[HN Gopher] Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
___________________________________________________________________
Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
Author : EvgeniyZh
Score : 512 points
Date : 2021-08-24 16:11 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.waymo.com)
| exikyut wrote:
| Maybe I'm just out of the loop on corporate presentation overload
| (I don't watch TV at all, and it's mildly jarring watching
| advertisments and whatnot), but this video feels so... formula-
| driven and lacking in depth and _interestingness_ that would give
| me the room to explore the concept and form /own my own view
| about the service's safety, efficiency and relevance... that it
| just feels boring. I love tech and self-driving, but the way this
| is presented, I'm completely turned off the idea.
|
| And then there's the fact that there's a shot of a driver in the
| front seat shown for like 400 milliseconds. What's up with that?
| Why is a token driver required to be in the front seat? I thought
| the foundation of the service was automated self-driving that
| obviates that...? If for whatever reason it _is_ required,
| alright, then own up to it and properly integrate it into the
| video so it doesn 't feel so awkward.
|
| Overall this presentation feels like it's hiding something,
| simply because it's so poorly put together.
| dilippkumar wrote:
| > We can't wait to hear from more San Franciscans as they
| experience the Waymo Driver themselves. Beginning later today,
| San Franciscans can sign up for the Trusted Tester program and
| help us shape the future of mobility in this city. Just download
| the Waymo One app to get involved.
|
| Anyone else got this to work? I only see a message that says "It
| looks like you're not in our service area..."
| [deleted]
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| Delete the Waymo One app and reinstalling worked for me when I
| saw this bug.
| lifekaizen wrote:
| I was able to complete the signup process: requires a gmail
| account, email link to a qualtrics survey which asks things
| like name, age, where you live (if SF proper, neighborhood?).
| (I do live in SF and gave it location access)
| zachberger wrote:
| "beginning later today"
| jjulius wrote:
| Perhaps they really do mean, "Beginning later today" and it
| will be available for your area later today?
| dilippkumar wrote:
| I skimmed past that detail. Thanks!
| dougmwne wrote:
| Given the number of people here saying self-driving cars require
| AGI (a.k.a. sand that thinks a.k.a. fairy magic), I would say we
| have definitely hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment.
| But since Waymo is launching in a second city, this is perhaps
| the very start of the slope of enlightenment.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >start of the slope of enlightenment
|
| that would be more like staircase of enlightenment. or up the
| down escalator to enlightenment
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Does Waymo plan to chisel it's drivers like Uber and Lyft did
| with Prop22?
| nemonemo wrote:
| I can think of a few milestones in the future for AVs:
| * the first accident between two fully automated AVs. * the
| first such accident within AVs from the leading company. *
| the first fatality in fully automated AVs * when uber or
| lyft or any similar company starts to use AVs more than human
| drivers in a metropolitan. * when a city gets half the
| driving hours in AVs. * when human drivers no longer get
| insurance coverage by a major insurance company.
|
| I wish the order in reverse.
| gfodor wrote:
| Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these
| outcomes:
|
| - Self driving is not possible
|
| - Self driving is not possible anytime soon
|
| - Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR
|
| - Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras
|
| I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving
| reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon
| if ever. I wonder which of their assumptions is wrong, if this
| ends up being successful.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| > - Self driving is not possible anytime soon
|
| Define "soon". For me it means 50 years. That's an
| infinitesimally small amount of time. If we can have level 5
| autonomy in 50 years I will say that progress was rapid and we
| really excelled.
| gfodor wrote:
| I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is
| an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.
| laichzeit0 wrote:
| To put it in perspective, 50 years is still less time than
| from now until when the transistor was invented.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| Yup. This whole era from WW2 onwards (the 3rd/4th
| Industrial Revolution?) will be looked at as covering
| 1950 to probably the mid 21st century hundreds of years
| from now.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| I am in the AGI camp, but have wondered and still wonder,
|
| Why are efforts not focused primarily on interstate/highway
| travel, specifically, collaboration with DoT for
| mesh/distributed/coordinated long-term travel?
|
| I don't need a self-driving taxi. I would pay 20K for a car
| which participated in a federally-regulated framework which let
| me let go of the wheel when I get on a highway and let teh
| emergent cloud determine how best to move my car and all the
| others on dedicated/reserved lanes in coordinated "trains" for
| hours.
|
| The wins here seem like no-brainers. Sidestep all
| jurisdictional nonsense; optimize commerce and personal travel;
| automatically handle emergency vehicles and other unusual
| conditions; etc ad infinitum.
|
| All my car needs to be able to do other than existing lower-
| tier self-driving/driver assist basics, is join the borg.
|
| Coordination for traffic flow management seems like an
| unbelievable win.
|
| But no, all we seem to be getting is cyclist-terminating taxis
| which cost $250K each and are, IMO, doomed in target-rich
| environments like SF to not forseeably adequately the last 8%
| of anomalous novel cases.
|
| Just don't get it.
| martinald wrote:
| I agree. I think the problem has been the ride hailing
| companies shifting all the attention to being self driving
| taxis.
|
| For 95% of people I think the value is in letting them do
| other stuff while driving long distances/times instead of
| stuck behind the wheel. This seems many orders of magnitude
| easier than trying to tackle inner city driving.
| ggreer wrote:
| If you just want a car that drives itself on freeways, get a
| Tesla. Probably 80% of my car's 15,000 miles have been on
| autopilot. It automatically changes lanes to pass and
| automatically gets out of the passing lane afterwards. It
| takes offramps and interchanges. It automatically brakes for
| obstacles. It aborts lane changes if someone else gets in the
| way. It even works in rain and light snow.
|
| Other car companies are a few years behind, but even
| something as simple as adaptive cruise control + lane
| centering is a huge help on freeways.
| im3w1l wrote:
| It has killed people letting it self drive on the freeways.
| It was a while ago and maybe it has gotten better since,
| but I don't think taking your eyes of the road is
| advisable.
| ggreer wrote:
| The latest update has eye tracking and warns you if you
| take your eyes off the road for more than a second or
| two.
|
| Nobody is saying that self-driving cars are perfectly
| safe. Considering how many Teslas are on the road and how
| many miles are driven on autopilot, it would be
| surprising if there _weren 't_ any deaths. As long as
| it's safer than unaided human drivers (which it is), it's
| a net win.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| Highways and big cities first. I predict non-self driving
| cars will be made illegal in areas like Manhattan, NYC.
| nradov wrote:
| GM Super Cruise already allows you to take your hands off the
| wheel while driving on many freeways.
|
| https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/cadillac-super-cruise-
| is-...
| beaconstudios wrote:
| The big concern is that driving as a human skill is reactive
| and adaptive, whereas ML (and software in general) models are
| pre-baked. If something happens outside the car's model, it
| will react unpredictably, and strange circumstances can arise
| while driving. AGI, as based on human cognition, would have the
| capability to adapt to as-yet-unseen circumstances.
| XorNot wrote:
| I would suggest visiting r/idiotsincars sometime. Humans are
| _terrible_ at reacting to situation outside of their
| experience, and essentially do random things all the time.
|
| If an AI system's default response is "come to a stop safely"
| then it's going to be way ahead of a lot of human "unexpected
| situation" handling in cars.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| There are many situations where "come to a stop safely" is
| the worst possible thing you could do.
|
| Yes, people are bad at driving, because they don't pay
| attention, panic, make mistakes etc. But ML models tend to
| freak out at slight variations on mundane circumstances; a
| cyclist crossing the road at just the right angle and the
| wrong colour of bike, that sort of thing. The thing self
| driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad
| daylight for no discernable reason, and that seems like the
| kind of thing that you'd need a mind for. It's the same
| issue as with adversarial image manipulation to fool image
| recognition; if changing 3 pixels can turn a frog into a
| toaster, you aren't really "seeing" the frog at all in a
| symbolic way, and not seeing a road symbolically seems like
| a recipe for disaster.
| ketzo wrote:
| > The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing
| people in broad daylight for no discernable reason
|
| This, I think, is the thing that people miss when they
| say "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they
| just need to be better than human-drivers, who aren't
| actually all that great".
|
| From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter
| if a self-driving car crashes one tenth, one one-
| hundredth as often as human drivers; as soon as you see a
| self-driving car kill someone in a situation that a human
| driver _obviously_ would have avoided (like in the
| adversarial image kind of scenario), you 've totally
| destroyed any and all confidence in this car's driving
| ability, because "I would never, ever have crashed
| there."
| akiselev wrote:
| You forgot a fifth one: Self driving is possible but follows
| the 80/20 rule that states that the last 20% of work requires
| 80% of the effort. We probably haven't even started on that 20%
| gfodor wrote:
| That's the "not possible anytime soon" answer, which is
| probably the most common choice.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Self driving was never impossible, just infeasible with tech at
| the time. Surely it'll be standard in a few decades, despite
| that being quite far into the future.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I assume that they just don't solve the really wacky edge cases
| which might require AGI.
|
| Many people assume that a self driving car must be 100%
| successful. To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20%/bottom
| 80% of drivers.
|
| So the car will crash if a seagull flies in front of the camera
| and there is a deer just beyond it. The human would probably
| crash too.
| dzdt wrote:
| I think self driving can work with AGI to match a horse. It
| doesn't need to understand with a depth and clarity of a
| human.
|
| That is still a pretty high ask for current software.
| boplicity wrote:
| > To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.
|
| Computerized safety systems can, should, and are raising the
| bar, in terms of safety for the top 20% of drivers. "Self-
| Driving Cars" aren't competing in a static environment,
| similar tools are raising the safety bar that they have to
| compete against. This means it will get increasingly
| difficult to beat non-self-driving vehicles.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Don't let silly little empirics around traffic fatalities
| in recent decades get in the way of a good narrative like
| this one!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Shouldn't this rapidly lead to a convergence between self
| driving cars and human cars though? I assume a lot of the
| technology is similar.
| threatofrain wrote:
| > similar tools are raising the safety bar
|
| And what is the story on driving becoming safer?
| _rpd wrote:
| > To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.
|
| It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume
| you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we
| should be happy if their driving performance is above
| average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the
| insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety
| and still be wary.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I would be fine with beating average but as soon as this
| thing kills someone, I want there to be a significant
| difference in accident rate so it does not end up in
| regulatory hell.
| nlh wrote:
| I think from a statistical standpoint, beating average is
| great. But the big difference is that we have this odd
| and fundamental requirement for justice/punishment in our
| society that gets lost with self-driving cars.
|
| If a human driver kills someone / injures someone /
| damages property, people get satisfaction or resolution
| when the human is punished - insurance increases, license
| points, jail, etc.
|
| But when a self-driving car - even if it's better-than-
| average - does something wrong, there's nobody to punish
| and no retribution to exact, so people will be left
| feeling unsatisfied. That's why the bar is going to need
| to be so much higher.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Most important one you missed:
|
| Given sufficient qualitative and quantitative investment self
| driving may be technologically feasible at some point in the
| future but not price competitive with human driving.
|
| Self driving proponents seem to assume the tech is free. Just
| keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive
| cost.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| There are enough people in the developed world who are
| physically unable to drive or use public transportation in
| their area and who also don't want to be homebound that the
| economics could still work out even if they were the only
| market, which they aren't.
|
| > _Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has
| a massive cost._
|
| True, but probably not actually necessary.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| You seem to assume there is unmet demand that you can meet
| cheaper with automation than with human drivers. I agree
| there may be unmet demand but I don't see you get
| automation to be cheaper than a $10 an hour cab driver. I
| mean if automation was cheap and easy then our factories
| would all be automated before something quixotic like a
| car. It is frankly absurd.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _a $10 an hour cab driver_
|
| Well, for one thing, I don't want anyone in populated
| parts of the US to live on $10 an hour, not even a cab
| driver. What happens when we double that? Cost of living
| goes up over time, but cost of technology goes down. When
| do we reach the tipping point? Have we already?
| morpheos137 wrote:
| No. Look into. Supply and demand.
|
| If wages go up to $20 an hour, then maybe there is
| general inflation and robotics goes up to $200 an hour.
| In the world today we have cheap labor and expensive
| energy. That is why automation is not replacing humans.
| Look into the history of the British industrial
| revolution.
| oppositelock wrote:
| I make these kinds of maps for a living.
|
| Yes, it's expensive, however, as we refine algorithms, and
| the processing systems, it gets cheaper, especially amortized
| over more cars, where the per-car cost becomes affordable.
|
| ML doesn't work well enough for offline maps generation
| either, and all the high quality maps require human editors
| for final touch.
|
| All this work is currently done because realtime perception
| doesn't work well enough, and you can have a much more
| reliable system with the aid of the maps. Having a 3D base
| map of the world makes the realtime perception problem far
| simpler, and it makes fancy sensors less critical.
|
| In the US, where the cost of labor is very expensive, self
| driving will make sense, even if it's expensive, but
| someplace like China or India, where a middle class person
| can afford a driver, it probably makes less sense, though the
| push for it in China is probably the strongest that I've seen
| anywhere in the world.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| So you think self driving cars will be able to profitably
| offer a 10 mile ride for $20 in suburbia of second tier
| cities like Springfield MA? If your opinion is that cab
| drivers make much more than $10 an hour today then I
| suggest you look at things outside the bay area.
|
| Self driving does not scale at all now. Because as you said
| these special maps need to a lot of human labor to make and
| the cars need a lot of sensors on top of the auto patform.
| Labor is not even the main cost driver in person
| transportation.
| notshift wrote:
| Waymo already "self-drives" today, it just is extremely slow at
| making turns when the road is busy, and if there is any kind of
| unusual obstacle on the road (such as construction cones that
| require you to drive partially in another lane) it just stops
| completely and has the rider wait for twenty minutes for a
| manual operator to come and take over.
|
| Those two obstacles won't be overcome until AGI. At best their
| frequency will be brought down a bit but not by nearly enough
| orders of magnitude.
| zone411 wrote:
| Completely disagree. This doesn't require AGI.
| goldbattle wrote:
| I think from the original DARPA challenges most researchers
| knew that while self driving is possible or more correctly "a
| promising direction", but its application to the realworld and
| its robustness was a far larger barrier back then.
|
| We have the advantage of retrospect when looking at these
| claims which now may seem _more_ possible then before due to
| our better understanding of the difficulties and technologies
| to address them.
|
| I think many people confuse their excitement for the _promise_
| of having self driving cars and the actual technical and
| political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring
| this to reality (ranging from robustness, infinite number of
| edge cases, perception, insurance, or public policies).
| rurp wrote:
| > I think many people confuse their excitement for the
| promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical
| and political barriers that still need to be addressed to
| bring this to reality
|
| I think most of the confusion is due to deceptive marketing.
| Sales people like Elon Musk have been saying that the big
| dream of true self driving is just around the corner for
| years now, even though they were nowhere close.
| paxys wrote:
| Self driving for taxis is a very different problem than for
| personal vehicles. For the latter you can always rely on the
| human driver to handle the last 1% or 0.1% edge cases and still
| provide a ton of value. Taxis don't have that option, so it
| really is perfect level 5 automation or bust. "Good enough"
| doesn't cut it.
| cyrux004 wrote:
| Taxis do have the option. Cruise remote operators "guide"
| taxis once every 5-10 miles during peak hours and thy expect
| to do so after public launch
| https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=212
| TillE wrote:
| Yeah it's been really odd to see the take that self-driving
| must require strong AI. It needs to be done carefully, but it's
| clearly a manageable engineering problem if you have good
| sensors.
| Mangalor wrote:
| If there's a person at an intersection directing traffic, it
| will be very hard to have the car itself communicate with
| them as easily as a human can. Edge cases like that is where
| AGI would be needed it seems.
| im3w1l wrote:
| People directing traffic use only a handful of signals.
| jjav wrote:
| > People directing traffic use only a handful of signals.
|
| Sometimes. Other times they confusingly gesticulate or
| just shout out things, or even give conflicting signals.
| Humans can interpret these without much effort but it's a
| hard AI problem.
| rurp wrote:
| I would believe that people directing traffic _usually_
| use only a handful of signals, but it 's certainly not a
| universal truth. This is one more case of the 80/20
| problem that self driving tech keeps running into.
|
| Sure it's probably feasible for cars to handle hand
| signals in the happy path, but anything outside of that
| will be disastrous. How will the car understand and
| communicate with a person who doesn't use the standard
| signals, aside from having some level of intelligence?
| bob33212 wrote:
| self-driving is more of a language problem than a technology
| problem. In 2005 grad students had cars driving themselves on a
| course. Tesla and Waymo both have cars that very drive well on
| many roads. self-driving is here, now all that is left is for
| people to argue about what "L5" means as the systems improve.
| They will improve as there is a clear path to improvement.
|
| I don't expect that we will ever see the day where everyone is
| OK with self-driving cars on the roads regardless of the safety
| statistics, because there will always be edge cases of crashes
| and personal preferences around driving styles.
| noneeeed wrote:
| As someone who lives in Bath, an old european city with roads
| (and other drivers) that can give experienced human drivers a
| nervous breakdown I'm rather more interested in how they do in SF
| than their current deployment in Phoenix.
|
| From what I've heard repeatedly, SF sounds much more irregular
| and messy than Phoenix, so it should be something of a stepping
| stone to making them usable more widely if they can crack it.
|
| I've been expecting it to happen for literally decades, but
| always been disappointed.
| notyourwork wrote:
| 100% Phoenix is basically a big grid with a relatively flat
| elevation. SF is quite contrary to that organization with
| elevation changes, more dense traffic and irregular roads being
| common.
