,000 rides a week, but that needs to increase a thousand fold to justify the $6B of venture capital and $30B valuation. That's a lot of cars and a lot more work than it takes Uber to bring on another underpaid owner driver (Uber has 23 million rides per day)
Waymo was smart to start with taxis. A self-driving car's competition is you, and of course you're an above-average driver. But a taxi's competition is the average Uber driver. People can be more objective about that low bar.
Readit News
Don’t even get me started on the “didn’t take psych 102: Attention and Memory”-level cluelessness required to believe a human can safely pay attention well enough in a vehicle that reliably tricks you into believing it’s autonomous to take over in the split seconds before a disaster…
I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. I mean, what are they going to say? “It’s too hard so we’re just waiting for Waymo or Cruise to license their tech once it works”?
I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…
The auto manufacturer approach is also showing progress. In CA and NV you can buy and operate a Mercedes with Drive Pilot, which is Level 3 certified. In the right (very restrictive conditions which essentially come down to "sitting in highway traffic on your commute") you legally do not have to pay attention to the road and can read/watch/work/etc.
https://www.mbusa.com/en/owners/manuals/drive-pilot
I'd personally never trust an autopilot unless it's either backed by human-level AI which has also had years of driving experience, or it's in some very highly constrained environment (maybe airport bus going from gate to plane). Out on a highway or public road system is the most unpredictable environment possible.
This is about the peak of what you can get with automated lane keeping and braking. I don't see any route from this point to anything like level 4.
How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?
Sadly its self-ownership is only "according to legend" rather than anything battle-tested.
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Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit!
...
If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cyrusfarivar/2023/12/04/judge-a...
Not sure if you count this as "legit" or not, but I haven't seen similar incidents from Waymo. (Perhaps I've just missed them - if so, links welcome!)
The question of Camera vs LIDAR+Camera is a narrow technical question about how to construct a 3D scene. That's it. It says nothing about making sense of this 3D world for which you you have a 3D point cloud and it says nothing about how to actually navigate that world. Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says. It doesn't tell you how to drive, how fast you should go, how much space to give the guy with the sign etc. Everything AV-related which is not constructing a 3D scene is actually the same across all AV stacks, which includes the hardest part - the actual driving itself.
Your example of needing to read a stop sign isn't a great example. At least in North America, a hexagonal sign is always a stop sign. A better example of your point would be a speed limit sign.
But Waymo never said you don't need cameras. Hell, they have 29 cameras in each vehicle compared to Tesla's 8.
Your point about their approaches being more alike than different is somewhat true, but you wrongly attribute the LiDAR vs camera debate to Waymo marketing. It's Elon and Tesla fans who started it and incessantly repeat it even to this day. Most rational folks say use whatever you can to get it working (which Waymo did) and optimize later.
There are atmospheric conditions and obstructions that lidar can see through that cameras can't.
Cameras also seem prone to being blocked by a small splash of mud/dirt. Is anyone on this thread knowledgeable enough in the domain to know if that's an issue? I thought of it while moving my head sideways to see around a temporary sight obstruction on my windshield. Luckily the windshield is big, and I can move my head. Cameras are small. I guess you just put several so you have an effectively large camera array? It does mean more redundancy is necessary than I would have initially thought.
if you want to drive across the ultra straight highway flyover states it's game changing. if you don't do that, it's not that useful.
I have watched enough recent Tesla self-driving ride along videos on YouTube to suspect you might be mistaken on this point. Tesla intends to launch a cybertaxi fleet and their software looks like it will be good enough to get them there without lidar or additional sensors.
I just watched the latest video from AIDRIVR on YouTube. AIDRIVR is a TSLA pumper-and-dumper who has dedicated their channel to uncritical praise of FSD. In the first third of the video FSD v12 runs two stop signs, once directly into oncoming traffic in a 1-way traffic control and once at a stop where the cross traffic does not stop. This stuff is not even a little bit ready for fully supervised operation. https://youtu.be/fpoXr_z_6a4?t=565
It is one thing to cherry-pick flawless drives on a sunny day and upload it to YouTube while having someone behind the wheel ready to take over the glorified driving assistant system. It is another to run a commercial driverless service open to the public 24/7 in one of the biggest urban areas, knowing that riders will record everything, assuming accident liability, and keeping a nice safety record without someone behind the wheel.
