[HN Gopher] Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
___________________________________________________________________
Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
Author : ra7
Score : 157 points
Date : 2024-06-25 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (waymo.com)
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| Living here for the last 10 years, it's been jarring how just in
| the last few years, driverless taxis went from "it'll never
| happen" to "is this the default now?"
|
| The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking
| them every time.
| xeromal wrote:
| I was riding a bike yesterday with a Waymo behind me and was
| impressed with how much confidence it gave me that it knew I
| was there.
| Abroszka wrote:
| > driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this
| the default now?"
|
| That's still far away, these are not driverless cars, there is
| always a driver monitoring, but they monitor not one but many
| cars, ready to take over.
| ra7 wrote:
| Highly recommend people read how Waymo's fleet response works
| before throwing out phrases like "remote drivers take over
| cars": https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
| Abroszka wrote:
| There is someone to take over as soon as the car encounters
| something it cannot handle. It's not self driving. By
| definition it's not driverless, there is always a driver
| assigned who will take care of it if needed. One of the
| reason they cannot scale beyond small areas.
| alphabetting wrote:
| Do you think the remote operators are driving the
| vehicles? They can only give the car instructions (pull
| over, go back to depot etc). In no sense are they
| driving.
| ra7 wrote:
| Assistance != taking over.
|
| It's driverless by definition because... there's no
| driver in the seat. The car is in control and is
| responsible for its safety at all times.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Regardless of the definition, I can't buy and own such a
| "driverless car" because I don't operate a supervision
| center with people available to "assist" the car.
| Whatever "assist" means. Nor can any company that's not
| large enough to operate the infrastructure.
|
| I'm sure at least some of the hype is in regards to
| people owning such "driverless" cars.
|
| It's driverless by definition because it does not have a
| driver, but it's not autonomous by definition, because it
| requires outside help to function. Cool hair splitting.
| It's an impressive technical feat for sure. In regards to
| perceived benefits for society, it's part of the way
| there, as it reduces the number of humans required to
| driver from 1 per car to 0.something per car.
| ra7 wrote:
| These cars are not meant to be owned. They're part of a
| fleet.
|
| They are driverless and specifically L4 autonomous, which
| is the best autonomy you can get right now. The vehicles
| that can operate without _any_ help doesn 't exist.
| You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your
| expectation.
| lucianbr wrote:
| No, what you explained is 100% what I expected.
| Driverless cars for Google. For me, I'll be waiting a
| loong time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _vehicles that can operate without any help doesn 't
| exist. You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your
| expectation_
|
| Eh, I'd say we're a decade out from an L5 vehicle. It'll
| officially be L4, on road only. But that matches a good
| fraction of American drivers' capabilities.
| dventimi wrote:
| How many someones are there per active vehicle?
| xnx wrote:
| Where did you get this information? There are definitely
| people ready to respond to any requests from the car or
| passenger when they come up, but I've never read anything to
| indicate that each ride is actively monitored by a person.
| Abroszka wrote:
| Search for "driver monitoring system". As soon as there is
| something unexpected there is an actual driver taking care
| of it. Also the reason why it's not level 5, but stuck at
| level 4 self driving.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That's not "always a driver monitoring". They're not
| actively monitoring all of them all of the time, they're
| responding to requests from the car.
|
| And they're not drivers, they're supervisors. They don't
| take over driving, AFAICT they issue high-level commands
| like "safe to proceed", "take the right lane", et cetera.
| Abroszka wrote:
| There is always somebody ready to respond. Of course they
| can't take full control, that would be stupid dangerous,
| but they can still control the car. They even have people
| who go to your car to get it unstuck manually when
| needed.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _There is always somebody ready to respond_
|
| I mean, this is true for Uber as well.
| dventimi wrote:
| How many cars does each person monitor?
| __loam wrote:
| Nobody is driving the car remotely, that would be an
| enormous liability. The car calls in and either asks the
| operator to make a decision for them or tell it where to
| go. Once they do that, the car handles the how. You're
| making a lot of proclamations about this stuff without a
| strong understanding about how it works.
| Stevvo wrote:
| If you could rent/purchase a vehicle without a steering
| wheel, would you not _want_ there to be someone available who
| can help out when the system runs into trouble? As long as
| there is no driver in the car, does it matter _how_ it
| drives? Is that not just an irrelevant implementation detail
| that has no bearing on your passenger experience?
| lucianbr wrote:
| As long as it requires some humans to be available to
| "assist", I'm not sure anyone would sell or buy such a
| vehicle. Or rent in the "car rental" sense. Taxi service is
| what makes sense.
|
| If I own the car, and I'm sending it to do errands for me
| while I work or sleep, seems like the cost of someone being
| available to "assist" it at short notice would be
| prohibitive. Unless it requires assistance once a month or
| so.
| dventimi wrote:
| If you're sending it to do errands, you might consider
| also sending it out to take riders, as a side hustle. Do
| that, and you're now a taxicab service.
|
| Point being, I suspect many people don't _want_ to own
| any vehicle, whatever level of automation it has (which
| could be none). The reason we do is that taking taxis
| everywhere is too expensive. If that cost can be brought
| down, however it 's done (computer brain, cab driver,
| capuchin monkey, whatever), many people will be happy to
| forgo owning a vehicle.
| lucianbr wrote:
| I think you meant to reply to the person I replied to.
| dventimi wrote:
| At this point I have no idea who's who in this thread
| anymore. Sorry.
| __loam wrote:
| The waymo I took on Sunday didn't have a driver.
| tomoyoirl wrote:
| I don't look forward to taking them and choose other drivers,
| mostly because the price and wait time dynamics are a little
| funny, but I am glad I did take a ride or two. They're much
| better drivers in the sense of "not interested in pushing any
| limits." They navigated around a parked truck effectively,
| queueing and waiting their turn to go into the opposing lane
| behind some other cars. The perception display of surrounding
| people and cars was very comforting. My only moment of fear was
| a sudden stop because a wrong-way bicyclist had lurched out
| into traffic -- that'd happen with any driver, unless we hit
| the guy. Yeah, I guess you can cone them, they're that
| conservative of drivers.
|
| It's clear that they're not the cars for me to worry about out
| there on a bike / on foot / etc.
| miohtama wrote:
| Does this mean the self-driving cars are finally here?
|
| Where next?
| icey wrote:
| They've been in Phoenix for the past two years (generally
| available for the past year). They're so commonplace now, I
| don't think anyone really notices them.
| xnx wrote:
| Austin https://waymo.com/waymo-one-austin/
| rwmj wrote:
| London hopefully. Maybe one day soon I can get rid of my car.
| archagon wrote:
| You can't get rid of your car in London, one of the best
| public transit cities in the world...?
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| I haven't taken a ride in one of those yet, what does it feel
| like?
| 649nanos wrote:
| > I haven't taken a ride in one of those yet, what does it feel
| like?
|
| Like grandma driving. In a good way.
|
| Less jerky motion, cars don't smell bad, less motion sickness
| while looking at your phone.
| skyyler wrote:
| Ubers don't smell bad until someone shits or pukes in one.
|
| I can't imagine these will be any different...
| xnx wrote:
| About half the Ubers I get in have overpowering air
| "fresheners" (perfumes). I'll always roll down a window
| unless the driver has disabled it (which is one more thing
| not to like about Ubers).
| skyyler wrote:
| Without those perfumes the scent of vomit and faeces
| would be more present.
| tayo42 wrote:
| How do you they stop you from trashing these? Or getting
| into one that isn't clean?