| standardUser wrote:
| The streets of pre-pandemic San Francisco were an unmitigated
| clusterfuck, arguably the worst in the nation at its 2019 peak.
| I imagine it's much easier these days for an autonomous
| vehicle.
| throwawaycuriou wrote:
| Other than reduced volume has San Francisco done something to
| unfuck its clusters?
| standardUser wrote:
| Absolutely not.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > arguably the worst in the nation at its 2019 peak
|
| Not even close - I've lived in the DC metro, Boston, and LA
| and all three are certainly worse than SF, and I think that
| is also backed up by evidence.
| exdsq wrote:
| I recently lived in Oxford where they have a few self-driving
| car trials (notably Oxbotica) that essentially just went round
| and round the station because of how awkward some of the
| junctions were.
|
| If we want to really test self-driving cars, introduce them to
| Milton Keynes 'Magic Roundabout'
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=milton+keynes+magic+roundabo...
| paddez wrote:
| I'm not sure the Magic Roundabout would pose any problem for
| any sort of automated driving. It's basically just a nested
| roundabout- where you essentially have to give the right-of-
| way to traffic already on the roundabout.
|
| If you can navigate a roundabout, you can navigate the magic
| roundabout - you just apply the same rules.
|
| If anything, this is the sort of thing an automated system
| would excel over humans at - where the automation won't get
| confused by an uncommon application of a familiar ruleset.
| sterlind wrote:
| Apparently Brits hate the Magic Roundabout, but it seems so
| shiny.. just the idea of a roundabout of roundabouts where
| the inner flow of traffic is reversed is really pretty. I'm
| sure it's one of those things that looks great in traffic
| flow simulations but falls apart when panicked drivers are
| trying to deal with each other and the unconventional traffic
| patterns.
| noneeeed wrote:
| I don't think most people in the UK who express an opinion
| on it have ever actually used it.
|
| I used to live round the corner from the magic roundabout.
| It's actually fine. The best analogy I have for it is
| juggling, if I concentrate too much and overthink it I drop
| the balls. If you over-think the magic roundabout it can
| seem intimidating, but when you're actually there it makes
| much more sense and you just go with the flow. You're not
| dealing with the whole system in one go, most people just
| take it one roundabout at a time.
|
| One of the reasons it seems to work is that people take it
| easy, everyone is paying attention to what they are doing,
| and most people take it at a sensible speed.
| mabbo wrote:
| What I don't understand is what advantage it has over
| just a single big roundabout. A single car may be able to
| save a few seconds by going around in a different
| direction, but I can't picture any actual throughput
| advantage.
|
| Needless complexity is all I see in it.
| Ftuuky wrote:
| Same with Coimbra, Portugal. Would love to see a Waymo car
| trying to navigate those old intricate roads.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I wonder if Waymo can use street mirrors.
| noneeeed wrote:
| I hadn't even considered those. It would be interesting to
| see how confused Telsa FSD got when confronted by something
| like that.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Just checked it out on google. What a beautiful place.
|
| My scepticism around SD cars in places like that and Bath is
| not even the roads themselves, but the traffic.
|
| The are quite a lot of roads around me that are quite narrow
| and frequently drop to single lanes. I feel like any self-
| drive system will need to develop quite an advanced theory of
| mind to perform the weird silent negotiation that happens
| when I'm driving a long, with three cars behind me, and come
| face-to-face with a bus coming the other way, and somehow we
| have to either backup en-masse, or perform the squeeze dance
| as we edge past each other with inches to spair.
| daveslash wrote:
| Re>> _" that can give experienced human drivers a nervous
| breakdown"_
|
| A couple of years ago I took a wrong turn and got lost in the
| Long Beach harbor - and had neither GPS nor phone. Holy Cow
| man.... holy cow... (admittedly, low quality comment)
| mosdl wrote:
| Yeah SF is very messy configuration wise and is more "european"
| in that way.
| skohan wrote:
| Partly due to challenges with the landscape right?
| texuf wrote:
| It's a thumb shaped peninsula seven miles across with a
| 922' peak in the middle. Market St runs diagonally through
| downtown separating two grid systems, the south side of
| which is offset by about 40 degrees. Columbus St runs
| diagonally in the opposite direction through Little Italy
| and China Town, itself a maze of one way streets, ancient
| buildings, triangular parks and steep hills. The whole
| thing is cut up by trolly tracks, makeshift bike lanes, and
| more pedestrians per square foot than most places in the
| US. Be prepared for your two-lane road to suddenly turn
| into a one-way street running towards you, seven way
| intersections, pedestrian traffic that never stops, and
| lane markers that completely disappear in the rain. On top
| of everything, intersections are only ever labeled in one
| corner, but never the same corner, and at least half of the
| stop signs are behind trees that should have been trimmed
| five years ago. Also it seems like 10% of drivers are drunk
| or stoned, and there's a moving van blocking 60% of the
| road everywhere, all the time.
| crackercrews wrote:
| Does anyone know what the cost of Waymo rides is?
| CyberRabbi wrote:
| Does anyone know what city official is responsible for approving
| this?
| s09dfhks wrote:
| Interesting timing given this article which was just posted a day
| or so ago on HN
|
| https://www.autoblog.com/2021/08/22/waymo-is-99-of-the-way-t...
| thkm wrote:
| I'll know that we've achieved full self driving when it can brave
| thru the streets of a South American city :)
| mleonhard wrote:
| Does the Waymo One app require a Google account? If Google
| arbitrarily freezes my Google account, will I be unable to use
| Waymo and unable to talk to any human about it?
| ANDREWB0SE wrote:
| Lol. Out of all the vehicles they could have chosen. Why the
| Jaguar?
| ryan93 wrote:
| Probably cut a good deal since jaguar could use the marketing.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| I wonder if the cars will always have a human chaperone. Not as a
| safety driver, but to prevent riders from trashing the car.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| This problem has been solved when it comes to hotel rooms, or
| rental cars. What would be fundamentally different when it
| comes to autonomous cars?
| alex_young wrote:
| If a human has to clean the car between rides that seems like
| a pretty big problem
| cookingrobot wrote:
| It's also been solved (or isn't a problem) with car share
| apps like Car2Go or Zipcar. Those cars don't get cleaned
| between rides, but system asks how clean the car is when
| you start a trip.
| r00fus wrote:
| It's not exactly solved - your examples are close but not
| equivalent.
|
| Hotels have many people who work there and cleaners who enter
| the room daily (no Hendrix hotel a la Altered Carbon yet).
| Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a
| massive disincentive to trash the vehicle.
|
| Perhaps pervasive recording of the vehicle interior would
| suffice.
| p1mrx wrote:
| I think they should record passengers boarding and
| unboarding, with motorized camera shutters that close while
| in transit for privacy.
| XorNot wrote:
| You wouldn't achieve any scaling benefits there. But also -
| trashing an autonomous car (aka a car full of cameras and
| sensors, which you charged to your credit card) seems like one
| of those self-limiting problems as the people who do it go
| bankrupt or to jail.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| There's a neverending stream of way-too-drunk people who need
| a taxi (or at least there were, in the beforetimes). I don't
| see that happening.
|
| Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a bunch
| of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.
| XorNot wrote:
| A self-drive / remote piloted vehicle doesn't need a
| functional interior. Which means the interior can be
| basically be made fluid tight, and rapidly replaceable.
|
| The current situation with taxis is that you enter before
| confirming your identity via payment, and the problem is
| put onto the taxi driver (an individual) when something
| happens.
|
| This is distinctly not the self-drive corporation issue:
| you trash the car, the issue is forwarded to corporate debt
| recovery, who then work a 9 to 5 slowly pushing the issue
| though the relevant channels. Meanwhile, the car is
| returned to base, maintenance rips out the absorbent
| materials and power washes the interior.
|
| Trashing it becomes a line-item cost to a very large
| organization, not a problem which "isn't worth it" for an
| individual operator.
| [deleted]
| dont__panic wrote:
| Agreed on both points. However... while _I_ don 't want to
| ride in a car full of sensors, I think the popularity of
| CCTV and Facebook demonstrates that a lot of other people
| are much more OK with that. Just look at busses, trains,
| and even gas stations -- I'd never want to have ads thrown
| in my face the way all of those systems push them on you,
| but a lot of people just seem to be... OK with it.
| fragmede wrote:
| Aside from vandalizing the gas pump TV, what do you
| suggest doing to say that I'm not okay with that? Whining
| about it on Twitter seems equally ineffective.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| > Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a
| bunch of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.
|
| Many (most?) taxis already have both dashcams and cabin
| cams. This has already been normalized.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| There are plenty of rail-based transports that have no driver
| (Vancouver's SkyTrain is the largest iirc). They seems to get
| by without being ripped apart by passengers.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| The other passengers serve as the social discouragement in
| that instance. Most human-driven rail transit isn't monitored
| by rail employees.
| gruez wrote:
| What about elevators? Sure it's sometimes shared, but you
| can also ride alone.
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm not saying I agree it will be a big problem - but
| graffiti, littering, urination definitely happen in
| public lifts.
|
| I imagine though that it'll just be something you can
| report when it comes along, then it gets sent off for
| cleaning, they pull up its recent rides, and send you a
| different car.
| godot wrote:
| I imagine truly autonomous rides without a specialist on
| board will have plenty of cabin cameras with clear view to
| identify the passengers. With consequences in mind, does
| that work in a similar way to the social discouragement of
| other passengers?
| jefftk wrote:
| They don't in Phoenix; the article links
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrV9wqXyH0 as an example.
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself.)
| sidibe wrote:
| It's interesting the number of comments I've seen since it
| launched many months ago that completely ignore that this has
| been deployed somewhere without safety drivers. However
| unimpressive you find the geofence/HD maps/lidar etc., you'd
| think more people would know about it
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Yep, there are multiple even on this thread.
| hn_go_brrrrr wrote:
| Thanks! I'd love to see their data on rider behavior. AIUI,
| they have hand-selected a group of riders into their pilot
| program there. I suspect those people probably behave better
| than your average taxi passengers. Either way, fascinating to
| see.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| I think initially they opened it up to handpicked riders
| that were willing to sign NDAs, but now anyone can sign up
| in the Waymo app
| WalterSear wrote:
| If you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect
| when it's being thrashed.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how
| would that help?
| caskstrength wrote:
| > Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants,
| how would that help?
|
| System locks all doors and calls police?
| rhacker wrote:
| And if it turns out the thrashing of said car was an in-
| cabin fire? You just locked them in.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I highly doubt police would care. People trash hotel
| rooms all the time, and they might escort people out of
| the hotel, but recouping any costs is a civil matter for
| the business. And good luck breaking even via that
| avenue.
| khc wrote:
| you automatically charge $500 to the passanger's credit
| card, and self-drive back to the depot to be cleaned
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The cost to clean (and repair damage) and opportunity
| cost of not earning money in the meantime would be far
| more than $500, and far more than how much most people
| could afford to pay.
| criloz2 wrote:
| Self-driving is not the solution and will show its crack in the
| future, the solution is probably a cloud service administrate by
| the city that feed direction to the cars and rules (that reduce
| or increment the degree of freedom of choices), do optimization
| and sort many other things, cars probably will still need cameras
| to take small decisions, but this can be made optional.
| dexter89_kp3 wrote:
| Kudos to the Waymo team.
|
| I was a self driving skeptic 2-3 years back. Now given the
| advances in both hardware and NNs, I do see possible solutions in
| the next decade.
| leesec wrote:
| Wow, 12 years in and they've spent about 6 billion and achieved a
| limited ridership Uber competitor in 2 fair weather cities. I'm
| sure the full solution they're pursuing is right around the
| corner though.
| eachro wrote:
| SF seems like not the best place to pilot this from a risk
| management perspective (ex: homeless people messing with the
| cars).
| pm90 wrote:
| It says they will have a human onboard at all times.
| eachro wrote:
| I remember this one bit from a video on self driving cars
| back a few years ago where someone basically said that self
| driving cars would not work well in cities because people
| will always want to mess with the cars just because they can.
|
| Consider how in the early 2000s when people would mess around
| with AIM's smarterchild chat bot and gave it outlandish
| scenarios just to see how it would react. I have to imagine
| you might see something similar here with these cars but
| you're right that having a human onboard would probably
| curtail these interactions.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Is everyone forgetting that they have a ton of cameras,
| sensors, lidar, etc on their cars?
|
| Messing with the cars means they have a full 3D video of
| you doing it.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I just signed up and actually skimmed the privacy policy (because
| hey, it's Alphabet). They record video of you during the ride and
| didn't mention anything that I caught about ever deleting it. I
| get that they need video in case I do bad stuff in the back, but
| it's really disappointing that they didn't bother reassuring you
| like "we delete it after a month" or something.
|
| I'm hoping I just missed that line. But I signed up anyway, so I
| guess that says more.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| You cannot predict the future with patterns from the past,
| regardless of how many patterns you crunch - the world is always
| changing. ML can just never solve FSD - conceptual understanding
| and causality is needed to achieve human level driving
| capability. We instantly classify things conceptually from our
| perception, instantly understand how those things may behave, and
| then learn the specifics of what that thing is doing to instantly
| predict what might happen and how it is interacting with other
| causally connected things in the environment.
|
| If ML could predict the future, there would be some very rich
| stock brokers right now.
|
| Autonomous driving efforts need a major pivot to start working
| with concepts, causality, and the integrated space time model of
| the world we humans use.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| _> Autonomous driving efforts need a major pivot to start
| working with concepts, causality, and the integrated space time
| model of the world we humans use._
|
| Dear god, no. I don't know what you think AV companies are
| doing past the perception layer, but they would be pivoting
| away from controls and planning -- you know, stuff that
| actually works outside of neurips/iclr/&c fantasy land.
| fyrn- wrote:
| I think you uave some major misconceptions about how this stuff
| works. Most vision models output the current state of the
| world, to be integrated with other sensor data like lidar that
| is then used for planning. There are models that try to guess
| things like the crossing intent of pedestrians, but even those
| models just output a confidence of them crossing. I work for a
| different self driving company, but this high level stuff is
| pretty much the same everywhere.
| gibsonf1 wrote:
| Exactly, that is how that stuff works. Past patterns in the
| Ml neural net generated from massive data and training try to
| figure out the label of things from various sensors, and then
| given that label, try to figure out other things that might
| happen based on the label and event stream. These patterns
| can recognize with a certain probability similar patterns,
| but they have no way to cope with brand new patterns. Those
| brand new patterns, although they may only occur 1 out of 100
| experiences - or lets say 3 days a year when your're driving,
| something fully novel occurs, this will kill you if you are
| relying on FSD. Until the systems try to think like humans,
| they simply wont.
| [deleted]
| truthwhisperer wrote:
| watch out for the homeless people please avoid inner sin city
| ahnick wrote:
| Are there any thought pieces on how cities can adapt roads to
| accommodate SAE level 4 cars to facilitate rolling out a wider
| deployment more quickly? I'm thinking of something like cities
| could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with
| designated drop-off locations and also only allow the service to
| be operational during clement weather conditions. It seems it
| would be beneficial to have fully automated routes to and from
| specific spots even today, for example an airport to a downtown
| location, for many cities to help reduce transportation costs and
| safety issues as compared with Uber/Lyft.
| zimprop wrote:
| > I'm thinking of something like cities could designate
| specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off
| locations
|
| I always find it interesting that the further down the road of
| self-driving we go the more it seems like its a techy version
| of a known but morre low tech paradigm. This if taken without
| the self driving part just sounds like a bus lane with bus
| stops. In fact the driving of a car would be a less efficient
| mode of transportation considering that they usually only carry
| one person at a time.
|
| I used to be very pro self-driving cars, but tthte moree I
| explored urbanism and transportation the more it became
| apparent that, self-driving is over optimization of an already
| bad paradigm that is car-centric development. You could cut out
| the middle man of needing a self driving car if you didn't live
| far away from the things you needed or if the public transit
| was efficient and reliable, that seems way easier than trying
| to figure out how to make cars drive themselves!
| TillE wrote:
| The optimistic vision of self-driving vehicles is as a
| publicly run transit system, where you have a fleet of
| automated vehicles of varying sizes able to dynamically,
| collectively route based on demand. A hyper efficient, fully
| electric bus system.
|
| That would be a pretty exciting development even in, eg,
| European cities with decent public transit.
| enahs-sf wrote:
| I guess all that driving around the avenues in the middle of the
| night paid off.
| dotBen wrote:
| Yes and the marketing copy that says "grab a bite in Sunset or
| visit Golden Gate Park" kind of implies the Ave's will the
| service area. I don't think it's going to be downtown and Soma,
| yet.
| matchbok wrote:
| Great, they built a smaller, more expensive, less flexible, and
| less useful BUS.
|
| No city should be encouraging this. Every trip that this would
| solve for is also solved for by public transit. So silly.
| kevinkimball wrote:
| If buses were a better alternative, people would take the bus.
| Unfortunately MUNI does not seem willing or able to compete on
| convenience
| lifekaizen wrote:
| Point to point goes where you want, when you want. Buses can be
| better for taking more people at once, cheap to the riders (if
| subsidized), but here in SF the service is so erratic it is
| difficult to use for anything on a schedule, and then with
| Covid-19 people want more space than mass transit provides
| matchbok wrote:
| Cities don't have the room for everyone to be driving a
| single occupancy vehicle point-to-point. There just isn't
| room.
