Live data from Hacker News

Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

techcrunch.com

11–20 of 221 posts

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#11
Good to see this finally happening. I wonder how they're going to scale this out though -- AVs are still pretty expensive to build/operate (COGS/TeleOps/Maintenance etc)

Haven't seen a recent study/article around cost/ROI (not sure if these have gone down significantly) -- any recommendations?

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#12
post #5
post #2

So sounds like we'll get level 4 autonomy in 2020. Once that happens the discussion around the nature of the approach to level 5 (which is probably asymptotic) will be a welcome change vs today where people are questioning if we'll ever have a consumer successfully use an autonomous vehicle.

the 80/20 principle says it's going to be a long, long time before level 5 autonomy is reached. That's 100% in all conditions. In fact, I would say it's more theory than attainable. There's a reason they're testing in Phoenix. It has almost no Inclement weather. Throw a little snow, mud, or sleet in there and it gets hairy fast. Level 2 is basically the 20% of effort in 80/20. It's exponential effort from then on out…

We shouldn't set a dramatically higher safety standard for autonomous drivers than human drivers.

When autonomous drivers have the same or fewer injuries per billion miles driven as human drivers, then for all practical purposes it doesn't matter if it's level 4 or level 5.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#15
post #2

So sounds like we'll get level 4 autonomy in 2020. Once that happens the discussion around the nature of the approach to level 5 (which is probably asymptotic) will be a welcome change vs today where people are questioning if we'll ever have a consumer successfully use an autonomous vehicle.

Even if the algorithms more-or-less know how to drive, the best algorithms will eventually be chosen by natural selection. I wouldn't want to be along for the ride during this process.

nor a pedestrian...

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same with best uber drivers.

Any human is the product of eons of natural selection honing our perception and reflexes. The process was unpleasant.

I think if you look at evolution more closely you'll see that it is messy and is constantly creating dead-ends. Mammals were insignificant until an extinction event occurred. It's not like we were superior and displaced the dinosaurs.

We have lots of errors and junk DNA. We make all kinds of mistakes. Perhaps not fatal ones yet, we'll see how climate change plays out.

As for our perception and reflexes... I wouldn't brag that they're that good just because they haven't been bad enough to cause our extinction.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#17
post #9

Waymo is so far ahead in this game. Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count. Uber has a dead pedestrian and a major lawsuit. Cruise has a lot of people on staff but virtually nothing to show for it. Lyft exists. Waymo is in production revenue service.

> Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count I don't think you're being very accurate there. There are lots of videos of people commuting 50+ miles to and from work every day without touching anything while on the interstates, including interchanges. It's doing a lot more…

I disagree. It’s completely fair. Handling basic tasks on nice freeways is exactly what adaptive cruise control + lane keeping is for. Last I checked, autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode” claims.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#18

Waymo is so far ahead in this game. Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count. Uber has a dead pedestrian and a major lawsuit. Cruise has a lot of people on staff but virtually nothing to show for it. Lyft exists. Waymo is in production revenue service.

I used to think that, but now I agree with George Hotz. Tesla uses machine learning to map inputs to control outputs. Google is using it just to build a model of the world and then use program logic to decide the control action to take.

The problem with the latter approach is the long tail of real life variety doesn't lend itself to a fixed set of programmed rules. You'll always have more edge cases.

I think Waymos approach gets you to 90% faster, but then plateaus.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#19
post #9

Waymo is so far ahead in this game. Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count. Uber has a dead pedestrian and a major lawsuit. Cruise has a lot of people on staff but virtually nothing to show for it. Lyft exists. Waymo is in production revenue service.

> Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count I don't think you're being very accurate there. There are lots of videos of people commuting 50+ miles to and from work every day without touching anything while on the interstates, including interchanges. It's doing a lot more…

Sure but specifically the staying in its lane feature doesn't work.

Re: Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way”

#20

This sounds familiar. Here's an article from 2 years ago saying the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-drivi... Hopefully this time it's the real deal. I remain skeptical.

The difference here is that now the "public paying customers" and "full self-driving" customer groups are merged - so this means there's genuinely a paid full self-driving service launched as of today! A miracle

Calling this service public is misleading, especially since Waymo created the bifurcation between Waymo One (no NDA) and Early Riders (NDA). Both of these programs you have to apply for and be accepted, so neither is public. And Waymo has made no claim of merging these. The upcoming driverless rides Waymo refers to in this article could very well be for the Early Riders still under an NDA - which theoretically could already be happening based on their past announcements (although the abundance of cell phones strongly suggests this is not the case).

This announcement is just a repeat of what they've said before. If they actually do it this time then that's great, but they haven't actually said anything new here.

Post reply on HN