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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

#321

Post by ra7 »

blueblisters wrote: post #242
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 is struggling to get hardware integrated with their self driving solution. Retrofitting cars with self-driving sensors is not easy, and Google does not have the scale yet to convince OEM partners to retool assembly lines for the Waymo fleet.

Source for them struggling? All the hardware upfitting is done by Magna, one of the biggest names in auto manufacturing, who are also a Waymo investor. There’s a reason they chose the Jaguar I-Pace which is also manufactured by Magna.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#322

Post by somebehemoth »

sandworm101 wrote: post #256
nullc wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the person you're responding to was referring to specifically to the add-on pre-order for full self driving, not the entire car.

As was I. Consumers had an opportunity to test drive the wanted feature and find it lacking, or read reviews of the same. Tesla hid nothing. If customers want to spend money on hope for the future then that is their right. They paid for hope and that is what they got.

> Tesla hid nothing.

They deceptively claimed that for additional money the customers' cars would be enhanced in the future with FSD. They then made that claim again each time they failed to deliver. They continue to make this claim and people are trusting it.

A lie hides the truth.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#323

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#324

Post by pqs »

sandworm101 wrote: post #235
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.

Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…

Skin in the game. Nassim Taleb would agree with this measure!

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#325

Post by dahfizz »

RhysU wrote: post #313
Swizec wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, that seems perfectly rational. There is nothing to hit on a deserted highway. Driving in traffic, on the other hand, is more stressful and has worse downsides.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#326

Post by lotsofpulp »

khc wrote: post #241
lotsofpulp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

you automatically charge $500 to the passanger's credit card, and self-drive back to the depot to be cleaned

The cost to clean (and repair damage) and opportunity cost of not earning money in the meantime would be far more than $500, and far more than how much most people could afford to pay.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#327

Post by lotsofpulp »

caskstrength wrote: post #244
lotsofpulp wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

> Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help? System locks all doors and calls police?

I highly doubt police would care. People trash hotel rooms all the time, and they might escort people out of the hotel, but recouping any costs is a civil matter for the business. And good luck breaking even via that avenue.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#328

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #308
nradov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. With modern car tech (traction monitoring, ability to redirect torque to a specific tire, ABS, radar) an automated car is going to have an easier time navigating snow/ice/rain than a human driver. The real challenges when navigating city streets are the human ones – delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal worker fixing a man…

[deleted]

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#329

Post by r00fus »

paxys wrote: post #308
nradov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. With modern car tech (traction monitoring, ability to redirect torque to a specific tire, ABS, radar) an automated car is going to have an easier time navigating snow/ice/rain than a human driver. The real challenges when navigating city streets are the human ones – delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal worker fixing a man…

Challenging weather conditions mean human drivers become even more unpredictable.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#330

Post by gibsonf1 »

You cannot predict the future with patterns from the past, regardless of how many patterns you crunch - the world is always changing. ML can just never solve FSD - conceptual understanding and causality is needed to achieve human level driving capability. We instantly classify things conceptually from our perception, instantly understand how those things may behave, and then learn the specifics of what that thing is doing to instantly predict what might happen and how it is interacting with other causally connected things in the environment.

If ML could predict the future, there would be some very rich stock brokers right now.

Autonomous driving efforts need a major pivot to start working with concepts, causality, and the integrated space time model of the world we humans use.

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