| neil_s wrote:
| I agree with smaller and more expensive. But less flexible? How
| is a fixed bus route that needs to run on a fixed schedule,
| reasonably invariant to current demand, more flexible than a
| car that can take you point-to-point on-demand?
|
| I see this as the future of public transport, where you'd have
| a combo of smaller and bigger vehicles (including self-driving
| minibuses and buses) running autonomously, with options to pay
| more in order to walk less, but only running where people
| actually need them . Similar to Uber and Lyft Pool before the
| pandemic, where you could pay less to be picked up on a main
| street intersection instead of your front door.
| tofuahdude wrote:
| This is both incredibly exciting and a little terrifying. As a
| pedestrian, I'm still a little weary around these cars.
| boulos wrote:
| Disclosure: I work at Waymo.
|
| At least the current fleets of AVs (Waymo, Cruise, etc.) are
| "obviously" potentially autonomous. I'm honestly more cautious
| now as a pedestrian when I see a Tesla coming after the FSD
| videos. I wish I could know "Is that Tesla owner using the FSD
| mode?"...
| judge2020 wrote:
| > I wish I could know "Is that Tesla owner using the FSD
| mode?"...
|
| I wish I could know a lot more about the car and the driver
| in it too, such as if the car has pedestrian airbags[0] or if
| the driver is having a heated argument with their spouse.
| It's all risk management and ultimately the person behind the
| wheel is responsible for the exoskeleton on wheels they
| pilot, as the existence of cars at all is a net negative for
| pedestrian safety.
|
| 0: https://www-
| esv.nhtsa.dot.gov/Proceedings/23/files/23ESV-000...
| gfodor wrote:
| > "obviously" potentially
|
| I count three distinct hedges there :)
|
| It's cool tho, congrats on the expansion!
| boulos wrote:
| I'm really bad at hedging and parenthetical remarks! (I
| guess I should add "quotes", too!)
| bluGill wrote:
| The bar to being better than human drivers is not that high. It
| is a hard problem, but there is plenty of room to be better
| than humans while still being dangerous to pedestrians.
| nickromano wrote:
| As a cyclist in SF, I see the Waymo vehicles every day in my
| neighborhood. They ALWAYS see me coming and slow down or stop.
| I've had a few close calls with regular drivers not paying
| attention and missing stop signs so I'm looking forward to
| Waymo deploying more vehicles.
| criddell wrote:
| Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast[1] on Waymo and their self-
| driving cars.
|
| He speculates that something very different will happen. He
| thinks that self-driving cars that follow the laws and
| unerringly yield to pedestrians will transfer ownership of the
| streets from cars to pedestrians. Perhaps travel through cities
| in self-driving cars will be tedious and slow because
| pedestrians will jaywalk fearlessly and the cars will always
| yield. It's an outcome I never really considered before.
|
| [1]: https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/i-love-you-waymo/
| yupper32 wrote:
| This is already mostly the case in San Francisco. You always
| have to assume someone is going to jump out from behind a
| parked car to cross the street in SF.
| mikebonnell wrote:
| As a pedestrian, I'm terrified of all cars.
| azornathogron wrote:
| Language tangent: I have seen this a lot recently from many
| different people, and I don't know if it's caused by typing on
| a phone or what, but I think you mean "wary" (cautious), not
| "weary" (tired).
| tofuahdude wrote:
| Indeed I do! I am not tired of self driving cars at all and
| in fact look forward to more of them. Thanks for pointing
| out.
| aRandomCynic wrote:
| It is heartwarming to see that Google is doing its part to solve
| San Francisco's homelessness problem.
| lifekaizen wrote:
| Yes, haha. To be fair it's more of a government role and they
| do support the government with "2.1 billion in state income
| taxes" https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/04/15/which-bay-area-
| compan...
| reaperducer wrote:
| When it's cheaper and easier to summon a Waymo than to find a
| public toilet in San Francisco, expect need to find solution.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Well, yes https://blog.google/inside-google/company-
| announcements/1-bi...
| 0xy wrote:
| Whoosh.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| That announcement was from 2019. Honest question, how can I
| see the progress made from this investment? Did they build
| any, some or all of these homes yet? It does sound great
| though, I hope they did.
| judge2020 wrote:
| Skimmed, this is probably the San Jose page on it:
| https://www.sanjoseca.gov/your-government/departments-
| office...
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Thank you for that. Looks like no ground has been broken
| and Google is still cutting through bureaucracy.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| This is encouraging. But it's only for "Trusted Testers".
|
| Do you have to have a Google account?
| Shank wrote:
| This is a clever reuse off a little known thing Google used to
| have called "Trusted Testers" for friends and family of Google
| employees to test new features. However, I don't think it
| requires a Google account. The TT program would just NDA you
| heavily and required an invite from a Google employee.
|
| This is likely to be more open, but again, requiring NDA.
| espadrine wrote:
| Waymo is currently the only SAE Level 4[0] self-driving car in
| use, right? The wheel must not be used. Even though it is limited
| to two cities.
|
| Their technology seems an order of magnitude above the rest,
| although factoring in its cost could make it look worse. (Can it
| turn a profit, when including the development costs?)
|
| Tesla FSD is at best SAE level 3 (can need human fallback), and
| at worst level 2 (needs constant human monitoring).
|
| [0]: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/revealing-our-approach-to-
| saf...
| tshaddox wrote:
| Those SAE levels apparently don't specifically mention the
| geographic range the vehicle can operate in [0], but at some
| point that's pretty important. Having "full automation" on a
| very tiny section of roads is hardly what I would call "orders
| of magnitude above the rest."
|
| [0] _edit: that 's incorrect, L4 and L5 are primarily defined
| by differences in geography range._
| ericye16 wrote:
| The difference between SAE level 4 and 5 is explicitly
| whether the autonomy is geographically limited or not.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| driving_car#SAE_Classific...
| darkwater wrote:
| Am I the only one seeing the change between l4 and l5
| abysmal? Also L5 description, at least in the Wikipedia
| article, is much more vague than the rest
| espadrine wrote:
| In terms of convenience, it can be irrelevant.
|
| However, in terms of technology, level 5 is a big step
| up.
|
| Consider for instance that a level 4 system can assume
| that the ground is purely flat (an assumption that
| Tesla's FSD vector space makes), while a level 5 system
| needs 3D information to navigate some vertically-diverse
| terrain.
| jsight wrote:
| There is a full document available on the SAE website
| with full descriptions and technical details. Its much
| better than the common summaries.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Still, Level 3 can be more "advanced" than Level 4.
| ra7 wrote:
| How? Level 3 requires a driver who needs to take over
| when alerted. Level 4 is fully driverless.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| No. It's fully driverless _in geographically limited
| areas_.
| ra7 wrote:
| I'm aware. It's really between "maybe works, maybe
| doesn't everywhere (L3)" vs "works with no driver in a
| defined area (L4)". I consider the latter as more
| advanced as they are taking full responsibility for your
| safety.
| tshaddox wrote:
| It depends. If I could choose one car for person use, I'd
| take any modern adaptive cruise control + lane-keep
| assist system over an L4 that only worked in one city
| (even if it's a major city where I live). I'm not really
| sure how you determine which one is "more advanced," but
| I would consider the "level of automation" to be the
| portion of my normal driving habits that are able to be
| automated.
| [deleted]
| ra7 wrote:
| You're talking about personal driving, which is a
| different use case than robotaxis. For that, yes, you're
| better served with an ADAS system. It will take a while
| for L4 systems like Waymo to trickle down to passenger
| cars.
| joshuamorton wrote:
| Any l4 autonomous system is capable of adaptive cruise
| control anywhere.
| crznp wrote:
| Expanding the geographic range for Waymo is straightforward:
| do the same thing in a new place (plus new hurdles like snow,
| but that isn't currently the limitation to growth).
|
| It isn't clear how Tesla goes from "FSD" to "full
| automation". They are working on the "draw the rest of the
| owl" step.
| tshaddox wrote:
| At some point "doing the same thing in a new place" is not
| going to be economically possible, unless the company is
| somehow able to continue getting money to burn (or unless
| they get much much better at bringing new places online).
| sjcoles wrote:
| FSD is still _technically_ level 2. In Tesla 's eyes and the
| law's eyes you are driving and in liable for what happens.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| It's also (and this is important for Tesla owners to keep in
| mind) not-italicized-technically level 2.
|
| As in, "This system is known to degrade in ways that require
| immediate human manual intervention under risk of serious
| injury or death. Do not operate it without constant driver
| supervision and preparation for takeover."
| pbreit wrote:
| Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4.
|
| I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades
| away are thinking?
| pavon wrote:
| That things are progressing about as expected. More
| specifically, Waymo is doing a bit better I than my general
| expectations, Cruise is about on par, and the rest slower.
|
| Waymo has been at it for a bit over 12 years now. We'll have
| to see if Waymo's progress ramps up after San Francisco, but
| to me this is still looking like an 80/20 problem, with the
| added twist that each new region they expand to will have
| it's own unique 20% to learn that adds another 80% to the
| schedule. But that just validates Waymo's approach even more
| in my eyes.
| pvarangot wrote:
| AFAIK no one recently claimed level 4 with a safety driver
| was decades away, and I was working on self driving until a
| few months ago so I was kinda "plugged" into the news. A
| handful of serious companies have plans and funding to deploy
| L4 taxi fleets or L4 features to consumer cars in 4/5 years.
|
| There's no commercial value at L4 whatsoever if you still pay
| a safety driver. It's usually even more expensive per hour
| than a normal human driver and the cars don't work under
| adverse weather conditions.
| ThomasBHickey wrote:
| When someone says 'in about 5 years' it means they have no
| idea when.
| pbreit wrote:
| Don't have to pay safety drivers with L4.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| How is there commercial value if you still need a driver in
| the car?
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Did anyone claim _this_ was decades away? The claim is
| usually about when self-driving cars will actually be viable
| for anyone to use in arbitrary areas, not when experimental
| pilot programs are launched in individual cities.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| The program was first publicly revealed nearly 11 years ago.
| People saying this project would take decades aren't wrong.
| panick21 wrote:
| Most commercial value is at Level 2 for quite a while.
| oakfr wrote:
| Level 2 is becoming a commodity. Its commercial value will
| fall to zero very quickly.
| jessriedel wrote:
| I would think most commercial value comes when you eliminate
| the human labor from driving, which is the dominant cost of
| transporting when there is less than ~10 passengers. What
| makes you think Level 4 is the most economically impactful
| threshold?
| afavour wrote:
| > I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades
| away are thinking?
|
| What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think
| there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be
| decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small,
| manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned
| it still isn't quite at Level 4.
|
| The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess)
| was and is around the notion that the vast majority of us
| would be sat in self-driving cars by now. That was always
| wildly optimistic. We're making progress and that's great!
| But there were a lot of breathless predictions years back
| that have not come to fruition.
| pbreit wrote:
| This is the 2nd market and the other is unmanned.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| This market is manned and a serious challenge. The trial
| is Arizona is in an extremely quiet, predictable suburb
| as well as being small scale; unmanned but not as serious
| a challenge.
|
| Each of these is different but neither's existence by
| itself proves unmanned in challenging locations is right
| around the corner. It's kind of an exercise in Baysian
| statistic, how much more likely this makes one think
| unmanned taxis in serious location is depends on what one
| thinks the initial probability is.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Okay... let me know when their market is the contiguous
| United States.
| ra7 wrote:
| That's the point of this comment chain. They don't have
| to make it work everywhere in the contiguous United
| States to have a useful product. The (robo)taxi market is
| concentrated in big metro areas and that's what their
| focus is.
| bobsomers wrote:
| Surely this is just moving the goal posts. If they can
| launch in Chandler and in San Francisco then a huge
| amount of the contiguous United States is on the table.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| Nope, not even close. There's a very specific reason
| they've picked Chandler, and it's that there's relatively
| little weather and the roads are fairly simple (among
| many other things specific to Chandler).
|
| The _vast_ majority of the contiguous United States is
| decidedly _not_ "on the table" as of now.
|
| "The contiguous United States" is still a decade (or
| more) away. It may literally never happen.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > The vast majority of the contiguous United States is
| decidedly not "on the table" as of now.
|
| So the _vast_ majority of the US has either significantly
| worse weather than SF, or a significantly harder ODD than
| SF?
|
| Could you elaborate on that?
| TameAntelope wrote:
| No sorry, the _vast_ majority of the US has significantly
| worse weather and /or more complex traffic than Chandler,
| AZ.
|
| I didn't make any statements about SF traffic or weather.
| pchristensen wrote:
| I feel like San Francisco is a good progression - still
| generally good weather, but much more crowded, more
| traffic, more special cases, pedestrians and bikes, one-
| way roads, topography, limited visibility due to hills
| and no-setback buildings, construction, buses, etc. It's
| a significant leap in urban complexity, probably greater
| than 98% of the rest of the USA.
|
| Regarding the weather, lots of people have mentioned
| snow, but much of the Midwest, Northeast, and especially
| the South can have sudden torrential rain. I haven't
| researched it but I would guess that a Florida rainstorm
| would be hard for both radar and visual guidance. I
| predict their next city will be Orlando, in partnership
| with Disney. Then somewhere like Boston (harder - older
| street pattern and more snow) or Philadelphia (easier).
| Each of those 3 would "unlock" new territory they can
| cover. I predict that NYC will be one of the last areas
| "unlocked".
| jdavis703 wrote:
| It generally doesn't snow in SF or Chandler. I personally
| like snow, so I wouldn't describe that weather as
| significantly worse. But my understanding is snow makes
| it hard for lane keeping, and then there's all sorts of
| edge cases like streets that aren't plowed and require
| special driving techniques, people placing cones to
| reserve parking spaces, etc.
| jsight wrote:
| I completely agree. I was pretty critical of them when
| they were just a tiny slice of Arizona, but going from n
| to n+1 is really major progress.
|
| The fact that the +1 is a city as complex as SF is a
| really good sign as well. If they can handle SF, they can
| handle Charlotte, Atlanta, LA, and many other major
| metros just as "easily".
|
| I'm a lot more optimistic for their rollout now.
| fastball wrote:
| SAE levels are pretty garbage.
| lhorie wrote:
| I'm curious how Waymo deals with the human aspects of cab
| hailing. With a human driver, you can say "hey looks like traffic
| is bad between where the car currently is and the pick up spot,
| can I meet you at X instead and save us both 10 minutes?"
|
| To "good morning dear, do you think you could help me load my bag
| in the trunk"
|
| All the way up to completely degenerate scenarios like "my friend
| was drunk and tried to take over command of the car to see if it
| would work" or "I had to call customer support because when my
| ride arrived to pick me up, there was a homeless guy hogging the
| backseat and cursing at me".
|
| Surely there's more to commercializing the tech than just not
| killing pedestrians. The absence of a driver should create some
| new weird dynamics.
|
| IIRC Uber et al spend a considerable amount on customer support.
| I wonder if Waymo can break free from Google's bad reputation on
| that front.
| kenjackson wrote:
| There are a different problems with no-driver, not necessarily
| worse problems. For example, some problems with drivers that
| don't exist, or exist to a lesser extent with no-driver:
|
| 1. How much should I tip?
|
| 2. The driver tried to rape me.
|
| 3. The driver seems drunk/high, and is driving horribly.
|
| 4. The driver didn't pick me up because, pick your reason: I'm
| black, had a bunch of kids, etc...
|
| 5. My friend was drunk and tried to pick a fight with the
| driver.
| lhorie wrote:
| Yeah, definitely goes both ways, and I can foresee many
| anecdotes about how not having to deal w/ a driver is nicer
| in some way or another. Hence why I said I'm curious about
| human-factor issues. I don't believe there's precedents
| anywhere for what to expect once the tech rolls out at scale,
| so it's going to be interesting to see what kinds of
| operational issues they end up running into.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the
| pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you
| somewhere else.
|
| If there's no driver, then there's nobody to ask to help with
| bags.
|
| For various degenerate situations I'm not sure being driverless
| really changes the situation all that much. A drunk passenger
| can grab the wheel of a manned vehicle as well. With a self-
| driving car you might even be able to avoid that situation
| entirely by preventing the passengers from using any controls
| without authorization. They can grab the physical steering
| wheel but can't turn it until they punch in an authorization
| code (which they don't have). Likewise you prevent unauthorized
| passengers from entering the car by keeping the doors locked
| until the authorized passenger gets there. And if someone does
| manage to sneak in you just shut down the vehicle and call the
| cops (just like if someone jumps in a cab without permission).
|
| But humans are great at flummoxing countermeasures like that so
| it will be an interesting thing to watch for sure.
| dave5104 wrote:
| > For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the
| pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you
| somewhere else.
|
| To add on, maybe even _Waymo_ tells /asks you if you'd like
| to change pickup locations to save X minutes off your trip.
|
| Feels somewhat in line with how Google Maps will ask you if
| you want to save X minutes by taking a new route that was
| previously not as good as when you started using directions.
| tzm wrote:
| > All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on
| board for now
|
| If you drive a Tesla w/ FSD, is it chic to refer to yourself as
| an Autonomous Specialist?
| kfarr wrote:
| Perhaps Crash Test Dummy is the preferred term?
| shadilay wrote:
| 'headless driving enthusiast'
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgV-YnHZeE
| jeffbee wrote:
| Last week Waymo said they are driving 100,000 miles per week in
| San Francisco. That figure is just bonkers. SF MTA only operates
| about 450,000 miles per week, and that was before COVID-19 shut
| them down. When one is on the streets of San Francisco does a
| Waymo Jaguar just drive by every couple of minutes? I honestly
| haven't been over there in a few months.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > When one is on the streets of San Francisco does a Waymo
| Jaguar just drive by every couple of minutes?
|
| I live on Dolores park. They drive by multiple times an hour
| Teknoman117 wrote:
| I saw a few of them when I went to visit my friend in SF a few
| weeks ago.
| loganlinn wrote:
| The are everywhere. I'm fairly certain that I encounter them
| more often than SFMTA.
|
| My car was broken into over the weekend and I couldn't help but
| think about whether a Waymo captured the vandalism... Not like
| it would help, but like all mass data collection campaigns, the
| potential implications are strange.
| STRiDEX wrote:
| I'm in glen park neighborhood of sf, it's the suburbs
| basically. I see them anytime I walk outside, but I don't think
| I keep track of which company I see driving by. It could be
| waymo, cruise, etc.
| domh wrote:
| Anecdotally I've seen many more of them in Chinatown in recent
| weeks, it's not particularly rare to see multiple Waymo Jaguars
| at the same intersection waiting for the lights to turn green.
|
| They seem to have taken over a previously public parking lot at
| Pacific and Sansome in the city. There are often 20/30 of these
| cars parked up there.
|
| I've never seen one without a driver, but occasionally when I
| look at the steering wheel it is turning independently and just
| being monitored by the driver.
| seehafer wrote:
| They're all over Potrero Hill. I see at least one daily.
