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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

#551

Post by beojan »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #467
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, traffic will be worse when you compare one bus with 50 people vs. 12 self-driving cars with 4 people each. A bus is 14-15m long, whereas even a small car like the Chevy Bolt is over 4m. So parked bumper-to-bumper the cars produce >3x as much traffic, and then you add some gaps for actually driving you're up to 4x. Personally I'm very skeptical of both the claim that a) self-driving cars will see huge adoptatio…

> say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market. In year 2000, in order to run a medium web site as a company you need 2 Servers one for each Database, WebServer. People bo…

> People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15%

So why do they need 2 servers?

Also, I'm pretty sure VPSes and shared hosting were available in 2000.

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

#552

Post by beojan »

mcny wrote: post #533
adrianN wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could build small self driving busses.

Someone said a few weeks ago that buses that run very often on the same route is just a very expensive train. I think for self driving to realy work well, we have to ban humans from driving (and perhaps make it a felony to interfere with a self driving bus the same way we cover assault on a bus driver). I thought it would be easier to implement self driving trains than to implement self driving cars. Who is working o…

> I thought it would be easier to implement self driving trains than to implement self driving cars. Who is working on that?

We already have self-driving light rail systems (London's DLR for instance).

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

#553

Post by nkoren »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #463
landryraccoon wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Car usage will go up by an order of magnitude because a major cost of driving isn't the dollars, but the time. This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. The more comfortable it is to be inside a car and the less people mind long car rides, the more people will drive (self driving or otherwise). If road infrastructure is the same, that necessarily means a much higher density of cars…

> self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. I definitely see your logic towards higher density with things like 'office cars' so people do more travel. Or sleeping cars but that would be outside typical peak hours. But would self driving increase volume that much? Possibly if people stopped getting trains/busses but this should be remain cheaper and faster via priority lanes most cities have. Also in gen…

> But would self driving increase volume that much?

Absolutely. Not even accounting for induced demand, you'll see ~30% more vehicle-miles due to empty-vehicle repositioning.

As you say, accelerations and decelerations can be synchronised, accidents reduced, and standing wave behaviours eliminated, all of which will indeed help traffic flow more efficiently. But this is not by any means enough to compensate for empty-vehicle redistribution, much less induced demand.

> And like those futuristic car intersection scenes where cars dont stop at lights but all go through an intersection from every direction reducing traffic back-ups.

That's only possible in environments where there are no pedestrians or cyclists -- eg., segregated motorways/freeways, which already have no intersection conflicts. At best it represents a space saving, not really a time saving.

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

#554

Post by ekianjo »

Johnny555 wrote: post #503
ekianjo wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in Japan where trains are tightly operated, you don't get trains every 3 minutes (talking about long distance trains, not metros). At best one train every 15 minutes on average between peak hours and more calm periods. That divides your capacity by 5 already, so you are now at around 10 000 passengers per hour with your trains. Add to that that freeways don't have a single lane, but usually at least 2, if not 3,…

The OP was talking about max capacity not real world capacity. Some JR lines run at 4 minute headways during peak times and subways run reliably at 2 minute headways. No freeway today has has 4 passenger cars running at 1 second headways so you end up with a more realistic 1000 to 2000 pax per hour. Which is about the number of pax you can fit in a single train. A 3 lane freeway takes up about the same amount of spac…

> Some JR lines run at 4 minute headways during peak times and subways run reliably at 2 minute headways.

I was talking clearly about long distance trains. Not Kyoto to Osaka distance.

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

#555

Post by stijnstijn »

zimpenfish wrote: post #547
C14L wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wait for a train or bus? Install an app that tells you when you need to leave your place to get to the station just in time.

That implies 1) the train or bus arrives and leaves at the station exactly according to the timetable and 2) you get from home to the station exactly according to the estimate. In my limited sample group of one (1), these are rarely true.

The train usually doesn't arrive exactly on time where I live, but delays aren't so bad that I have to wait 30 minutes on average. And if it's a 4-12 minute walk to the station, as OP says, I'm sure they don't need a huge buffer to get there on time. Personally, I just make sure I have a five-minute leeway and I'm good.