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| They do have cameras pointed inwards, so passengers are
| monitored and I'm sure the remote operators can see car
| condition as well.
| nova22033 wrote:
| so "Driven by Ms. Daisy"
| taylorlapeyre wrote:
| They are extremely nice compact SUVs (Jaguars), extremely nice
| interiors with displays (like Teslas) that show the entire
| surrounding area with visualizations of what the car can see,
| you can choose music and air conditioning, and the driving is
| extremely good -- equivalent to a typical safe (albeit slow)
| Uber driver.
| cawlfy wrote:
| I've only taken them twice but I was surprised by how smooth it
| was. They're pretty defensive drivers, which is what you want,
| but were still able to navigate some tricky stop signs (e.g. a
| biker biking along stopped cars, pedestrians trying to cross in
| both directions) without getting totally paralyzed.
|
| It's a really uncanny feeling when it pulls out into traffic
| for the first time and the car is driving itself. I have a
| Tesla, so I've played around with autopilot, but being in the
| back seat and not being responsible for the car at all is a
| crazy feeling. Legitimately one of the most "oh my god I'm
| living in the future moments" I've experienced in recent
| memory.
|
| Pick up and drop offs get snapped to specific areas so I had to
| walk ~1.5 blocks on either end which wasn't a big deal for me,
| but could see how that might be annoying/difficult for others.
| xeromal wrote:
| What are the odds. I'm in SF this week for work and joined the
| waitlist last night. lol.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I'm always struct by how much more slowly driverless cars has
| been deployed than what I expected when the first won the darpa
| grand challenge. I guess I understand the need for caution. By
| the time this goes nationwide, I expect it will be pretty damned
| solid.
| avrionov wrote:
| The need for caution is one reason, but the other reason is the
| huge capital expenses which are needed to deploy a fleet of
| cars in a major city.
| ra7 wrote:
| Add freeways and airport rides, both of which they are very close
| to doing, Waymo will become much more of a complete service and a
| true Uber/Lyft replacement.
|
| In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale
| in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities),
| especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A
| possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US
| government.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities)_
|
| If I had to guess, I'd say Atlanta, San Diego, Houston and
| Miami.
| ra7 wrote:
| They're testing in DC and giving media rides there. So DC is
| a candidate too.
| ajcp wrote:
| 1: Airport rides are already available in Phoenix between 10PM
| and 6AM.
|
| 2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone
| driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving
| it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding
| that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the
| limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed
| of travel required. That is: the sensors cannot see far enough
| ahead to react comfortably when going above N miles-per-hour.
| That might be a dated understanding of the issue though...
|
| Source: I've been riding Weymo since 2019 when it first went
| public beta (NDA-restricted use). Rode one last night coming
| home from the airport!
| Lisdexamfeta wrote:
| Airport rides in Phoenix are always available, but apart from
| the hours you note, Waymo drops riders off at the 24th or
| 44th Street Sky Train locations.
| ajcp wrote:
| Apologies, you are correct. I took OPs meaning to be that
| capability that Uber/Lyft operators can already provide at
| Sky Harbor.
| ra7 wrote:
| I meant airport rides to the terminal at all hours of the
| day.
|
| Waymo is already giving driverless freeway rides to employees
| in Phoenix, so I don't agree that it's far away. It's
| definitely a different challenge though.
| ajcp wrote:
| Are they really? Only in Chandler or throughout?
| ra7 wrote:
| I know from their announcements that they give freeway
| rides to employees in Phoenix area. They're also
| frequently spotted in Bay Area and Austin freeways, but
| with safety drivers.
| prasoonds wrote:
| I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an
| incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too
| (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious.
|
| The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within
| 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If
| I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and
| driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly longer wait and
| slightly more fare, I'd choose the Waymo every time.
|
| (I have no affiliation with Waymo, Google or any related industry
| - it's just an amazing service!)
| tapoxi wrote:
| Wouldn't the Ubers potentially be cleaner? Who's cleaning the
| Waymo between rides?
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Potentially. But, with each driver exercising quality control
| over their own vehicles, the actual result will likely vary
| from hitting as good or better a standard to being worse. The
| Waymo standards, thus far, are pretty high, so I would expect
| on average Uber/Lyft/Etc. would fair worse on average.
| kungito wrote:
| I have no doubt that Google is waiting for more adoption
| before starting to cut costs everywhere and before you know
| it your puked out ride will direct you to www.waymo.hr/help
| to find an article which resolves your issue
| dventimi wrote:
| Why would that be any different from Uber? Doesn't Uber
| also want to cut costs?
| kungito wrote:
| Uber has partner drivers which have their own companies,
| their own rating, and can be punished for their
| behaviour. Once a company completely vertically
| integrates (like Google would like), meaning they have
| their own cars, they no longer want to punish themselves
| for bad behaviour/cars. Since they have to choose between
| short term cost of higher maintenance fee or long term
| cost of loss of quality of service their managers will
| start to optimize for quarterly results: cutting short
| term costs. What they want is to first entrench the
| market, push out competitors, introduce complex
| regulation and fees which prevents new competitors into
| the market and then start cutting costs everywhere they
| can and increase prices.
|
| Since you mention Uber, I can definitely see in my city
| how the quality of cars decreased and they started using
| almost inclusively cheap immigrants who realistically
| couldn't pass a drivers exam in my country and have on
| multiple occasions driven into wrong directions/ran red
| lights etc.
| dventimi wrote:
| I didn't understand any of that.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Waymo is posiionting itself as a premium product.
| Defending that brand precludes letting the cars go to
| shit.
| dventimi wrote:
| Yup. Plus, _if_ Waymo can clean its cars with greater
| efficiency at lower cost than Uber can, then all other
| things being equal, Waymo will have cleaner cars.
| rurp wrote:
| Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through
| messier cars. But they _can_ do things like increase
| prices after taking over a market, which they have not
| been at all shy about doing.
| dventimi wrote:
| > _Uber doesn 't really have a way to increase profit
| through messier cars_
|
| Don't they? Allowing messier, older, and less pleasant
| cars would increase the supply of drivers, allowing Uber
| to place lower bids on those drivers, lower their prices,
| increase volume and revenue, and increase profit.
| rurp wrote:
| I would be surprised if the Waymp cars weren't
| exceptionally nice in this phase, while they're trying hard
| to gain market share and trust. Google Search was a clean
| and delightful experience once upon a time. The aspect I'm
| more interested in is what the experience will be like if
| they ever become a dominant transport option.
| dventimi wrote:
| I've taken 38 Waymo rides so far. Every one of them has been
| very clean, cleaner than the average Uber ride.
| cwillu wrote:
| Is that a function of the limited population in the beta
| though?
| scarby2 wrote:
| i wonder if it's a function of a consistent cleaning
| schedule. Many uber drivers seem to wait far to long
| between interior cleans.
| dventimi wrote:
| No idea. I'm just reporting on what's already actually
| happened in the past (my ride experiences) instead of
| speculating on what might happen in the future.
| pb7 wrote:
| It's a function of the _filtered_ population. The cars
| are at full capacity day and night so the increased
| number of users won 't affect a single car's cleanliness
| nearly as much as the type of people that will be riding
| in them.
| dventimi wrote:
| What do you mean by the type of people who will be riding
| in them?
| fragmede wrote:
| That's a loaded question, but sure, let's go there. The
| problem with public transportation is that the public is
| allowed to use them, and the rules, legal and social, are
| not well defined or enforced. Assaulting other passengers
| is generally tolerated by the system, depending on the
| type of assault. Physical assault is considered too far
| and doesn't go unnoticed, but chemical and audio assault
| on fellow passengers usually goes unreported. The types
| of people are those who would assault others on some
| fashion.
|
| Whether this translates to Waymos smelling like meth or
| fentanyl when you get in them thanks to the previous
| rider remains to be seen. Or just needles, foil, or used
| condoms left behind. They record video, so Google could
| close the person's account so they won't be able to book
| Waymos with that account again, so we'll end up having to
| see how hard it is to create new accounts to use Waymo on
| to ban nuisance riders.
| xnx wrote:
| Waymo's have cameras inside the car to make sure the vehicles
| are clean: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819
| fragmede wrote:
| Yeah they probably pipe that video to an algorithm that
| does background subtraction so they're able to assert that
| the vehicle is clear of foreign objects, but those cameras
| don't detect smell. If someone defecates and wipes it
| somewhere the camera doesn't see, then what?
| orbisvicis wrote:
| Another comment, another thread mentioned that Waymo requires
| more walking than an equivalent Uber ride - to the pickup
| location, from the drop-off location. Anyone know why this
| might be true?
