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Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#281

Post by TulliusCicero »

hansworst wrote: post #270
TulliusCicero wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars take up too much space. Relying on cars instead of mass transit means everything has to be more spread out, which makes walking and biking a lot worse.

If everyone can share a small fleet of self driving vehicles, they don’t need to take up a lot of space at all. I’m assuming you were talking about parking space; I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.

> If everyone can share a small fleet of self driving vehicles

They cannot.

> I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.

They would take up more space because they're cars. Cars can't get to similar efficiencies of space compared to buses unless you compared packed private cars with sparsely ridden buses. And then of course, there's trains.

Perhaps someday we'll have all self driving cars that can safely coordinate and pack themselves into smaller spaces on the road, but that's decades away at a minimum, since you'd first need to get rid of all manually driven cars.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#282

Post by unionpivo »

gonehome wrote: post #252
xnx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that. Tesla thought they could do it (better!) with an inferior sensor suite.

The argument was more that to do it generally you need vision to work, lidar will always be a narrow solution and redundant when you have vision. It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case. Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attach…

Just because humans can generally do it without lidar and other sensors, does not mean that lidar and other sensors, would not improve human driving, if we could somehow integrate them seamlessly (and well reduce their price).

A car equipped with more sensors, will always be better at handling more situations, than the one without them, no matter how "smart" their drivers become.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#283

Post by gniv »

I wonder if they plan to test in Europe. I moved to France and one issue I struggle with as a human driver is speed limits. I live in a suburban area where most streets have 30kmh limits (19mph). Nobody respects them, not even busses. I often get honked at when driving the speed limit. What would Waymo do?

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#284

Post by pfsalter »

George83728 wrote: post #274
dymk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human. Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.

Good public mass transit presumably involves cops kicking out the smelly homeless people, right? I don't think that would fly in most places these days though, it isn't humane. Yet it's the only way to make public transit tolerable.

A better idea might be to provide the homeless with a better standard of living, therefore making them nicer to be around on public transport

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#285

Post by pfsalter »

abecedarius wrote: post #175
wolfram74 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an energetics perspective it's incredibly hard to beat walking, biking or rails. If your occupancy on the car is reliably greater than 1, that is an improvement over single occupancy cars, but those boxes are just huge compared to a bicycle.

Once it makes economic sense to design car models specifically for robotaxi use, small light one-passenger electric models may well become the most common type. In the graph I linked from my other reply, a one-person E.V. like this beat all of the transit systems and came in second only to an electric scooter/trike.

Still more cost efficient to run a single bus than separate vehicles, just in maintenance alone. Also we already have buses, these single occupation EVs that still have enough space for a decent battery size don't exist.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#286

Post by HyperSane »

rwmj wrote: post #271
drusepth wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the fourth passenger sit in the "driver's" seat, or is it a three-packed-in-the-back kind of situation? Never seen a self-driving-car in person, but I assume it's the standard 4-seater sedan layout, right?

I wonder if there's some regulation behind why they haven't got rid of the traditional front-facing layout entirely and replaced it with train carriage style seats around a table?

That would be a very expensive modification to make on all their cars.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#287

Post by fastball »

unionpivo wrote: post #282
gonehome wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument was more that to do it generally you need vision to work, lidar will always be a narrow solution and redundant when you have vision. It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case. Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attach…

Just because humans can generally do it without lidar and other sensors, does not mean that lidar and other sensors, would not improve human driving, if we could somehow integrate them seamlessly (and well reduce their price). A car equipped with more sensors, will always be better at handling more situations, than the one without them, no matter how "smart" their drivers become.

I think the overlooked part is "seamlessly integrate". Signal to noise ratio is important, and it is not trivial to "just add sensors". I think the analogy of "too many cooks in the kitchen" applies here.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#288

Post by fastball »

jeremyjh wrote: post #69
sidibe wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ??? -> profit. It's actually Profit -> Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ???

Yes why build a technology when you can sell just the promise of that technology to your stans.

You don't think Tesla is building out their technology?

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#289

Post by wepple »

rcme wrote: post #160
jeffbee wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine believing that anyone at Alphabet gives a fuck what a 5% shareholder wants.

Apparently someone does. Activist investors are the reason for Google’s layoffs.

Citation (other than Business Insider) needed

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#290

Post by callalex »

In this thread I am seeing nearly 100% positive praise for the driving abilities of these vehicles, but that is simply not always true. They are causing almost daily incidents for emergency responders in San Francisco and these companies seem unwilling to address the issue.

https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-departmen...

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