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

Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#211

Post by joshuamorton »

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.

Any l4 autonomous system is capable of adaptive cruise control anywhere.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#212

Post by Lammy »

pfarrell wrote: post #192
jcranmer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cities that did decide to tear up urban areas for freeways aren't really any better. Consider places like Los Angeles, Dallas, or Houston. What makes SF difficult to drive in (from my perspective of only ever being a pedestrian there) is a) extremely hilly terrain, b) the general difficulty of a dense urban environment anywhere , and only a distant third is c) traffic, which is merely an added stressor to the complex…

For SF, not rebuilding the 480 after the '89 earthquake made the Bay side of San Francisco really pleasant and enjoyable place to be. The Embarcadero from Giant's stadium to the Wharf and around to Fort Mason is such a beautiful place to walk/jog/ride, I can't imagine the area with the double-decker highway it used to have.

> I can't imagine the area with the double-decker highway it used to have.

How about with the freight railroad it used to have for 75 years before the state donated the ring of land to the city and paid to build the highway?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Belt_Railroad

http://sanfranciscotrains.org/sbrr_history.html

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#213

Post by tshaddox »

crznp wrote: post #159
tshaddox wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those SAE levels apparently don’t specifically mention the geographic range the vehicle can operate in [0], but at some point that’s pretty important. Having “full automation” on a very tiny section of roads is hardly what I would call “orders of magnitude above the rest.” [0] edit: that's incorrect, L4 and L5 are primarily defined by differences in geography range.

Expanding the geographic range for Waymo is straightforward: do the same thing in a new place (plus new hurdles like snow, but that isn't currently the limitation to growth). It isn't clear how Tesla goes from "FSD" to "full automation". They are working on the "draw the rest of the owl" step.

At some point "doing the same thing in a new place" is not going to be economically possible, unless the company is somehow able to continue getting money to burn (or unless they get much much better at bringing new places online).

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#214

Post by paddez »

exdsq wrote: post #164
noneeeed wrote: post #79

As someone who lives in Bath, an old european city with roads (and other drivers) that can give experienced human drivers a nervous breakdown I'm rather more interested in how they do in SF than their current deployment in Phoenix. From what I've heard repeatedly, SF sounds much more irregular and messy than Phoenix, so it should be something of a stepping stone to making them usable more widely if they can crack it.…

I recently lived in Oxford where they have a few self-driving car trials (notably Oxbotica) that essentially just went round and round the station because of how awkward some of the junctions were. If we want to really test self-driving cars, introduce them to Milton Keynes 'Magic Roundabout' https://www.google.com/search?q=milton+keynes+magic+roundabo...

I'm not sure the Magic Roundabout would pose any problem for any sort of automated driving. It's basically just a nested roundabout- where you essentially have to give the right-of-way to traffic already on the roundabout.

If you can navigate a roundabout, you can navigate the magic roundabout - you just apply the same rules.

If anything, this is the sort of thing an automated system would excel over humans at - where the automation won't get confused by an uncommon application of a familiar ruleset.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#215

Post by throwawaycuriou »

standardUser wrote: post #140
noneeeed wrote: post #79

As someone who lives in Bath, an old european city with roads (and other drivers) that can give experienced human drivers a nervous breakdown I'm rather more interested in how they do in SF than their current deployment in Phoenix. From what I've heard repeatedly, SF sounds much more irregular and messy than Phoenix, so it should be something of a stepping stone to making them usable more widely if they can crack it.…

The streets of pre-pandemic San Francisco were an unmitigated clusterfuck, arguably the worst in the nation at its 2019 peak. I imagine it's much easier these days for an autonomous vehicle.

Other than reduced volume has San Francisco done something to unfuck its clusters?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#217

Post by pfarrell »

Lammy wrote: post #195
pfarrell wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a second Oakland/SF bridge that doesn't exist. Well, I assume it would go to Oakland. It's marked with "???" and just says "Crossing". I presume that hypothetical bridge wouldn't have Yerba Buena Island to connect through, so would be really impressive and long (compared to the Golden Gate and Bay bridges).

That's the "Southern Crossing"! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Crossing_(California) It would have probably been the continuation of I-980 had that bridge been built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_980#History At one point it was also planned to be just north of SFO. Have you ever taken I-380 east instead of one of the exits to 101N/S? There's a huge multi-lane road that dwindles to basically an air…

Oh man, thanks for those links. TIL. A causeway or something that extends off of Alameda? It's wild to think about what that would have done to the area.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#218

Post by minhazm »

sschueller wrote: post #123

If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this. It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.

Google took a completely different approach and relies heavily on pre-mapped environments. Tesla has several orders of magnitude more vehicles, more data, and a more diverse set of data given their cars are in many different countries. It's not implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at FSD faster than Google.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#219

Post by oldsecondhand »

hammock wrote: post #148
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…

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

For the computer it doesn't make much difference if there's a passanger or if there isn't.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#220

Post by scrose »

mostdataisnice wrote: post #176
dragontamer wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not "end of life" vehicles that should be concerned, but instead "end of lease" vehicles. People who bought a 3-year or 5-year lease from 2016 with the $5k full-self driving package probably should feel pissed for wasting money.

Also, I don't think we actually know what the end-of-life of Tesla vehicles is. They've not been mass produced for long enough.

I'm guessing end-of-life for a Tesla is whenever they decide they will not replace your battery.
Post reply on HN