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Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

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Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#91

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

cromwellian wrote: post #47

Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice. IMHO, to do less would be reckless showboating that could do unimaginable damage to the AV industry, as well as end up endangering lives. In the tech industry, we don't like to wait, we like moving fast, taking risks, shi…

>> Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice.

I'm sorry but where does this "one year" expectation come from? What says that Waymo needs a year (or two years, or ten, or three months, etc) to start "scaling back the drivers"?

From what I can tell, the only way to judge the competence of their driverless systems is to compare where they are today with were they were 10 years ago when they started out. However, this is next to impossible- that data is not public.

So, where does that "one year" optimism come from? Autonomous driving won't magickally become easier in a year from now.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#92

Post by mft_ »

coffeedrinker wrote: post #55
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just fund a minibus from the retirement home. I think many people do that already? Ok, so it’s an interesting idea to use personal transit, but it could be done already without self driving vehicles, it might be economical. But it would be pretty niche.

It's just a thought, not a business plan :)

I think you're bang on - but it needn't be limited to driverless cars.

Honestly, I'm surprised it's not something that Google have already built heavily into Maps. People often search for what they want (e.g. burger, pizza) - this would be an obvious time to offer deals or discounts to drive customers to particular businesses. You then expand to compete with particular retailers - someone searches for Nike specifically, they get offers from the nearby Adidas store.

This is not really any different to what happens with Google searches, where advertisers can buy keywords related to their competitors.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#93

Post by cpcarey »

bgentry wrote: post #78
rsync wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice." A whole year! Truly sage-like wisdom from the MoveFastBreakThings generation of technical development. It is simultaneously comical, exasperating and sad to watch this tragedy unfold. We will slowly build our own, moder…

That’s funny, a month ago my car was totaled by a guy who fell asleep and blew through a red light. That happened at a right angle but only at 30mph. Since then I’ve been concerned at every intersection about what the other cars will do. I’m not sure how much of it can be blamed on cell phone use, but I swear that human drivers have been getting substantially worse over the last few years (at least in the Bay Area).…

To add another anecdote, I thought I was the only one who thought drivers have gotten worse in the Bay Area over the past few years. The frequency of some driver not paying attention or not following the rules of the road and blowing through stop signs and red lights or abruptly turning into my path without a signal has been increasing, as a driver, cyclist, and pedestrian. Stay safe out there, especially during the winter months.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#94

Post by Fricken »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #67
Fricken wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The milestone to mark is the day when you or I can, at least theoretically, download the the fricken app and request a ride in an autonomous vehicle that has no safety driver.

I think that line is going to a bit more blurry than you think. Waymo has already done fully driverless testing during the early rider program, with plans to roll that out to Waymo One in the future[1]: > We’re never done learning, and our early rider program will continue as a way for a select group to give us ongoing insights. They’ll help test early features before those new capabilities graduate to Waymo One. For…

I've been following the industry so closely for so long that I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge to commemorate the day that a publicly accessible, fully driverless pilot project opens up somewhere in the world, and that bottle has been in the fridge for 3 years now.

However anticlimactic it may be when it arrives, that day is nonetheless the day when, in my mind, self driving cars have officially gone from zero to one. There will be no apprenticeship this year.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#95

Post by opencl »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #5

I know this is a heated debate, but it's interesting to see the divergent approaches that are being taken to achieve self driving. In one corner, it's lidar-based, equipping vehicles produced by other companies, organically and incrementally growing the navigation technology. In the other, it's video-based with now 100s of thousands of vehicles feeding data to a massive neural net. Each has very well thought-out argu…

It really doesn't seem like much of a heated debate. The entire industry aside from one company has decided to combine video+radar+LIDAR and the one company that isn't using LIDAR has shown no meaningful progress (in actual self-driving, not referring to driver assist tech) in years.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#96

Post by jacobmoe »

notahacker wrote: post #89
jacobmoe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it exactly backwards. You will _know_ what the vehicle will do because it will be programmed to do it. Meanwhile, that other vehicle could do anything because the driver might be texting, might have fallen asleep, might be in a fit of rage. Driving is an absurdly dangerous thing to do. We don't tolerate that level of risk in almost anything else in life. It just so happens that getting around at 60mph is so…