There certainly must be places in the world where trains are so unpredictable that the average delay is 30 minutes, but (not having been there, I should say) Menlo Park and Palo Alto sound like places where trains should be a bit more punctual than that?

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

#556

Post by ataturk »

LrnByTeach wrote: post #214
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…

Here is the most probable scenarios I foresee. If you are a pessimist about autonomous being bigger part of transpiration then add 2 years to DATES shown below. 2021 : Electric Self-driving on-demand FLEET Car 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION from Google, DiDi, Uber, Renault/Nissan,Tesla, VW,Toyota,GM for $400/month 2024 :same 1000 miles/month SUBSCRIPTION $200/month At $200/month Subscription price for 1000 miles/month…

I have a few reservations about all of it: First off, you're putting your life in the hands of some code, which is totally stupid, as anyone who writes code for a living will attest (and don't talk to me about airliners and autopilots, it's no the same thing with a PILOT sitting right there who can immediately take over the plane).

Second, these stupid things will be red-lined such that you won't be able to have it take to a location other than where you're allowed to go. If you don't think that is a probable scenario, just watch as robbery gangs use them to pilfer and steal from the suburbs and see how it all goes down.

Third, and this is kind of the stealth thing I see going on here: All this subscription non-ownership is really pulling apart the basic nature of what being free and owning property is all about. I like owning my stuff because it's mine. If you've ever worked around a rental business of any kind, you know what the tragedy of the commons does to rental equipment--and for those who don't know, it gets wrecked HARD. Always. So I don't need some stealth corporate communism shoved up my anus just so Waymo or whoever can make billions.

I guess "NO OWNERSHIP" appeals to emasculated Millenials or something, dunno. I really think when these folks finally grow up they're going to be extremely unhappy about the living hell they made for themselves.

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

#557

Post by ataturk »

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…

It would be easy to turn one of these into a cheap guided bomb, too. Hail one, load it with explosives, tell it to drive to the state house.

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

#558

Post by lallysingh »

wiz21c wrote: post #495
randycupertino wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I think self driving cars will make traffic worse, not better. Yeah, of course self driving cars are going to make traffic way worse! Who even thinks otherwise? Suddenly you are going to have millions of disabled and homebound seniors wanting the cars to take them to do grocery shopping and errands, kids being driven around to and from from school and practice, and low income residents sleeping in their…

another climate apocalypse... 'cos even if all of these cars are electrical, they still need quite a lot of energy to be built and, after a while, destroyed...

One mitigating factor for that is that service cars will have much higher duty cycles (80%+?) than private cars currently do (5%).

What might be interesting is how they deal with peak usages like commute hours. Would swarms of cars try to hop over to the next time zone when it's easy?

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

#559

Post by notl4wy3r »

samstave wrote: post #452
notl4wy3r wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Nope, not question their competence - I’m questioning where the answers are to the dialogue we should be having surrounding ai cars???? Where the fuck are the answers, what body owns them?

Presumably each company will have their own approaches to these issues. They don't prima facie seem to be issues that require legislation. In that sense, "we" are not having a dialogue about this at all, any more than "we" are having conversation about cyclist detection, because "we" are not building self-driving cars. Waymo, Cruise, etc. are building self-driving cars, and we are not privy to their internal deliberations on these issues.

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

#560

Post by [deleted] »

beojan wrote: post #551
LrnByTeach wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> say the average American today spends $600/month total on owning a car. Why would anyone price a self-driving service at $200/month? No, they'd go for an initial price of $400/month for a couple of years to get customers, then sneak back up to $600/month once they've caught most of the market. In year 2000, in order to run a medium web site as a company you need 2 Servers one for each Database, WebServer. People bo…

> People bought each server box for $5000 and server capacity used is only at 15% So why do they need 2 servers? Also, I'm pretty sure VPSes and shared hosting were available in 2000.

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