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| I see them in my neighborhood at least twice a day. They don't
| bother me, to be honest. Just like any other car.
| specktr wrote:
| They're also in my neighborhood - I generally see one every
| time I do an errand. They tend to drive 5-10 mph under the
| rest of traffic which can be frustrating. They also tend to
| be slow when making lane changes and turns to the point where
| it holds up other vehicles.
| genericone wrote:
| 5-10mph under while within the city limits, on streets
| where things pop out at you all the time, sounds really
| nice actually. It's one of the things that happen all the
| time that drivers ignore the possibility of.
| genericone wrote:
| Long story short, yes, you do indeed see the white jaguar
| crossover with the spinning lidar sensors every few minutes
| while you are out and about. Always a different person sitting
| in the driver seat, yes I've checked because I didn't believe
| the number of Waymo cars at first either.
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Waymo helps widen the gap between haves and have-nots. Lets see
| the next test in St Louis, Detroit or Baltimore - places where
| accessibility is orders of magnitude less than SF or PHX.
| cycrutchfield wrote:
| They don't have Uber in STL, Detroit or Baltimore?
| ecommerceguy wrote:
| Actually getting an Uber in some parts of STL is very
| difficult. If you ever visited you'd find out first hand.
| eastof wrote:
| How do I get an invite!? Do you just have to know someone at
| Waymo?
| purple_ferret wrote:
| elon in shambles
| rpmisms wrote:
| Waymo and Tesla have very different approaches to autonomy. I
| think both are valid avenues, but it's fascinating to watch
| them develop in parallel. You don't have to make it into a
| spiteful contest.
| lifekaizen wrote:
| Definitely both valid business approaches, Tesla more
| interesting from a startup / leverage approach. As a
| consumer, I'm less excited about Tesla putting out beta
| software in situations where mistakes can be deadly
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-
| autopilot-...
| jsight wrote:
| As someone who has seen and driven their "pro" pilot
| competitor, I am not bothered by that. The non-beta
| competitors are often worse and sometimes more dangerous
| (sigh).
| rpmisms wrote:
| I'm fine with Tesla putting out dangerous betas, as long as
| the betas are opt-in. Shipping beta software by default is
| a bad thing.
| purple_ferret wrote:
| Most people in the Tesla camp (like George Hotz) believe
| Waymo is destined to fail.
| rosetremiere wrote:
| Why is that? and what are the two approaches?
| rpmisms wrote:
| Waymo is trying to solve the areas. They're HD mapping
| every centimeter of areas they operate in, so that they
| can let their vision systems focus on deviations from
| that single source of truth. It's a reasonable approach,
| but it has some significant limitations, especially in
| terms of infrastructure.
|
| Tesla, on the other hand, is trying to make their cars
| work anywhere. It's a larger problem space, but the end
| goal is a far more robust product, with much lower long-
| term infrastructure spending.
|
| I personally like the robust approach, but I think both
| approaches are long-term viable, albeit for different
| use-cases.
| rpmisms wrote:
| I think Tesla is taking the correct approach, treating it
| as an AGI problem, and training their system to be
| antifragile.
|
| I think Waymo will make money off of their system sooner.
| Yajirobe wrote:
| Cue the haters who said Waymo is a money dump
| cobookman wrote:
| Waymo has raised 5.5B so far. How much does it cost to add a
| market and how long will it take to recoup those costs?
|
| How much are Waymo vehicle operational costs vs rider revenue?
| How long do Waymo vehicles last?
|
| Even with this announcement, we do not know if Waymo has a
| clear path to profitability.
| pavlov wrote:
| Expanding to new markets and being a bottomless money dump are
| not mutually exclusive?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why does Waymo use a niche British luxury car for their platform?
| Must be very expensive and what are the benefits?
| ra7 wrote:
| Electric and manufactured by the same company that does
| upfitting for Waymo vehicles (and also a Waymo investor) -
| Magna International.
| judge2020 wrote:
| - They likely were able to get a commercial volume purchase
| discount
|
| - if that's the car their devs are testing on, it's going to be
| the fleet car, at least at first
|
| - Alphabet has $135B cash on hand[0]
|
| 0:
| https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings...
| kjksf wrote:
| I'm guessing they want to start with premium feel to give
| people good first impressions. That's why their other car is
| $60k Pacifica minivan and not $25k Honda Civic.
|
| I'm also guessing that they want an electric car. At the time
| they made a deal to purchase those cars (was quite a while ago)
| Jaguar i-Pace was one of few premium electric cars available
| (if you exclude Teslas, which obviously Waymo wouldn't want as
| it's a competitor).
|
| At this stage cost is not a big problem.
| keewee7 wrote:
| Is Jaguar still a niche brand?
|
| Most taxis in Denmark and Germany are Mercedes-Benz so it's not
| uncommon for the taxi industry to use luxury brands.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Niche in that they only sell a hundred thousand or so a year,
| yes. If Waymo are planning to seriously scale up they'll be
| using every Jaguar they're making!
| yupper32 wrote:
| Why would they need all Jaguars to scale up?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why would you want to have a hodge-podge of random
| vehicle makes to service?
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| I'm surprised the numbers for Phoenix are so low (10's of
| thousands of rides). I'm not sure if that fleet is just very
| small or my sense of how many rides/day a major metro can
| generate.
| ra7 wrote:
| They operate in only a small area of Phoenix metro - Chandler
| and some parts of Tempe. That's why the numbers are small.
|
| My guess is Chandler is purely a testing ground for them to
| learn to operate a robotaxi service. Things like remote
| assistance, customer support, emergency protocols, fleet
| maintenance etc.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The drivable area isn't huge[0] so it seems like it's not a
| choice in many situations, especially not for commuting from a
| further-out home.
|
| 0: https://i.redd.it/4rsg9pui55531.jpg
| boulos wrote:
| Disclosure: I work at Waymo.
|
| This is big news, and I encourage you to apply if you're in San
| Francisco. For the HN crowd, I'd also recommend last week's blog
| post [1] which includes some more technical material on "how"
| we're driving.
|
| [1]
| https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/MostExperiencedUrbanDriver.ht...
| miratom wrote:
| One of these things almost sideswiped me the other day. I wish
| they'd go away.
| poopypoopington wrote:
| I'll never forget I almost got murdered terminator style by a
| Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they
| figured that out.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Don't worry, the later terminator models are much more
| effective.
| ThePadawan wrote:
| He really does do all his own stunts.
| useful wrote:
| Yea it is terrifying, I had a reflective vertical zipper on a
| jacket while out for a run and saw a Cruise swerve towards me
| after it crested a small hill. I guess I looked like the new
| lane
| hadlock wrote:
| A Cruise car nearly ran me and my baby in a stroller (a pretty
| standard model stroller for the neighborhood, too) in the
| crosswalk by Caltrain station. The rest of the cars have not
| been so overzealous in running down pedestrians. I give Cruise
| an extra wide margin of error since then.
| aix1 wrote:
| > I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while
| riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out.
|
| I had to google "Cruise". To save others a moment or two,
| Cruise is a self-driving startup unrelated to Alphabet. In the
| quoted sentence, "they" != "Waymo" (I wasn't sure).
| mulletbum wrote:
| That's awful. I am almost murdered daily and I live in a city
| without self driving cars.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I discovered a few years ago that a Cruise will stop dead if it
| hears a horn. My bicycle happens to have an electric horn from
| a motorcycle. This provided some occasional amusement. I wonder
| if they still do that.
| nso wrote:
| That would not be a very efficient feature to have enabled
| here in Mexico
| ortusdux wrote:
| Reminds me of the 'honk more wait more' video from the
| Mumbai police dept.
|
| https://twitter.com/MumbaiPolice/status/1223090017397960705
| mas-ev wrote:
| Can you elaborate more on how?
|
| HN is getting to reddit's status where people make comments and
| everyone just upvotes because it sounds good to them.
| blamazon wrote:
| People have been saying "HN is turning into Reddit" for over
| ten years. There's a bit of an Easter egg at the bottom of
| the HN guidelines about it:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I don't know. I've been here for nearly a decade (I switch
| accounts every once in a while), and in the last six months
| or so, it sure _feels_ like somethings different.
| Specifically, I 'm noticing more joke replies that aren't
| downvoted. Maybe I'm just getting old.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| "All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on
| board for now"
|
| This tells me that we're still a long way from full level 4 (and
| certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco.
| The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too
| frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case
| in Phoenix.
|
| Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to
| being level 5, since it is still heavily geofences and requires
| those remote safety monitors. I still think that true level 5
| (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human
| oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human
| driver) requires AGI. Would love to be proven wrong!
| crackercrews wrote:
| > I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI.
|
| In case anyone else was wondering what AGI means, its
| Artificial General Intelligence. [1]
|
| 1:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
| id wrote:
| Is this not a legal requirement?
| dagmx wrote:
| This is legally required today. It's not necessarily a
| reflection of Waymo. Whether their system was perfect or not,
| it's legally required they do this till the government changes
| their minds.
| pavon wrote:
| California DMV regulations do allow testing of autonomous
| vehicles without a safety test driver if certain conditions
| are met, spelled out in Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1
| Article 3.7 Section 227.38 [1]. The most technically
| challenging of these is that the car must be capable of
| operating at SAE level 4, which goes back to the OP's
| comment. CUPC licensing for commercial passenger services
| also allows this [2].
|
| That said, I agree with others that this is the natural
| progression of testing rollout and doesn't tell us anything
| about the pace at which the rollout will occur, in particular
| whether it will be faster or slower than Phoenix.
|
| [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-
| text-p...
|
| [2] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-
| services/licensing/transp...
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Yeah, the commenter straight up assumes that a person is
| present because the L4 tech doesn't work, when in reality
| there are legal, liability, and even _user comfort_ reasons
| to have someone on board with this new pilot.
| rkagerer wrote:
| _I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI_
|
| I agree today's AI tech is a long way off from completely
| supplanting a human driver. I'm surprised the average consumer
| I talk to about this seems to think we're on the cusp.
|
| But as vehicles with neural nets become more prevalent I expect
| we'll see the problem morph as it gets tackled from other
| angles as well. e.g. Self-driving corridors with road
| infrastructure aimed to improve AI safety (whether that be
| additional technology, modified marking standards, etc).
|
| Once upon a time street signs with speed limits, curve
| warnings, and such didn't exist. After faster cars supplanted
| horse-drawn carriages, highways became a thing. Eventually when
| the only reason humans drive is for recreation (e.g. off-
| roading) the problem from the car's perspective will look
| somewhat different than it did during the transition.
| thesausageking wrote:
| Level 4 is where most of value is. If a system could drive in
| all cities and highways, that's more than 90% of benefit.
| pavon wrote:
| The more I travel, the more I consider myself an SAE level 4
| driver :)
| snarf21 wrote:
| Agreed 100%. There will be special exit/on ramps built along
| highways and the trucks will largely just stay in their lane
| even if slower. It would cut the number of truckers needed by
| probably 50+%.
| akira2501 wrote:
| For depot to depot runs, sure. Most runs aren't that
| though, and require direct delivery from manufacturer to
| purchaser. Plenty of deliveries, for example in Chicago,
| basically happen off a residential street. Alley docking
| and turning around in these environments is challenging
| even for a human.
|
| Add to all this one thing and we're further than I think
| most people realize: Weather. Show me an FSD doing better
| than a human in the snow or we're not really anywhere yet.
| mavhc wrote:
| From 2018 https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-
| navigation.ht...
| [deleted]
| ghaff wrote:
| More likely driving on most highways in decent weather which
| is a big win. I'd pay for that.
| [deleted]
| dougmwne wrote:
| Note sure about the AGI requirement. The current systems will
| always need the heavy involvement of human intelligence to be
| able to rescue stuck cars, drive in new areas or monitor for
| changing driving conditions and update the driving model. There
| does seem to be at least some hope these systems will be able
| to run a true driverless taxi service with minimal geofencing.
| On the other hand, a human can go to a new country with
| different road markings, signage, rules, and traffic flows and
| be able to drive safely pretty much immediately or maybe a
| quick Google search. That would truly require AGI.
| hammock wrote:
| >"All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist
| on board for now" This tells me that we're still a long way
|
| Did you expect something different? I can't really see a
| boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from
| test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard
|
| to actual rides with passengers - no backup
| driver onboard
|
| with no in-between steps.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Waymo is already doing test rides with neither passengers no
| backup drivers in CA, so they wouldn't be jumping from no
| passengers plus safety drivers to paid passengers without
| safety drivers if they did offered paid, full-driverless
| rides.
| oldsecondhand wrote:
| For the computer it doesn't make much difference if there's a
| passanger or if there isn't.
| melling wrote:
| For a company having paying customers does matter a lot.
|
| Having customers paying for the R&D will help make it
| sustainable.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| I suspect the revenue from passengers in this case looks
| like a rounding error. But the PR and feedback from early
| adopters is very valuable.
| brunoqc wrote:
| Yeah you can put the people with the good feedback in
| your ads video and ignore the ones who went thru the
| windshield.
| VelkaMorava wrote:
| I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely
| fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your
| scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts
| around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3
| a,75y,307...
| sologoub wrote:
| That's just stunningly beautiful - Czech countryside is
| something else!
|
| I'd gladly buy a self-driving car that require some
| additional input on such a road and had additional aids to
| spot oncoming traffic I can't see behind the tractor that's
| a few hundred meters forward of the spot linked to. It
| would still be safer.
|
| To really make things work, we need cars to be able to
| negotiate the way humans do on the right of way, etc. There
| is a lot of non-verbal (and when that fails, very verbal)
| communication while driving. Currently, cars can't
| communicate with each other and the pedestrians, which
| limits possibilities a lot.
| [deleted]
| boc wrote:
| Believe it or not there are tons of two-way roads like that
| just 30 minutes from Silicon Valley that self-driving cars
| could practice on. Here's an example:
| https://goo.gl/maps/1CVb7Mpiwv1VL2sd7
| willyt wrote:
| Lots of roads like that in Britian as well and the speed
| limit is 60mph/100kph. Not uncommon for two cars on a
| single track road to adjust speed to pass each other at a
| passing place without slowing down much, so at a closing
| speed of over 100mph. Perfectly safe for human drivers who
| know the roads.
| smeyer wrote:
| This sounds like the sort of "perfectly safe for human
| drivers who know the roads" that actually results in a
| fair number of road deaths.
| willyt wrote:
| If you look at the accident maps, there are almost none
| on single track roads and lots on twin track roads. My
| hypothesis is that driving on a single track road feels
| much more risky so people pay more attention and slow
| down more on blind corners. Also, it's not possible to
| overtake and a lot of accidents are related to
| overtaking.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Autonomous driving systems are set at various levels of
| autonomy.
|
| Level 0 is no automation, level 1 is just a dumb cruise
| control, level 2 is radar adaptive cruise control plus lane
| keeping (which is where most production systems like Tesla
| Autopilot and GM Supercruise are currently at). Level 2
| still requires full human supervision, if you engaged it on
| the road above it would either fail to engage or you'd
| crash and it would be your fault. Level 3 is the same plus
| an ability to handle some common driving tasks, like
| changing lanes to pass a slower vehicle.
|
| Level 4 is where it gets really interesting, because it's
| supposed to handle everything involved in navigating from
| Point A to Point B. It's supposed to stop itself in the
| event of encountering something it can't handle, so you
| could theoretically take a nap while it drove.
|
| However, an important limitation is that Level 4 autonomy
| is geofenced, it's only allowed in certain areas on certain
| roads. Also, it can disable itself in certain conditions
| like construction or weather that inhibit visibility. Waymo
| vehicles like these are ostensibly level 4, if you tell
| them to drive through a back road in the snow they'll
| simply refuse to do so. It's only useful in reasonably good
| conditions in a few big cities.
|
| Level 5 is considered to be Point A to Point B, for any two
| navigable points, in any conditions that the vehicle can
| traverse. You could build a Level 5 vehicle without a
| driver's seat, much less an alert driver. I kind of think
| this will require something much closer to artificial
| general intelligence; level 4 is just really difficult
| conventional programming.
