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Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

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Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#61

Post by juliesulti »

samstave wrote: post #28
samstave wrote: post #14

I do a hit and run on a driverless car, assume its on its way to pickup a passenger, so no humans involved. I hack a driverless car, again with no passengers, and make it do my bidding (hit that other [thing]) I follow driverless car back to its charging base and slash its tires? I rearend a driverless car then leave the scene? (same as option 1 I guess - but could be applied differently) A driverless car gets into i…

OK - im replying to my comment because I find all these answers to be bullshit and here is why: So what these answers say is that you "no longer have any expectation of privacy while driving out and about" -- which is a fine argument to make in a police state, are we a police state - because guess what: this is now saying that any self driving car company has the ability to license plate scan you and take your pictur…

Nobody has an expectation of privacy while driving. There is decades of jurisprudence establishing quite the opposite. That's why there is a giant mandatory number plate on your car, why there is implied consent for search as a condition of your driving license, etc.

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#62

Post by samstave »

joshuamorton wrote: post #44
samstave wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK - im replying to my comment because I find all these answers to be bullshit and here is why: So what these answers say is that you "no longer have any expectation of privacy while driving out and about" -- which is a fine argument to make in a police state, are we a police state - because guess what: this is now saying that any self driving car company has the ability to license plate scan you and take your pictur…

A lot of drivers have road cameras in their vehicles. If you crash into them, they will provide that as evidence when filing a police report. No one claimed that there would be a direct link from an autonomous car to police HQ, but that if you decided to break the law, the owner of that vehicle would do everything in its power to pursue you to the fullest extent of the law. That's not materially different than where…

Thats not what I presumed the commenters to be saying: "driverless cars will have sensors and cameras that wil report anything back to the police"

So, lets assume we turn on an amber-alert and activate all driverless car cameras and sensors to find license plate X...

Sure that sounds great - but "just leave all driverless car sensors up all the time and track everything everywhere is what I hear in that comment.

And like I said, major tech companies are actually tracking every vehicle that drives by them, and reporting it to the police already.

I am just saying that the implications of driverless cars, while seeming like "sexy tech" have not been fully thought out - or if they have, that they havent been shared as being resolved issues.

I can tell you that I am in the process of handling about a petabyte of police body-cam video and I can see how thesse things can be abused

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#63

Post by Fricken »

eggpy wrote: post #39
nwatson wrote: post #13

>>> "Waymo will be operating a fully autonomous ride hailing service without any humans at the wheel ... Waymo wants to broaden the geographic scope of its trial, starting with expansion in the near-term to cover the entire Phoenix metro area, which represents more acreage than the whole of the Greater London area, he noted" My family is mostly in Tempe / Mesa area (near Chandler, AZ) and during my last few visits I'…

I dunno I can see this remaining small-scale for a while so Waymo can gather data about how people feel about the experience. I can see the backlash now if they were to suddenly unleash a battalion of fully autonomous vehicles on the unsuspecting public. I suspect keeping the numbers relatively low will be a good way to gather just how disturbing this is to the general populace without overwhelming people and ultimat…

The cars are a familiar sight in Phoenix, they've been testing there for a couple years now. They started up an early rider program in the spring, with real people volunteering to be guinea pigs while they refine the human UI and logistics. This isn't coming out of the blue.

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#64

Post by nwatson »

samstave wrote: post #48
nwatson wrote: post #13

>>> "Waymo will be operating a fully autonomous ride hailing service without any humans at the wheel ... Waymo wants to broaden the geographic scope of its trial, starting with expansion in the near-term to cover the entire Phoenix metro area, which represents more acreage than the whole of the Greater London area, he noted" My family is mostly in Tempe / Mesa area (near Chandler, AZ) and during my last few visits I'…

>> The public will accept the perceived risks in driverless rides. This is what I am trying to highlight - what, specifically, are these risks that people need to be made aware of? So now, in addition to everything, there will come a day when a person is stranded some-place as the driverless car couldnt exactly find them, and the person had to call the call center to get help and guess what... calling the call center…

These are companies with big purses and lots of human-factors personnel, and lots of lawyers that can write huge terms-of-service agreements, and cover legal costs and damages in lawsuits until they get it right.

