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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#201

Post by kjksf »

chrisseaton wrote: post #54

Why does Waymo use a niche British luxury car for their platform? Must be very expensive and what are the benefits?

I'm guessing they want to start with premium feel to give people good first impressions. That's why their other car is $60k Pacifica minivan and not $25k Honda Civic.

I'm also guessing that they want an electric car. At the time they made a deal to purchase those cars (was quite a while ago) Jaguar i-Pace was one of few premium electric cars available (if you exclude Teslas, which obviously Waymo wouldn't want as it's a competitor).

At this stage cost is not a big problem.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#202

Post by danielrhodes »

Lammy wrote: post #67
ra7 wrote: post #19

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering m…

> SF is a real nightmare to drive. 'cause they decided not to build most of the roads: https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg

This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads exist, more or less, except for the Embarcadero which was removed after it collapsed in the 1989 earthquake (and was a crazy eye sore).

It is certainly true that the taste for elevated highways through cities has waned given the pollution and dust and general unsightliness that it produces. In the 1950s, when cars were all the rage, people were very excited by these things.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#203

Post by rpmisms »

lifekaizen wrote: post #156
rpmisms wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo and Tesla have very different approaches to autonomy. I think both are valid avenues, but it's fascinating to watch them develop in parallel. You don't have to make it into a spiteful contest.

Definitely both valid business approaches, Tesla more interesting from a startup / leverage approach. As a consumer, I'm less excited about Tesla putting out beta software in situations where mistakes can be deadly https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...

I'm fine with Tesla putting out dangerous betas, as long as the betas are opt-in. Shipping beta software by default is a bad thing.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#204

Post by spyckie2 »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…

The key metric is probably "obscure incidents" per miles driven, probably classified manually into various levels of danger. Once the "incidents that lead to disaster" count reaches 0 statistically, it will definitely roll out en masse without the need of safety drivers.

My guess is that they know how many miles they have to drive in order to reach that number, and it's a whole lot. Statistics and math stuff but you can probably pin it down to the month or quarter based on trends. Either that, or it's about driving every road in the city with all sorts of weather / traffic / pedestrian conditions until there's no issue. This isn't generalized AI driving (L5) but it's a much more logical approach to getting autonomous driving coverage where it's the most valuable.

My guess is that each city will involve a safety driver rollout until they have enough data to know the incident rate is zero. There might be a lot of variance between cities - maps data, weather conditions, customs, etc. Then remove the safety drivers.

I'm sure they also are experimenting with disaster/safety protocols while they do the roll out.

My prediction is that waymo will be a mainstream option within the next 5 years.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#205

Post by tshaddox »

ra7 wrote: post #167
0-_-0 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It's fully driverless in geographically limited areas .

I'm aware. It's really between "maybe works, maybe doesn't everywhere (L3)" vs "works with no driver in a defined area (L4)". I consider the latter as more advanced as they are taking full responsibility for your safety.

It depends. If I could choose one car for person use, I'd take any modern adaptive cruise control + lane-keep assist system over an L4 that only worked in one city (even if it's a major city where I live). I'm not really sure how you determine which one is "more advanced," but I would consider the "level of automation" to be the portion of my normal driving habits that are able to be automated.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#206

Post by dheera »

ra7 wrote: post #91
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…

> Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5 Because they are not even trying to be level 5. They've made it very clear that will only ever be a level 4 company and level 5 is not feasible.

Anyone who says L5 is bullshitting honestly.

L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed.

In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers.

Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?"

Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical interventions per kilometer, non-critical interventions per kilometer, accidents per kilometer, etc.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#207

Post by beaconstudios »

XorNot wrote: post #109
beaconstudios wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big concern is that driving as a human skill is reactive and adaptive, whereas ML (and software in general) models are pre-baked. If something happens outside the car's model, it will react unpredictably, and strange circumstances can arise while driving. AGI, as based on human cognition, would have the capability to adapt to as-yet-unseen circumstances.

I would suggest visiting r/idiotsincars sometime. Humans are terrible at reacting to situation outside of their experience, and essentially do random things all the time. If an AI system's default response is "come to a stop safely" then it's going to be way ahead of a lot of human "unexpected situation" handling in cars.

There are many situations where "come to a stop safely" is the worst possible thing you could do.

Yes, people are bad at driving, because they don't pay attention, panic, make mistakes etc. But ML models tend to freak out at slight variations on mundane circumstances; a cyclist crossing the road at just the right angle and the wrong colour of bike, that sort of thing. The thing self driving cars need to avoid is killing people in broad daylight for no discernable reason, and that seems like the kind of thing that you'd need a mind for. It's the same issue as with adversarial image manipulation to fool image recognition; if changing 3 pixels can turn a frog into a toaster, you aren't really "seeing" the frog at all in a symbolic way, and not seeing a road symbolically seems like a recipe for disaster.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#208

Post by zone411 »

notshift wrote: post #65
gfodor wrote: post #27

Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes: - Self driving is not possible - Self driving is not possible anytime soon - Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR - Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon if ever. I wonder which of their as…

Waymo already "self-drives" today, it just is extremely slow at making turns when the road is busy, and if there is any kind of unusual obstacle on the road (such as construction cones that require you to drive partially in another lane) it just stops completely and has the rider wait for twenty minutes for a manual operator to come and take over. Those two obstacles won't be overcome until AGI. At best their frequen…

Completely disagree. This doesn't require AGI.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#209

Post by MattGaiser »

_rpd wrote: post #185
MattGaiser wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that they just don't solve the really wacky edge cases which might require AGI. Many people assume that a self driving car must be 100% successful. To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20%/bottom 80% of drivers. So the car will crash if a seagull flies in front of the camera and there is a deer just beyond it. The human would probably crash too.

> To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers. It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.

I would be fine with beating average but as soon as this thing kills someone, I want there to be a significant difference in accident rate so it does not end up in regulatory hell.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#210

Post by ra7 »

tshaddox wrote: post #205
ra7 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware. It's really between "maybe works, maybe doesn't everywhere (L3)" vs "works with no driver in a defined area (L4)". I consider the latter as more advanced as they are taking full responsibility for your safety.

It depends. If I could choose one car for person use, I'd take any modern adaptive cruise control + lane-keep assist system over an L4 that only worked in one city (even if it's a major city where I live). I'm not really sure how you determine which one is "more advanced," but I would consider the "level of automation" to be the portion of my normal driving habits that are able to be automated.

You're talking about personal driving, which is a different use case than robotaxis. For that, yes, you're better served with an ADAS system. It will take a while for L4 systems like Waymo to trickle down to passenger cars.
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