| zestyping wrote:
| It's not obvious that Level 4 falls within what one would
| call really difficult conventional programming. That
| level entails something like "in the event of any
| exceptional situation, find a safe stopping location and
| safely bring the car to a stop there," and even that
| alone seems incredibly hard.
| paganel wrote:
| Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because
| that's the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy
| capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours
| ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way
| but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for
| the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I
| said to myself that unless we get to AGI there's no way for
| an "autonomous" car to handle that situation correctly.
| njarboe wrote:
| People at Tesla and other autonomous driving companies,
| of course are aware and worry about such situations. If
| you have a few hours and want to see many of the
| technologies and methods that Tesla is using to solve
| them, check out Tesla's recent "AI day" presentation.
| Tesla is quite cool about openly discussing the problems
| they have solved, problems they still have, and how they
| are trying to solve them.
|
| An incomplete list includes:
|
| 1) Integrating all the camera views into one 3-D vector
| space before training the neural network(s).
|
| 2) A large in-house group (~1000 people) doing manually
| labeling of objects _in that vector space_ , not on each
| camera.
|
| 3) Training neural networks for labeling objects.
|
| 4) Finding edge cases where the autocar failed (example
| is when it loses track of a vehicle in front of it when
| the autocar's view is obscured by a flurry of snow
| knocked off the roof of the car in front of it), and then
| querying the large fleet of cars on the road to get back
| thousands of similar situations to help training.
|
| 5) Overlaying multiple views of the world from many cars
| to get a better vector space mapping of intersections,
| parking lots, etc
|
| 6) New custom build hardware for high speed training of
| neural nets.
|
| 7) Simulations to train rarely encountered situations,
| like you describe, or very difficult to label situations
| (like a plaza with 100 people in it or a road in an
| Indian city).
|
| 8) Matching 3-D simulations to what the cars cameras
| would see using many software techniques.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| They're cool about openly discussing it because this is
| all industry standard stuff. It's a lot of work and
| impressive, but table stakes for being a serious player
| in the AV space, which is why the cost of entry is in the
| billions of dollars.
| tuatoru wrote:
| You described a lot of effort, but no results.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> People at Tesla and other autonomous driving
| companies, of course are aware and worry about such
| situations._
|
| Yeah, a Tesla couldn't possibly drive into a stationary,
| clearly visible fire engine or concrete barrier, on a dry
| day, in direct sunlight.
| chx wrote:
| You don't even need to go that far, the other day I saw
| an ambulance going down on Burrard Street in Vancouver,
| BC without lights or sirens then I guess a call came in ,
| it put on both and turned around. It's a six lane street
| where normal cars aren't allowed to just turn around. It
| was handled real well by everyone involved, mind you, it
| wasn't unsafe but I doubt a computer could've handled it
| as well as the drivers did.
| trhway wrote:
| a very complex looking behavior sometimes comes from the
| very simple easy to implement principles, like say a bird
| flock behavior
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flocking_(behavior)#Rules
|
| I don't believe people are using their full AGI when
| driving (and the full "AGI" may as well happen to be a
| set of basic pattern matching capabilities which we
| haven't discovered yet). After decades of driving the
| behavior is pretty automatic, and when presented with
| complex situation following a simple rule, like just
| brake, is frequently the best, or close to it, response.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| To me the solution to that is obvious and far better than
| the current status quo. The cars are all attached to a
| network and when an emergency service vehicle needs to
| get somewhere in a hurry there is a coordinated effort to
| move vehicles off the required route.
|
| As things stand emergency vehicles have to cope with a
| reasonable minority of people who completely panic and
| actually impede their progress.
| zestyping wrote:
| This has to work even if network reception is weak or
| absent. You can't be certain that 100% of cars will
| receive the signal and get themselves out of the way in
| time.
| lwf wrote:
| Right, so don't use the network: broadcast a signed
| message on a band reserved for emergency services.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > This has to work even if network reception is weak or
| absent.
|
| Or hacked maliciously.
| arsome wrote:
| From what I've seen of Tesla's solution at least - even
| busy city centers and complex parking lots are very
| difficulty for present day autonomous driving technologies.
| The understanding level necessary just isn't there.
|
| These things are excellent - undeniably better than humans
| at the boring stuff, highway driving, even major roads.
| They can rightfully claim massive mileage with high safety
| levels in those circumstances... but throw them into
| nastier conditions where you have to understand what
| objects actually are and things quickly seem to fall apart.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| It's unclear to me why Tesla's solution is so discussed.
| They are definitely not on the same playing field as
| Waymo or even Cruise.
| Larrikin wrote:
| There's a lot of people on here who have invested in
| Tesla
| notatoad wrote:
| also a lot of people on here who have actually
| experienced tesla's self-driving. certainly a lot more
| than have experienced any other self-driving product (at
| least above a "lane-keeping" system)
| mike_d wrote:
| That is like trying to judge modern supercomputing by
| your experinces with a 6 year old Dell desktop.
|
| Waymo drove 29,944.69 miles between "disengagements" last
| year. That is an average California driver needing to
| touch the wheel once every 2.3 years.
|
| Tesla by comparison is classed as a SAE Level 2 driver
| assist system and isn't even required to report metrics
| to the state. While they sell it to consumers as self-
| driving, they tell the state it is basically fancy cruise
| control.
| nradov wrote:
| Would you describe Tesla's tendency to crash full speed
| into stopped emergency vehicles during highway driving as
| "excellent"?
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/16/business/tesla-autopilot-
| fede...
| sshine wrote:
| While controversial, we tolerate a great deal of
| casualties caused by human drivers without trying to
| illegalise those.
|
| While we can (and should) hold autonomous vehicle
| developers to a much, much higher standard than we hold
| human drivers, it is precisely because of excellence.
| robterrell wrote:
| We actually do "illegalise" casualties by human drivers.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| I'm sure the grand poster meant banning human driving
| entirely in order to prevent human driving casualties.
| mavhc wrote:
| That's autopilot, not FSD beta though, at this point it's
| probably 10 generations old
| zeusk wrote:
| Ah yes, because "autopilot" is not autonomous.
| mavhc wrote:
| Well yeah, it's like other autopilots:
|
| An autopilot is a system used to control the path of an
| aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring
| constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots
| do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot
| assists the operator's control of the vehicle, allowing
| the operator to focus on broader aspects of operations
| (for example, monitoring the trajectory, weather and on-
| board systems).
| polynox wrote:
| The failure modes are going to be very strange and the
| technology is not strictly comparable to a human driver.
| It is going to fail in ways that a human never would. Not
| recognizing obstacles, misrecognizing things, sensors
| being obscured in a way humans would recognize and fix
| (you would never drive if you couldn't see out of your
| eyes!).
|
| It is also possible that if it develops enough it will
| succeed in ways that a human cannot, such as extremely
| long monotonous cross-country driving (think 8 hour
| highway driving) punctuated by a sudden need to intervene
| within seconds or even milliseconds. Humans are not good
| at this but technology is. Autonomous cars don't get
| tired or fatigued. Code doesn't get angry or make
| otherwise arbitrary and capricious decisions. Autonomous
| cars can react in milliseconds, whereas humans are much
| worse.
|
| There will undoubtedly be more accidents if the
| technology is allowed to develop (and I take no position
| on this).
| zaphar wrote:
| I would say it's better then the Human's tendency to
| drive full speed into _anything_ while impaired by a
| drug. Especially since the bug was fixed in Tesla 's case
| but the bug in Human's case is probably un-fixable.
| fragmede wrote:
| Drugs (or alcohol)? There are so many more failure modes
| that drugs are the least of my concerns. Especially of
| unspecified type. I'm not the least bit worried about
| drivers hopped up on tylenol. Humans get distracted while
| driving, by texting, or simply boredom and start
| daydreaming. Don't forget about driving while tired. Or
| emotionally disturbed (divorce or a death; road rage).
| Human vision systems are also pretty frail and have bad
| failure modes, eg the sun is close to the horizon and the
| driver is headed towards the sun.
| nradov wrote:
| Computer vision systems also have bad failure modes. The
| camera sensors typically used today have better light
| sensitivity but less dynamic range than the human eye.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| Now add the completely blind switchback turns, where your
| "visibility' into whether another car is coming comes from
| a convex mirror nailed to a tree or post at the apex of the
| corner - if it hasn't fallen off or been knocked crooked...
|
| basically all of Italy
| jjoonathan wrote:
| I'd still buy a self-driving car that refuses to drive on
| that road.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| In the back seat of the Waymo there's a "Pull Over"
| emergency lever.
| ghaff wrote:
| You can't always "pull over."
| Swizec wrote:
| As someone who learned to drive in the city, those roads
| make me sweat bullets.
|
| My grandpa who drives on those roads primarily, sweats
| bullets in the city.
|
| Maybe you'll have different driving models to load in
| different scenarios ...
| RhysU wrote:
| My mother thinks nothing of driving on deserted roads in
| significant unplowed snow. She gets nervous on a dry,
| Texas highway at rush hour.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Yeah, that seems perfectly rational. There is nothing to
| hit on a deserted highway. Driving in traffic, on the
| other hand, is more stressful and has worse downsides.
| fragmede wrote:
| _> significant unplowed snow_
|
| Spinning out on a deserted highway and hitting a snowbank
| and getting trapped in your car kills a large number of
| people every year. Even with smartphones, calls for help
| can't always be responded to in time, resulting in death.
| (Have an emergency kit in your car if you live above the
| snow line!)
|
| Driving in city traffic can be quite harrowing, but
| hitting another car at 20-30 mph isn't usually fatal.
| (Wear your seatbelts!)
|
| The _point_ that GP post was trying to make is that
| humans have different preferences, and what seems
| dangerous to one doesn 't (and possibly isn't) dangerous
| to another. Humans are also _notoriously_ bad at judging
| danger, eg some people feel threatened by the idea of
| wearing of papers masks.
| raldi wrote:
| The computer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be
| better than a human.
| robterrell wrote:
| You can replicate that without going overseas. Send that
| autonomous vehicle over the Golden Gate bridge, take any of
| the next few exits, and turn right. The street I live on is
| a paved horse path from the 1910s. No snowdrifts, but a lot
| of aggressive drivers angrily refusing to back up, which
| will be fun to see software deal with!
| grlass wrote:
| The book Halting State by Charlie Stross (2007) [1] had an
| interesting self driving car model, where it was autonomous
| on simple roads like highways/motorways, and a human driver
| took over remotely for more complex city streets.
|
| Of course the book showed some failure modes for that, but I
| wonder if network coverage and latency, as well as "backup
| driver response time" could be considered good enough,
| perhaps this sort of model could have an acceptable risk
| trade-off.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to
| board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement
| for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay
| increases.
|
| Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline
| execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that
| aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive
| logic was sound.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-china-caught-in-midair/
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/chinese-airlines-won-t-be-
| bi...
| tuatoru wrote:
| The acid test will be (4) Board members use product on
| their children.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Followed by (5) board members claiming legal bills for
| child custody disputes after caught leaving kids
| unsupervised in the custody of a 3000lb robot.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| In Phoenix, people are being driven without a safety
| driver. They are doing these in between steps.
| pqs wrote:
| Skin in the game. Nassim Taleb would agree with this
| measure!
| rudyfink wrote:
| I think of that as a parachute-rigger solution
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_rigger).
|
| Historically, people packing parachutes could be randomly
| selected to jump with the parachute they had packed.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| It remains true in the military. Refusal to jump on a
| chute you have packed will cause you to lose your rigger
| qualifications.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to
| board meetings. (2) Board members use product as
| replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand
| pay increases.
|
| How do you know board members aren't already using Waymo
| product heavily? It still doesn't mean they can go straight
| from board members using Waymo without backup drivers to
| arbitrary customers using Waymo without backup drivers.
| greesil wrote:
| Possibly to drive between their various houses?
| throwaways885 wrote:
| > Possibly to drive between their various houses?
|
| I'm guessing this is the old joke about Eric Schmidt?
| stingrae wrote:
| "I save money by using nest thermostats in my various
| houses"
| naveen99 wrote:
| Maybe open up waymo rides to people with alphabet shares ?
| Then the owners and customers are the same group.
| Unfortunately multiple spouses aren't really allowed in
| America, or you could limit ridership to spouses.
| ra7 wrote:
| > Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close
| to being level 5
|
| Because they are not even trying to be level 5. They've made it
| very clear that will only ever be a level 4 company and level 5
| is not feasible.
| dheera wrote:
| Anyone who says L5 is bullshitting honestly.
|
| L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is
| needed.
|
| In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs
| at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not
| engineers.
|
| Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going
| "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?"
|
| Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical
| interventions per kilometer, non-critical interventions per
| kilometer, accidents per kilometer, etc.
| rhacker wrote:
| It's not an engineer's thing at all. The classifications
| are very specific differences in the overall system. From
| an engineer's point of view they are just creating a fully
| autonomous car. L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios
| is that fully autonomous car been tested through.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| driving_car#Classificatio...
| dheera wrote:
| > L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios is that fully
| autonomous car been tested through.
|
| Not really. L5 is impossible, period.
|
| What I think _will_ happen is L4 with 99.999% cases
| covered and have it come to a safe stop for the 0.0001%,
| assuming there was a way to safely stop.
|
| L5 which means 100.000% covered, will not happen, but the
| PR people will continue to use the term.
| fogof wrote:
| I think the key thing people need to realize from the SAE
| definition [1] of the levels is that they represent
| designs of the system rather than abilities of the
| system. I could slap a camera on my dashboard, tell the
| car to go when it sees green pixels in the top half of
| its field of view and stop when it sees red pixels. Then
| I could get out the car and turn it on, and for the 5
| seconds it took for that car to kill a pedestrian and
| crash into a tree, that would be level 5 self driving.
|
| So when people talk about a particular company
| "achieving" level 4 or level 5, I don't know what they
| mean. Maybe they mean achieving it "safely" which is
| murky, since any system can crash. Maybe they mean
| achieving it legally on public roads, in which case, it's
| a legal achievement (although depending on what
| regulatory hoops they had to go through, maybe they had
| to make technical achievements as well).
|
| [1] : https://web.archive.org/web/20161120142825/http://w
| ww.sae.or...
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| >It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think
| they understand tech, not engineers.
|
| Really? Because the L5 claims come more out of the Ubers
| and Teslas than the "MBAs".
| dheera wrote:
| It's usually the MBAs and PR people at those companies,
| not the engineers, that use that term.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical
| ones.
|
| I don't think any company wants to sign off on the notion
| that their software will handle all classes of problem, even
| ones they have no data for at all.
| ra7 wrote:
| Except Tesla, who are going to be "L5 by the end of the
| year" every year!
| Bukhmanizer wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Tesla's whole strategy is to overpromise
| so much it's as much a legal liability to not have L5
| than to have L5.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Tesla brand sells a lifestyle at this point, not just a
| vehicle. They have to keep pumping it.
| espadrine wrote:
| > _Level 5 isn 't feasible as much for legal reasons as
| technical ones._
|
| That point is taken into account under J3016_202104 SS 8.8:
|
| _"There are technical and practical considerations that
| mitigate the literal meaning of the stipulation that a
| Level 5 ADS must be capable of 'operating the vehicle on-
| road anywhere that a typically skilled human driver can
| reasonably operate a conventional vehicle,' which might
| otherwise be impossible to achieve. For example, an ADS-
| equipped vehicle that is capable of operating a vehicle on
| all roads throughout the US, but, for legal or business
| reasons, cannot operate the vehicle across the borders in
| Canada or Mexico can still be considered Level 5, even if
| geo-fenced to operate only within the U.S."_.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Beating humans doesn't require AGI. Just not drinking, texting,
| or falling asleep will get you halfway there.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Ah yes, the SF elite will gladly shell out fortunes to ride
| around in a car just for the opportunity to witness the gross
| power of AI! Not to mention it's a nice Jag. I wonder if they
| are hiring models for the "autonomous specialist" role?
| RobRivera wrote:
| This tells me that you can show progress and draw magnifying
| glass criticism from people.
|
| can only please some of the people some of the time.
| pcurve wrote:
| I'm guessing if all cars become Waymo right now, there will
| probably be reduction in vehicle fatality by 99%.
|
| But people have hard time accepting with the notion that
| unmanned vehicle may be part responsible for that 1%.
| jsight wrote:
| Notably, SAE level 5 is actually well below the standard that
| you've laid out here. The vehicle simply has to be able to make
| itself safe in situations that it can't handle. This allows
| room for remote assistance or a human takeover in certain
| situations.
| jedberg wrote:
| > This tells me that we're still a long way from full level 4
|
| The only thing it tells me is that regulations are more lax in
| Arizona than California.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| > ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human
| oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human
| driver
|
| I think this statement is off the mark. Comparing to a human is
| hard. Not many accidents happen because people are bad at
| driving. Driving is honestly pretty easy. They happen because
| people are distracted, tired, drunk, or perhaps just an asshole
| driving recklessly for thrills or for speed.
|
| A self driving car might be a lot "worse" than the average
| human driver but could still be a huge improvement in terms of
| expected safety record for driving overall.
|
| They don't need to be better than humans, they just need to be
| not shit 100% of the time unlike humans.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix.
|
| It's not a remote human safety driver, it's more like a remote
| human safety coach.
