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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

#311

Post by [deleted] »

thesausageking wrote: post #138
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…

Level 4 is where most of value is. If a system could drive in all cities and highways, that's more than 90% of benefit.

[deleted]

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#312

Post by raldi »

VelkaMorava wrote: post #197
hammock wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“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.

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...

The computer doesn't have to be perfect; it just has to be better than a human.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#313

Post by RhysU »

Swizec wrote: post #232
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...

As someone who learned to drive in the city, those roads make me sweat bullets. My grandpa who drives on those roads primarily, sweats bullets in the city. Maybe you’ll have different driving models to load in different scenarios …

My mother thinks nothing of driving on deserted roads in significant unplowed snow. She gets nervous on a dry, Texas highway at rush hour.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#314

Post by dave5104 »

thinkharderdev wrote: post #173
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…

For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you somewhere else. If there's no driver, then there's nobody to ask to help with bags. For various degenerate situations I'm not sure being driverless really changes the situation all that much. A drunk passenger can grab the wheel of a manned vehicle as well. With a self-driving car you might even be able to…

> For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you somewhere else.

To add on, maybe even Waymo tells/asks you if you'd like to change pickup locations to save X minutes off your trip.

Feels somewhat in line with how Google Maps will ask you if you want to save X minutes by taking a new route that was previously not as good as when you started using directions.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#315

Post by samfisher83 »

leesec wrote: post #273
ancientworldnow wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant 10 years ago people might have assumed if GM can't make the electric car work than Tesla can't either, and yet here we are.

The ev1 was a pretty good car for it's time. It had a lot of fans. Battery tech got better. An electric car is theoretically much simpler than an ice car.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#316

Post by crackercrews »

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…

> I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI.

In case anyone else was wondering what AGI means, its Artificial General Intelligence. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#317

Post by paxys »

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.

Most drunk driving accidents/deaths happen in rural areas because there is really no other alternative for transportation. Because of low population density and long distances taxis are basically impossible to find. Self driving cars could definitely fill a niche there should they ever become cost effective.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#319

Post by chipotle_coyote »

_ea1k wrote: post #277
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.

To be fair, a lot of people right now would willingly pay $5k for the features that are available now, especially if they spend a lot of time on long highway trips.

The price keeps going up, though: if you bought it right now, it wouldn't be $5K, it'd be $10K. It's possible Tesla's driver assistance systems are better than anything else on the market in their current incarnation, but that's getting to be a pretty big ask.
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