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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

#631

Post by marmshallow »

supperburg wrote: post #573
boulos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?"...

What is it about FSD that makes you fear for your safety? It seems a lot more capable than waymos solution. 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… https://youtu.be/y85oGY02gtg Here’s a video where the title says it all. https://youtu.be/tdHlKhKKOgQ I read one…

In SF, Waymo/Cruise/etc have safety drivers behind the wheel who are being paid to ensure the car doesn't crash. Tesla drivers, on the other hand, are often misled about the capabilities of "FSD" and may not be paying as close attention.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#632

Post by supperburg »

marmshallow wrote: post #631
supperburg wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it about FSD that makes you fear for your safety? It seems a lot more capable than waymos solution. 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… https://youtu.be/y85oGY02gtg Here’s a video where the title says it all. https://youtu.be/tdHlKhKKOgQ I read one…

In SF, Waymo/Cruise/etc have safety drivers behind the wheel who are being paid to ensure the car doesn't crash. Tesla drivers, on the other hand, are often misled about the capabilities of "FSD" and may not be paying as close attention.

Na, actually not. It’s labeled as beta, it is always explicit about the fact that it must be watched at all times and that your hand has to remain on the wheel. There’s no ambiguity about it.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#633

Post by rosetremiere »

rpmisms wrote: post #543
rosetremiere wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that? and what are the two approaches?

Waymo is trying to solve the environment. They're HD mapping every centimeter of areas they operate in, so that they can let their vision systems focus on deviations from that single source of truth. It's a reasonable approach, but it has some significant limitations, especially in terms of infrastructure. Tesla, on the other hand, is trying to make their cars work anywhere. It's a larger problem space, but the end g…

Thanks!

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#634

Post by runarberg »

pbreit wrote: post #89
espadrine wrote: post #47

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?

AFAIK most of the cynicism around self driving cars is not that it is not possible, but rather that it doesn’t solve the problems they claim to be solving. E.g. self driving cars won’t solve traffic (busses do), they won’t be safer (trains are), they won’t be convenient (unless you are rich enough to afford one), and at the end of the day, they are still massive things that takes tonnes of space and infrastructure and pollute a bunch. Just like human driven cars.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#635

Post by adrianN »

burnished wrote: post #303
actusual wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitionally, the achievement of self driving vehicles does not require AGI. Doing one task very well requires a subset of AGI called Weak AI.

Part of driving well requires a diverse of array of abilities, right? You know what is litter and what is debris because you can make a guess about material properties based on some observations, like looking at something that moves without being touched and is translucent, you probably conclude that its a plastic bag of some sort and not a hazard. Similarly you probably use a wealth of experience to judge that a sma…

"Making roads more suitable for self-driving vehicles" will make roads much worse for pedestrians and cyclists if you're not very careful.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#636

Post by darawk »

joe_the_user wrote: post #382
pbreit wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

SF seems like a pretty serious location to me. Granted, its still manned, but it makes sense that they'd start out manned in any new environment out of an abundance of caution. It seems likely that we could see a switch to unmanned in SF in the next 1-2 years if things go well. I have to think at least Waymo believes this is likely, otherwise they wouldn't be doing this.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#637

Post by runarberg »

bobsomers wrote: post #408
bluGill wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as it is only urban areas it is a band-aid for the lack of good transit options. Not that you are wrong, just that you should be wrong because if cities actually had useful transit rural areas would be a much larger share of demand despite not having many people.

Very true, but retrofitting good transit into a city that didn't plan for it is extremely expensive and disruptive. I see these kinds of services being a great complement to public transit in cities that have struggled to make them attractive. For example, I am way more likely to take Cal Train into SF if I can use a point-to-point service like Uber/Lyft/Waymo to get me the rest of the way there. Without that missing…

I’ll grant you that the muni busses are really terrible but they should get you (almost) from point to point. The muni system covers all the city of San Francisco (even Treasure Island) and run frequently.

The only problem is that they are painfully slow. If muni had more dedicated bus lanes (like, a lot more) it might very well be the best bus network in the world.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#638

Post by alkonaut »

freyr wrote: post #607
kgin wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good enough. By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year. Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.

Is remote assistance good enough though? It probably works fine when you have a fleet of 100 cars on the road, but 10,00? 1,000,000? How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.

When manufacturers (after taxi companies) start competing for this, the manufacturer that can have 1 remote driver per 100 vehicles will beat the one that needs 1 remote driver per 10 vehicles. A manufacturer might require massive halls with thousands of workers to pilot their fleet of cars, but so long as customers pay the bills, that's no problem. And customers will need to pay the bill through subscriptions on FSD packges.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#639

Post by alkonaut »

mbesto wrote: post #617
dheera wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> 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. So how do you explain, succinctly, the difference between a car that can hold 55 mph (but do nothing else automatically) without driver intervention and one that can change from 25 mph to 55 mph and change lanes without driver intervention. The differences between levels are drastic in…

> When do I get that? L4? L5?

It doesn't really matter so long as there are fallback drivers in all situations. An lower level autonomy car would remotely connect to the backup driver (in a third world call center) several times per hour in order to behave like a higher level one.

A higher level one would connect more rarely. The only difference I notice as a customer is I pay more out of the box for the higher level car and less as a subscription , while the lower level car costs less out of the box and has a higher subscription fee because the human costs are higher.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#640

Post by machinelearning »

rpmisms wrote: post #589
machinelearning wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but the end goal is a far more robust product What about Tesla's approach makes you think it is inherently more robust?

Tesla does not want HD maps. They want to be able to place the car somewhere it's never seen and have it drive itself competently. That's by definition more robust than requiring HD maps to navigate anywhere.

What you're referring to is overall coverage not robustness. In fact, placing your car somewhere you've never been before and operate it seems less robust than one that already has HD maps.
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