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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

#181

Post by ehsankia »

strin wrote: post #166
sudhirj wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Also I feel like these are all things Google is already really good at. They already do most of these with Maps/Waze.

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

#182

Post by carapace »

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…

Off topic, but years ago a friend of mine participated in a jury research program around tobacco. He learned a lot of weird and fascinating stuff there. One thing he said was that cigarettes et. al. were "the only product which, when used as directed, will kill you." He also said that they had apparently come up with a strain of tobacco that wasn't addictive but didn't bring it to market.

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

#183

Post by visarga »

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).

By combining SDC with electric I think the cost of owning a car could be lowered significantly.

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

#184

Post by ehsankia »

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'…

More interesting, the impact it'll have on parking, especially on busier areas.

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

#185

Post by tomjakubowski »

soared wrote: post #127
notahacker wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the driver of a commercial road vehicle makes a mistake which causes a serious accident or behaves in a way deemed reckless or inattentive, they can go to jail. Similarly, I was under the impression that the humans who took over Waymo vehicles according to very conservative engagement protocols (and according to Waymo's calculations prevented several accidents) had responsibility for the road vehicle Who goes to j…

Whats your deal with putting people in jail, and why would you assume no on will be punished if something goes wrong? Obviously there will be repercussions for accidents, but we don't know what they are or how it will play out.

> Obviously there will be repercussions for accidents, but we don't know what they are or how it will play out.

The top-level comment was just asking if we could work out how this might look beforehand.

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

#186

Post by nroets »

zjaffee wrote: post #118
dabeeeenster wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Self driving (and taxis) cars can reduce traffic, because commuters can combine them with mass transit (e.g. trains).

If a commuter travels more than 2 legs in a day, it's very likely that mass transit will not cover one of the legs and he will take his car.

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

#187

Post by ghaff »

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).

As many have said here before, it really depends on the use case. Many have cars customized for various activities. They also essentially use their cars as mobile storage lockers--especially parents with children. The way some people use vehicles in a handful of dense cities is utterly unrepresentative of how most people use their cars and trucks. To the degree that vehicle depreciation is more miles-based than time-based, it's not even clear how much driving up utilization past a certain base usage really helps financially.

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

#188

Post by notl4wy3r »

samstave wrote: post #93
Johnny555 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ahh, if you think this is a new problem, you're too young to remember the fun of calling a cab by pay phone to some obscure address, then alternating between going inside and calling the dispatcher and then running out to the street to try to flag down the cab. At least with a…

im 42, so no not too young - and I appreciate your point. I feel that people are latching onto their opinions about driverless car tech and not talking about the wider implications. That is the point, I am poorly, making, apparently.... I just think that not all the questions have been asked about what it means to be a "driverless car" and that we need to run through all the risks -- and thats the one thing I find re…

TBH, your objection seems like something that anyone would think of in ten minutes of considering pitfalls. To think that no one at Waymo (or Cruise, or Lyft, etc.) has considered it, you must have a very dim view of their competence.

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

#189

Post by carapace »

erikbye wrote: post #114

Does it pull over for police? And what about for police impersonators?

This is an important general consideration. I designed a class of drone/robot I call "gun-hunter": They detect humans holding guns and destroy the forearm.

Now immediately you have to solve "How do you NOT attack LEOs?" Because of course the obvious thing for the badguys to do would be to impersonate LEOs well enough to fool the robots. (This also applies to signals guns might emit to say they're legit/friendly.)

The solution I came up with was that no one should use guns in the presence of active gun-hunters. After all, why would the police need guns if the crooks can't use them?

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

#190

Post by ElijahLynn »

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).

Keeping your stuff in the car. Kinda nice not to have to unload/load for every ride.
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