|
| The difference is giving high level directions vs directly
| driving the car. They don't remotely drive the car because that
| would obviously be super dangerous w/r/t connection
| stability/latency.
| kgin wrote:
| L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good
| enough.
|
| By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding
| around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars
| that phone home less and less every year.
|
| Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home
| for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote
| to an era that already feels taken for granted.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I suspect the main "roadblocks" are about the environment for
| the SDC.
|
| All traffic signs and signals need to be machine readable at a
| distance. That is, a traffic light might beam out "I am light
| 'SFTL783', will be green for 8 more seconds". The location and
| other data for SFTL783 is in a preloaded database. Same for
| speed limits and other signage.
|
| An updated 3d map of all roads would also help a lot. As would
| car-to-car communication systems.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive
| autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety
| record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI._
|
| This might be true. Most of the time (95%) I am on complete
| human brain autopilot when I'm driving but those other 5% need
| my full focus and attention. I shut of the radio and tell other
| passengers to be quite (if I have the time for it).
| birdman3131 wrote:
| Anybody who rides with me on a normal basis have come to
| learn to recognize the sudden stop halfway through a word
| when I switch from autopilot brain to active driving. There
| are times when you need more focus on everything than others.
| Closi wrote:
| This assumes that the challenges that are hard for a human
| are the same challenges that are hard for a self driving car
| - that might be the case, but self driving cars may have some
| theoretical advantages such as 360 cameras/lidar and an
| ability to follow satellite navigation without having to take
| its eyes off the road.
|
| Put another way, the 5% of times I need to focus are usually
| the times where I am somewhere new and don't necessarily
| understand the road layout - which something like Waymo may
| avoid through mapping for instance.
|
| It might be true, but plenty of problems that have been
| thought to require true AGI have later been found to not
| require it after sufficient research - for example it's not
| long ago that we thought good image recognition was entirely
| out of reach.
| actusual wrote:
| Definitionally, the achievement of self driving vehicles does
| not require AGI. Doing one task very well requires a subset of
| AGI called Weak AI.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Stacking shelves in a warehouse is one task. Driving is not
| one task. There are too many corner cases for a modern-day AI
| system to perform as well as a median driver in, say, 95% of
| environments and settings in North America and Europe. I
| think the argument is that such a system might as well be
| AGI.
| actusual wrote:
| The idea that an AI must have the ability to learn how to
| do anything in order to learn how to drive seems like an
| extremely pessimistic and misguided goalpost. That is also
| not how iterative development works.
| nicoffeine wrote:
| I think ML is fantastic, and combined with LiDAR, inter-
| vehicle mesh networking, and geofenced areas where humans
| take over, we could quickly arrive at mostly automated
| driving without trying to reinvent the human brain. We
| should also be more focused on enforcing established
| legal limits to newly manufactured cars. Just preventing
| someone from exceeding the speed limit or driving the
| wrong way would start saving lives immediately. It would
| also allow traffic flow to be optimized, and eventually
| prioritize emergency traffic or allow metro areas to be
| evacuated efficiently for things like natural disasters.
|
| It would be great to see the dawn of AGI, but I don't
| think it will ever happen with classical computation.
| GPT-3 spits out nonsense with the input of the largest
| and easiest to parse portion of reality, and I have not
| seen any ML approach replicate the abilities of something
| as simple as bacteria. ML requires constant validation
| from human operators, so the same is going to hold true
| for ML powered vehicle navigation.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Driving is a set of tasks, but not AGI. AGI would be if it
| could drive and then also learn to write poetry without any
| code update.
| burnished wrote:
| Part of driving well requires a diverse of array of
| abilities, right? You know what is litter and what is debris
| because you can make a guess about material properties based
| on some observations, like looking at something that moves
| without being touched and is translucent, you probably
| conclude that its a plastic bag of some sort and not a
| hazard. Similarly you probably use a wealth of experience to
| judge that a small piece of tire is not a hazard, but a chunk
| is a hazard and a whole one is definitely a hazard.
|
| Or, on seeing an anomalous <children's toy> enter the road
| you can probably guess that a child might follow shortly
| after.
|
| I'm not suggesting that the problem cannot be solved without
| AGI, but you can see why some people might think that though,
| right?
|
| My personal feeling is that we shouldn't be setting the bar
| at making a car that can handle any situation anywhere way
| better than any human at any time, but that we should also
| try to make roads that are more suitable for self driving
| vehicles. I'd rather we move to driving agents that don't get
| bored, frustrated, or angry.
| rhacker wrote:
| I think the engineer's answer to the child entering the
| roadway would be: The car SHOULD never drive at such a
| speed that if the child WERE to enter the visible zone that
| it could swerve+slow enough to not hit it, forget the toy.
| After that we can move the goal posts and say it's a FAST
| child on a bike - but then the reasonable solution to that
| is a human driver may have also hit the biking child. Then,
| of course, we get into the ethics of fault for the
| accident.
| burnished wrote:
| My agreement with you falls largely under my last
| paragraph. I'm trying to illustrate a couple examples
| where driving as a human on roads built for human drivers
| requires perceptive powers and understanding that are
| beyond 'merely' driving safely, but also require a sort
| of holistic understanding of the world. If your goal is
| to make a better than human substitute driver then I
| don't think it is a completely unreasonable position to
| believe you'll need some level of AGI. Of course, as we
| figure out how to do concrete tasks and incorporate them
| into a system they'll stop being considered traits that
| would require general intelligence, but I suppose that is
| a different discussion.
|
| And your example isn't moving goalposts, its just another
| legitimate example of a situation thats gotta get figured
| out. If you think that things like understanding that
| some kid learning to skateboard nearby could fall a
| surprisingly far distance and thus you should exercise
| caution, or being aware of factors that imply fast biking
| children (say, an adult and a child implies the potential
| for another fast moving child on the same trajectory),
| that this sort of situational and contextual awareness is
| critical for proper driving.. then yeah, that would be a
| reasonable sounding argument to support "I think self
| driving cars will require some level of progress in AGI".
|
| That's all I'm long-windedly getting at.
| spyckie2 wrote:
| The key metric is probably "obscure incidents" per miles
| driven, probably classified manually into various levels of
| danger. Once the "incidents that lead to disaster" count
| reaches 0 statistically, it will definitely roll out en masse
| without the need of safety drivers.
|
| My guess is that they know how many miles they have to drive in
| order to reach that number, and it's a whole lot. Statistics
| and math stuff but you can probably pin it down to the month or
| quarter based on trends. Either that, or it's about driving
| every road in the city with all sorts of weather / traffic /
| pedestrian conditions until there's no issue. This isn't
| generalized AI driving (L5) but it's a much more logical
| approach to getting autonomous driving coverage where it's the
| most valuable.
|
| My guess is that each city will involve a safety driver rollout
| until they have enough data to know the incident rate is zero.
| There might be a lot of variance between cities - maps data,
| weather conditions, customs, etc. Then remove the safety
| drivers.
|
| I'm sure they also are experimenting with disaster/safety
| protocols while they do the roll out.
|
| My prediction is that waymo will be a mainstream option within
| the next 5 years.
| michaelt wrote:
| There's no such thing as a remote safety driver.
|
| Cell data connections aren't reliable enough, and having the
| car emergency stop (and potentially get rear-ended) when it
| loses signal wouldn't be acceptable.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| It doesn't matter for the rider though, unlike a Tesla where
| you still have to keep your hands on the wheel.
| eagsalazar2 wrote:
| You are making a ton of assumptions about what is driving this
| decision.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| They are not legally allowed to not have a human driver
| onboard. It's a legal requirement that is not a relevant signal
| one way or another.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This tells me that we're still a long way from full level 4
| (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San
| Francisco.
|
| I think its in part regulatory relating to paid rides in
| autonomous vehicles in CA, which is why Cruise is dodging it
| with passenger-carrying but unpaid rides that are fully
| driverless. I can't find a good summary of the rules, but I
| infer from the coverage I've seen that the threshold for having
| no safety driver when offering paid passenger rides is
| different from that without paid passengers.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| Would it be easier to just build a "futuristic" test city built
| around the idea of self-driving cars to make it easier for them
| to work? If self-driving cars are so great people will move
| there naturally due to improved quality of life. Trying to make
| self-driving cars work in current cities is like building
| around crippling technical debt
|
| Seems like Google and a few other tech companies could easily
| bootstrap a small city by planting some offices somewhere
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still
| too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is
| the case in Phoenix._
|
| I think you can only determine that if you know how many times
| the human attendant takes over.
|
| Just having a human behind the wheel doesn't tell you much, I
| don't see how to get full self-driving without an intermediate
| step of human supervision.
| t0rt01se wrote:
| Can't wait for these to be launched in my city! Love from Dhaka.
| pm90 wrote:
| Considering the Density of Dhaka, it would be much better
| served with public transportation/metro.
|
| While the US has a lot of Urban Sprawl, dense Asian cities have
| the option to invest and reap the benefits of public
| transportation instead. Eg im incredibly excited about all the
| metro lines in India, HSR in China etc.
| ketzo wrote:
| Many comments in this thread are variations on a theme of "self-
| driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be
| better than human drivers, who aren't actually all that great." I
| think it would be nice if this were true, and I suppose it is
| from an actuarial perspective, but it's also an extremely flawed
| point.
|
| From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a
| self-driving car crashes one tenth, even one one-hundredth as
| often as human drivers.
|
| If you see a self-driving car cause an accident, particularly a
| lethal one, in a situation that almost any human driver would
| have avoided, you've totally destroyed any and all confidence in
| this car's driving ability, because "I would never, ever have
| crashed there."
|
| As we've seen, there are lots of scenarios like this. The Tesla
| crash from last year, where the car simply didn't see a white
| truck against a light background. Or imagine an adversarial image
| attack, where some tiny insignificant detail is placed onto a
| stop sign or a "do-not-enter" that turns it into nothing from the
| perspective of the AI driver.
|
| These kinds of scenarios _obliterate_ public confidence in self-
| driving cars, because intuitively, you immediately realize that
| you 're "a much better driver" than this car! Even if that's
| untrue 99/100 times, it only takes one visceral example to drive
| this kind of wedge.
|
| Self-driving cars _don 't_ just have to be better than human
| drivers. They have to be as close to perfect as is possible,
| because that's what people will expect.
| cactus2093 wrote:
| Counterpoint - nobody actually cares about traffic fatalities.
| Nearly 40,000 deaths a year in the US, and the majority of
| people get in their cars every day without ever thinking about
| this risk and go about their lives (or to put that another way,
| the risks are already so low as to be negligible to most
| people, and anything else within the ballpark of negligible is
| still negligible). Normalcy bias is incredibly strong and as
| soon as self-driving cars are "normal" people will get on board
| without thinking twice. Tesla is slowly acclimating people to
| self-driving, basically everyone is familiar with the idea at
| this point, and as soon as it's available and someone tells you
| it's "just as safe as driving yourself", most people will just
| go with it. Especially given how big the upside is - you don't
| have to deal with the stress of driving anymore, you can just
| relax in your car. Or in terms of getting a ride, maybe it's
| 1/4 the price of a taxi driven by a human. Sounds good, people
| will roll with it.
|
| Of course the more it starts taking off, there will always be a
| vocal subset of the population that is strongly opposed to it,
| just like there are vocal anti-vaxxer groups and there were
| anti-seatbelt protests back in the 80's. But I can't imagine
| the naysayers having a very big impact on the progression of
| the technology, the upsides are just too enormous.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| This is arguing that because humans are stupid and biased, they
| will believe they are better drivers despite all the evidence
| to the contrary, and therefore, a solution needs to be close to
| perfect so that humans stop being fearful.
|
| We have seen this before with autopilots in aircraft and ship,
| elevator operators and so on.
|
| All it needs is time and adoption, not perfection, and as
| adoption increases, the roads get safer and safer, bringing us
| closer to the ideal, and as time increases, the closer we get
| to adoption.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I was a doubter for awhile.
|
| Watching the Waymo video just changed my viewpoint.
|
| They have a "Pull Over" lever in the back seat.
|
| Would I trust a self-driving vechicle without Lidar--probally
| no.
|
| Would I use use a self driving vechicle commuting, and around
| the city--yes. Two driving chores I hate. I hate them to the
| point that the philosophical argument over dying by my own
| hands, or a computer, is put in the trunk.
|
| On a personal note, the thought of a computer driving me off a
| cliff while driving to Stinson beach is not something I would
| chance. Even if they are statistically better drivers than most
| humans.
|
| I can't imagine tumbling down a cliff, and thinking if only I
| drove today.
|
| I still foresee most trucking jobs, and most driving jobs,
| completely gone in a few years.
|
| Yes--it's time for a Basic Income.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Here's a particularly spicy viewpoint: It doesn't matter if you
| obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, or if there
| are lethal accidents that would've been avoided.
|
| As t approaches infinity, what are the chances that self-
| driving cars _won 't_ take over the world?
| thereare5lights wrote:
| pretty high if people won't use them because they don't trust
| them.
| dougmwne wrote:
| If you think governments can't simply legislate away
| people's freedom to drive in the service of corporate
| profits or what's "best for them", you haven't read the
| news lately.
| make3 wrote:
| It's funny how Americans seem to have accepted the idea
| that corporations control their political life
| dougmwne wrote:
| I wouldn't say agreed with, but mostly accepted a reality
| they have no power to change.
| andrewzah wrote:
| "If you think governments can't simply legislate away
| people's freedom to drive"
|
| Less drunk, distracted, angry, and/or sleepy drivers on
| public roads, with overall significantly less crashes?
| Sign me up!
| dougmwne wrote:
| That would be an ideal outcome, but plenty of people
| would need to be economically or legally forced. Cross-
| reference to vaccines.
| andrewzah wrote:
| Freedom clearly does not work in a self-centered society.
| We wouldn't need such drastic actions if enough people
| voluntarily did the right things. But not enough do, so
| here we are.
|
| I'm really beginning to get sick of seeing people use the
| word "freedom" when they clearly mean "no personal
| responsibility while living in a society among other
| people".
| abstrakraft wrote:
| I imagine Waymo's investors want a return before t reaches
| infinity...
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| People get on passenger planes every day and there are loads of
| instances of those crashing for extremely unorthodox reasons.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >human drivers, who aren't actually all that great.
|
| A large fraction of human drivers _are_ actually all that
| great. The majority of accidents /deaths are caused by a
| minority of terrible drivers, or good drivers who found
| themselves in terrible but rare circumstances. The majority of
| drivers drive hundreds of thousands of miles without any
| accidents that were their fault, or even any accidents at all.
|
| In other words, it's probably easy to beat the _mean_ human
| driver, which is greatly dragged down by a minority of terrible
| drivers. It 's probably very difficult to beat the _median_
| human driver, and near impossible to beat the top 20% of human
| drivers.
| not2b wrote:
| I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to
| demonstrate with solid data that you've done so.
|
| In 2019 in California, there were 1.06 deaths per 100 million
| vehicle miles traveled. Any self-driving automobile
| technology that doesn't have at least 1 billion vehicle miles
| of data is in no position to claim that it is safer than
| human drivers and less likely to kill people.
|
| Self driving cars don't make the same kinds of mistakes as
| human drivers do, but they make different kinds of mistakes.
| Some of these can be fatal.
| make3 wrote:
| I'd be curious to see a source for your number
| mortehu wrote:
| Not really answering your question, but CDC says 28% of
| all traffic-related deaths in 2016 involved alcohol.
| Excluding these would immediately improve the mean
| performance.
| mikestew wrote:
| I see why LMGTFY had its day in the sun: you can
| literally paste the first sentence of parent's post into
| DDG, and the first link answers your question. Hell, the
| _preview_ answers your question, you don't even need to
| click it.
| make3 wrote:
| the writer has the responsibility give a source, not the
| reader
| [deleted]
| eigen wrote:
| * The 2019 Mileage Death Rate (MDR) - fatalities per 100
| million miles traveled - is 1.06.
|
| https://www.ots.ca.gov/ots-and-traffic-safety/score-card/
|
| California Numbers:
|
| * 3,606 traffic fatalities in 2019.
|
| * 1,066 Alcohol-impaired driving fatalities (fatalities
| in crashes involving a driver or motorcycle rider with a
| blood alcohol concentration, or BAC, of 0.08 or higher)
| in 2019.
|
| * 620 Unrestrained passenger vehicle occupant fatalities
| in all seating positions in 2019.
|
| * 164 Teen motor vehicle fatalities (age 16-19) in 2019.
|
| * 972 Pedestrian fatalities in 2019.
|
| * 133 Bicycle fatalities in 2019.
|
| assuming the above (alcohol-impaired, unrestrained
| passenger, teens, pedestrian, bicycle) are all all poor-
| driver related that leaves 651 traffic fatalities.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| >I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and
| to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so.
|
| Agreed. I should have written "relatively easy."
|
| > Any self-driving automobile technology that doesn't have
| at least 1 billion vehicle miles of data is in no position
| to claim that it is safer than human drivers and less
| likely to kill people.
|
| The circumstances under which those miles are driven (e.g.
| road type, location, weather, time of day, etc.) also have
| to be consistent with circumstances under which humans are
| driving. 10 billion autonomous vehicle miles driven only on
| highways in broad daylight is a worthless point of
| comparison, whereas 500 million miles driven across a
| variety of conditions representative of the full human
| driving population is worth a lot more.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| > but they make different kinds of mistakes.
|
| This is key, there's expectation and some wiggle room that
| as a human driver, humans will fuck up predictably and
| experienced drivers know how to avoid getting into
| incidents when this happens (usually).
|
| Self-driving cars are weird to drive around. They will
| absolutely stop in situations where no human would think to
| stop. I think about this as a motorcycle rider, what if I'm
| committed to cornering on a corner I can't see around and
| the software decides on a self-driving car that it should
| just stop in the middle of the road after the apex? A human
| driver could do this too but many will know that this is a
| dangerous place to stop and try to put the car on the
| shoulder or minimize the amount of time it's stuck there.
|
| I don't know if this is something we need to tolerate a
| temporary increased incident rate on as people get used to
| them being on the road, or if we need to make the software
| drive more like humans (with the assumption that means
| potentially making the behavior act sloppier than it can
| handle so that increased software reaction rate doesn't
| cause humans with slow reaction rate to slam into them)
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| > _I don 't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver
| and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so._
|
| It is. The mean is dragged down by alcoholics who drive
| drunk every single day. If you never drive drunk, that
| gives you a significant advantage.
| not2b wrote:
| We were talking about self-driving cars.
|
| The mean is given by the number I posted, about 1 death
| per 100 million miles traveled. That number _includes_
| drunk drivers, distracted drivers trying to text,
| everything.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| The point is that _" 1 death per 100 million miles
| traveled"_ is the _mean_ average, but most drivers do
| better than the mean. Mean, median, and mode are not the
| same and the mean crash rate is not relevant to most
| drivers.
| erostrate wrote:
| Do you have a source for that?
| chrismcb wrote:
| I don't know where the op got the statistic from. But this
| claims 1.02 per 100 million.