I have a comma.ai in our minivan and it works great. Much better than Honda's built in lane following tech
https://www.teslafsdtracker.com puts miles to disengagement at 30 and miles to critical disengagement at 300 for all v12.x.y versions. Note: this is crowdsourced data and the users themselves get to decide what's critical and what's not.
As far as numbers required to make it fully self driving, it's at least 3 orders of magnitude worse than the big players. Waymo and Cruise routinely had 30,000+ miles per disengagement during their California testing. That's one disengagement for roughly 3 years of driving.
Well, being as how people get to pick and choose when they use it, and that the driver has to remain vigilant at all times, I'm not surprised.
But this is easy to test: stick random people in the car and go to random locations with FSD, see how it works. Why haven't they demonstrated this yet?
I am very skeptical of the "weeks without intervention". It's cool technology, but I never had a single trip where I didn't need to intervene at least once.
It would regularly blow through school zones, failing to read the posted sign.
On a couple of occasions it veered off the road on to the shoulder.
My thinking is the car will never be level 4. It doesn't have sufficient sensors or NN compute power.
Tesla already silently abandoned the "just over the AIR one day" approach with a dedicated car announcement.
However the camera+ultra-sonic radars but no lidar is not only Tesla vision, but other companies too.
We don't know what it costs Waymo to operate their car. The fact that they charge money doesn't make them a real business, just as people paying for FSD doesn't make it a real business.
Both are promises until a breakthrough occurs. Waymo is starting small-scale but for a full setup, even if guided by humans here and there. Tesla starts with millions of cars and multiple countries but with far modest functionality.
Waymo is scaling up; Tesla FSD finally starts to look like the promise, with a high chance of a ride with 0 disengagements still on the scale of many countries and launching it also on a different continent right now.
It's interesting to observe how companies with radically different approaches are about to arrive at the same goal almost simultaneously.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...
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Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.
Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.
Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven (i.e., frustration at the driver in front, wanting to take the more scenic route, being undecided about stopping at that cafe halfway).
I'm all for self driving in highly populated areas. In a perfect world I'd like to see it integrated into all vehicles, and when entering specific areas you are told your car will enter self-driving mode. Arguably this makes the most business sense for Waymo, licence the underlying tech to manufacturers that already have capacity to produce vehicles vs compete.
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As far as humans suck at driving, it's not that they suck on average, but that the ones who do suck at it don't always have a sticker saying that they suck.
No one with kids wants to ride in taxis with kids all the time. Ditto for anyone with hobbies that require transporting large things, like kayaks, bikes, etc. Or people with large pets. Or grocery shopping for more than 1-2 people. Or any of the dozens of other conveniences that Americans have come to expect from owning a car over the past century.
I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver.
I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft.
I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more.
I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.
Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.
You mention American at the end of your comment, but the rest of the world isn’t the same. Waymo doesn’t really have to limit itself to the states once they get the concept worked out.
Americans have become emotionally attached to cars because of what they enable them to do. That might take a while to die. But in Europe cars are more of a pita to own and run because we have less space. I don’t have any great love for mine. As soon as waymo gets here and is reasonably priced I’ll get rid of my car.
People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.
> Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans).
Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around.
If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1.
I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.
The driving experience itself is on par with the "best" drivers I've ever ridden with (things like stopping at actual stop signs, for instance, and not racing from one traffic light to the next, and being courteous to bikes and pedestrians), not to mention just the peace and tranquility of being in a car solo when you're not having to drive (I know, I know, mass transit is better for countless reasons and this is actually doubling down on human isolation which is probably not great long term). Anyway, I have zero interest in getting into an Uber at this point. I'd wait longer and pay more for a Waymo if given the choice. And I'm fully aware people will, if this works more broadly, lose jobs bc of it. I'm not insensitive to that, but I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle barring catastrophic incidents by Waymo et al that cause regulators to kill self-driving cars altogether. Note that I did witness an incident where on a road with no lane markings the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane. It's an intersection I transit often and normal drivers have great trouble with and frankly makes me uneasy every time I turn left there as well. The Waymo was definitely perplexed by it.