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| I'll hazard a guess: because Uber drivers are sometimes
| willing to stop for a minute in an illegal spot to park to do
| a quick pick up or drop off, and Waymos are never willing to
| do that (presumably).
| mikeodds wrote:
| Last night a waymo dropped me off near the giants game.
| Presumably somewhere you aren't meant to stop as I heard a
| security guard on loudspeaker asking "the car with the
| display on top" to move along as I was walking away, but
| the car wouldn't move as there was still relatively fast
| traffic moving past it.
|
| I've had to walk a few times near steep hills, I was
| wondering if partly it was due to the angle of approach and
| the sensor view being blocked so they avoid the area?
| gst wrote:
| During one of my last Waymo rides the car stopped on Powell
| between Bush and Sutter (facing South stopping on the
| regular lane a bit before the Powell/Sutter crossing). This
| caused other drivers to drive on the cable car tracks to go
| around the Waymo (which are separated from the driving lane
| with a double yellow line) and it caused a truck to do a
| right turn directly from the cable car tracks (as there
| wasn't enough space to merge back into the lane).
|
| Not sure if was legal or not for the Waymo to stop there,
| but given that Waymo stops take quite a bit longer than
| stops with Uber/Lyft (as it takes a while for the car to
| continue driving) this was one of the worst places possible
| to stop. Especially as there would have been space
| available right after the crossing next to Walgreens.
| smugma wrote:
| I've seen a Waymo stop and pick up a rider at Octavia and
| Linden. If you look at a map, you can see that it's totally
| blocking all traffic.
|
| Double parking is legal (in some cases) in California, but
| this wouldn't be allowed under any reasonable
| interpretation.
|
| I've also seen Waymos double parked on both sides of the
| street, which blocks other cars from going around them.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Human taxi drivers are okay parking illegally to do pick-
| ups/drop-offs, and we as a society usually tolerate that, as
| long as they're quick about it.
|
| But Waymo probably isn't comfortable telling its cars to park
| in many illegal parts of streets, even if it's going to be
| quick. Partially because determining which illegal parking
| jobs are socially acceptable vs unacceptable is a hard
| determination for a robot to make.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Is there any kind of limit to them besides the geofence? Can
| you get a Waymo at night? In the rain? I suppose it never snows
| there. How about roadworks? How do they react to vehicles with
| emergency signals? Can they follow directions of a cop in the
| street?
| xnx wrote:
| No. Yes. Yes. Waymo's have been taught to handle construction
| and emergency signals. Waymo's can follow hand directions
| from a cop in the street.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Are there no freeways inside the geofence? Someone in the
| thread mentions that they will be adding freeways soon, so
| I understand it can't do those now.
| xnx wrote:
| Good point. Not sure what the status is in SF. They're
| working on it in Phoenix:
| https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-
| freew...
| aetherson wrote:
| There are freeways within the geofence in SF. My
| understanding is that Waymos will not drive on those
| freeways without a safety driver for now.
| ramonverse wrote:
| While they pick up in almost every location the drop off is
| sometimes "close by" like 3min walk to final destination (the
| app tells you in advance tho so you can decide to order or
| not). This is quite annoying sometimes and I picked uber
| instead.
| __loam wrote:
| https://waymo.com/blog/2022/02/utilizing-key-point-and-
| pose-....
| choppaface wrote:
| They are starting to obstruct bike lanes just like Ubers,
| I've seen this happen 3-4 times and it's documented here:
| https://sfba.social/@SafeStreetRebel/112634004752866771
|
| Years ago they were very respectful and conservative of basic
| road markings but clearly they have now 'expanded
| capabilities'
| pengaru wrote:
| So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of
| stopping abruptly.
|
| source: I commute by skateboard in SF daily. Just yesterday an
| empty Waymo cruised straight through a fresh red, narrowly
| missing my entry into the crosswalk.
|
| But don't get me started on what I've seen human drivers do on
| the same streets. Just annoyed that Waymo's aren't better.
| choppaface wrote:
| Have also nearly been hit as a pedestrian by a Waymo. I also
| last week saw a Waymo blow through a yellow-red very
| aggressively, so I think the downvotes on above comment are
| intensely biased.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The way you can tell that a mode of transport is very safe
| is there are tons of people online whining that they
| _almost_ got killed by it.
| archagon wrote:
| No. It means it's only a matter of time before this
| technology breaks the law and kills someone.
| Swizec wrote:
| Competing anecdata: Yesterday I was running downtown and a
| Waymo stopped for me at a green light because it wasn't sure
| if I was gonna jaywalk (jayrun?). Only once I stood still for
| a few seconds did it continue to make its turn.
|
| This was in a turn-left-only intersection with a separate
| pedestrian light. Maybe the Waymo got confused and thought I
| also had green.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Could also be that they're taught to be overly cautious to
| avoid suicidally stupid humans
| bragr wrote:
| I got access to Waymo in LA a few weeks ago and have taken it 4
| times. It's capabilities are impressive for sure, but I'm not
| sure I'd go as far as "smooth and sure ride". The car's skills
| seems to vary between impressive and "nervous new driver". It
| drives like someone that got randomly stuck into a much bigger
| car than they are used to.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I'd say the same, maybe. But yesterday I had an Uber with a guy
| that had a degree in history and a love for SF lore, and told
| me about the tomb of Starr King, and then I went on a quest to
| find it with my friend. Just saying that there's magic out
| there that's not technological.
| mlboss wrote:
| Not so difficult to add this feature with the help of human
| like voice and LLM backend.
| darkteflon wrote:
| Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Hacker News.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Just saying that there's magic out there that's not
| technological.
|
| Dark magic too, I've been on one too many rides where the
| driver insists on monologuing on topics that range from
| detestable (politics) to alarming (the driver was armed, and
| had picked me up from the airport)
| fragmede wrote:
| I have women friends who have been physically assaulted by
| human drivers.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| I love how we've gone from _" Taxis are gross and dirty, that's
| why I love Uber!"_ to _" Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why
| I love Waymo!"_ in the span of 5 years.
|
| What do you think comes next? These cars are literally
| unsupervised.
| alphadog_78 wrote:
| Mr: Musk, It's your move now, Please go ahead ;-)
| kelsey98765431 wrote:
| I remember almost 10 years ago, maybe 8 i first saw one of these
| up in the city. It was parked and the technician was outside of
| it with an ipad, and i happened to strike up a conversation with
| the gentleman. I was just curious and at first he was remarkably
| cagey, i was quite confused and just continued to be friendly and
| express hope for the projects success and for automation in
| general.
|
| I got the feeling that man had been accosted many times by angry
| locals and I may have been the first to give a word of
| encouragement, he was very polite after the initial tension wore
| away and he felt my shared enthusiasm. He must have been one of
| the early engineers, I had never seen or heard the name waymo but
| I was aware google had been competing in the level 1/2 dessert
| tests.
|
| The man was very friendly and i was surprised how his behavior
| must be a reflection of society's view towards technical
| automation. Seeing the videos of people kicking food delivery
| robots and now my own tendency to flip off elon musks tesla
| cameras all these years later I am starting to get why he was
| nervous.
