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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

#261

Post by cascom »

ra7 wrote: post #82
bluGill wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife will jump out of in front of you.

Is there a market for taxis in the rural areas? They have little incentive to expand there if there's no money to be made.

There is typically an acute need and it is a market that is chronically underserved, but also typically unattractive from an operator’s standpoint

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#263

Post by Shank »

Animats wrote: post #196

This is encouraging. But it's only for "Trusted Testers". Do you have to have a Google account?

This is a clever reuse off a little known thing Google used to have called “Trusted Testers” for friends and family of Google employees to test new features. However, I don’t think it requires a Google account. The TT program would just NDA you heavily and required an invite from a Google employee.

This is likely to be more open, but again, requiring NDA.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#264

Post by Lammy »

danielrhodes wrote: post #202
Lammy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

> This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads exist, more or less

Personally, as an SF resident I would much prefer all the cars to be tunneled or elevated instead of idling in front of my house or blowing loudly through my block. It's a safety issue.

When there's only so much surface area where else are people supposed to build except up and down? That's why we have skyscrapers, and those don't seem to provoke the same vitriol as the roads.

Even the famously-hated Embarcadero Fwy wouldn't have been visible if the plans for the World Trade Center (lol) at Market/Embarcadero hadn't also been canceled:

https://archive.org/details/ferrybuildingcom2919sanf

https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Ferry-Building-what-m...

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#265

Post by ancientworldnow »

leesec wrote: post #236
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.

"If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this." 10 years ago this might have read: "If General Motors can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this."

Of course this ignores that super cruise is considered safer and better on the same tasks that it's allowed to do as Tesla FSD by third party analysts. The difference is GM is less willing to allow it to be enabled for dangerous beta driving unlike Tesla which clearly doesn't care about consistency or safety.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#266

Post by VBprogrammer »

paganel wrote: post #227
VelkaMorava wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because that’s the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I said to myself that unless we get to AGI there’s no way for an “autono…

To me the solution to that is obvious and far better than the current status quo. The cars are all attached to a network and when an emergency service vehicle needs to get somewhere in a hurry there is a coordinated effort to move vehicles off the required route.

As things stand emergency vehicles have to cope with a reasonable minority of people who completely panic and actually impede their progress.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#267

Post by burnished »

ffggvv wrote: post #133
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.

if they don’t have fsd then they are just an electric car company. if they are just a car company their stock should be at 50 dollars right now. hence why he’d never admit it and instead will double down with his robot that will never materialize

Their current assist packages are already incredible even though they come short of full self driving.

EDIT: In case my point isn't clear, if your position is predicated on the idea that anything less than full self driving is worthless garbage, you should know that is a pretty hot take. If you are instead having an emotional reaction and feel deceived I don't know what to tell you, you might have a very valid point but that doesn't appear to figure into evaluating whether a stock is under or over priced.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#268

Post by kenjackson »

lhorie wrote: post #102

I'm curious how Waymo deals with the human aspects of cab hailing. With a human driver, you can say "hey looks like traffic is bad between where the car currently is and the pick up spot, can I meet you at X instead and save us both 10 minutes?" To "good morning dear, do you think you could help me load my bag in the trunk" All the way up to completely degenerate scenarios like "my friend was drunk and tried to take…

There are a different problems with no-driver, not necessarily worse problems. For example, some problems with drivers that don't exist, or exist to a lesser extent with no-driver:

1. How much should I tip?

2. The driver tried to rape me.

3. The driver seems drunk/high, and is driving horribly.

4. The driver didn't pick me up because, pick your reason: I'm black, had a bunch of kids, etc...

5. My friend was drunk and tried to pick a fight with the driver.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#269

Post by hadlock »

poopypoopington wrote: post #11

I'll never forget I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out.

A Cruise car nearly ran me and my baby in a stroller (a pretty standard model stroller for the neighborhood, too) in the crosswalk by Caltrain station. The rest of the cars have not been so overzealous in running down pedestrians. I give Cruise an extra wide margin of error since then.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#270

Post by _ea1k »

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…

Notably, SAE level 5 is actually well below the standard that you've laid out here. The vehicle simply has to be able to make itself safe in situations that it can't handle. This allows room for remote assistance or a human takeover in certain situations.
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