> You will _know_ what the vehicle will do because it will be programmed to do it. I don't share either the OP's confidence in the attentiveness of human drivers or yours in the existence of bug-free complex software The biggest differences between the two is that (i) software bugs can be potentially be systematic across all vehicle types and sudden, whereas human failure modes are discrete (ii) we have pretty good d…

I don't have confidence in bug-free software, just in software that is bug-free enough to be better than the status quo. Systematic bugs can be fixed systematically. Humans will never not be too easily distracted, easily angered, easily bored. We're never going to fix ancient human characteristics so that driving stops being an unacceptable risk to life.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#97

Post by ehsankia »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #91
cromwellian wrote: post #47

Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice. IMHO, to do less would be reckless showboating that could do unimaginable damage to the AV industry, as well as end up endangering lives. In the tech industry, we don't like to wait, we like moving fast, taking risks, shi…

>> Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice. I'm sorry but where does this "one year" expectation come from? What says that Waymo needs a year (or two years, or ten, or three months, etc) to start "scaling back the drivers"? From what I can tell, the only way to…

No, the only way to know how well it's doing is for it to get enough "interesting" miles, and then compare the success rate of those miles to similar human-driven miles. Right now Waymo is past 8 million miles driven. Miles driven is a better and normalized metric, with comparable real world statistics, unlike time.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#98

Post by ehsankia »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #67
Fricken wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The milestone to mark is the day when you or I can, at least theoretically, download the the fricken app and request a ride in an autonomous vehicle that has no safety driver.

I think that line is going to a bit more blurry than you think. Waymo has already done fully driverless testing during the early rider program, with plans to roll that out to Waymo One in the future[1]: > We’re never done learning, and our early rider program will continue as a way for a select group to give us ongoing insights. They’ll help test early features before those new capabilities graduate to Waymo One. For…

Right, the real milestone was when they set Waymo cars with no safety drivers on the streets a few months ago. This milestone realistically is just that the riders don't have an NDA anymore, unlike the previous ones. It's still a cool step forward, but it's still a "private beta". At least now we can start getting photos and videos from the users though which is cool.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#99

Post by adrianmonk »

pavelrub wrote: post #52
bertil wrote: post #11

They announced a change of brand a month ago. I guess adding “One” at the end of the existing name counts, and I like the implication that they want to communicate clearly on phases of the project but… Was it worth announcing a brand change? I feel like I’m missing something.

I'm not sure I understand. What brand change? Wyamo is the name of the company. Waymo One is the name of the service they are launching.

Yes, seems like this can be viewed as adding a sub-brand, not a brand change. Like Amazon Prime and Amazon AWS are both sub-brands of Amazon.

One could speculate they're planning ahead, making space for another brand, either a different variation of SDC as a service or some other type of product.

Maybe they'll have SDCs with multiple riders (like Uber Pool) and call it Waymo Share. Or maybe they'll have self-driving commuter buses (like Chariot) and call it Waymo Shuttle.

Once you've mastered SDCs, there are just so many applications that you almost expect to do multiple things with it. They could license to car manufacturers and call that WaymOEM, sell their own cars and call it Waymotors, do trucks and call it Waymo Freight, etc., etc.

Re: Waymo One: The next step on our self-driving journey

#100

Post by frutiger »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #91
cromwellian wrote: post #47

Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice. IMHO, to do less would be reckless showboating that could do unimaginable damage to the AV industry, as well as end up endangering lives. In the tech industry, we don't like to wait, we like moving fast, taking risks, shi…

>> Keeping the safety drivers in the beginning, scaling up, and getting a year or more worth of actual real world use, before slowly scaling back the drivers is what I'd call a very responsible choice. I'm sorry but where does this "one year" expectation come from? What says that Waymo needs a year (or two years, or ten, or three months, etc) to start "scaling back the drivers"? From what I can tell, the only way to…

The exact paragraph you quoted says “a year or more”.
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