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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

#171

Post by strin »

Levels of driving automation is an ill-defined concept.

For example, L4 is defined as "mind-off". According to Wikipedia, "the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver's seat. Self driving is supported only in limited areas (geofenced) or under special circumstances, like traffic jams. Outside of these areas or circumstances, the vehicle must be able to safely abort the trip, i.e. park the car, if the driver does not retake control."

However, the difficulty of driving varies so much from case to case. City is significantly more complex than urban areas. If some company geofence the cars in urban areas and achieve level 4, it might be less impressive say a Level-3 system that works in complex city scenarios and extreme weather conditions.

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

#172

Post by vthallam »

smeyer wrote: post #169
strin wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a lot of other factors to work out like scheduling, routing, supply-demand management, optimal vehicle distribution, pooling etc These things come along the way. If there is a service that's 10x cheaper than Lyft, I could imagine most people would churn to that service. The technology shift from human to completely autonomous driving is so huge that it could just disrupt the current market structure.

>If there is a service that's 10x cheaper Why would a ride service based on autonomous cars be 10x cheaper? It's not like 90% of the current revenue or costs are human labor. I'm not sure the exact ratio of driver labor vs. gas/maintenance/depreciation, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 10:1.

You can run a car for longer with no driver and of course the human capital involved is none. But the flip side is that the cars wear out quickly.

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

#173

Post by jtmcmc »

rayiner wrote: post #67
joshuamorton wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's too bad they can't rollout self driving cars in places with less extreme edge case scenarios like... Chandler AZ and then build up to more challenging scenarios like NYC!

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

#174

Post by peoplewindow »

aecs99 wrote: post #137

This, indeed, is a major step for Waymo. While some people may be skeptical about the safety of these rides, we all saw this coming. This has been a part of the ambitious goal most self-driving companies set out when they start. The reason I say "part of the goal", is because the end goal is L5 - to handle more complex scenarios which I assume Waymo is still working on. Taking the ninety-ninety rule or the rule of cr…

Why would self-ownership ever be the goal though? I can see people just moving en-masse to Lyft/Uber type services that use a mix of people and machines, with people eventually being phased out, and simply giving up their own cars (except for those who genuinely enjoy driving).

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

#175

Post by radicalbyte »

sudhirj wrote: post #164
a9a wrote: post #148

It will be interesting to see how Lyft's partnership with Waymo evolves given this tech announcement and Waymo's acknowledgment that they plan to offer their own ridesharing service. Lyft's approach to self-driving partnerships in general seems to rest on the assumption that self-driving providers will catch up to each other before any of them can fully handle everything a human driver can do. If this assumption is c…

Think it's unlikely that Waymo will build out and operate a full fledged ride service - there's a lot of other factors to work out like scheduling, routing, supply-demand management, optimal vehicle distribution, pooling etc that they could just delegate to Lyft for. They might just build a service to the extent of push a button and a vehicle will come, and take you where you tap. That's enough to work inside a contr…

If they're serious they'll just buy Lyft. That's probably Lyft's strategy. Get Instagramed/WhatsApped.

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

#176

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #116
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 y…

[deleted]

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

#177

Post by davidkuhta »

ghaff wrote: post #161
davidkuhta wrote: post #129

Excited about the technology and expected this news eventually, but in less of a "Bam, we did it" and more of a "Coming Dec 2017... look for new autonomous vehicles, they'll be bright orange with flashing lights". Following-up on the "How is this legal" question below, can anyone comment on: 1. For the 'autonomous engineers/technologists': a) Is the technology mature enough that it can be utilized without an on-board…

>a) Any examples of technologies prematurely introduced that had negative impact on their growth or contributed to their demise? Not really a class of product, but there certainly have been interesting processor architectures whose implementations weren't very good (and/or their timing was bad) out of the gate. Itanium comes to mind although there are others as well. One can reasonably argue whether it made a differe…

Yeah with respect to injuries, I agree that the consumer aspect is a particularly unique facet of the discussion. I've heard stories of accidents involving automated machinery in factories which resulted in "accidental death & dismemberment", but that seems to be somewhat of a known risk. With autonomous vehicles it you can foresee them being marketed as 'roombas of transportation'.

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

#178

Post by smeyer »

vthallam wrote: post #172
smeyer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If there is a service that's 10x cheaper Why would a ride service based on autonomous cars be 10x cheaper? It's not like 90% of the current revenue or costs are human labor. I'm not sure the exact ratio of driver labor vs. gas/maintenance/depreciation, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 10:1.

You can run a car for longer with no driver and of course the human capital involved is none. But the flip side is that the cars wear out quickly.

A lot of taxis are already run 24 hours a day, switching off between drivers at shift changes. The per-mile gas, maintenance, and depreciation (ignoring any fixed per-day or per-year costs) are already much more than 10% of the total cost of a ride.

I came across a (possibly outdated) Uber pricing model for LA of a $5.60 minimum fare and a $0.90 per mile charge, and among other fees, NYC cabs are $2.50 per mile. Compare both of those numbers to the IRS mileage rate of $0.53 per mile to get a very rough lower bound on some of the costs.

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

#179

Post by ghaff »

smeyer wrote: post #169
strin wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there's a lot of other factors to work out like scheduling, routing, supply-demand management, optimal vehicle distribution, pooling etc These things come along the way. If there is a service that's 10x cheaper than Lyft, I could imagine most people would churn to that service. The technology shift from human to completely autonomous driving is so huge that it could just disrupt the current market structure.

>If there is a service that's 10x cheaper Why would a ride service based on autonomous cars be 10x cheaper? It's not like 90% of the current revenue or costs are human labor. I'm not sure the exact ratio of driver labor vs. gas/maintenance/depreciation, but I'm pretty sure it's less than 10:1.

I haven't personally done the math but my understanding is that the current (possibly subsidized) rate for Lyft/Uber is in the $1.00 to $1.50 per mile range. The IRS rate for car usage is about $0.53/mile.

Presumably the cost for a heavily utilized vehicle is going to be lower per mile. OTOH, any commercial fleet service is going to have costs on top of the base mileage cost. (The $0.53 figure also ignores any distance the vehicle might have to travel to pick you up.)

So it's probably reasonable as a back-of-the-envelope swag to assume that, if a fully autonomous vehicle were available today, you could probably undercut a "ridesharing" service by about 50%. It's definitely not suddenly going to be almost too cheap to meter just because you take the driver out of the equation.

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

#180

Post by milesokeefe »

peoplewindow wrote: post #174
aecs99 wrote: post #137

This, indeed, is a major step for Waymo. While some people may be skeptical about the safety of these rides, we all saw this coming. This has been a part of the ambitious goal most self-driving companies set out when they start. The reason I say "part of the goal", is because the end goal is L5 - to handle more complex scenarios which I assume Waymo is still working on. Taking the ninety-ninety rule or the rule of cr…

Why would self-ownership ever be the goal though? I can see people just moving en-masse to Lyft/Uber type services that use a mix of people and machines, with people eventually being phased out, and simply giving up their own cars (except for those who genuinely enjoy driving).

Immediate access to the vehicle and monetary returns from renting it out when not using it.
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