|
| Cheers to the future I suppose, but hopefully the future has less
| cars and more walkable cities.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| In the future, when you're old and quite possibly disabled, you
| might rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing.
|
| I mean, it's easy to say "just walk (or ride a bike)" when
| you're 22 years old and in prime health, but the population in
| most First World countries is rapidly aging.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| A walkable city doesn't preclude driving. In fact it often
| improves it. If almost everybody is walking or biking or
| using transit that means there are few other cars and driving
| becomes much nicer too.
| spankalee wrote:
| Old and handicapped people have lived before cars, and in
| less car-centric cities forever. Walkable cities mainly mean
| that things are close to you so you _can_ walk to them.
|
| Actual car-free areas, like the access-controlled dense old
| towns in Europe, are possible (if built-out where they don't
| exist), but not necessarily to be walkable.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Old and handicapped people have lived before cars, and in
| less car-centric cities forever.
|
| Yes. And they suffered for it.
|
| > access-controlled dense old towns in Europe
|
| Europe is about the size of a postage stamp. Oregon is
| bigger than the UK. Texas is larger than France. Alaska and
| many Canadian provinces and territories are larger than the
| entire EU..
| krisoft wrote:
| "Walkable cities" doesn't mean that everyone is forced to
| walk everywhere. It means that there are destinations
| (grocery store, restaurant, pub, library, cinema, hospital
| etc) you can reach within walking distance without having to
| play frogger on a highway. They are absolutely a boon to
| someone old and disabled. They can use assistive devices,
| public transport, and even cars to get around.
|
| I think you have the wrong impression about what "walkable
| cities" mean.
| a_c_s wrote:
| The biggest reason people loose muscle mass as they age is
| due to lack of use, so a built environment that encourages
| walking is going to help keep people in shape to walk as they
| age.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a built environment that encourages walking is going to
| help keep people in shape to walk as they age_
|
| It's the reason New Yorkers live longer [1].
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/29/health/l
| ife-e...
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Why not just put Granny on a treadmill and have someone
| standing behind her to administer electric shocks?
|
| Walking HURTS if you have arthritis, and that has
| absolutely nothing to do with "muscle mass".
|
| P.S. It's "lose".
| addicted wrote:
| Many things incorrect here.
|
| Better driving can only get you from 1 curb to another. You
| still have to walk to your actual destination whether it's to
| the other end of the mall, or to your home's door. In no way
| is this any worse in a walkable city which will not only
| allow you to walk everywhere when you're able, therefore
| delaying any loss in walking capabilities, but will also
| include better and more accessible public and private curb to
| curb transportation.
|
| A walkable city will also make the curb to actual destination
| far more walkable.
|
| A walkable city will also mean a lot more options are
| accessible to the disabled through their wheelchairs, etc.
| vdnkh wrote:
| Yeah I wonder what people do, and have done, around the world
| in walkable communities predating the car. Perhaps people in
| these communities are on average more mobile into old age
| because they frequently walked?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Yeah I wonder what people do, and have done, around the
| world in walkable communities predating the car
|
| They suffered and died.
|
| Just like they suffered and died because there wasn't high
| blood pressure medication. Or air conditioners. Or any
| number of other things.
|
| Go out and live a year or two in a pre-car society, then
| get back to me. It sucked ass even as a healthy young
| person.
|
| Lots of unempathetic youngsters in this thread. Some day
| you'll know. Sooner than you think.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _when you 're old and quite possibly disabled, you might
| rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing_
|
| Manhattan is _incredibly_ senior friendly.
| jeffbee wrote:
| NY is an AARP top-10 most livable city alongside other
| pedestrian-centric cities like Boston and San Francisco.
| Orlando and Tulsa conspicuously absent. Aging in car cities
| sucks.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| The AARP is an organization that's mainly in the business
| of selling crappy overpriced insurance policies in order
| to pay out massive salaries to its execs.
|
| You know that, right?
| jeffbee wrote:
| Many more disabled people are disabled in a way that prevents
| them from driving a car than in ways that prevent them from
| walking. There is also a huge class of people who are
| physically capable of driving but legally barred from it.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Many more disabled people are disabled in a way that
| prevents them from driving a car than in ways that prevent
| them from walking.
|
| I'm sorry, but this is patent nonsense.
| tayo42 wrote:
| How much do these cost? Is it cheaper then uber/lyft, taxis?
| Muni? That would be pretty crazy
| elforce002 wrote:
| $300,000 per car. They're burning billions trying to go
| mainstream.
| ra7 wrote:
| 4 year old quote from their former CEO: "It costs as much as
| a moderately equipped S-class".
|
| That's around $150,000.
| gary_0 wrote:
| That's what I've read, about $150-200k:
| https://blog.dshr.org/2023/11/robotaxi-economics.html
| swozey wrote:
| Do these need a significant amount of local infrastructure
| (parking, charging, etc) specific to Waymo that would make them
| moving into a new city (Austin is next) a big investment? Like
| will there need to be a big Waymo fleet center/office built in
| each city?
|
| I'm not sure if these park and someone plugs them in or what, who
| maintains the actual Jaguars, etc.
|
| Can't wait to never _have_ to drive a car again.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Depends on your definition of "significant". They require at
| least one depot in each city where they operate. The depot
| handles charging, cleaning, inspection, repair, and parking
| during low-demand times. Each depot is different since they are
| generally leased buildings or lots in light industrial areas.
| You can search on YouTube to see them.
| swozey wrote:
| Thanks! Found the perfect video. He talks about the depots
| here, there are some that are full service and some that are
| not. These are actually a lot bigger than I was expecting and
| have a bunch of staff.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QZ3e7mWD9E
| petters wrote:
| The app is not available in my region (EU). But I visit SF from
| time to time. What should I do?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| This is both amazing and horrifying. I'm actually confident this
| automation will save lives. Well of course any system can fail,
| Uber drivers are often distracted by 30 things, they're fiddling
| with the app, on personal calls, while navigating tricky traffic
| situations.
|
| However I predict within a decade or so we're going to get to a
| point where gig work is no longer feasible. It'll take a bit of
| trickery, but I'm sure you could have restaurants opt in to
| putting their own food in the backseat of these. And then as a
| consumer you would just get your own food from the car .
|
| So think about every delivery driver, and every Uber driver, and
| many other gig workers. All of these people are going to be out
| of work very soon. Plus tons of creatives will be replaced by AI.
| AI will reduce the need for junior software engineers .
|
| I don't think the modern economy is ready for this. If I had one
| wish, it would be to at least decouple employment from health
| care. As is, let's say you have a serious illness that requires
| you to resign or otherwise not have employment for an extended
| period of time. You're now stuck with a serious illness and no
| health care. Depending on the state unless you're a child or
| parent you're not qualifying for Medicare period.
|
| Has anyone figured out, who exactly gets sued when one of these
| Waymo's hits someone.
| dventimi wrote:
| If gig work is such a good job perhaps you should consider
| doing it.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| A lot of people depend on those job to survive. We need some
| type of off-ramp if we're going to just wipe out a large
| section of the economy .
|
| I've worked horrible jobs before, and I needed the money to
| survive. Not everyone can write Ruby code and make 300k a
| year.
| dventimi wrote:
| > _We need some type of off-ramp_
|
| Now, we're talking. Often, there will be handwringing about
| low-wage jobs from people who wouldn't dream of working
| low-wage jobs and who benefit from the existence of low-
| wage jobs. Often, that will be invoked as a rebuke to
| automation. But, automation in general isn't a threat to
| workers or well-being. In fact it's productivity gain which
| benefits well-being by lowering costs and raising living
| standards. If a portion of those productivity gains aren't
| used to help the people they displace, that's a matter of
| _policy_ not of _technology_.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Oddly enough people are self-regulating, so few people
| are having children now because modern economics makes it
| a bad idea for most people .
