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

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

#101

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

Like someone said, driverless cars will save thousands, and kill hundreds.

It's obviously the best choice to adapt a technology like that, but I'm not sure our society has the fortitude to do it.

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

#102

Post by yourapostasy »

I wonder when rental car buses at airports will adopt autonomous driving. On the surface it might seem ideal because it is repeatedly the same route, but the density, diversity and loose rules of vehicular and pedestrian traffic would make it a very challenging environment for machine learning, and I speculate whether or not that might accelerate building the "dense urban environment" corpus.

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

#103

Post by esoterica »

Causality1 wrote: post #95

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.

Why would companies not sell autonomous cars if customers exist who are willing to pay a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs? The fact that autonomous taxis are viable doesn’t preclude personal car ownership.

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

#104

Post by rubicon33 »

jonplackett wrote: post #71
2bitencryption wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right. But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflex…

Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year.

Think about that.

Self driving cars aren't just a solution to nuisance of driving. They're a solution to one of the leading causes of DEATH and INJURY in the country.

Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"!

But I sure hope when we do that, the car points right back at us and asks "And for the other 1.20 million lives I've saved this year? You would have killed them"

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

#105

Post by stubish »

Driverless, but they didn't say autonomous (yet). I think this means the safety driver will be remote, teleoperating. It is the obvious next step, and if things go well they can start lowering the ratio of operator:car in the way that drone operations already do.

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

#106

Post by richk449 »

pjdemers wrote: post #84

This afternoon I was driving up Alma in Palo Alto, near the Embarcadero underpass. There was a Waymo test van behind me, and another two cars in front of me. My thought was: "look at me, actually driving my car, like a sucker".

That’s what he waymo cars were thinking too.

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

#107

Post by beerandt »

jonplackett wrote: post #71
2bitencryption wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and we’d have stopped, and we’d be right. But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflex…

Yes, except this presumes that AI would recognize the kid at the same time as a human driver. Or at least soon enough such that AI's quicker reflexes can compensate for any delay.

If AI can't recognize some obstacles at all, then I think it's safe to assume there may be some delay in obstacle recognition compared to humans.

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

#109

Post by choppaface »

Will they be the current cars, or cars with the new next-gen hardware that are substantially safer? The cars that end up driving could signal a lot to the industry.

New lidar was spotted a few months ago and more recently on the Jaguar cars and the CEO said it’s an order of magnitude better: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/04/21/new-waymo-... https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-iaa-frankfurt-2019-b3cca36d84...

One would imagine this early announcement comes in reaction to their recent “valuation” cut: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-cut-40percen...

If Waymo starts driving without safety drivers en-masse, even on small fixed routes, it will signal certain takeover metrics have been hit. It will be interesting to see if Waymo uses existing cars (the ML and planners just got better) or if they use new hardware and signal a certain lidar improvement is necessary for achieving a viable takeover rate.

The signal won’t be clear but should be there. And then it’s up to the rest of the industry to show how fast they can react to the change.

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

#110

Post by foota »

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 actually think driverless cars will do better here. They will likely be able to recognize cars deviating from their current path in O(hundreds of milliseconds) and avoid a collision, whereas if a car from the opposite direction lane starts drifting into mine seconds before we hit there's little I can do.
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