Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 634 posts

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

#111

Post by robotresearcher »

samstave wrote: post #80
nwatson wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

jeasus christ I dont know why you all are literally sticking your heads in the sand about asking questions and thinking answers. "because money" isnt a freaking answer to the questions I have posed - so fucking man up and answer if you know? Just because self driving tech is the new hotness doesnt mean that we can be ignorant to the consequenses and then thought-shame me for asking questions. An engineer of any of hi…

The basic answer is that, yes, at least until we all understand these things, they will have humans monitoring rides quite carefully. One person should be able to watch tens of rides at a time.

At the very least, there will be a panic button that will get human support very quickly.

I think people are not jazzed about your questions because this answer seems like common sense. And nobody, engineer or not, owes you an answer.

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

#112

Post by Fricken »

stephengillie wrote: post #104
Fricken wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Cruise automation are building out call centres, where remote human monitors will be available to help out the vehicles when they get hung-up. The monitors won't be able to make safety-critical interventions, but they'll be able to give the cars and passengers instructions, kind of like a backseat driver, I guess. So if there's an accident scene, for example, the human monitor will judge whether to stop and…

Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all! They are merely remote-control cars with adaptive cruise and lane assist. So it's somewhere between a Lyft and remote surgery. What happens if the car loses internet?

No, they're not remote control. The human operators can't make safety-critical interventions, they won't be able to drive a robotaxi 50 mph into a tree, for example. There's an inherent liability associated with that.

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

#113

Post by quirkot »

edshiro wrote: post #68

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…

> This may not be a winner-take-all market (I don't know honestly...)

I think it’s important to distinguish service from tech. Once the tech is mature, you’ll probably have a handful of providers but the service will be wildly federated. It’ll only take one tech provider to have moderately open terms and the service will be the equivalent of WordPress for autonomous vehicles.

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

#115

Post by s17n »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #70

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?

The real challenge here is extracting valuable information - if you just dump the sensor data to disk you will consume the world's storage capacity with a handful of cars.

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

#116

Post by Animats »

edshiro wrote: post #68

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…

Waymo does seem to be ahead technically. They've been working on the hard cases for years, while the other guys are still struggling. They are trying hard to get good situational awareness. One of the few neutral measures we have are CA DMV's disconnect and accident reports, and in those, Waymo has been consistently ahead. Waymo is hooked up with FCA (Fiat-Chrysler Automobiles), of all things.

Uber is "fake it 'til you make it". Otto's truck demo only worked on a deserted highway surrounded by chase cars. Cruise also started out that way, but they seem to have improved once acquired by GM. Those guys seem to drive mostly on visual cues, without as much of a near-area model as Waymo.

Tesla has the self-crashing car. Four collisions with something partly blocking a lane, all on video. I've posted the links before. Musk made a big mistake trying to do it without LIDAR. Nobody else can do that reliably, and neither can Tesla. Tesla had to turn off most of the autonomy. Now they're shipping the Model 3 in small quantities with hardware that's only enough for lane keeping and auto-braking.

Volvo has a good, but limited 100 car demo with real drivers running. Freeway only. Their goal is "no crashes". They'll probably get there.

Ford is quietly doing something and not talking about it much.

Meanwhile, Continental and now, Delphi are quietly gearing up to make low-cost LIDARs by the millions. Despite all the talk about self-driving as a service, it may turn out to just be an auto part.

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

#117

Post by verletx64 »

stephengillie wrote: post #104
Fricken wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Cruise automation are building out call centres, where remote human monitors will be available to help out the vehicles when they get hung-up. The monitors won't be able to make safety-critical interventions, but they'll be able to give the cars and passengers instructions, kind of like a backseat driver, I guess. So if there's an accident scene, for example, the human monitor will judge whether to stop and…

Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all! They are merely remote-control cars with adaptive cruise and lane assist. So it's somewhere between a Lyft and remote surgery. What happens if the car loses internet?

> Ah, the cat is out of the proverbial bag! These cars are not really "self-driving" at all!

?

Do you class a self driving vehicle as one without any manual controls whatsoever? In which case, you're going to be waiting a long time for your version of it, and not for tech reasons.

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

#118

Post by zjaffee »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #41
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'…

Why bother with ride sharing when the cost per mile would be so cheap?

Car pool lanes will likely be a big reason people choose to pool in autonomous cars. I imagine that self driving cars will make traffic much worse, and we will see a movement where cities create more and more HOV lanes to reduce traffic in such situations.

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

#119

Post by maxerickson »

samstave wrote: post #97
kllrnohj wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So now we have driverless cars effectively classified as emergency ambulances That's quite a huge leap you made there. Care to back up and explain how a drunk person calling an uber magically turns the uber into an emergency ambulance?

They manage to climb in, they OD/go into arrest, cant climb out. What then? So the uber now has to either get a person or take that car to a hospital - how do they know to do such? So is uber running a massive call center that watches every driverless ride and monitors the situation? Are they monitoring if people get into a fight in the car? That actually happened to me, where I took an uber pool, and the two other r…

These aren't hard questions in the long term though.

Non responsive passenger->follow protocol that emergency services prefers (or even legally requires).

Fist fight->stop car, inform passengers that car won't transport them further.

Rape->turn over recordings of vehicle interior to police.

I suppose for the last one you have to take it as a given that they are making such recordings (probably on a rolling basis), but there you go.

It's not like these situations are any thornier because an automated system is involved. Passed out person is better off with monitoring (at least in health terms), fist fight without car, same difference, rape without monitoring, no video evidence.

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

#120

Post by ewhanley »

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…

With the exception of the hacking case and maybe the legal ramifications of a fatal accident, I don't see how any of these are different than the status quo. Hit-and-run accidents and auto vandalism are an everyday occurrence whether a car is self-driven or not. I agree that there are a lot of questions and strange scenarios that should be considered. I think the assumption that none of these questions have been considered because they aren't being discussed in this thread on HN is flawed.

ed. grammar

Post reply on HN