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

techcrunch.com

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

#91

Post by grecy »

new_realist wrote: post #88
grecy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What other vehicle will change lanes by itself, and take on/off ramps through interchanges to take you where your navigation is routed, without you touching a single thing?

You have to keep touching the wheel or it will disengage. It sounds like you’ve never used it.

OK, sure. You have to touch the wheel or it turns off.

What I mean is, you are not providing input to the wheel, or pedals, or turn signal or driving the car in any way. You're just letting it know you have not fallen asleep.

And, yes, thanks for asking, I have used it.

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

#92

Post by Cogito »

cookie_monsta wrote: post #80
ehsankia wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially". I think you're confused. They've been having customer rides with employee in the car for almost a year now. The email sent to customers today is saying that they will soon find rides with no employee inside. And again, rides without employee inside have been happening also since 2017, just not with customers inside.

Maybe I am confused. I'm just going on what Waymo says. The point is that "soon" is meaningless in this context and Waymo very clearly states that "a Waymo employee would likely be present in the vehicle initially."

That quote is from Techcrunch, I haven't seen it in any of the Waymo communications yet.

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

#93

Post by mgalgs »

2bitencryption wrote: post #61
jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc. Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but I do this as a human who knows what a plastic bag is, and how it is far safer to drive right over it than sla…

> Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following, etc.

I would argue that the examples you gave are just image recognition, etc. What is your brain doing if not image recognition and obstacle avoidance?

We're not there with today's technology but eventually our machines will perform better at those uniquely human tasks you mentioned. After all, we humans and our cognition is just the output of these giant meat computers inside our skulls pulling in sensory data and running pattern recognition algorithms.

The $65,000 question is whether or not today's technology is sufficient (however barbaric) to be acceptable for the job.

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

#95

Post by Causality1 »

Nowadays I hope it takes a very long time. As Elon Musk pointed out, once cars can independently generate income as autonomous taxis, there's no reason to sell them to the public at all. Self-driving cars isn't the death of personal driving because they'll be too convenient; it's the death of personal driving because we won't be able to buy a car at a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs.

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

#97

Post by scottlocklin »

ehsankia wrote: post #74
cookie_monsta wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is unfortunate that it took 2 years to get to the point where they felt safe putting people customers in the car Except they're not at that point yet, and even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially". I don't think that anybody is accusing anybody of lying, just making the point that predictions of the marketing team aren't really something you would want to set your watch by.

> even when they are they will still have a Waymo employee on board "initially". I think you're confused. They've been having customer rides with employee in the car for almost a year now. The email sent to customers today is saying that they will soon find rides with no employee inside. And again, rides without employee inside have been happening also since 2017, just not with customers inside.

Except they all have remote control "employee inside."

https://www.wired.com/story/designated-driver-teleoperations...

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

#98

Post by jakeogh »

beerandt wrote: post #81
jonplackett wrote: post #42

I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently. The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine - even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life. I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter…

Maybe semantics, but the biggest problem isn't necessarily trusting the machine to do what's expected. The problem is the machine being able to predict what pedestrians and other drivers are going to do. This isn't just a problem for driverless cars, it's become a real problem for people, too. The rules of the road are there for a reason, people! When you wave someone into traffic, or have your emergency flashers on…

I agree. The humans are the bugs thing is an excuse that the pre-programmed proponents keep leaning on. That hypothetical has the unintentional implicit frame; as if it's the non pre-programmed humans that are the problem, when clearly a "self driving" car should be able to handle that mundane situation (although it never will). Adding rules to abstract away the humans is the natural next step that their bad assumptions lead to.

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

#99

Post by hitekker »

ehsankia wrote: post #56
cookie_monsta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. FTA: > "are on the way" > "soon you may experience" Vague promises without any concrete dates attached make this seem like output from PR rather than engineering

Except in the previous article, driverless rides were already happening : > since mid-October, the company has been operating its autonomous minivans on public roads in Arizona without a safety driver The difference is that those were without any users inside. This new article is saying that the public offering, with real customers inside, will get rides with no one inside. It is unfortunate that it took 2 years to g…

> it's very misleading to equate the two and use is as a way to imply they lied last time around.

Your belief that the GP thinks they lied may be rooted in your own biases than in her or his words.

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

#100

Post by revscat »

persistent wrote: post #30
eloff wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Not sure there is enough evidence in support of those claims about Tesla. Tesla doesn't collect anywhere near enough data from its customer fleet to support the kind of massive training being claimed. In contrast Waymo and Cruise vehicles are regularly in the depot where each car offloads terabytes of data. Who has the bigger training set?

Tesla routinely gets data from the fleet and analyzes it. Here is Andre Karpathy speaking on this subject:

https://youtu.be/Ucp0TTmvqOE

1:49:30. I’m on mobile otherwise I would link to the exact spot.

Tesla has tens (hundreds?) of thousands of vehicles on the road right now that are continuously feeding training data back to Tesla. What evidence is there that this is insufficient, or even deficient? From what I can gather, Waymo has limited testing geofenced to Phoenix, Arizona. Tesla has cars all over the world with autopilot, all providing training data.

I don’t see a reason for your conviction that Waymo has an advantage here.

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