There are few better test beds for driverless cars than Phoenix metro, from technical, legal, and customer-concern viewpoints.

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#65

Post by ocdtrekkie »

koolba wrote: post #52
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I read recently, they're going to have basically a call center the car will connect to for an operator to drive it remotely.

Cell service dead zones aside, is the latency and jitter for remote operation over a wireless link low enough to be feasible?

I think this whole thing is hilariously premature for a bunch of other reasons, but I assume a remote piloted car is gonna go REALLY slow until the car is confident again, and Google's cars are ridiculously limited in their geographic area. My guess is that they have sent a Verizon guy ("Can you hear me now? Good.") down each and every road they whitelist the cars to drive on.

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#66

Post by Ajedi32 »

Wow! Waymo is now confident enough in their vehicles that they're willing to risk letting the public use them completely unsupervised? This seems like a huge milestone for self-driving car tech.

I wonder what their current disengagement rates are for Chandler; at this point it has to be really close to zero, right?

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#67

Post by rayiner »

joshuamorton wrote: post #56
rayiner wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In New York, they sometimes block all of Lexington Ave. (a major north-south throughfare) at Midtown for pedestrian activities. What happens when a hundred self-driving cars all get to Lex and stop because they can't pass?

After one or two get backed up, they alert the others that traffic is stopped and to go another way? In general the answer to all of these whacky what ifs is "whatever a human driver, or group would do, but with more efficient communication".

These aren't "wacky what ifs." I don't know what things are like in the Valley, but here on the east coast something unexpected changes my commuting route a couple of times a month (multiply that by tens of thousands of drivers).

"Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases.

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#68

Post by edshiro »

If Waymo's tech is years ahead of the competition (say 18-24 months ahead minimum) then I think a lot of the self-driving companies and car manufacturers in the US will be having cold sweats. This may not be a winner-take-all market (I don't know honestly...) but I see this lead up enabling Waymo to capture significant market share in the US in regions where laws towards autonomous vehicles are friendly.

One way the competition could attempt to mitigate Waymo's lead is to test and launch in areas where Waymo are not currently active (other states in the US, or other countries altogether). They could of course accelerate development of their self driving tech but that's easier said than done I presume.

I also worry Uber & Lyft's valuations and usage will drop with the introduction of driverless vehicles, unless they somehow manage to strike long-lasting partnerships with Waymo.

Regarding OEMs (i.e. car manufacturers), I can't tell what will happen with them: do they continue shunning Waymo and pursuing their own self-driving car efforts or come back begging for some sort of deal? I presume we will see both attitudes play out depending on how confident each company feels about its own self-driving tech ability and acquisition potential.

It's hard to foresee the consequences of this announcement, but I feel Waymo has upped the stakes tremendously today, and the pressure on everyone (including Waymo) to deliver is on, more than ever.

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#69

Post by Ajedi32 »

mdorazio wrote: post #15
Kiro wrote: post #11

How is this legal?

Arizona's government has deliberately taken a very pro-autonomous vehicles approach. The governor's executive order [1] specifically allows driverless vehicles on the roads within the state, provided they follow traffic laws and there is a licensed driver somewhere who will take responsibility if something goes wrong. [1] https://azgovernor.gov/file/2660/download?token=nLkPLRi1

> a licensed driver somewhere

So, who would that be in this case? Does Waymo have a licensed driver monitoring the vehicle remotely, ready to take over at a moment's notice?

Re: Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

#70

Post by dabeeeenster »

There's a positive feedback loop that will happen: As they get more cars on to the road, the log more real world miles, which makes the cars better, which gets more cars onto the road which log more miles...

I wonder how valuable this is?

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