|
| In my grandfather's time you could work a normal job and
| buy yourself a three-bedroom house in what's now one of
| the most expensive cities in America.
|
| If I wanted to buy the same house at the same city, me
| and a partner would both have to make 150k to 200k each.
| And even then we'd barely be middle class, we wouldn't
| really be doing exceptionally well.
|
| Homeownership shouldn't be regulated to the top 5% of
| income earners.
|
| However I don't realistically imagine a tech utopia. I
| think we're headed towards unholy levels of income
| inequality. And income inequality isn't a problem by
| itself. Hypothetically if Billy Bob makes 60k a year, but
| he owns a house worth 400k and he's able to leave it to
| his kids, that's just fine .
|
| The problem emerges when he's renting his home from a
| mega corporation that raises rent by 15% per year, until
| he ends up either homeless ( unhoused, shelter
| challenged, pick your semantic softening) or sharing a
| room with 2 other people.
|
| It's a complicated problem with no clear solution.
| dventimi wrote:
| I feel you. Thing is, I think there is a solution or at
| least part of one, on paper. We _know_ what to do.
| Trouble is, we can 't do it because of politics, politics
| that transcends the usual divisions. It's hard to have a
| tech utopia and deep income inequality without policy to
| make it that way. Policy creates markets, and markets
| create and distribute wealth. How that's done, whether
| evenly or unevenly, is determined by politics, policy,
| and the market structures they create.
|
| Patents, copyrights, subsidies, ZIRP, foreign policy,
| etc., even without reporting to value judgments of "good"
| and "bad" and sticking safely with neutral terms, all
| these things involve trade-offs. They have consequences.
| They do tend to pick winners and losers.
|
| The point is that the shape of society is a matter of
| _choice_ not chance, technology, or divine providence.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Gig work is already not feasible. The only reason anyone
| undertakes it is financial illiteracy. Uber is largely funded
| by the irrational sacrifice of numerous individuals of the
| residual value of their own cars.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's quite feasible. The cost structure only permits those
| e-bike riders in SF to do it reasonably. But it's feasible.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| For anyone else curious about the exact service area:
| https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en
| jessriedel wrote:
| To be clear: Waymo can take you to basically any address in
| those city limits, but it doesn't do so by taking the freeways
| like 101 and 280 that pass through it.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I saw a Waymo on 280 the other day. Maybe it was being driven
| by hand, but the lidar was spinning.
| hypeatei wrote:
| I can't imagine this turning out well if there is any social
| media movement around these cars. It's reminding me of that one
| robot travelling across the country which ended up getting
| destroyed by some people.
| jebby wrote:
| It will turn out well once the newness and novelty of messing
| with them wears off eventually.
| jessriedel wrote:
| They have been slowly expanding service in SF for several
| years. Tens of thousands of people have taken a ride. Actually,
| they give more than 10k rides a week, so probably over a
| hundred thousand people. Scaling up to the whole city (pop:
| 800k) is not that big of a jump.
| yunwal wrote:
| People already have gone around putting traffic cones over the
| car sensors.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1196487085/anonymous-
| protesto....
| renewiltord wrote:
| Just as a comparison, the people who did that also do highway
| protests. There's a video if you'll scroll down a little
| https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/08/activists-block-san-
| franci...
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| While it's still a drop in the bucket compared to human driven
| taxis, it's remarkable that Waymo will like reach 50 million
| passenger only miles this year. And will surpass 100 million
| passenger only miles sometime in 2025.
|
| With that much data the safety case should become very clear.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Except that they have remote humans monitoring every vehicle so
| the whole thing is an illusion and we don't know the truth of
| how safe truly autonomous vehicles are (since they don't
| exist.)
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| 1:1 remote human monitoring would not scale from a unit
| economics perspective, and even if they did that, the remote
| operators can't drive the car, only offer small feedbacks. So
| the car is really driving itself.
|
| The safety story is an interesting one. Companies like Cruise
| and Waymo are not forthcoming with their incident data. They
| share infrequently and through spreadsheets that do not
| capture every incident. It's pretty ass, and I'd be wary of
| trusting their self-reported data. I imagine their insurance
| companies have slightly better data than the gov't, but even
| then maybe not.
| jessriedel wrote:
| Spreadsheets are the best and most open way to share data
| because it lets other people analyze it. But they put out
| plenty of their own research if you want to read that.
|
| I'm really not sure what you mean by "infrequently". They
| release new raw data every 3 or 6 months or something, and
| every single accident is trumpeted in the news. What other
| industry has more publicly accessible safety data?
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| Every software release is a totally new driver. If they
| release software at a cadence of say, 6 or 8 weeks, would
| you feel comfortable riding? You don't know how safe the
| car was during that time -- any part of the driver can
| regress. You're basically trusting that they know how to
| do simulation, that they bore the cost of running that
| simulation, and that their simulator is realistic enough
| to yield trustworthy statistics.
|
| Sadly, our regulatory agencies are currently set up for
| very delayed decisionmaking. Since every company can
| release software at any time, you could imagine a
| regulatory platform that tracks software releases and
| their corresponding safety statistics in real time.
| irjustin wrote:
| > Except that they have remote humans monitoring every
| vehicle so the whole thing is an illusion
|
| I think this argues the opposite of what you think it does.
|
| Monitoring != driving and if you had humans pesudo driving,
| the experience would be insanely bad cuz the human would be
| interjecting way too much.
| greenthrow wrote:
| We don't know how often the humans interject. That's my
| whole point. It's an illusion that the car is operating
| alone. When I drive a Tesla on FSD i only need to interject
| periodically, but it's enough that the car cannot be called
| autonomous IMHO. How many remote human supervisors are
| needed for Waymo vehicles? How often do they interject?
| Without that data it is absurd to call Waymo autonomous.
| foota wrote:
| Waymo operators do not ever drive the vehicle. My
| understanding is that Waymo operators can specify things
| like "take this path" (e.g., by drawing on a map or
| something) or "yes that's safe" but this doesn't
| correspond to the actual driving inputs.
| greenthrow wrote:
| I'd appreciate if they were open and honest about the
| reality of how they operate. But since they keep it very
| secret, I have no choice but to assume the worst. If it
| was impressive rathee than detrimental to their
| valuation, they'd be open about it.
| jessriedel wrote:
| If you mean actual taxis in San Francisco, it's not a drop in
| the bucket. There are 1,800 taxis and compared to 300 Waymos,
| and the latter have a much higher duty cycle. It's true that
| the number of Uber/Lyft is a lot higher, something like 40k
| drivers (who work a widely varying number of hours per week).
|
| Yes, the 100M miles scale is very important, because that's
| about how many miles humans drive until they cause a death.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Is much known about the science behind Waymo? I am impressed that
| the cars can operate autonomously in real life when I see them
| around me. At the same time, they have an enormous number of
| sensors like multiple spinning LIDARs (?). I also read that they
| have to map everything ahead of time to be able to operate in an
| area. That seems a bit like cheating to me. It may work and may
| even be valuable to customers, but it doesn't seem like as big a
| breakthrough as achieving autonomy with the same sensors as
| humans.
| greenthrow wrote:
| Nobody knows the details, e.g. how many humans are monitoring
| per car. It came out at one point that Cruise was using >1
| human per car. What is Waymo doing? We dunno, we just keep
| seeing these absurd puff pieces.
| Heliosmaster wrote:
| But...they are a company, their goal isn't to make
| breakthroughs. Their goal is (eventually?) to make a profit.
| They'll simply use the technology and breakthroughs that allow
| them to get there faster. That's not cheating.. that's business
| aresant wrote:
| Genuine question ->
|
| - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the
| co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has
| been promising it just around corner for years
|
| - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-
| proximity driving and has deployed as a business.
|
| Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla
| actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing
| capability / current deployment of Tesla's?
