541–550 of 691 posts
Waymo helps widen the gap between haves and have-nots. Lets see the next test in St Louis, Detroit or Baltimore - places where accessibility is orders of magnitude less than SF or PHX.
They don’t have Uber in STL, Detroit or Baltimore?
“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.
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Most people in the Tesla camp (like George Hotz) believe Waymo is destined to fail.
Why is that? and what are the two approaches?
Tesla, on the other hand, is trying to make their cars work anywhere. It's a larger problem space, but the end goal is a far more robust product, with much lower long-term infrastructure spending.
I personally like the robust approach, but I think both approaches are long-term viable, albeit for different use-cases.
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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…
Source: grew up watching subarus do 360s on the freeway.
Waymo is currently the only SAE Level 4[0] self-driving car in use, right? The wheel must not be used. Even though it is limited to two cities. Their technology seems an order of magnitude above the rest, although factoring in its cost could make it look worse. (Can it turn a profit, when including the development costs?) Tesla FSD is at best SAE level 3 (can need human fallback), and at worst level 2 (needs constant…
Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4. I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?
Waymo has been at it for a bit over 12 years now. We'll have to see if Waymo's progress ramps up after San Francisco, but to me this is still looking like an 80/20 problem, with the added twist that each new region they expand to will have it's own unique 20% to learn that adds another 80% to the schedule. But that just validates Waymo's approach even more in my eyes.
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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…
People at Tesla and other autonomous driving companies, of course are aware and worry about such situations. If you have a few hours and want to see many of the technologies and methods that Tesla is using to solve them, check out Tesla's recent "AI day" presentation. Tesla is quite cool about openly discussing the problems they have solved, problems they still have, and how they are trying to solve them. An incomple…
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> 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,…
Really? Because the L5 claims come more out of the Ubers and Teslas than the "MBAs".
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Except Tesla, who are going to be "L5 by the end of the year" every year!
I’m pretty sure Tesla’s whole strategy is to overpromise so much it’s as much a legal liability to not have L5 than to have L5.
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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...
Not really. L5 is impossible, period.
What I think will happen is L4 with 99.999% cases covered and have it come to a safe stop for the 0.0001%, assuming there was a way to safely stop.
L5 which means 100.000% covered, will not happen, but the PR people will continue to use the term.
This is big news, and I encourage you to apply if you're in San Francisco. For the HN crowd, I'd also recommend last week's blog post [1] which includes some more technical material on "how" we're driving.
[1] https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/MostExperiencedUrbanDriver.ht...