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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

491–500 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#491
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive in the service of corporate profits or what's "best for them", you haven't read the news lately.

It's funny how Americans seem to have accepted the idea that corporations control their political life

I wouldn't say agreed with, but mostly accepted a reality they have no power to change.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope, not even close. There's a very specific reason they've picked Chandler, and it's that there's relatively little weather and the roads are fairly simple (among many other things specific to Chandler). The vast majority of the contiguous United States is decidedly not "on the table" as of now. "The contiguous United States" is still a decade (or more) away. It may literally never happen.

> The vast majority of the contiguous United States is decidedly not "on the table" as of now. So the vast majority of the US has either significantly worse weather than SF, or a significantly harder ODD than SF? Could you elaborate on that?

It generally doesn’t snow in SF or Chandler. I personally like snow, so I wouldn’t describe that weather as significantly worse. But my understanding is snow makes it hard for lane keeping, and then there’s all sorts of edge cases like streets that aren’t plowed and require special driving techniques, people placing cones to reserve parking spaces, etc.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive in the service of corporate profits or what's "best for them", you haven't read the news lately.

"If you think governments can't simply legislate away people's freedom to drive" Less drunk, distracted, angry, and/or sleepy drivers on public roads, with overall significantly less crashes? Sign me up!

That would be an ideal outcome, but plenty of people would need to be economically or legally forced. Cross-reference to vaccines.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#494
post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.

To put it in perspective, 50 years is still less time than from now until when the transistor was invented.

Yup. This whole era from WW2 onwards (the 3rd/4th Industrial Revolution?) will be looked at as covering 1950 to probably the mid 21st century hundreds of years from now.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#495
I can think of a few milestones in the future for AVs:

  * the first accident between two fully automated AVs.
  * the first such accident within AVs from the leading company.
  * the first fatality in fully automated AVs
  * when uber or lyft or any similar company starts to use AVs more than human drivers in a metropolitan.
  * when a city gets half the driving hours in AVs.
  * when human drivers no longer get insurance coverage by a major insurance company.
I wish the order in reverse.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#496
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world doesn't work in idealized ways. Yes, perhaps ideally self-driving cars would need to be nearly perfect in order to win wide public acceptance. At the same time there was an article on the front page today investigating literal gulag labor camps in the USA, and I doubt those are popular or going away any time soon. Once this is working technology that can turn a profit, it will depend on who stands to gain,…

Well a large difference is that consumer goods companies like Tesla are reliant on their public image for sales.

People don't usually pay too much attention to what the government relations department has been saying to the NHTSA. It doesn't have the be the same thing Elon is tweeting.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Jaguar still a niche brand? Most taxis in Denmark and Germany are Mercedes-Benz so it's not uncommon for the taxi industry to use luxury brands.

Niche in that they only sell a hundred thousand or so a year, yes. If Waymo are planning to seriously scale up they'll be using every Jaguar they're making!

Why would they need all Jaguars to scale up?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#498
post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so. In 2019 in California, there were 1.06 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Any self-driving automobile technology that doesn't have at least 1 billion vehicle miles of data is in no position to claim that it is safer than human drivers and less likely to kill people. Self driving cars don't make th…

> I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so. It is. The mean is dragged down by alcoholics who drive drunk every single day. If you never drive drunk, that gives you a significant advantage.

We were talking about self-driving cars.

The mean is given by the number I posted, about 1 death per 100 million miles traveled. That number includes drunk drivers, distracted drivers trying to text, everything.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#499

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.

And when you look into thoose reports - the only reason they rank Super Cruise higher is because it can only be used on a very limited number of roads, and uses a camera to detect awareness. FSD uses a camera, and works on all roads - and is dramatically better then supercruise. source - test drove both, bought the tesla because of how impressed I was with supercruise.

Don't know why you're downvoted this is 100% accurate.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#500

This is both incredibly exciting and a little terrifying. As a pedestrian, I'm still a little weary around these cars.

Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast[1] on Waymo and their self-driving cars. He speculates that something very different will happen. He thinks that self-driving cars that follow the laws and unerringly yield to pedestrians will transfer ownership of the streets from cars to pedestrians. Perhaps travel through cities in self-driving cars will be tedious and slow because pedestrians will jaywalk fearlessly and the cars wil…

This is already mostly the case in San Francisco. You always have to assume someone is going to jump out from behind a parked car to cross the street in SF.
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