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Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

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Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#141

Post by abvdasker »

dragonwriter wrote: post #48
abvdasker wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. And when transportation gets cheaper basically every product that needs to be moved gets cheaper (assuming the companies using this technology don't just pocket the savings). Also, basically drivers of al…

> Transportation in general will become much cheaper. Because driverless cars will get into far fewer accidents than humans the cost of insuring them will be a fraction of what it costs to insure a human driver today. Insurance is a small fraction of the cost of transport by car, so dropping the insurance cost by some fraction won't drop the total cost by that much.

Actually insurance in the trucking industry is pretty expensive [1]. In addition to commercial vehicle insurance for the actual truck there are frequently other types of insurance like cargo insurance and trailer insurance which would be affected by self-driving cars. Because trucking is already such a low-margin business any reduction in cost is actually a pretty big deal.

1. http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-ins...

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#142

Post by monkmartinez »

Asooka wrote: post #65
kyrra wrote: post #2

TLDR: * People can apply to use/borrow a Waymo vehicle (RX450 or Pacifica) for some period of time. * "as part of this early trial, there will be a test driver in each vehicle monitoring the rides at all times." * Limited to Phoenix metro area for the time being. * You apply here: https://waymo.com/apply/ * Waymo will be adding 500 more of the Pacifica minivans for this program.

Interesting that they only let you borrow for now. Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars? Will Waymo let you actually buy and own a car that isn't network connected and fully yours? Seeing how value extraction works in today's enterprise, i.e. via rent-seeking, I'm guessing we're headed to not owning cars any more.

Yeah, it is working out great for farmers that use John Deere tractors.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#143

Post by ocdtrekkie »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #10

Is there really a race to build self-driving cars? It seems that Waymo is eons ahead of everyone else.

I would argue Waymo is way behind everyone else, but the fundamental point is that companies like Tesla and Comma.ai and most of the car companies have a totally different approach than Google.

Namely, that Google relies heavily on their mapping services to make their cars work. This makes a lot of sense for Google, because of self-driving cars require their mapping data, there's a big new market for them. The maps they run on are significantly more detailed than the public-facing Google Maps/Street View. They work in Phoenix, AZ, Mountain View, CA and Austin, TX and like... nowhere else. (Was there one other city in Oregon maybe?)

As an aside, note the "As an early rider, you’ll be able to use our self-driving cars to go places you frequent every day, from work, to school, to the movies and more." I am curious if this suggests you have to tell Waymo in advance a set list of destinations they can ensure work correctly or something similar, or if I'm reading too much into it.

Tesla, Comma.ai, etc. are not relying on special map data as much as they are relying more heavily on road signals and lane lines and such, and then having machine learning decide how to navigate them locally.

While they may not have the same driving record, everyone else's approach works nationwide (and wouldn't be exceptionally hard to extend to a global scope, presuming you taught them different countries' markers and signage), whereas Google's approach currently does not scale.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#144

Post by MarkMc »

pythonaut_16 wrote: post #21
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #10

Is there really a race to build self-driving cars? It seems that Waymo is eons ahead of everyone else.

I have a lot of respect for Waymo's approach to this. While Tesla and Uber have both just recklessly (imo) jumped in and started setting loose self driving cars and making bold claims, Google/Waymo has really taken a slow and measured approach and given great care to making sure their cars are actually safe.

Actually I think Waymo is too cautious. Tesla has thousands of customers effectively acting as test drivers for their autonomous software, which allows them to collect data at a much faster rate and discover more 'edge cases' than with a more cautious test environment.

33,000 people die each year on US roads and self driving cars offer the chance to dramatically reduce that figure over time. The more aggressively we can test self-driving software now, the faster the software can be improved.

So as long as the accident rate for autonomous Teslas is initially no more than for human drivers, the Tesla approach will lead to fewer deaths in the long run.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#145

Post by csours »

marvin wrote: post #105
csours wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, and if drivers read ALL of the fine print of Tesla Autopilot, they would have been informed of the limitations of that system as well. The problem comes when the Large Print promises things that the system does not do. Another problem came from the implementation of the system where Tesla did not verify that the driver maintains hands on the wheel.

The large print says to keep your hands on the steering wheel and be prepared for the autopilot to fail or disengage at any time. I don't see how this is promising a self-driving car?

It does now, but in previous versions it did not.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#146

Post by jonmc12 »

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman16_sae_autono...

If we are building the safest transportation system, what role do driverless vehicles play? Wouldn't that be the narrative that actually saves the most lives?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#147

Post by maxerickson »

tyingq wrote: post #132
TheGRS wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't really thought about the safety and maintenance part of this before. If people own their self-driving cars I suppose there's also a chance they can opt-out of software updates, which would potentially be very dangerous. I do believe that the autonomous car future will have room for owned vehicles, but at this stage I don't think any of us really know how it will shake out.

I assume a lease program with baked in maintenance costs and a lockout if maintenance is skipped would suffice. Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.

Or just decertify outdated systems.

I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed.

There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#148

Post by monkmartinez »

jacquesm wrote: post #125
skuzye wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular software, yes, they crash all the time. But I would think these systems would be more safely handled. For example, nuclear energy, air traffic control, bank systems and automated train lines don't crash nearly as often, for example. Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.

> nuclear energy, air traffic control, bank systems and automated train lines don't crash nearly as often, for example. Bank systems crash with great regularity. Source: worked for a bank, customer of a bank. Industrial systems and anything related to flight is typically much better from a design point of view than your average bit of firmware. Redundancy is built in from the first day and all failure modes are teste…

Also! Don't forget how expensive this software is... This puts it out of reach for like 97% of the world.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#149

Post by monkmartinez »

bigato wrote: post #46
monkmartinez wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because computers never crash right? I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.

So far the statistics are overwhelmingly in favour of computers doing less mistakes in traffic than humans. Furthermore, if we had mostly self-driving cars, bugs found could be easily deployed to all of the cars, fixing the problems once and for all. While human drivers require cultural changes to drive more safely, and that's way harder to deploy.

Yeah, no heartbleed for cars will ever exist! We can just push an update... like mid-trip... I am dumbfounded by the rose colored glasses on this HN regarding self driving.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#150

Post by bhhaskin »

QuercusMax wrote: post #135
diebir wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess except that it's not about some stolen files, but rather about people. Uber has the guy who built the Google's self driver tech, which is what really matters.

bhhaskin's post said Uber was selling secrets, which is definitely NOT the case; I don't think I've heard anyone accusing them of that.

You haven't heard the allegations that Uber approached Levandowski while still at Google to start Otto so Uber could buy them later?
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