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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

#91

Post by jowday »

nickik wrote: post #88
jeffbee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

HN is one of the most negative about Tesla of any place I have seen, including car forums. The hate against Tesla and their approach is about 10x more aggressive then the skepticism of Waymo. Also, I'm pretty sure Tesla has a lot of PhDs and probably about 100x more unit tests then Waymo as they have an gigantic amount of strange real-world corner cases that they have converted to unit-tests. There is no way Waymo ha…

The reality of Tesla's data pipeline is nothing like what Elon presented during autonomy day. If you wanted to be generous, you could describe that presentation as a very forward looking vision of what they want their pipeline to look like at some point in the future.

A bunch of hobbyist reverse engineers have explored how Tesla's data pipeline works in practice. @greentheonly does great work.

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

#92

Post by RivieraKid »

chubot wrote: post #81
twmahna wrote: post #44

Just a few months ago, I recall many skeptics on HN claiming that full driverless technology was 10-20 years away. Do those people still think that it's going to take 10-20 years for this tech to reach say, New York, now that it's live in Phoenix?

Yes, because this announcement is a lot like their previous announcements -- fudging the language to make it sound like it's more available than it is. It's not even generally available in Phoenix yet. I'm sure someone on HN lives in Phoenix, and has never used Waymo before. Tell us if you can get a driverless ride. It's got a long way to go before it's something like Uber in Phoenix. It's got even longer to go befor…

Will you cease to be a skeptic once Waymo One is open to anyone?

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

#93

Post by RivieraKid »

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?

If you can take a ride with or without a random person travelling with you, what would you choose? Some people will prefer the latter, because of introversion, social anxiety, etc.

In the long-term, the obvious benefit is the price. In the next 5 to 10 years I don't expect it to be cheaper than Uber, even if their cost is half of Uber's.

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

#95

Post by xtracto »

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?

I hate interacting with that random person, it is awkward and unnecessary. Also, hopefully this will decrease the cost. This, in addition to the lower maintenance needed for electric cars might make my dream com true of not having to own a car and travel only by driverless-Uber (i.e. it might become available and affordable at last!).

My take is that this will become widely available in the next 5 years. The future is bright!

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

#96

Post by klmadfejno »

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?

* You don't need to pay drivers

* You don't need an army of marketers/hr/legal/support staff for your drivers

* You don't need to dodge ambiguous contractor vs. employee laws

* You don't have any risk about individual drivers being bad actors or acting fraudulently

* You can predict, with great accuracy, how many cars will be available at any given time, whether or not they'll want to do another drive after (they will), and where they want to end up

* Your cars meet a minimum level of safety (if it works) that humans can't guarantee, especially in regards to distracted, tired, drunk, or whatever driving

Given how much effort is spent on attracting and retaining drivers, I'd say Waymo has many competitive advantages lined up. If it works.

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

#97

Post by leetcrew »

angryasian wrote: post #67
holidayacct wrote: post #15

I know everyone loves the idea of self-driving cars but the reality of self-driving cars is really ugly. We need repetitions driving vehicles in order to operate them effectively. If you don't have enough repetitions driving a vehicle when something goes wrong you're not going to be able to operate the vehicle at all. Furthermore, I'm skeptical that driverless vehicles can factor in all the ways in which someone migh…

I don't buy this repetitions argument at all. A computer and machine learning go through billions of driving scenarios more than any human could if the data is available.

I think they are worried about driving skill atrophying among the human population if they ride exclusively in FSD vehicles.

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

#98

Post by agildehaus »

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.

Yet their cars still crash into huge stationary objects and pedestrians.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVgkWii5JdM

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

#99

Post by RivieraKid »

twmahna wrote: post #49

Let's place skepticism aside for a second and assume that full driverless tech will be fully operating in major metros soon. What does that mean for the rideshare business? Are Uber/Lyft basically dead if they are years behind Waymo?

If driverless taxis are cheaper - which is likely in the "fully operating in major metros" scenario, then the answer is obviously yes.

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

#100

Post by jacquesm »

adoxyz wrote: post #33
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?

I would assume cheaper and more reliable service. With Uber/Lyft, you never know who you're going to get and what the experience will be like, and as someone that easily took 200-300 Uber rides per year pre-covid, I've seen some shit.

In the case of Uber/Lyft the driver has another function besides being the driver: they are on the hook for the capital invested in the vehicle or their ability to lease one. That's a lot of money per vehicle and utilization is the responsibility (and risk) of the driver.
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