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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

#381

Post by rhacker »

dheera wrote: post #206
ra7 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

It's not an engineer's thing at all. The classifications are very specific differences in the overall system. From an engineer's point of view they are just creating a fully autonomous car. L4 -> L5 is more about how many scenarios is that fully autonomous car been tested through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#Classificatio...

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#382

Post by joe_the_user »

pbreit wrote: post #188
afavour wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking? What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4. The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was an…

This is the 2nd market and the other is unmanned.

This market is manned and a serious challenge. The trial is Arizona is in an extremely quiet, predictable suburb as well as being small scale; unmanned but not as serious a challenge.

Each of these is different but neither's existence by itself proves unmanned in challenging locations is right around the corner. It's kind of an exercise in Baysian statistic, how much more likely this makes one think unmanned taxis in serious location is depends on what one thinks the initial probability is.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#383

Post by ggggtez »

pitaj wrote: post #354
paxys wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How well do sensors and vision systems handle winter conditions like snow and lack of lane markers?

Easy, my dumb level-0 car can tell me when it's icy. And finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in self driving (the hard part is knowing when to ignore them).

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#384

Post by mdoms »

minhazm wrote: post #218
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.

> It's not implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at FSD faster than Google.

It absolutely is implausible.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#385

Post by nradov »

fragmede wrote: post #348
zaphar wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's better then the Human's tendency to drive full speed into anything while impaired by a drug. Especially since the bug was fixed in Tesla's case but the bug in Human's case is probably un-fixable.

Drugs (or alcohol)? There are so many more failure modes that drugs are the least of my concerns. Especially of unspecified type. I'm not the least bit worried about drivers hopped up on tylenol. Humans get distracted while driving, by texting, or simply boredom and start daydreaming. Don't forget about driving while tired. Or emotionally disturbed (divorce or a death; road rage). Human vision systems are also pretty…

Computer vision systems also have bad failure modes. The camera sensors typically used today have better light sensitivity but less dynamic range than the human eye.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#386

Post by travisporter »

willvarfar wrote: post #18

I can’t wait for truly autonomous cars. I live in the countryside and have to drive to collect and deliver kids, or abstain as a designated driver and so on. Self driving will change this. The aspect I dislike is the move towards hiring cars on demand instead of owning them, though.

Actually, if the cost of hiring is less than insurance, maintenance and fuel, I'm all for it. Don't have to be sober, find parking. Don't know if that will happen in rural areas though

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#387

Post by zestyping »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #359
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...

Autonomous driving systems are set at various levels of autonomy. Level 0 is no automation, level 1 is just a dumb cruise control, level 2 is radar adaptive cruise control plus lane keeping (which is where most production systems like Tesla Autopilot and GM Supercruise are currently at). Level 2 still requires full human supervision, if you engaged it on the road above it would either fail to engage or you'd crash an…

It's not obvious that Level 4 falls within what one would call really difficult conventional programming. That level entails something like "in the event of any exceptional situation, find a safe stopping location and safely bring the car to a stop there," and even that alone seems incredibly hard.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#388

Post by akira2501 »

snarf21 wrote: post #191
thesausageking wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed 100%. There will be special exit/on ramps built along highways and the trucks will largely just stay in their lane even if slower. It would cut the number of truckers needed by probably 50+%.

For depot to depot runs, sure. Most runs aren't that though, and require direct delivery from manufacturer to purchaser. Plenty of deliveries, for example in Chicago, basically happen off a residential street. Alley docking and turning around in these environments is challenging even for a human.

Add to all this one thing and we're further than I think most people realize: Weather. Show me an FSD doing better than a human in the snow or we're not really anywhere yet.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#389

Post by whimsicalism »

nradov wrote: post #92
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 hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

Lived in Boston for quite a while, and grew up driving in a city.

I find SF much more challenging to drive in, at least wrt the other drivers. In Boston, drivers are aggressive and take calculated, dangerous risks to meet their goal.

In SF, a lot of people on the road act like it's their first time driving in like 5 years and they're still figuring it out. There's no rational risk-taking towards a goal, but more people bumbling around unpredictably while unsure of what their goal even is.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#390

Post by sterlind »

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...

Apparently Brits hate the Magic Roundabout, but it seems so shiny.. just the idea of a roundabout of roundabouts where the inner flow of traffic is reversed is really pretty. I'm sure it's one of those things that looks great in traffic flow simulations but falls apart when panicked drivers are trying to deal with each other and the unconventional traffic patterns.
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