For those who talk about how Phoenix's roads are straight and wide... This is not true in Los Angeles (nor in SF though SF is more of a compact grid than LA). For those of you unfamiliar, a lot of the streets in LA where Waymo operates today are very narrow, with cars parked on both sides and so there's inadequate room for two cars to go down them without waiting for another car to pass. These same streets have zero lane markings on them. I've experienced this several times in Waymo to date where the car just "gets it," though it's almost too cautious when it needs to get over to let another car pass when there's not enough space for both. And if you read all of that and say "what about the weather?" It's obviously an issue and I fully agree it will delay the rollout "everywhere."
All that said, I cannot wait until I can jump in one of these things, from Waymo or any other company, and safely go up to the mountains or some other road-trip destination. The economics of longer trips, particularly to rural areas, are likely tricky bc of the inability to count on a return fare, but, man, I do think self-driving cars are a radically important technology that will vastly change how we transit and, really, how we live. That is, if they don't fuck up too much en route to getting there.
I agree with all of your points about Waymo vs. Uber-like ridesharing—the average Uber ride is so much less safe that it’s hard to argue for.
But I also agree with your aside about the growing isolation of society—the longer term implications of every event, meal, and errand being separated by autonomous journeys are staggering.
So the question is, how do the societal isolation factors play into your decision making? (Honest question, not a gotcha, I’m curious how others think about these tradeoffs.)
I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk and I've never even seen a self-driving car. Anywhere. I don't even think such a thing exists on public roads in my country. That Gibson quote about the future not being evenly distributed, etc.
Just a data-point.
You won't know if people have Level 3 "Self Driving" cars because unlike Level 4, the Level 3 cars always have a human sat in the driving seat, it's just that maybe the human isn't paying attention and maybe the car is driving anyway. It may be difficult to gauge (beyond guessing) how many people you see are bad drivers and how many aren't actually driving at all under L3...
L1 (the machine does some of the work but a human driver is always doing much of the driving) is certainly something you see and don't even think about. Intelligent Cruise control (ie it won't smack into the car ahead but instead slow down) on a motorway, maybe automatic lane keeping on somebody's fancier or newer car, it's not "Self driving" as you'd understand it, but it's something.
The way these "Levels" work is L3 to L4 is the point where we transition from "The human is legally driving but the machine is offering more and more assistance" to "The machine is legally driving and the human is asked less and less often to do anything at all". As a result a person who is literally blind and thus couldn't possible drive the car or obtain a license to do so - can (and they do) use a Waymo, just like they'd use an Uber, but they cannot do the same with Tesla "Full Self Driving".
That’s an interesting way of saying you live in London ;)
(Phoenix urban area is more populous than every urban area in the UK except for London)
Countries develop at different rates on different things.
A significant portion of traffic deaths also occur in special conditions-- at night, with intoxicated persons, in bad weather.
Existing self driving cars won't even drive in those more difficult conditions.
In terms of the passenger miles driven if you compare to non-intoxicate humans the expected number of deaths for self driving cars is still below 1 if they were as safe as non-intoxicated human drivers.
Safer cars are an excellent goal but they're not automatically a given result for self driving.
> Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
And introduces new ones like being dropped off blocks from your destination because the car refuses to drive on perfectly fine roads, service being unavailable in poor weather, and extending Google's tracking of everything you do online to offline.
:D
Aside, you can just ask uber drivers to turn off the radio.
To put some numbers on it in the US cars are driven about 3.2 x 10^12 miles per year, and around 4 x 10^4 people are killed in car accidents (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists).
That's one death per 8 x 10^7 miles.
There are around 2 x 10^6 people non-fatally injured in car accidents per year in the US. That's an injury every 1.6 x 10^6 miles.
There are around 4 x 10^6 non-injury car accidents per year in the US, which is one every 8 x 10^5 miles.
If we assume all miles driving are equally risky and that we drive 40 miles per day 365 days a year, then we would expect to be in a non-injury car accident around once every 55 years, be injured in a car accident around once every 110 years, and be killed in a car accident around once every 5500 years.
Of course almost no one drives all their miles at times and in conditions when the risk per mile is average so when estimating your personal risk you need to take that into account.
Phoenix has the perfect climate for self-driving cars.
It will require a major technological leap in order for them to succeed in the "real world" (fog, rain, snow, etc).
We handle both dense fog and heavy rain on the latest vehicles. The best blog post is probably https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ but you can find a lot of videos in the rain.
Snow and very cold weather is a challenge for sensor cleaning. We've done some testing in both NYC and Buffalo (https://waymo.com/blog/2023/11/road-trip-how-our-cross-count...) to collect data.
