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Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#201

Post by bpodgursky »

josephcsible wrote: post #133
worik wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Waymo is 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic" actually means "Waymo drives at the legal speed limit for that location... Probably 100% safer too Speed is the most dangerous aspect of motor vehicles

> Speed is the most dangerous aspect of motor vehicles Not in the way you think. If you're going 55 because it's the speed limit, but everyone else is going 70, you're the most likely driver to cause a collision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve

Regardless, Waymo is under the spotlight and they can't risk the regulatory hit of openly breaking laws, even if it's a perfectly normal thing for a human to do.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#202

Post by natch »

twoWhlsGud wrote: post #182
helloworld wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A matched case-control analysis of autonomous vs human-driven vehicle accidents Published: 18 June 2024 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4 "The analysis suggests that accidents of vehicles equipped with Advanced Driving Systems generally have a lower chance of occurring than Human-Driven Vehicles in most of the similar accident scenarios. However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur mor…

Unfortunately, that seems to include data regarding Tesla's FSD function, which renders it useless for actual comparisons between human driving and responsible implementations of self driving technology.

Nitpick, but Tesla does not yet have full self driving technology. They have a beta which is "supervised" by human drivers. Repeating the myth that they have self driving perpetuates the misconception that Tesla's marketing has pushed in the past.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#203

Post by Arete314159 »

tanvach wrote: post #7

We recently started using Waymo more often: - Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly. - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get. - AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver. - No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby. Negatives: - Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. - Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations…

How are the starts / stops? Jerky? I have c-spine issues. That's my main concern.

Why are they more expensive? I hoped they would be cheaper without a driver to compensate.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#204

Post by skywhopper »

dventimi wrote: post #73
RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Consistently [...] clean [...] I don't expect this to hold true once Waymo become generally available, alas.

I do. It'll be easier to keep the fleet on a cleaning schedule, and won't be left to the whims of individuals.

Just wait until they 1) have a near monopoly and/or 2) decide it’s time to actually make a profit. Because it won’t last either way.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#206

Post by markerz »

Arete314159 wrote: post #203
tanvach wrote: post #7

We recently started using Waymo more often: - Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly. - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get. - AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver. - No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby. Negatives: - Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. - Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations…

How are the starts / stops? Jerky? I have c-spine issues. That's my main concern. Why are they more expensive? I hoped they would be cheaper without a driver to compensate.

Extremely smooth! I can't comment on the c-spine issues but I'd argue that it's the smoothest driver I've ever experienced. Surely they have some math in their AI driving code that clamps acceleration and jerkiness. It's NOTHING like Tesla Full Self Driving, which I find to be incredibly jerky for both steering and acceleration.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#207

Post by Robotbeat »

kaibee wrote: post #179
akira2501 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can incorporate the cost of large horizontal demand spikes into the off hours and you can find cheap enough labor to fill it, perhaps. The time spent travelling out of service, in cleaning, and back into service are all lost opportunities. Hopefully you can clean a very large number of cars in a very short period of time. The cars may be standard. The messes, obviously, will not be.

Once you have a large enough fleet of roughly the same shape, it starts to make sense to build some automated cleaning thing. I'm picturing like, a long tube with vacuum ports in it that can just be shoved in by a robot arm to vacuum each seat. Unless there's a wet mess, that'll basically get it 90% of the way there.

I think we'll see such self-driving taxi interiors optimized for staying clean and then ease of cleaning. At the limit, think like a stainless steel kitchen that can just be sprayed down. Or these sort of self-cleaning public bathrooms: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/z81KtV9w5fo?feature=share

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#208

Post by psunavy03 »

sho_hn wrote: post #141
psunavy03 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And anecdotally it's common for friends to talk about driving 10-15 mph over the speed limit, and we know speed is the leading predictor for severity of a crash. Most US drivers, especially of higher income classes, are probably well aware that they speed and break plenty of other traffic laws on a regular basis and don't want to reckon with that fact. Because 99 44/100 percent of the time, this is not a factor. Th…

As a German, I'd like to point out that about half of the German Autobahn network do have speed limits in place, or had in 2019 (this oscillates a lot between about 30-60%, I think). According to a government study into Autobahn fatalities that occurred in 2018, "non-adapted speed" (defined as the appropriate speed for the traffic conditions and allowing full control of the vehicle) was the cause of death in 45% of c…

I'm not denying any of this. I'm just observing that there's a faction in the US which seems to say "speed is a leading factor in car deaths" (which it is) and then insists on everyone never going 1mph over our often-arbitrary-and-politically-set speed limits. When what you're describing as "non-adapted speed" is exactly the actual problem . . . driving beyond one's capabilities or the capabilities of one's vehicle.

Our freeways stateside were largely built in the late 20th century to a uniform 70mph (~110km/h) speed limit engineering-wise. But after the 1970s oil crisis, speed limits became a political football that often have as much to do with driving traffic ticket revenue for local governments as actually promoting driving at a safe speed.

So the problem is that a portion of Americans commenting on our speed limits don't understand there's a difference between "what the government puts up on the sign" and "what is actually a safe speed to drive without endangering other people" as if what's on the sign is some sacred totem that shall not be questioned because We Must All Follow The Rules Like Good Little Boys and Girls.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#209

Post by senordevnyc »

Arete314159 wrote: post #203
tanvach wrote: post #7

We recently started using Waymo more often: - Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly. - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get. - AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver. - No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby. Negatives: - Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. - Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations…

How are the starts / stops? Jerky? I have c-spine issues. That's my main concern. Why are they more expensive? I hoped they would be cheaper without a driver to compensate.

Why are they more expensive?

Likely because they're not pricing based on their costs, but rather what the market will bear.

Although they have a lot of R&D to recoup, so that's a cost.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#210

Post by senordevnyc »

josephcsible wrote: post #133
worik wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Waymo is 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic" actually means "Waymo drives at the legal speed limit for that location... Probably 100% safer too Speed is the most dangerous aspect of motor vehicles

> Speed is the most dangerous aspect of motor vehicles Not in the way you think. If you're going 55 because it's the speed limit, but everyone else is going 70, you're the most likely driver to cause a collision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve

Rear-ending someone going slower than you is not their fault.
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