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/fatal-
| car-a...
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| Exactly right. Furthermore, most risky behavior is a choice.
| Crashes aren't random "acts of god" that strike anybody with
| equal likelihood. If you _choose_ not to drive drunk, drive
| in bad weather, or for many hours without rest, then you can
| greatly improve your odds and almost certainly reduce your
| risk below the average. In these discussions I often see far
| too much fatalism; _" Everybody thinks they're above average
| but half of you aren't"_. ignores both the fact that crashes
| aren't distributed like that, and the fact that the riskiest
| behavior is a choice. The mean number of miles driven drunk
| is greater than zero, but the number of miles _I_ drive drunk
| is zero.
| snarkypixel wrote:
| Not sure about that. I'd say from the people that are very
| close to me (friends & family), I wouldn't want to be a
| passenger with half of them. AI is /so much better/, can't
| wait for it to be mainstream. And it's not just about the AI
| driving, it's about the AI reacting 100X faster and having
| eyes all around the car to avoid accidents before they could
| even happen.
|
| I wonder what humans will actually do better than AI in 50
| years. I have a personal theory but I'm a bit off topic here
| foota wrote:
| I agree that these incidents are concerning, but you mention
| Tesla's crashes, yet people are still buying it? I think you
| are underestimating people's laziness.
| fouc wrote:
| Even if public confidence was low, so what? People will still
| buy self-driving cars and fall asleep in them. Laziness
| triumphs over safety.
| aiisjustanif wrote:
| > Self-driving cars don't just have to be better than human
| drivers. They have to be as close to perfect as is possible,
| because that's what people will expect.
|
| Though I disagree because people expect a lot of things and
| alternative outcomes happen when there are incentives (Current
| cars, airplanes, and elevators come to mind). Waymo seems to be
| aware of this from this recent video. [1]
|
| 1. https://youtu.be/yjztvddhZmI
| dougmwne wrote:
| The world doesn't work in idealized ways. Yes, perhaps ideally
| self-driving cars would need to be nearly perfect in order to
| win wide public acceptance. At the same time there was an
| article on the front page today investigating literal gulag
| labor camps in the USA, and I doubt those are popular or going
| away any time soon. Once this is working technology that can
| turn a profit, it will depend on who stands to gain, how deep
| their pockets are, who gets bribed, which talking points get
| pushed, and which votes get bought. Whether the public ends up
| particularly happy about the outcome is at best, secondary, and
| at worst, irrelevant. Don't think I've run into too many people
| happy about our healthcare system, yet that remains stubbornly
| broken. No one I've met really wanted to lose our lower-middle
| class to China, yet there it went.
| make3 wrote:
| Well a large difference is that consumer goods companies like
| Tesla are reliant on their public image for sales.
| dougmwne wrote:
| People don't usually pay too much attention to what the
| government relations department has been saying to the
| NHTSA. It doesn't have the be the same thing Elon is
| tweeting.
| acchow wrote:
| I'm a bit surprised by how negative a view HN has towards human
| adoption of technology.
|
| What technology is perfect? What code is perfect and doesn't
| have bugs in it? And yet we adopt automated systems anyway.
| Yes, sometimes it is painful and an entire airline grounds all
| planes for half a day... But that doesn't stop the unending
| march towards efficiency and technological progress.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I think the point is that the general public is fickle and
| their trust in self driving cars is tentative. If the public
| loses confidence in the technology it will make it very
| difficult for them to roll it out. So this isn't really about
| what HN thinks, it's about what HN predicts the general
| public will think.
| stickfigure wrote:
| Why did they pick Jaguar for the platform? That seems like an
| obscure choice.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Probably got them for free/really cheap. Waymo has regularly
| looked for partnership deals with car manufacturers, driven by
| the push to make Waymo look good on the budget sheets.
|
| Also, companies pushing their own self-driving or ADAS
| solutions may be hesitant to partner with Waymo, excluding some
| of the large players.
| michaelt wrote:
| Well, as long as the tech isn't ready to sell to consumers,
| 'partnering' with Waymo doesn't have all that much upside for
| automakers. It's not like Waymo is handing over the secret
| sauce or promising them exclusivity. I also suspect over the
| past decade Waymo has found fewer and fewer automakers fighting
| to make a deal with them.
|
| Jaguar doesn't have a high-profile competing autonomy effort of
| their own, that would create a conflict of interest and/or
| invite spying.
|
| The i-pace is electric, which makes integration easier and
| won't hurt for PR purposes.
|
| And it's luxurious enough that no matter who you're showing the
| tech off to, it won't be a big step down from their personal
| car.
| lifekaizen wrote:
| Most likely Jaguar is involved financially and it's not a
| straight purchase. From Wired:
|
| "Jaguar, for its part, gets a large chunk of guaranteed sales
| and a chance to look like it's at the forefront of this
| emerging technology."
|
| - Waymo Expands Its Robo-Fleet with Electric Jaguar SUVs,
| https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-buys-jaguar-suvs/
| jstx1 wrote:
| What's the biggest technical challenge that they have right now?
| And how much time and effort will it take to overcome?
|
| I feel like there is a lot of disconnect between the different
| media pieces and opinions I come across specifically when it
| comes to Waymo's self-driving - from "we're already there" to "it
| won't happen in the next 10 years".
| jeffbee wrote:
| If Waymo has a 10-year lead, the people who get paid by the
| word to write about the horse race don't get paid. That's why
| you'll often see articles on self-driving cars that don't even
| mention Waymo.
| willvarfar wrote:
| I can't wait for truly autonomous cars. I live in the countryside
| and have to drive to collect and deliver kids, or abstain as a
| designated driver and so on. Self driving will change this.
|
| The aspect I dislike is the move towards hiring cars on demand
| instead of owning them, though.
| bluGill wrote:
| hiring cars on demand makes sense in dense cities where most
| trips would not be by car even if you owned one (walk, bike,
| transit...). When most trips are by car anyway you are better
| off owning your own car.
| travisporter wrote:
| Actually, if the cost of hiring is less than insurance,
| maintenance and fuel, I'm all for it. Don't have to be sober,
| find parking. Don't know if that will happen in rural areas
| though
| ra7 wrote:
| It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to
| drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban
| street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ).
| They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a
| real test.
|
| Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace
| ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing
| more blog posts, offering more insights into their tech and
| generally seem to have increased their PR game. I wonder if that
| was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to
| show some urgency.
|
| Surely Alphabet has noticed that their competitors are nipping
| at Waymo's heels. If they _don 't_ pick up the pace, all sorts
| of business books will be written about how Waymo squandered a
| decade-long lead in the industry.
| afavour wrote:
| > SF is a real nightmare to drive.
|
| Yes and no. The weather conditions are probably close to
| perfect for a project like this. A city that spends months with
| icy roads... _that_ would be the real nightmare.
| ra7 wrote:
| Yeah, fair enough. Only adverse weather they'd encounter in
| SF is fog and may be light rain. But I still consider driving
| in SF pretty challenging, especially for an autonomous
| vehicle - narrow roads, people not following rules,
| pedestrians everywhere, cable cars in the middle of roads.
| Certainly more complex than Chandler, AZ.
| nradov wrote:
| SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter
| storm.
| pvarangot wrote:
| This cars don't even work with a light drizzle.
| verdverm wrote:
| Waymo in snow and sand
|
| https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-
| navigation.ht...
|
| https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/tech/2019/08
| /...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| That's a big point if true. What's the source for that
| info?
| pvarangot wrote:
| Not sure if I can tell so I'll have to pass on answering
| that. You can take a look at this though:
| https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434
| ra7 wrote:
| Those are their previous generation vehicles. The I-Pace
| in SF are the newest generation with upgraded sensors.
| [deleted]
| paxys wrote:
| I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather
| conditions for self driving. With modern car tech (traction
| monitoring, ability to redirect torque to a specific tire,
| ABS, radar) an automated car is going to have an easier time
| navigating snow/ice/rain than a human driver.
|
| The real challenges when navigating city streets are the
| human ones - delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal
| worker fixing a manhole with a single cone to redirect
| traffic, pedestrians/bicyclists appearing out of nowhere, no
| one following traffic signs. This is the kind of stuff that
| tests "intelligence".
| pitaj wrote:
| How well do sensors and vision systems handle winter
| conditions like snow and lack of lane markers?
| ggggtez wrote:
| Easy, my dumb level-0 car can tell me when it's icy. And
| finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in self
| driving (the hard part is knowing when to ignore them).
| mike00632 wrote:
| > And finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in
| self driving
|
| It's not a matter of "finding" lane markers. There are no
| lane markers visible after it snows.
| tylerrobinson wrote:
| You're being downvoted for the flippant and dismissive
| tone of your comment, but I do wonder how computer-driven
| cars will determine when it is acceptable to violate lane
| markings and road signs. Boston in winter is more than
| just traction control. There are snow piles that might be
| icy, ridges left from a plow, shifting conditions, and
| bad visibility. I suspect it IS a hard problem.
| marwatk wrote:
| I suspect it will know where the lane markings are better
| than human drivers. They are mapped ahead of time and the
| car can likely localize itself via other landmarks to
| determine where they are without being able to see them.
|
| The harder part is driving like a human and detecting
| that a path has been made in the middle of two lanes in
| heavy snow and not obeying the lines at all.
| [deleted]
| r00fus wrote:
| Challenging weather conditions mean human drivers become
| even more unpredictable.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > With modern car tech (traction monitoring, ability to
| redirect torque to a specific tire, ABS, radar) an
| automated car is going to have an easier time navigating
| snow/ice/rain than a human driver.
|
| Huh, what? Human drivers can _already_ take advantage of
| all of those, and they still find snowstorms and torrential
| rain challenging.
|
| The challenge is understanding what you see (and hear), and
| dealing with very noisy and limited--sometimes actively
| misleading--inputs.
| newsclues wrote:
| If a pedestrian slips in deep snow while crossing a street
| and is no longer visible because the snow obstructs them,
| does the car see a clear path and kill someone or not?
| CarelessExpert wrote:
| > I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of
| weather conditions for self driving.
|
| This remark makes me wonder if you've ever lived in an area
| that actually experiences winter.
|
| Around here, dead of winter, there are no lines visible on
| the streets. Heck, after a good snow storm the lanes are
| basically a function of group consensus.
| asdff wrote:
| Waymo et al will have to install snow tires or else no
| matter of traction control or even all wheel drive are
| going to help when your tires cannot find grip.
|
| Source: grew up watching subarus do 360s on the freeway.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Lived in Boston for quite a while, and grew up driving in a
| city.
|
| I find SF much more challenging to drive in, at least wrt the
| other drivers. In Boston, drivers are aggressive and take
| calculated, dangerous risks to meet their goal.
|
| In SF, a lot of people on the road act like it's their first
| time driving in like 5 years and they're still figuring it
| out. There's no rational risk-taking towards a goal, but more
| people bumbling around unpredictably while unsure of what
| their goal even is.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| That's a great description of driving for literally
| everywhere in the country that's not the Northeast. It's
| also why I think driving in the Northeast is the safest.
| Driving on highways in the South is scary.
| travisporter wrote:
| What if the car/service just doesn't work or is planned to be
| offline based on the weather? It would suck to be stranded
| because it started raining, but would it still be valuable to
| have an automated taxi service on good weather days in big
| cities? I am inclined to say yes, and also delighted that
| this is the question I'm asking, but I'm an optimist.
| delecti wrote:
| In my experience with snow driving, a well maintained car
| (including good snow tires) goes a long way, and a fleet of
| commercial vehicles (like these) will have that as an edge
| over the average driver.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Try a southern state that has never seen snow before but got
| half an inch and is losing its collective mind.
| jsight wrote:
| Honestly, I think Boston is harder even without a winter
| storm.
| bluGill wrote:
| It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads
| were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is
| there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the
| ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife
| will jump out of in front of you.
| pnathan wrote:
| Having driven many rural roads, that is something I would be
| much more comfortable with an automatic system on: staring
| around for deer at night is the classic attention task where
| humans tend to fail.
|
| What I _wouldn 't_ be as comfortable with is the "random
| sheet of ice" or "oh look, rocks" or "suddenly washboard dirt
| road".
| ra7 wrote:
| Is there a market for taxis in the rural areas? They have
| little incentive to expand there if there's no money to be
| made.
| paxys wrote:
| Most drunk driving accidents/deaths happen in rural areas
| because there is really no other alternative for
| transportation. Because of low population density and long
| distances taxis are basically impossible to find. Self
| driving cars could definitely fill a niche there should
| they ever become cost effective.
| cascom wrote:
| There is typically an acute need and it is a market that is
| chronically underserved, but also typically unattractive
| from an operator's standpoint
| toast0 wrote:
| If the price is right, maybe. I live in a semi-rural area
| (about a house per acre, but unevenly distributed) and we
| have one Uber driver and a handful of taxi companies.
| Competition is tough though, my PHEV costs very little to
| operate and there's always parking and the bus system does
| on demand rides for $2 during weekdays between the morning
| and evening peaks.
| tazjin wrote:
| I can't speak for the US, but in Europe (experiences from
| Sweden, Norway, Russia) rural areas usually have a handful
| of taxi drivers and you "use their services" by calling
| their numbers which you can get from locals.
| bayesianbot wrote:
| In Finland we had a law that required the taxi monopoly
| to provide services even in rural areas, so disabled and
| elderly people could get transportation to services they
| need. Worked well in my town of 7 000 people except
| sometimes on weeknights the only driver could be in the
| next city 50km away.
|
| (Had, as in they changed the law few years back. Not sure
| how it's now)
|
| Robotaxi(s) could be quite good solution to the problem -
| the drivers were often pissed if you called them for a
| single ride when they were home or far away.
| mdoms wrote:
| Absolutely! I live in outskirts and I would LOVE to be able
| to get a taxi to the pub and back! Unfortunately they don't
| service me here.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The superiority of a blended computer vision system for this
| task, over a human performance, is almost impossible to
| overstate. The computer is not going to overlook even one
| deer.
| bluGill wrote:
| It isn't possible to not overlook deer because they are
| often doing things such that you cannot spot them. Unless
| you mean they won't fail to see a deer 2 meters in front of
| the car - but it is too late to do anything about it then.
| fooker wrote:
| >The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.
|
| Oh it will. Animals have evolved amazing camouflage.
| Computer Vision will easily miss a deer hidden in a dark
| treeline. And radar/lidar even more so because the forest
| is going to have a pretty irregular geometry.
|
| Even identifying a bicycle in a regular city street is
| something we have not convincingly solved yet. Animals on
| the side of a forest road is pretty far away.
| Filligree wrote:
| So they'd need more training data. It doesn't sound difficult
| to get.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > It may not scale to rural areas though.
|
| Most products, including this one, don't need to do
| everything to be both useful and profitable.
| bluGill wrote:
| So long as it is only urban areas it is a band-aid for the
| lack of good transit options.
|
| Not that you are wrong, just that you should be wrong
| because if cities actually had useful transit rural areas
| would be a much larger share of demand despite not having
| many people.
| bobsomers wrote:
| Very true, but retrofitting good transit into a city that
| didn't plan for it is extremely expensive and disruptive.
| I see these kinds of services being a great complement to
| public transit in cities that have struggled to make them
| attractive.
|
| For example, I am _way_ more likely to take Cal Train
| into SF if I can use a point-to-point service like Uber
| /Lyft/Waymo to get me the rest of the way there. Without
| that missing link, I'm much more likely to just give up
| and drive instead.
| bluGill wrote:
| The best time to do good transit was 20 years ago, the
| second best is today. SF needs to quit making excuses and
| make transit good. What they have is not good even if it
| better than everyone else in the US.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there,
| that 's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring"
| suburban driving (Chandler, AZ)_
|
| Both are low-hanging fruit. When it can navigate a snow-covered
| road at night while it's still snowing, get back to me.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Doing that better than the average human is a pretty low bar.
