Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 216 posts

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

#131

Post by bsder »

lhorie wrote: post #63
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.

Well, they might have a "lead" in the sense that they have technology to avoid having a driver, but there's still chicken-and-egg problems like demand vs availability and wait times (two of the criticisms lashed out at taxis, in comparison to Uber). I'm also curious about how driverless plays out in the real world (e.g. is there an equivalent of "oh shoot, I accidentally put the wrong address, can you drop me off ove…

> problems like demand vs availability and wait times (two of the criticisms lashed out at taxis, in comparison to Uber).

These were never my problems with taxi service.

Tracking is the thing that makes the rideshare services better--and taxis could apply that, if they wanted to.

Tracking solves most bad things about taxis. "Is it actually coming? How long until it gets here? Did they hit something unexpected? etc."

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

#132

Post by 8ytecoder »

whimsicalism wrote: post #24
nemonemo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We expect our new fully driverless service to be very popular, and we’re thankful to our riders for their patience as we ramp up availability to serve demand. I think this explains the reasoning behind the gradual ramp-up. Even at the product launch like new iPhones, the demand is difficult to estimate, so IMO it seems more responsible to give a reasonable expectation to the public like this, than just saying brave…

Nope. It's a poor press release because that is not what "general public" means . You shouldn't have to analyze the takeaways of what Waymo really meant when they used the extremely common phrase "general public."

Yup, “available to general public” or “generally available” in product terms usually mean anyone can go sign up for it.

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

#133

Post by wetpaws »

Judgmentality wrote: post #2

https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr... > 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 So...this is just an extension of what they currently do where it's not really open to the public? Waymo One is something you have to apply for and almost nobody gets in. It's not clear to me what "w…

Pretty sure this is intentional. Waymo had an insane (decades) head start in regards to self driving technology and was notably quiet about it.

While Uber and other folks are all boasting about their self driving project and collecting the lion share of controversy and unwanted attention, waymo is quietly, step by step, heading towards it's total dominance, staying completely off the radar.

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

#134

Post by dang »

whimsicalism wrote: post #24
nemonemo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We expect our new fully driverless service to be very popular, and we’re thankful to our riders for their patience as we ramp up availability to serve demand. I think this explains the reasoning behind the gradual ramp-up. Even at the product launch like new iPhones, the demand is difficult to estimate, so IMO it seems more responsible to give a reasonable expectation to the public like this, than just saying brave…

Nope. It's a poor press release because that is not what "general public" means . You shouldn't have to analyze the takeaways of what Waymo really meant when they used the extremely common phrase "general public."

Ok, we've shrunk the general public to "more people" in the title above.

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

#135

Post by nmstoker »

wetpaws wrote: post #133
Judgmentality wrote: post #2

https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr... > 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 So...this is just an extension of what they currently do where it's not really open to the public? Waymo One is something you have to apply for and almost nobody gets in. It's not clear to me what "w…

Pretty sure this is intentional. Waymo had an insane (decades) head start in regards to self driving technology and was notably quiet about it. While Uber and other folks are all boasting about their self driving project and collecting the lion share of controversy and unwanted attention, waymo is quietly, step by step, heading towards it's total dominance, staying completely off the radar.

I think you're spot on here. Whilst I suspect they've a long way to go, it seems likely to mirror the situation Google had with early search growth where the more they had people use it the better it got, quickly feeding a cycle the competitors could not compete with.

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

#136

Post by nmstoker »

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.

Just a small nitpick point: data is collected in the order of a GB per minute so there's no way they're reporting back even a fraction of the data gathered.

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

#137

Post by revscat »

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…

I’ve noticed this as well. Tesla here is treated like Microsoft was on Slashdot in the 2000s.

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

#138

Post by drfuchs »

Can anyone knowledgeably speak to what these gizmos can and can't do? Can I tell it to "please back into the driveway on the left side, but not so close that I can't open the garage door, and open the trunk, so I can easily load a box of my stuff"? Or "please go around to the back entrance where they deliver the to-go orders"? "No, down there where that guy is standing." Etc.

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

#139

Post by imtringued »

scotth wrote: post #43
fullshark wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

You can buy it and get your hands on it today.

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

#140

Post by jryle70 »

chubot wrote: post #120
RivieraKid wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Weird question :) My claim is that it won't be open to "anyone" in a useful way any time soon. And you need to define "anyone" -- that's precisely what's being fudged here (and what's been fudged in previous announcements). To be clear: I think Waymo will fold or be wound down before this happens. In a previous comment, I said that IF we get economically feasible self-driving cars in the next 10-20 years, then it wil…

> Weird question :) My claim is that it won't be open to "anyone" in a useful way any time soon.

Seems pretty clear it will be available to public in the next few weeks, unless you're saying "general access to anyone who chooses to download the app" isn't about general public.

"Beginning Thursday, any existing Waymo One customer can hail a driverless minivan from a fleet of more than 300. The vehicles will be operating in a smaller, roughly 50-square-mile service area. Passengers are free to invite friends and family and to share their experiences on social media. Waymo plans to open the service to new customers within a few weeks. “At that point, we’ll have general access to anyone who chooses to download the app,” Krafcik said." - [0]

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/waymo-one...

Post reply on HN