Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 520 posts

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

#321

Post by xnx »

saberience wrote: post #305
xnx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's understandable, but very unfortunate that people group Waymo, Cruise, and Tesla together. Waymo is at least 5-10 years more advanced.

It’s really really not, Waymo only works in a tiny section of the country which has almost perfect conditions for self driving. Let me know when it works in upstate New York during winter. Tesla is developing a general solution which works everywhere and can take left hand turns! ;)

Waymo is only publically active in a limited area. By all indications, they could operate to the same or better standard than Tesla in unmapped areas.

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

#322

Post by RivieraKid »

HALtheWise wrote: post #192
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.

I spouted this line for a long time, but was recently corrected by commenters pointing out that 2-3 occupancy electric cars actually beat the vast majority of subways and trains in practice, because you don't need to accelerate and decelerate every passenger at every possible stop. Cars are designed to be remarkably aerodynamically efficient, especially compared to motorcycles or bicycles, and an electric battery+mot…

Maybe in some type of energy efficiency, but the push for public transit is not really about energy - it's about making cities pleasant places.

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

#323

Post by RivieraKid »

saberience wrote: post #305
xnx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's understandable, but very unfortunate that people group Waymo, Cruise, and Tesla together. Waymo is at least 5-10 years more advanced.

It’s really really not, Waymo only works in a tiny section of the country which has almost perfect conditions for self driving. Let me know when it works in upstate New York during winter. Tesla is developing a general solution which works everywhere and can take left hand turns! ;)

Depends on your definition of advanced. A coffee maker is more advanced than Waymo because it can do something Waymo can't. Waymo could easily modify their cars so that they can make coffee and can drive everywhere with a lower failure rate than Tesla, but they don't want to. On the other hand, Tesla can't do what Waymo does.

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

#324

Post by 2devnull »

pfsalter wrote: post #284
George83728 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Some of them aren’t merely lacking access to resources. Mental illness is part of the picture too. Trains and busses are warm comfortable places for such, as well as the criminal element. People think of bus and subway stations as dirty and often dangerous places, not just in the USA.

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

#325

Post by speedgoose »

itsoktocry wrote: post #306
speedgoose wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Tesla full self driving private beta is more comparable, but not able to drive by itself for long time.

> The Tesla full self driving private beta is more comparable Have they removed the "you need to be fully aware and ready to grab the wheel" requirements of FSD? If not, how is this comparable? There is no driver.

I mention that in the second part of the sentence you quote. It's comparable in some ways because the car drives itself most of the time. And apparently is not restricted to some well mapped areas.

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

#326

Post by esalman »

surfpel wrote: post #310
esalman wrote: post #308

Phoenix gets like 300 days of sunny weather, Bay area also has historically mild climate. Why is almost no comments mentioning this?

> Bay area also has historically mild climate Bay Area yes. San Francisco less so. Sure it doesn’t get snow but it is often rainy and foggy. Beyond that, the drivers are very aggressive along with pedestrians and cyclists. It is not a very easy place to drive. Are you suggesting that they should start development in a more extreme climate right off the bat?

Yes. What's the point of developing something that is suitable for sunny climate only? This is how bias creeps into Al/ML systems.

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

#327

Post by ra7 »

fastball wrote: post #287
unionpivo wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the keyword you’re looking for is ‘sensor fusion’, which apparently is only a problem for Tesla because the others have figured it out years ago. Perhaps there is a talent gap at Tesla or an unwillingness to invest in it. They generally avoid having to do anything that’s hard and try to look for shortcuts.

Case in point: the whole radar removal and reintroduction flip flop. It seems like they don’t believe themselves that cameras are sufficient.

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

#328

Post by zaroth »

surfpel wrote: post #314
bdcravens wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2,800 employees is small, when you consider what they are trying to accomplish. Tesla has 130k.

Waymo is the autonomous driving division of Alphabet. Alphabet has 190k employees Tesla’s autopilot team has ~300 people. Both teams have done incredible work.

I didn’t realize Tesla’s team was so small. Both companies have truly done incredible work!

It’s funny watching HN comments trying to tear down Musk and Tesla while their software—which has driven billions of miles—continues to just get better and better.

I love that we have these companies all investing billions of dollars on trying to solve this problem in very different ways. Truly a beautiful example of capitalism at work pushing technology forward in a way that (sooner than you think) will be saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars.

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

#329

Post by [deleted] »

kpw94 wrote: post #157
austinkhale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers - The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell - You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely. - They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive - You get to play your own mus…

> The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell If they scale, that will become a problem: - people puking in car - people having sex in car - people eating greasy fries in car These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely), but the big difference here is that users won't be anonymous. The next waymo rider (or waymo staff if the car…

[deleted]

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

#330

Post by granshaw »

nvrmnd wrote: post #229
mdorazio wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not OP, but I work in the industry. It's not as simple as opening the tap for three primary reasons: 1) localization, 2) operations, 3) cost. Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-dri…

I haven't taken a ride but I expect that Waymo/Cruise just set their current price/ride to 80% of whatever Uber etc. charge. Since that cost is just a made up number anyway as they have accepted operating at a loss. When you take a hard look at exactly how to get the costs down to the point where that price is profitable, that must be a monumental challenge. The cars must cost maybe $100-150k more? Maintenance on the…

No driver wages tho!
Post reply on HN