|
| Disclaimer - I am an Alphabet & Tesla shareholder
| greenthrow wrote:
| 1) Waymo has not "solved" robotaxis as a business. They are not
| profitable and the vehicles are not truly autonomous (the
| humans monitoring the vehicles are merely remote. We don't know
| how many humans are needed per vehicle.)
|
| 2) Tesla has zero even remotely monitored, let alone
| autonomous, miles driven. So no, there is no reason to believe
| Tesla is close to true robotaxis.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Really, you can't repeat this point enough. Tesla has _zero_
| experience in autonomous operation. Their vehicle has not
| ever driven itself any distance, under any circumstances.
| There is no reason to believe their software is on the cusp
| of a sudden improvement. They simply release new major
| version numbers that have different sets of flaws.
| zooq_ai wrote:
| as a Alphabet and Tesla shareholder, this is what is important.
|
| The rate of innovation at Tesla > Waymo
|
| The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo
| FSD
|
| The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering
| Waymo FSD
|
| Tesla has economies of scale. Waymo has all the details figured
| out. Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never
| buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2
| years)
|
| Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll
| play out as that.
|
| Larry, Sergei are extremely poor capital allocators. Musk is
| brilliant (despite him being a narcisstic a*hole).
|
| Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't
| think in terms of economics, just coolness.
|
| Waymo is successful enough to not kill it, but also not a cash-
| flow positive to scale it up
|
| Edit : Tch, Tch expected HN anti-Musk hate showing up in
| downvotes.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| > Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't
| think in terms of economics, just coolness.
|
| Larry/Sergei didn't create the Cybertruck
| zooq_ai wrote:
| They wish they had
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Tesla doesn't even have a single autonomous vehicle yet...
|
| They have driving assist that people still measure in 'number
| of times I had to grab the wheel'.
| shkkmo wrote:
| Tesla is still stuck at Level 3 while Waymo has been
| operating at level 4 for years.
|
| If Tesla does manag to jump straight from level 3 to level 5,
| they have a chance to compete, but that seems unlikely. They
| also might move to level 4 and be able to expand level 4
| coverage faster, but that still remains to be seen.
|
| Waymo has years of experience with the other hard part of
| self driving taxis: actually picking up and dropping off
| people without a human driver.
|
| Anti-musk partisanship frustrates me, but I suspect it is
| your fan-boy talking points that drive the downvotes of your
| comment
| notyourwork wrote:
| Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a
| taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a
| different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can
| Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi
| network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to
| Alphabet.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental
| improvements each year, but even after several years of
| development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars
| and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not
| talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly
| trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering
| effort.
|
| Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much
| as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it
| seems like it must be fairly infrequent.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| FWIW a quick google search turns up Waymo reporting they
| have 0.41 incidents with injuries per million miles driven
| [0], whereas Tesla vehicles using autopilot had 0.152
| incidents with or without injuries, per million miles
| driven [1].
|
| So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then
| Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without
| injuries.
|
| Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different
| numbers, but from those initial numbers it seems your
| perception of reality of Waymo "screwing up" less is not
| accurate.
|
| [0] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-
| outperfor...)
|
| [1] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-
| crash-data....
| ra7 wrote:
| This is a ridiculous, apples-to-oranges comparison.
| You're comparing fully driverless miles to driver assist
| miles with humans actively preventing accidents without
| controlling for any variables.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| This is an extraordinarily disingenuous comparison. A big
| reason why Tesla superfans have such a poor reputation is
| because of bad faith arguments like this that frequently
| pop up in these discussions.
|
| Tesla cars with FSD have a driver behind the wheel who
| can instantly take over if the car is about to crash into
| a stationary object. Any time a Tesla _would 've_ crashed
| into something an object but its human driver saved it,
| that doesn't count in stats like these. Many Tesla owners
| have reported that they have to regularly disengage FSD
| because it's trying to do something dangerous or looks
| like it's headed for a crash.
|
| In contrast, Waymo cars do not have a human who can take
| the wheel if they try to run into a wall. The closest
| equivalent is that if Waymo cars get confused and don't
| know how to proceed, they can stop, then phone home and
| ask a human navigator to give them 'advice' or a general
| path; these people don't directly control the car,
| they're more comparable to a human navigator in the front
| passenger seat. It's still human assistance obviously,
| but it's not gonna save the car from running into an
| object that it didn't think was there.
| lambdaone wrote:
| Remember that the passenger cars are not the only thing that
| can scale; if you can automate the mapping and data
| preparation part of the process sufficiently, you may even be
| able to reduce it to mostly a matter of driving a few sensor
| cars around for a few weeks; maybe even cars that are adapted
| versions of your normal taxi vehicles, but with a human
| driver behind the wheel while you are mapping.
|
| I would imagine that while Waymo's mapping efforts have been
| very human effort-intensive so far, they will be looking at
| developing this automatic map-making capability as a high
| priority for rolling out new cities. Scaling the rate of
| expansion is then mostly a matter of throwing hardware and
| compute at the problem.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Tesla is willing to sell to people who will pay $$$ for a
| self driving car. Waymo isn't. That's probably more important
| for now. Taxi drivers don't earn that much, and have some
| advantages AI can't easily replace (able to help with
| luggage, use petrol stations etc). Replacing them requires
| undercutting them which in turn means you can't generate a
| ton of revenue from that. Yet Waymo's business model, such
| that it is, has put them many billions into the red already.
| I wonder if anyone has done some ROI calculations and if so
| how long it'd take. The LIDARs alone would require a huge
| number of trips just to pay them off, then you have the cars,
| the decade+ of enormously high software development
| salaries... if Waymo were another YouTube where it could hide
| amongst Google's other profitable businesses that'd be one
| thing. As a separate business with its own accountings, how
| long will it take until it's turned a profit?
| bangaladore wrote:
| The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can)
| work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation
| information and what the car can see.
|
| Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the
| specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect
| reconstruction of the environment, including additional
| metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings,
| barriers, traffic signs, and much more.
|
| HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it
| requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will
| get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in
| general, at best in certain cities.
|
| Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and
| easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale.
|
| It remains to be seen if Tesla can generalize FSD enough to
| reach the same level as HD Mapping everywhere. Still, they have
| shown that the current limiting factor is not what the car sees
| or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear
| how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and
| easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale.
|
| If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity
| of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost.
|
| I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road
| in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every
| mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as
| amounting to building roads. They will be built in lucrative
| places. Cruise and Waymo won't make money from putting taxis
| in nowhere Arkansas, so they don't need to map it.
|
| > the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or
| knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear
| how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
|
| That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be
| reliability and sensor gated. Cruise and Waymo have amazing
| sensors and even they struggle with sensor range, sensor
| reliability, model performance on tail cases, etc. For
| example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or
| Thermal sensing. They are relying on the limited dynamic
| range of their cameras + active illumination + hoping laser
| gets enough points / your object is reflective enough. Laser
| perception also hits limits when lasers shine on small
| objects (think: skinny railroad arm). Cars also have limits
| with regard to interpreting written signs, which is a big
| part of driving.
|
| Occlusions are still public enemy #1. Waymo killed a dog.
| Cruise crashed into a fire truck coming out of a blind
| intersection even though their sensors saw the truck within
| 100ms.
|
| LiDAR and HD mapping together are supremely useful, even if
| you don't drive with it, for enabling you to simulate
| accurately. You cannot simulate reliably while guessing at
| distances and locations. HD maps let you use visual odometry
| to localize, and distance measurements grounded in physics
| backstop the realism of your simulation at least in terms of
| the world's shape.
|
| Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with
| confidence since they don't have HD ground truth. There are
| believers at the company that maybe you could make "good
| enough" ground truth from imagery alone but that in and of
| itself is a huge risk, and it's what skipping steps looks
| like. Most in the industry agree that barring a major change
| in strategy they just have no way to regression test their
| software to the level of reliability required for L4 / no
| human supervision.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Google already has a fleet of vehicles driving around
| continuously taking new street view photos.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Google Maps seems to update at a frequency of 2-8 years.
| Maybe longer in some areas and we don't know what they do
| other than stitch it together.
|
| HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated
| frequently and immediately when any construction occurs.
|
| It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is
| nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't
| think that is possible.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| The obvious thing to do is to just have every Waymo
| robotaxi or car with licensed Waymo tech report in its
| daily mapping/obstacle data to the mothership, so you can
| get new changes almost immediately.
|
| I dunno if said data would be as high quality as
| dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least
| decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every
| Waymo car has.
| singleshot_ wrote:
| Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a
| dog, your car should warn me as I'm approaching. I'm not
| sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we
| could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.
| c22 wrote:
| This is a good point. Do Waymo cars ever use their horn?
