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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

#171

Post by BoorishBears »

nickik wrote: post #90
almost_usual wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The question is not, who has the first taxi on any public road anywhere, but who first can launch 10000 of autonomous taxis and make money. Probably Waymo > Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waymo has incredibly few ours driven on public roads outside of a limited area. an…

> Probably Waymo Waymo has spend 10+ years and they can now barley driven in possibly the easiest location in the world, a location where they have logged millions of miles. Waymo focuses on the easiest thing first. The technology on their car is incredibly expensive both now and to scale it to 10k, 100k, 1M vehicles is a huge challenge, both capital and manufacturing. They are like a rocket company who says, we have…

> Waymo focuses on the easiest thing first.

Hilarious to hear this come from someone rooting for the guys who took an off the shelf LKA + ACC system that couldn't handle stationary objects, turned it on full-time, and called it "Autopilot".

Of course the decision to essentially misuse that sensor suite killed a few people but that's neither here nor there right.

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

#172

Post by jliptzin »

nmstoker wrote: post #135
wetpaws wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tesla?

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

#173

Post by remote_phone »

Can Waymo cars do left turns into traffic? A few years ago I saw a Waymo car in Mountain View attempting a left turn across Rengstorff and the traffic was pretty bad. I would personally be terrified if I had to trust an algorithm to properly navigate that situation.

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

#174

Post by WWLink »

BoorishBears wrote: post #170
bsder wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somebody has to pay for the fact that a driver lost 90 minutes in a traffic jam because some idiot caused a traffic fatality and blocked everything up. Or does the driver have a right to kick you out of his cab when the ride becomes unprofitable? The only question about payment is "Who?" As much as you can fight it, at the end of the day the answer will always be "the end consumer." The only question is whether you p…

Did someone say no one should pay for the traffic jam? What no one ends up paying for when incentives are aligned however, is taking the tourist from the airport on an unsolicited tour of the city rather than directly to their destination. Or the taxi driver who accidentally ends up on that one road that always has an idiot who caused a fatality when there were others that were less busy at the time. _That_ is what m…

I'd rather pay a little more than have the driver risk their life and my life because waze told them they can make a left turn on a 45mph street across 4 lanes of traffic with nothing more than a stop sign and save half a minute.

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

#175

Post by rtx »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #142
olyjohn wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big deal. You can do this in a Honda Fit for crying out loud.

You can, yes, but marketing is very much a thing. The average person knows Tesla has self driving (to whatever extent), but not everyone knows a Honda Fit can drive itself. I sure didn’t.

Isnt it amazing we need billions of dollars of investment in AI for that. If they could have continued with knobs instead of touch screen.

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

#176

Post by jfoster »

sidibe wrote: post #144
jfoster wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill? Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually le…

Waymo is part of a company that is sitting on $100B+, if they thought rolling out their own cars everywhere was worth it they could afford it easier than Tesla, but also they don't need to do it in a capital intensive way, they can partner with car manufacturers or ride hailing businesses and just be responsible for the driver.

They have $100B+, but do they want to spend it all in one go like that? Sure, there's also ways to split or reduce the cost, but those also require things to be done. How long do you think it takes Waymo to get their stuff ready for a new vehicle model? Last I heard, it was between 6 and 12 months.

The beauty of the Tesla model is that they've already made tonnes of the cars that should eventually be able to do this. Furthermore, instead of each vehicles being a cost for them, the vehicles are a source of revenue.

I acknowledge that it does all hinge upon Tesla reaching a point with their autonomy where it can be unsupervised. Some people say they will never get there, but I think that's pretty shortsighted. The data collected by their existing fleet is a massive advantage. Let's not forget that it's been more than 11 years since the first video of what became Waymo, and they can pretty much only drive a small area in Phoenix, with high likelihood of needing to train extensively for every new location as they're now doing in California. Tesla are doing most of the world in (more or less) one go.

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

#178

Post by asdff »

klmadfejno wrote: post #96
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 wil…

How long until these too are abused like shared scooters and bikes? You order one after a night out and the previous tenant discretely left their partially digested dinner all over the seat and floor. What then? In many ways, an uber driver is also a custodian.

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

#179

Post by ironman1478 »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #110
donor20 wrote: post #102

Fantastic. The reality is that good mapping and some level of lidar (which is getting cheaper faster for low res/angle sensors) is somewhat game changing in terms of self driving vehicle reliability. Tesla will miss out I think by not taking advantage of doing even the cheapest possible one sensor lidar to augment their existing system. $500 -> in the future $100 for the data lidar gives you is gold.

I imagine you're correct that lidar is a huge leg-up in the race to self-driving. However, I can see a scenario where, despite that, it is not the right choice for Tesla. It's important to remember that self-driving technology will be commodity at some point (like the lidar units themselves). Whoever offers the most affordable option meeting some baseline performance will dominate the market and licence to every self…

I do not think self driving technology will become a commodity be for a very very long time. It takes an enormous amount of processing power, both offline and online, and some incredibly specialized hardware to get right. I don't think the companies that actually succeed will actually sell their software. Waymo and probably are cruise are light years ahead of the competition and would want to take advantage of the monopoly they would have for as long as the can.

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

#180

Post by BoorishBears »

WWLink wrote: post #174
BoorishBears wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did someone say no one should pay for the traffic jam? What no one ends up paying for when incentives are aligned however, is taking the tourist from the airport on an unsolicited tour of the city rather than directly to their destination. Or the taxi driver who accidentally ends up on that one road that always has an idiot who caused a fatality when there were others that were less busy at the time. _That_ is what m…

I'd rather pay a little more than have the driver risk their life and my life because waze told them they can make a left turn on a 45mph street across 4 lanes of traffic with nothing more than a stop sign and save half a minute.

Not wanting to die is kind of something that one doesn't tie to their mode of payment...

Not to mention ridesharing apps have incentivized safer driving with their review systems much more than taxi drivers who generally felt they were beholden to no one or "their own" (which is why they felt comfortable doing things like taking people on joyrides) ever did

There's a lot of ambiguity about accident rates when a passenger is not in the vehicle with an Uber driver, but the rates for actual trips are lower than national averages: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/ubers-fatal-accident-tally...

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