| joebob42 wrote:
| But the bar to be better than a human in this case is also
| wickedly low.
|
| I basically can't do this. If it was absolutely necessary I
| would go out there and drive like 5 mph and be terrified the
| whole time, but otherwise I would just treat whatever I
| needed to drive to in a snowstorm at night as temporarily
| inaccessible. I have lived in places where it snowed in
| winter before.
| Lammy wrote:
| > SF is a real nightmare to drive.
|
| 'cause they decided not to build most of the roads:
| https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg
| mjmahone17 wrote:
| Wait do you mean? As in, the highways proposed in 1955
| weren't built?
|
| I'm not sure how highways going through SF would make it
| easier to drive in SF (outside of the highways): wouldn't
| that generally increase traffic and conflicts?
| Lammy wrote:
| > wouldn't that generally increase traffic and conflicts?
|
| When coupled to our additional refusal to build housing,
| sadly, yeah. What two things do people usually commute
| between?
| jcranmer wrote:
| Cities that did decide to tear up urban areas for freeways
| aren't really any better. Consider places like Los Angeles,
| Dallas, or Houston.
|
| What makes SF difficult to drive in (from my perspective of
| only ever being a pedestrian there) is a) extremely hilly
| terrain, b) the general difficulty of a dense urban
| environment _anywhere_ , and only a distant third is c)
| traffic, which is merely an added stressor to the complex
| choreography that is an urban street.
| pfarrell wrote:
| For SF, _not_ rebuilding the 480 after the '89 earthquake
| made the Bay side of San Francisco really pleasant and
| enjoyable place to be. The Embarcadero from Giant's stadium
| to the Wharf and around to Fort Mason is such a beautiful
| place to walk/jog/ride, I can't imagine the area with the
| double-decker highway it used to have.
| Lammy wrote:
| > I can't imagine the area with the double-decker highway
| it used to have.
|
| How about with the freight railroad it used to have for
| 75 years before the state donated the ring of land to the
| city and paid to build the highway?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad
|
| http://sanfranciscotrains.org/sbrr_history.html
| asdff wrote:
| Los Angeles also didn't build all its planned freeways, and
| today LA has fewer freeway miles per area and per capita
| than most american cities
| Lammy wrote:
| > extremely hilly terrain
|
| Yes, I agree, but they decided it was better to go over
| every hill instead of through them:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4182283392/
| pfarrell wrote:
| There's a second Oakland/SF bridge that doesn't exist. Well,
| I assume it would go to Oakland. It's marked with "???" and
| just says "Crossing". I presume that hypothetical bridge
| wouldn't have Yerba Buena Island to connect through, so would
| be really impressive and long (compared to the Golden Gate
| and Bay bridges).
| Lammy wrote:
| That's the "Southern Crossing"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Southern_Crossing_(California)
|
| It would have probably been the continuation of I-980 had
| that bridge been built:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_980#History
|
| At one point it was also planned to be just north of SFO.
| Have you ever taken I-380 east instead of one of the exits
| to 101N/S? There's a huge multi-lane road that dwindles to
| basically an airport access road exit.
| pfarrell wrote:
| Oh man, thanks for those links. TIL. A causeway or
| something that extends off of Alameda? It's wild to think
| about what that would have done to the area.
| Lammy wrote:
| On the north side there was also a plan to bridge San
| Francisco / Angel Island / Tiburon! Part of it still
| exists as Route 131.
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4047626058/
|
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4047626054/
|
| https://www.cahighways.org/ROUTE131.html
|
| Here you can see an idea of doubling-up the Bay Bridge,
| plus a view of the Southern Crossing / I-980 alignment:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/4247129432/
| cascom wrote:
| Supposedly more road construction doesn't alleviate traffic,
| in only induces more demand (which is moderated by high
| traffic levels)
|
| Source (great read if your interested in the subject):
| https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-
| About/dp/0307...
| Lammy wrote:
| Yes, inducing some demand is the point. People have to live
| somewhere, work somewhere, and until recently generally had
| to commute between the two. When this happens in your
| circulatory system it's called a stroke :p
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| "Induced demand" applies to literally every public resource
| from subways to parks. If you build it and it's not totally
| out of place they will come.
| danielrhodes wrote:
| This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads exist,
| more or less, except for the Embarcadero which was removed
| after it collapsed in the 1989 earthquake (and was a crazy
| eye sore).
|
| It is certainly true that the taste for elevated highways
| through cities has waned given the pollution and dust and
| general unsightliness that it produces. In the 1950s, when
| cars were all the rage, people were very excited by these
| things.
| Lammy wrote:
| > This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads
| exist, more or less
|
| Personally, as an SF resident I would much prefer all the
| cars to be tunneled or elevated instead of idling in front
| of my house or blowing loudly through my block. It's a
| safety issue.
|
| When there's only so much surface area where else are
| people supposed to build except up and down? That's why we
| have skyscrapers, and those don't seem to provoke the same
| vitriol as the roads.
|
| Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Fwy wouldn't have been
| visible if the plans for the World Trade Center (lol) at
| Market/Embarcadero hadn't also been canceled:
|
| https://archive.org/details/ferrybuildingcom2919sanf
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Ferry-Building-
| what-m...
| sschueller wrote:
| If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors
| don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this.
|
| It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were
| hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are
| nearing end of life.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| FSD v2 hw with DOJO - we definitely got it right this time.
| ffggvv wrote:
| if they don't have fsd then they are just an electric car
| company. if they are just a car company their stock should be
| at 50 dollars right now. hence why he'd never admit it and
| instead will double down with his robot that will never
| materialize
| burnished wrote:
| Their current assist packages are already incredible even
| though they come short of full self driving.
|
| EDIT: In case my point isn't clear, if your position is
| predicated on the idea that anything less than full self
| driving is worthless garbage, you should know that is a
| pretty hot take. If you are instead having an emotional
| reaction and feel deceived I don't know what to tell you, you
| might have a very valid point but that doesn't appear to
| figure into evaluating whether a stock is under or over
| priced.
| panick21 wrote:
| Nonsense. Go look at some of the models by different analyst.
| Even if you include no software revenue at all, you can
| justify a much higher stock price then you suggest. Some
| never include anything for FSD in the first place.
|
| And even if they don't reach FSD, they could still generate a
| lot of software revenue from Autopilot features.
|
| And beyond that Tesla still does more then final assembly of
| EV and selling them to dealerships.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| As I understand it, they just started selling the "fsd capable"
| stuff a few years ago. Are any of those cars nearing end of
| life? That would be an even greater cause for concern IMO.
| burnished wrote:
| I'd be surprised, I've heard (and can not immediately
| substantiate) that they are generally very reliable vehicles.
| I guess part of it is that they just don't have as many
| mechanical points of failure.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Its not "end of life" vehicles that should be concerned, but
| instead "end of lease" vehicles.
|
| People who bought a 3-year or 5-year lease from 2016 with the
| $5k full-self driving package probably should feel pissed for
| wasting money.
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| Also, I don't think we actually know what the end-of-life
| of Tesla vehicles is. They've not been mass produced for
| long enough.
| scrose wrote:
| I'm guessing end-of-life for a Tesla is whenever they
| decide they will not replace your battery.
| jsight wrote:
| To be fair, a lot of people right now would willingly pay
| $5k for the features that are available now, especially if
| they spend a lot of time on long highway trips.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| The price keeps going up, though: if you bought it right
| now, it wouldn't be $5K, it'd be $10K. It's possible
| Tesla's driver assistance systems are better than
| anything else on the market in their current incarnation,
| but that's getting to be a pretty big ask.
| minhazm wrote:
| Google took a completely different approach and relies heavily
| on pre-mapped environments. Tesla has several orders of
| magnitude more vehicles, more data, and a more diverse set of
| data given their cars are in many different countries. It's not
| implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at FSD faster than
| Google.
| alphabetting wrote:
| I'd contend Waymo has more data but data isn't really the
| hurdle. It's AI/ML and simulation needed to get the final 1%
| right.
|
| Good thread on ground Tesla would need to make up to catch AV
| leaders here.
| https://twitter.com/Christiano92/status/1428671634131628033
| diegocg wrote:
| The idea that data will somehow magically translate into FSD
| is laughable. It relies in the delusion that we just need to
| train neural networks with the proper data and then we all
| can go to sleep.
|
| There are many issues with Tesla's autopilot that are
| completely unrelated to the amount of data they have, and
| they will not be fixed with more data, and having more data
| will not make it easier to fix it. At this point, I would
| argue that the discussion about who owns more millions of
| miles of data is completely irrelevant.
| _coveredInBees wrote:
| It isn't laughable at all. The real problem of FSD is the
| ridiculous long-tail of scenarios in the real-world that
| you simply cannot account for or manage well. At this
| point, Tesla has a huge upper hand because every vehicle in
| their fleet can constantly collect and provide new semi-
| labelled training data every time there is a user
| disengagement or an unforeseen action taken by the driver.
|
| Tesla has built out amazing infrastructure to capture
| extensive amounts of "hard" examples from their fleet, turn
| them around into labeled data for training very efficiently
| and then utilizing simulations to further broaden the
| distribution of such quirky long-tail events in their
| training-set. In the absence of AGI, this is a very
| effective "brute-force" approach and they have a huge upper
| hand over every other player in this space.
|
| I say all of this even though I am very skeptical that
| anyone will achieve L5 self-driving with where the state of
| things are today. But Karpathy and team are very pragmatic
| and making lots of good decisions coupled with excellent
| engineering and infrastructure development.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Tesla relies on geographic whitelists to suppress problematic
| signals from their radar. Not what I'd want from an FSD
| machine.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I can't really see how Tesla would have more data than
| Google, who have been mapping the entire world for decades.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| Similarly, Waymo stopped a bulk of their live testing and
| switched to simulation _because_ they had so much data.
| mdoms wrote:
| > It's not implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at
| FSD faster than Google.
|
| It absolutely is implausible.
| thereare5lights wrote:
| > pre-mapped environments
|
| this raises the question of: what happens when those
| environments change?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD.
|
| Fools and their money. Like most every expensive car, Teslas
| are luxury vehicles and fashion statements. People buy them
| because they are cool. That product was delivered. As for
| future features, nobody should believe Telsa's advertising any
| more than we do Microsoft's advertising about how the next
| version of Windows will solve all our computing problems. The
| hamburger never looks as good as it does in the commercial.
| Demanding such things post-purchase, after the test drive
| demonstrates the deficiencies of the real product, is simply
| buyers remorse.
| nullc wrote:
| I believe the person you're responding to was referring to
| specifically to the add-on pre-order for full self driving,
| not the entire car.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| As was I. Consumers had an opportunity to test drive the
| wanted feature and find it lacking, or read reviews of the
| same. Tesla hid nothing. If customers want to spend money
| on hope for the future then that is their right. They paid
| for hope and that is what they got.
| somebehemoth wrote:
| > Tesla hid nothing.
|
| They deceptively claimed that for additional money the
| customers' cars would be enhanced in the future with FSD.
| They then made that claim again each time they failed to
| deliver. They continue to make this claim and people are
| trusting it.
|
| A lie hides the truth.
| mdoms wrote:
| They haven't even released the feature yet.
| legolas2412 wrote:
| > Tesla hid nothing.
|
| But they lied a lot though, right? "Cross county automous
| summon in 2017" "Coast to coast autonomous drive in 2018"
| "Tesla driverless taxis in 2019" are a few examples. One
| may hold the view that Elon musk can make grandiose
| statements about solving AGI and nuclear fusion in 1 hour
| and make futuristic statements about that, but when does
| it go from projection to lying?
| coding123 wrote:
| That hamburger sure TASTES better than it does in the
| commercial.
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| But then the hamburgers used to make food ads are made from
| plastic and most definitely fake as food goes soggy and off
| when subjected to lamps used in studio's.
| argc wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the USA has consumer protection laws against
| deceptive advertising, so a company can't just say whatever
| they want when selling a product in order to convince someone
| to buy it. Maybe Tesla protected themselves with clauses in
| the purchase contracts that absolves them from having to pay
| the purchaser back in the event of their own failure to
| deliver, but I think a FSD purchaser might have a case just
| based on Elon's verbal promises that have failed to come true
| over and over again.
| leesec wrote:
| "If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors
| don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this."
|
| 10 years ago this might have read:
|
| "If General Motors can't do it with its massive resources and
| sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| General Motors is offering unpaid but fully driverless rides
| in California now. They, like Waymo, are ahead of Tesla, and
| likely to remain there.
|
| Tesla's unique strength, when it comes to autonomy as opposed
| to battery-electric vehicles, is selling hype.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| Of course this ignores that super cruise is considered safer
| and better on the same tasks that it's allowed to do as Tesla
| FSD by third party analysts. The difference is GM is less
| willing to allow it to be enabled for dangerous beta driving
| unlike Tesla which clearly doesn't care about consistency or
| safety.
| leesec wrote:
| I meant 10 years ago people might have assumed if GM can't
| make the electric car work than Tesla can't either, and yet
| here we are.
| samfisher83 wrote:
| The ev1 was a pretty good car for it's time. It had a lot
| of fans. Battery tech got better. An electric car is
| theoretically much simpler than an ice car.
| InTheArena wrote:
| And when you look into thoose reports - the only reason
| they rank Super Cruise higher is because it can only be
| used on a very limited number of roads, and uses a camera
| to detect awareness.
|
| FSD uses a camera, and works on all roads - and is
| dramatically better then supercruise.
|
| source - test drove both, bought the tesla because of how
| impressed I was with supercruise.
| leesec wrote:
| Don't know why you're downvoted this is 100% accurate.
| ElFitz wrote:
| While I do get your point and have my own doubts, I fail to see
| how this is a fair argument:
|
| > If Google can't do it with its massive resources
|
| The companies behind the SLS had and have an enormous amount of
| resources. Yet, they have failed to even launch it.
|
| Arianespace has a huge amount of resources and experience too.
| Yet, when asked, they said landing a rocket couldn't be done.
| Then, back-pedalling, that it was pointless and would never
| make any economic sense.
|
| Yet, SpaceX has developed three generations of rockets (Falcon
| 1, 9 and heavy), builds them, launches them, iterates on them,
| lands them, reuses them, and is now working on a fourth rocket
| (SuperHeavy).
|
| They have also created 4 different rocket engines and are
| working on two others.
|
| Honestly, where are Boeing and Arianespace?
|
| Another example? Microsoft, their incredible wealth of
| resources and superior position falling flat on their face with
| smartphones.
|
| Funnily enough, Google getting the greatest share of the global
| smartphone OS market, despite having had no real experience
| with operating systems, consumer hardware, or licensing
| operating systems before.
|
| Kodak, which had some of the first patent on digital camera
| sensors, going pretty much extinct despite their massive
| resources and market position.
|
| Xerox, failing to ever enter the personal computer market
| despite designing what everyone else would copy for the next 10
| or 20 years.
|
| Sure, the amounts of resources and experience seem to help, a
| lot, but it also certainly doesn't seem to help reliably
| predict any outcome.
| ctvo wrote:
| > Yet, SpaceX has developed three generations of rockets
| (Falcon 1, 9 and heavy), builds them, launches them, iterates
| on them, lands them, reuses them, and is now working on a
| fourth rocket (SuperHeavy).
|
| What does SpaceX have to do with Tesla? They're owned by a
| billionaire with his attention split, but otherwise are
| structured differently, are in different industries, and most
| likely have different cultures.
|
| The cult of worshipping a single person has got to stop.
| ElFitz wrote:
| You will notice that I expand my point way beyond SpaceX,
| and even start by stating
|
| > While I do get your point and have my own doubts [...]
| Infinitesimus wrote:
| The parent's point is less about Elon and more about the
| fact fact all the resources in the world means nothing if
| you do not have the right team, culture and incentives to
| pull it off.
| diegocg wrote:
| The problem with your comparison is that the company that is
| "the spacex of FSD" is Waymo. And even them can not get FSD
| right.
| ElFitz wrote:
| Who would be Boeing then?
|
| Because almost no company has much more serious experience
| with self-driving cars, let alone FSD.
| dnautics wrote:
| Isn't comma.ai the SpaceX of fsd?
| magicalist wrote:
| > _Isn 't comma.ai the SpaceX of fsd?_
|
| Astra, maybe?
|
| Difficult analogy because the barrier to entry's a lot
| lower for car mods vs orbital rocketry kits :)
| Wheaties466 wrote:
| while it is disappointing that the true FSD may never
| materialize on cars that paid for it nearing EOL. The FSD beta
| 9 looks pretty impressive and from some videos i've seen have
| made some very difficult driving decisions.
| blueblisters wrote:
| Google is struggling to get hardware integrated with their self
| driving solution. Retrofitting cars with self-driving sensors
| is not easy, and Google does not have the scale yet to convince
| OEM partners to retool assembly lines for the Waymo fleet.
| ra7 wrote:
| Source for them struggling? All the hardware upfitting is
| done by Magna, one of the biggest names in auto
| manufacturing, who are also a Waymo investor. There's a
| reason they chose the Jaguar I-Pace which is also
| manufactured by Magna.
| bitsoda wrote:
| I'm happy for their efforts and hope my kids never have to drive
| unless they want to, but I still think we're 20+ years out from
| level 4+ autonomy. Maybe when Waymo tests in a city that has
| weather -- like anywhere in the Northeast -- I'll be more
| enthusiastic.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-08-24 23:01 UTC)