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Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#71

Post by toast0 »

crazcarl wrote: post #64
chris_st wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, we were taking an Uber through a part of a nearby city I'd never been in before, and approaching a confusing bit of roundabout, the driver leaned over to me and asked me which way to go :-(

Just the other night my driver turned too wide and started going the wrong way down the divided street. He u-turned and fixed it without any issue thankfully, but then he blamed it on the construction workers "moving the road" - which they definitely didn't.

I mean, that's not great, but I would take that over my SuperShuttle experience. At least your driver wasn't falling asleep repeatedly, despite apparently regularly spaced prompts from the company app to confirm he was awake.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#72

Post by drivebycomment »

evanlivingston wrote: post #59
whimsicalism wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if they can make this work well then you cut out the driver - which is very cost-saving. It also lets you a. optimize exactly where cars are driving to maximize ride share revenue, b. have the cars ready to pick someone up 24/7. It's going to be a much more efficient use of car capital than hiring a person to drive it.

Is it though? will autonomous vehicles ever get to point where there is even close to less than one engineer for each vehicle? Engineering salaries are substantially larger than driver's salaries. Also, there is the cost of years and years of extremely expensive research that needs to be offset, cloud infrastructure costs, hardware costs + costs of retooling factories for integrating the large numbers of sensors + co…

It's a good question.

https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... shows Uber generated $65B gross booking in 2019, and we know substantial fraction of that goes to the driver.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/For-a-... says driver takes about ~60% of the booking.

So this is a question of whether the capital cost / the engineering cost / operating cost for autonomous vehicle is higher than $65B * 0.6 = $39B per year for the same number of rides.

The engineering cost will be amortized over long enough time that it's likely not a significant factor in the long run. So, the limiting factor will be the capital cost (for vehicles and its support infra) and the operating cost. As you say, at this point we don't know for sure - one thing we know is that the capital cost and the operating cost likely will see significant reduction thanks to the economy of scale.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#73

Post by leetcrew »

evanlivingston wrote: post #59
whimsicalism wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if they can make this work well then you cut out the driver - which is very cost-saving. It also lets you a. optimize exactly where cars are driving to maximize ride share revenue, b. have the cars ready to pick someone up 24/7. It's going to be a much more efficient use of car capital than hiring a person to drive it.

Is it though? will autonomous vehicles ever get to point where there is even close to less than one engineer for each vehicle? Engineering salaries are substantially larger than driver's salaries. Also, there is the cost of years and years of extremely expensive research that needs to be offset, cloud infrastructure costs, hardware costs + costs of retooling factories for integrating the large numbers of sensors + co…

> will autonomous vehicles ever get to point where there is even close to less than one engineer for each vehicle?

if FSD actually ends up working on most roads, I don't see why not. there's no inherent reason why engineer headcount would scale linearly with the number of cars.

as for the cost savings, they don't necessarily have to beat uber's pricing today. they could alternatively try to drive uber's costs up by lobbying hard to get drivers classified as employees and catch some PR points at the same time.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#74

Post by cyrux004 »

flokie wrote: post #28

I know the community is generally very negative/skeptic on this (at least based on the 21 comments so far below), but this is an amazing technical & business accomplishment. Congratulations! The blog post is relatively clear that ramp up will take a few weeks - "we’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app" b…

People are dissatisfied because of the vageuness around the start date for general public; not at the state of self driving. By Waymo's own timeline; they were supposed to deliver this atleast 3 years back. This seems to be a much bigger problem than anybody anticipitated

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#75

Post by minwcnt5 »

fullshark wrote: post #37
actuator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo was started in 2009, they have existed for half of Google's existence. The amount of research and money that has gone into it is not comparable to things like Google Reader. Also, they seem to have the lead over most and the market opportunity is huge.

I'd argue Tesla has the lead. Perhaps their approach has technical limitations that make full self-driving impossible so it's moot but they have the lead.

I might have missed some news, has Tesla already deployed completely empty cars on public roads?

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#77

Post by AnimalMuppet »

ilaksh wrote: post #36
advisedwang wrote: post #23

What is the actual advantage to consumers over an Uber? Novelty will wear off, and so to survive Waymo will actually need to be better in some way. Can anyone in Phoenix answer if Waymo is cheaper? Is Waymo hoping people will choose Waymo for safety?

For the moment one advantage is you can't catch anything from a driver since there isn't one. Long term it should be possible for the service to be cheaper than manned since they don't have to pay a driver.

But you can catch something from the previous rider, and there isn't any driver to sanitize things for you.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#78

Post by jeffbee »

flokie wrote: post #28

I know the community is generally very negative/skeptic on this (at least based on the 21 comments so far below), but this is an amazing technical & business accomplishment. Congratulations! The blog post is relatively clear that ramp up will take a few weeks - "we’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app" b…

The HN discussion around Waymo is always overwhelmingly negative because Waymo doesn't fit into the HN cosmology of innovation. Self-driving will come to pass when we force an AI to watch us play Pole Position for a million years, is the HN timeline. HN is comfortable with this Tesla narrative. Less comfortable is the idea that self-driving will be brought to market by lots of control theory PhDs and a really large number of unit tests.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#79

Post by dbt00 »

fullshark wrote: post #37
actuator wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo was started in 2009, they have existed for half of Google's existence. The amount of research and money that has gone into it is not comparable to things like Google Reader. Also, they seem to have the lead over most and the market opportunity is huge.

I'd argue Tesla has the lead. Perhaps their approach has technical limitations that make full self-driving impossible so it's moot but they have the lead.

I own a Tesla model 3 with the V3 hardware and FSD package.

They are not even close to being able to do what Waymo does.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#80

Post by karpierz »

lozaning wrote: post #68
scotth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so in what way do they have the lead?

They certainly have the largest corpus of data to train their models on. All their cars reporting back all that data is an extremely valuable moat.

Is unlabeled video data in limited supply? My impression was that the limiting factor was labeled data, especially labeled video + lidar data.
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