Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
571–580 of 691 posts
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. This remark makes me wonder if you've ever lived in an area that actually experiences winter. Around here, dead of winter, there are no lines visible on the streets. Heck, after a good snow storm the lanes are basically a function of group consensus.
This is a situation where automation has the advantage. With detailed position information and detailed maps, the fact that the lines on the street can't be seen is irrelevant. The car didn't need them anyway. (noting that Waymo requires full detail maps to be able to drive an area, including all signage).
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#573This is both incredibly exciting and a little terrifying. As a pedestrian, I'm still a little weary around these cars.
Disclosure: I work at Waymo. At least the current fleets of AVs (Waymo, Cruise, etc.) are "obviously" potentially autonomous. I'm honestly more cautious now as a pedestrian when I see a Tesla coming after the FSD videos. I wish I could know "Is that Tesla owner using the FSD mode?"...
Edit: can’t reply because “rate limiting”
That video is almost half a year old. Here’s a video from the same channel that’s 6 days old rather than 6 months old. Tesla pushes updates very frequently…
Here’s a video where the title says it all.
I read one of the latest waymo blog posts and was surprised to see how directly you guys reference Tesla. It felt like the whole thing was written for people at tesla… You differ in choice of hardware but could you tell me more about how you differ on software? Is there any meaningful difference?
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#574Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#575I'm sure I got all the science wrong but do we really want cars with souls? Do they become non-human humans? Do they get the right to vote? Are they considered slaves?
Even if its just horse-level smarts, that's still enough to develop consciousness, maybe. Let's just say sure. But then, what kinda relationship do you have with your car then?
Another thing is that, now that everyone's working from home, there's a lot less incentive to buy cars. Who are the going to sell these cars too? Maybe they'll all be self-driving taxis. And that's a whole can of proverbial worms on its own. Politically, self-driving taxis are dead ducks.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a situation where automation has the advantage. With detailed position information and detailed maps, the fact that the lines on the street can't be seen is irrelevant. The car didn't need them anyway. (noting that Waymo requires full detail maps to be able to drive an area, including all signage).
Unless you're tesla and you're using computer vision to determine where you are on the road.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#577“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…
Would it be easier to just build a "futuristic" test city built around the idea of self-driving cars to make it easier for them to work? If self-driving cars are so great people will move there naturally due to improved quality of life. Trying to make self-driving cars work in current cities is like building around crippling technical debt Seems like Google and a few other tech companies could easily bootstrap a smal…
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#578If 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.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I've seen of Tesla's solution at least - even busy city centers and complex parking lots are very difficulty for present day autonomous driving technologies. The understanding level necessary just isn't there. These things are excellent - undeniably better than humans at the boring stuff, highway driving, even major roads. They can rightfully claim massive mileage with high safety levels in those circumstan…
That is like trying to judge modern supercomputing by your experinces with a 6 year old Dell desktop. Waymo drove 29,944.69 miles between "disengagements" last year. That is an average California driver needing to touch the wheel once every 2.3 years. Tesla by comparison is classed as a SAE Level 2 driver assist system and isn't even required to report metrics to the state. While they sell it to consumers as self-dri…
You know better. If most of those miles were in sunny Mountain View suburbs, they don't count.
Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco
#580Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. This remark makes me wonder if you've ever lived in an area that actually experiences winter. Around here, dead of winter, there are no lines visible on the streets. Heck, after a good snow storm the lanes are basically a function of group consensus.
This is a situation where automation has the advantage. With detailed position information and detailed maps, the fact that the lines on the street can't be seen is irrelevant. The car didn't need them anyway. (noting that Waymo requires full detail maps to be able to drive an area, including all signage).