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid
| a dog, your car should warn me as I'm approaching.
|
| What does this mean? Electric cars are already required
| to emit a sound as they drive.
|
| I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking
| might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to
| constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if
| there's no imminent crash.
|
| > I'm not sure why we are trying to teach each car to
| drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road
| to drive.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean. Presumably Waymo's software
| is the same across its fleet. They're not training one
| car's model at a time.
| bangaladore wrote:
| I suspect its the processing and validation, not the raw
| data that is difficult. At least for cities.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Agreed, but having the raw data is still useful,
| especially for less-used routes where it's not
| economically feasible to send out dedicated mapping cars
| all the time.
| directevolve wrote:
| I'm just speculating here, but I can envision a few ways
| of dealing with the cost problem in scaling an HD
| mapping-based robotaxi fleet:
|
| 1. Robotaxi companies might simply stand to make enough
| money to cover the cost of routine HD mapping. Anywhere
| the revenue of putting taxi services in a new city
| outweighs the cost of implementing the necessary updates
| sufficiently, won't companies do it? We could think of
| these companies as having similar economics to Uber, but
| replacing the cost of paying drivers with the cost of
| routine HD mapping updates.
|
| 2. Smaller towns have less frequent construction, so the
| update costs might be lower as you target less dense
| areas.
|
| 3. I could see a single company that specializes in
| providing routinely updated maps to a variety of fleet-
| operating companies. This could potentially be a utility
| or somehow subsidized by the government. It would also be
| possible for government to coordinate construction with
| HD mapping updates. After all, by lowering the rate of
| accidents and decreasing square footage devoted to cars,
| governments have a vested interest in seeing robotaxis
| replace human-owned and driven cars.
| bangaladore wrote:
| > That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be
| reliability and sensor gated.
|
| IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human
| level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but
| humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any
| evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has
| developed for their vision system is their limiting factor
| in the slightest to reach L4/L5.
|
| Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time and
| get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus
| crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not
| need to solve.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model
| that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their
| limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5
|
| For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes is
| way higher than cameras. Dynamic range is another. Also,
| Cruise and Waymo are some of the only companies that have
| hard internal data / ability to simulate how well their
| safety drivers do, and in the very same scenario what
| their software driver will do. Without LiDAR you can't
| build that simulation, and once you have that data if you
| continue to use HD Maps and LiDAR there's probably a good
| reason.
|
| > Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time
| and get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus
| crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not
| need to solve.
|
| Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would
| be able to avoid.
|
| > IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is
| human level
|
| See, you could say this if you had some data that showed
| that incidents per X miles (when the vehicle is driving
| at night) is sufficiently low, + if the software passes
| some contrived scenarios to gut-check its ability to see
| in the dark with the necessary reliability. But you don't
| have that data, do you? Someone has it though :) and I'd
| argue regulators should have it too.
| bangaladore wrote:
| > For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes
| is way higher than cameras.
|
| I don't think it's exciting to say that you must have
| theoretical parity with something to use it for this use
| case. Tesla's solution monitors ~6? cameras at once with
| accurate depth in each. That's 6x more views than a human
| can see. I wish people would stop comparing apples to
| oranges.
|
| > Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would
| be able to avoid.
|
| I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit
| all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying
| attention.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > Tesla's solution monitors ~6? cameras at once with
| accurate depth in each
|
| No, the depth is estimated. It's not accurate, at least
| not in the way you need for L4.
|
| > I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit
| all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying
| attention.
|
| I was just clarifying what the bar is. The bar is that
| avoidable accidents need to be avoided. Nobody will get
| mad if a plane crashes due to unavoidable circumstances
| (freak accident where two engines go out due to bird
| strikes or something). People will stop flying in the
| plane when it becomes clear that the airline is not doing
| everything it can to avoid fatalities.
| RankingMember wrote:
| > if the bar is human level
|
| IMO the bar is well above human-level if you actually
| want to attain the level of trust necessary to remove the
| steering wheel from a car.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Agree 100%. And IMO it is worth remembering that a really
| significant share of collisions are caused by well known
| risk factors. For those of us who avoid being in those
| situations to begin with, the robotaxi would need to be a
| good bit safer than _our_ average.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat
|
| Eyes which are orders of magnitude capable than the best
| cameras, and Teslas come with mediocre cameras, not the
| best. Eyes which are connected to a brain, and ML is a
| looooong ways from rivaling that.
|
| > That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to
| solve.
|
| Robotaxis do not need to account for things jumping out
| unexpectedly in front of them?
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Orders of magnitude more capable than the best cameras? I
| wish. I need corrective lenses for my eyes to even work
| at all. With that fixed they feed my brain an image
| that's upside down, black and white except in the centre,
| which is covered in blood vessels and which has a blind
| spot. They also take a long time to adjust to sudden
| changes in lighting conditions, don't do any true depth
| sensing, suffer frequent frame drops and can't run for
| more than about 20 hours at a time before they basically
| stop working.
|
| My brain tries to hides all this from me, and makes me
| think that I see the world in glorious 3D technicolor all
| the time, but that's a lie as revealed by the many
| amusing optical illusions that have been discovered over
| the years.
|
| Meanwhile, today I used ML that knows more than me, can
| think and type faster than me, which is a much better
| artist than me and which can read and react far faster
| than me to visual stimuli. Oh, it can also easily look in
| every direction simultaneously without pausing or ever
| getting distracted or bored.
|
| Somehow it doesn't feel like I have a big advantage over
| computers when it comes to driving.
| mlyle wrote:
| The cameras we are talking about have poor angular
| resolution, worse dynamic range than the human eye, and
| don't do any direct depth sensing either.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| Are we talking about Tesla's cameras or the "best"
| cameras? There are smartphone cameras that do depth
| sensing and HDR, and cameras are cheaper than eyeballs so
| composing them to get more angular resolution seems OK.
| mlyle wrote:
| ToF/structured illumination cameras are honestly not that
| capable.
|
| The maximum dynamic range of the eye is ~130dB. It's very
| difficult to push an imaging system to work well at the
| dark end of what the eye will do with any decent frame
| rate.
|
| It's not as different as it used to be, but even so: the
| Mk. I eyeball does pretty damn well compared to quite
| fancy cameras.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > My brain tries to hides all this from me
|
| Your brain is _really really_ good at surmounting
| challenges including many that you did not mention. We
| don't know how to get close to this in terms of
| reliability when using cameras and ML alone. Cameras and
| ML alone can go very far, but every roboticist
| understands the problem of compounding errors and
| catastrophic failure. Every ML person understands how
| slow our learning loops are.
|
| Consider that ML models used in the field have to get by
| with a fixed amount of power and ram. If you want to
| process time context of say 5 seconds, and with temporal
| context 10Hz and with resolution 1080p, how much data
| bandwidth are you looking at? Comparing what you see with
| your eyes with a series of 1080p photos, which is better?
