Waymo's big self-drive car report
arstechnica.com
Waymo's big self-drive car report
1–10 of 47 posts
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#2Can anyone comment as to how realistic the last line is?
>But it's clear that Waymo is aiming to bring its product to market soon—likely in 2018, if not this year.
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#3Waymo's car safety systems engineered in from the ground up bode well for their reputation and also distinguish their system from other vehicles with self-driving "tacked-on".
The latest statistics suggest that Waymo's car requires about an order of magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers. If these systems are a key reason for that or will further boost their safety records, it will be a long while before competitors can catch up.
"Waymo says it has done extensive work to make sure that computer crashes don't lead to car crashes. All of the key systems on its cars—the computer, brakes, steering systems, and batteries—have backups ready to take over if the main system fails."
"Safety-critical aspects of Waymo's vehicles—e.g. steering, braking, controllers—are isolated from outside communication," Waymo writes. "For example, both the safety-critical computing that determines vehicle movements and the onboard 3D maps are shielded from, and inaccessible from, the vehicle's wireless connections and systems."
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#4Can anyone comment as to how realistic the last line is? >But it's clear that Waymo is aiming to bring its product to market soon—likely in 2018, if not this year.
They've had cars driving all over the place for years. If they've got the driving part "done", the other parts of it are about product stuff; how to request rides, in-ride experience, etc. They definitely would've had that all happening in parallel with refining the autonomy tech. I don't have any information, but it seems plausible to me that it could be 2018.
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#5Can anyone comment as to how realistic the last line is? >But it's clear that Waymo is aiming to bring its product to market soon—likely in 2018, if not this year.
Indeed. Insiders, please share!
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#6This article links to another one of their articles that talks about another marketing step waymo took in the last week, the partnership with a number of organizations to help shoe where self driving cars can help various people in our society.
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#7> "Passengers cannot select a destination outside of our approved geography, and our software will not create a route that travels outside of a geo-fenced area, which has been mapped in detail," Waymo says. The Information reported earlier this month that Waymo's cars will initially be made available in the area of Chandler, a Phoenix suburb.
I saw one of their minivans a week or two ago. Chandler is mostly "new" construction - New strip malls, newish neighborhoods with nice sidewalks, etc. It's also relatively well-to-do. Average incomes are much higher than in Mesa, which is just to the north.
Phoenix (other side of the Salt River) has nice areas, and it has ghettos. I wonder where the geofence's lines are drawn. Certainly they'd include ASU/Tempe...
I wonder how these would work for passengers who need to get their illegal plant products, dealers of which don't always live in neighborhoods with nice sidewalks. Mostly those passengers didn't tell me what they were actually doing, but sometimes I figured it out.
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#8> "Passengers cannot select a destination outside of our approved geography, and our software will not create a route that travels outside of a geo-fenced area, which has been mapped in detail," Waymo says. The Information reported earlier this month that Waymo's cars will initially be made available in the area of Chandler, a Phoenix suburb. I saw one of their minivans a week or two ago. Chandler is mostly "new" con…
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Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#9It's certainly smart to start this as a ride-sharing service rather than DTC ownership model. By being able to choose which trips it is confident in taking, it removes a lot of the remaining question marks that would come up by a car owner trying to take it anywhere.
Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report
#10Link to actual report.[1] (When you're posting a link to something important, post the link to the real document, not some pundit blithering about it. Yes, you may have to do some digging to find it when the pundit outlet doesn't provide a link.)
There's not much new here if you've been following what Waymo is doing. Chris Urmson's SXSW talk from 2016 [2] covered most of this material in more detail. This is more of a PR-level version of that content. The new material covers mainly the limitations Waymo is imposing on their system. It works only where they have very detailed maps of the road system, with more information than even StreetView. This is conservative, but not a bad decision for initial release.
They have a button to call customer service. (That's so unlike Google.)
[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way... [2] hhttps://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik?t=6