I'm not sure whether this reflects their own preferences, what they think customers want, or if they are just completely oblivious.
Knowing BigCo reputation, I think it’s equally possible that Waymo and/or BigCo accounts will be banned for actual perp, complainant or random rider in-between… what a world…
If they are doing 50k rides a day, then they would appear to have a remarkable safety record.
It will be interesting to see if these investigations lead to a repeat of the Cruise debacle or if this will become the price of doing business.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-saf...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s
> The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries.
> Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident.
> According to former Google executives, in Project Chauffeur’s early years there were more than a dozen accidents, at least three of which were serious. One of Google’s first test cars, nicknamed kitt, was rear-ended by a pickup truck after it braked suddenly, because it couldn’t distinguish between a yellow and a red traffic light. Two of the Google employees who were in the car later sought medical treatment.
It was a long time ago, but Larry Page was well aware of it, and imagine if that incident received fair coverage and investigation.
I recognize accident lawyer work when I see one :) They charged Waymo’s insurance to the max.
Self driving buses will be such a boon for public transportation. Now you can have 24 hour buses, that operate on holidays as well, or even dynamic, short term routes based on demand (eg: after a concert or sports event), without being dependent on the availability of pre-allocated human drivers.
Electrical autonomous vehicles don't have a need for a driver and electricity is relatively cheap. So you don't get much economies of scale by making them bigger. Most city journeys would be under a kwh. Even at current grid pricing that's cheap.
Eventually, cheap autonomous vehicles could be mass produced at low cost and would have very low operational cost. So the ride cost would be comparable to, or lower than, current public transport options.
Trains (and train-like options such as metros) are vastly more efficient than cars in number of people moved per unit of time per area used. That might not be a big deal in suburbia, but in dense inner cities it's one of the most important drivers of public transport.
https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/
If you are not paying for the conductor, can’t you make trains much more appealing? They could run every five minutes, and last mile can be solved with autonomous car that is waiting for you when you arrive.
AVs give us a path toward a world where very few people need to own their own car. We can put all those parking spaces to better use. We can improve equity by giving more people access to safe, reliable, affordable, and convenient point-to-point transportation. Being able to consistently get a ride to where you need to go is something we consistently under-appreciate. It means being able to get a better paying job on the other side of town. Or not having to worry about missing a dialysis appointment, or a meeting with your parole officer or therapist. When the marginal cost of a robotaxi/robobus ride is close to zero is when the AI economic boom will really begin.
Interestingly, no one ever argued for the profitability of cars, so all we can do now is to calculate the overall economic costs and societal benefits and that's where public transport clearly and easily wins.
But the impact of taxis on road traffic in a dense city is comparable to the impact of private cars - perhaps even more so as they're often travelling empty between rides. If every journey which was previously done with a car is done with a taxi, there's no reduction in vehicle traffic - meaning the same problems of congestion and pedestrian safety.
Driverless cars can probably drive closer on highways to increase throughput, but that doesn't really help in cities or residential areas. Ultimately if lots of people shift to driverless taxis to get around, there will be far more vehicles on our streets.
> But even the most bullish believers in autonomous transportation acknowledge the tech still has a ways to go before it’s reliable enough for widespread deployment on U.S. roads.
I will give tempe/scottsdale credit though - they have their roads around the major tourist hubs in GREAT shape - the lines crisp and the lights bright and new - I think it makes it much easier for a waymo to get around.
Waymo is a real business serving 50,000 rides each week delivering paying customers to their destination. If you haven't tried it yet, the product is amazing. Private, doesn't cancel, safe, and smooth. I will never take Uber again if I have the choice.
How much money is Waymo bleeding every quarter? Maybe the investors don’t care, but it’s relevant if you want to call it a real business.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997
The biggest (only?) complaint I had is that it would not pickup/dropoff at the curb at our hotel. So if it was raining, we'd have had to walk out in the rain to meet the car in a parking spot.
The real business is an entire transit system, with purpose-built vehicles of various sizes, centralized routing, etc.
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Has it though? They've come an impressively long way to have 50,000 rides a week, but that needs to increase a thousand fold to justify the $6B of venture capital and $30B valuation. That's a lot of cars and a lot more work than it takes Uber to bring on another underpaid owner driver (Uber has 23 million rides per day)