| Up it to 4k: how long does it take to even run object
| detection and tracking with a limited temporal context?
|
| Your brain is working with more temporal context, more
| world context, and has a much more robust active learning
| loop than the artificial systems we're composing today.
| It's really impressive what we can achieve, but to those
| who've worked on the problem it feels laughable to say
| you can solve it with just cameras and compute.
|
| There are plenty of well respected researchers who think
| only data and active learning loops are the bottlenecks.
| In my experience they're focused on treating the self
| driving task as a canned research problem and not a
| robotics problem. There are as many if not more respected
| researchers who've worked on the self-driving problem and
| see deeper seated issues -- ones that cannot be
| surmounted without technologies like high fidelity
| sensors grounded in physics and HD maps.
|
| Even if breadth of data is the problem and Tesla's
| approach is supposedly yielding more data -- there is
| also the question of the fidelity of said data (e.g. the
| distances and velocities from camera-only systems are
| estimated and have noiser gaussians than ones generated
| with LiDAR). If you make what you measure, and your
| measurements are noisy, how can you convince yourself or
| your loss function for that matter that it's doing a good
| job of learning?
|
| It's relatively straightforward to build toy systems
| where subsystems have something on the order of 95%
| reliability. But robotics requires you to cut the tail
| much further. https://wheretheroadmapends.com/game-
| of-9s.html
| bangaladore wrote:
| Again, another claim that a brain or AGI is required to
| drive a car. Does anyone have any research to cite that
| establishes this seemingly known fact?
| mlyle wrote:
| I am not sure that the vision in Teslas is adequate with
| -any- amount of processing to drive a car. Spatial
| resolution is limited, as is seeing distant vehicles
| during merges, etc.
|
| Secondarily, there is no guarantee that the amount of
| processing is enough, because the extant human systems
| use much more.
|
| "Cheating" by using more sensors to simplify out
| complexities and to cover for the shortcomings of other
| sensors in the suite seems wise.
| kajecounterhack wrote:
| > "Cheating" by using more sensors to simplify out
| complexities and to cover for the shortcomings of other
| sensors in the suite seems wise.
|
| Also, "cheating" is just a necessary step to build
| baseline metrics. You need ground truth.
|
| It may very well be the case that cheating is needed to
| generate the training data necessary to stop
| cheating...someday.
| rurp wrote:
| That vision-only argument is marketing spin from Tesla.
| The biggest thing it leaves out is that humans process
| their vision input with a human brain, which Tesla
| vehicles very much do not have. If and when we create
| true AGI they will have a good argument, but a world
| where that exists will be wildly different from our
| current one and who knows if Tesla's tech will even be
| relevent anymore.
| bangaladore wrote:
| Why are you so confident that AGI, or a human brain, is
| necessary to be able to drive a car with only cameras?
|
| I get annoyed with statements like this because
| technology changes and advances so quickly, and Tesla has
| made substantial technical leaps in this field of machine
| learning. They have the state-of-the-art vision ->
| voxels/depth models and are only improving.
| michaelt wrote:
| Tesla, who use cameras only, have not demonstrated full
| self driving, despite trying for a decade. Elon Musk has
| stated "It is increasingly clear that all roads lead to
| AGI. Tesla is building an extremely compute-efficient
| mini AGI for FSD" [1]
|
| Waymo, who use additional sensors like lidar, have a
| driverless taxi service which needs no safety drivers.
|
| The evidence kinda speaks for itself, IMHO.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/17406414738493524
| 50?s=20
| consumer451 wrote:
| > The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can)
| work "everywhere."
|
| I seem to recall Musk saying in the last couple years that
| "full self driving will basically require AGI." This appeared
| to me to be extremely honest and accurate, though I believe
| that in the moment he was trying to promote the idea that
| Tesla was an AGI company.
|
| Does anyone happen to remember when he said that?
| ra7 wrote:
| > _HD Mapping is great when it 's accurate and available. But
| it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car
| will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented
| in general, at best in certain cities._
|
| Waymo have said time and again they don't rely on maps being
| 100% accurate to be able to drive. It's one of the key
| assumptions of the system. They use it as prior knowledge to
| aid in decision making. If they got "lost" whenever there was
| a road change, they wouldn't be successfully navigating
| construction zones in San Francisco as we've seen in many
| videos.
|
| They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves
| are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout
| changes to the entire fleet. See
| https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-
| map...
|
| At this point, the whole "HD maps are not practical" is just
| a trope perpetuated by the Tesla community for years.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to
| play devil's advocate for a moment:
|
| Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch
| so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city.
| They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've
| seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety
| drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee
| passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider
| rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the
| waitlist.
|
| This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just
| the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of
| the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla
| some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be
| bounded by geography in the same way.
|
| Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is
| workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only
| vision seems like taking something that was already enormously
| challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow
| progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic
| errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I
| think points to this strategy just being bad.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| I don't think every city is a brand new learning experience,
| there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up
| deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments
| can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20
| places at a time simultaneously doesn't seem extraordinary.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're aiming for, and I hope
| it works out.
| jessriedel wrote:
| > They have several phases before they open fully: safety
| driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee
| passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited
| rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with
| waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
|
| It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive
| mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect
| their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the
| first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning
| in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location;
| it's not all city-specific learning.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| It will get faster definitely, but how _much_ faster is the
| question. We 've only seen full rollout to two cities so
| far, so hard to extrapolate.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| Well you can definitely bet it will be _faster_ not
| slower than the first two, especially given the basic
| (i.e. shared /city-agnostic) engineering required and the
| policy component, which will get easier and easier with
| each city as risk aversion turns to FOMO.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| As a potential customer, Waymo's careful approach seems much
| more appealing to me. I don't want to ride in a move fast and
| break things robotaxi when it's snowing in Chicago.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Same, though playing Devil's Advocate some more, I can
| certainly see why "everywhere all at once" sounds more
| appealing to many people than "incremental rollout to major
| metros". While I'm guessing that _eventually_ Waymo will
| cover pretty much any paved public road, that 's not
| actually certain, let alone when it would happen.
| slibhb wrote:
| Many people predict that AI is going to explode, and afterward
| nothing will be the same. If that happens, Telsa is in a better
| position than anyone else to simply update their software and
| deliver self driving cars.
|
| Whether that happens remains to be seen.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Waymo is in a better position because:
|
| 1. Robotaxi is a better target than general self-driving
| because the human baseline is much lower for robotaxis (most
| people dislike their experience with uber, while most people
| think that they are a better-than-average driver)
|
| 2. Google took the high road on safety. The move-slow-and-dont-
| break-things DNA of Google (that hurts them in so many domains)
| is a golden asset in self-driving.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Tbh I love my experience with Uber. I know people who don't
| own a car because they think it's cheaper to use Uber. But
| you're right - I am an above-average driver.
| choppaface wrote:
| The main factor though is that California appears poised to
| hand them a monopoly.
| jrflowers wrote:
| This is a good question. Will the robot taxi company beat the
| company that hasn't made a single autonomous vehicle in the
| robot taxi business? It is hard to say
| LZ_Khan wrote:
| I really don't think robotaxi's are viable with just consumer
| grade cameras. Lidar's are what make them truly safe. Aka:
| tesla's training data is garbage.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| There was an episode of _The All In_ podcast a month or two
| ago. Friedberg brought up driverless Waymo being available in
| San Fran. Chamath hadn 't even heard of it. He looked it up
| live and it blew his mind.
|
| These guys are all about tech and couldn't believe there were
| companies ahead of Tesla, what do you think the normies know?
| jonny_eh wrote:
| Can they drive over steam yet?
| https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1dm3cqf/se...
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Is it stopped for the steam? Or for the person holding the
| camera directly in front of it?
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