Can they drive over steam yet? https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1dm3cqf/se...
Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
111–120 of 651 posts
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that they have remote humans monitoring every vehicle so the whole thing is an illusion and we don't know the truth of how safe truly autonomous vehicles are (since they don't exist.)
1:1 remote human monitoring would not scale from a unit economics perspective, and even if they did that, the remote operators can't drive the car, only offer small feedbacks. So the car is really driving itself. The safety story is an interesting one. Companies like Cruise and Waymo are not forthcoming with their incident data. They share infrequently and through spreadsheets that do not capture every incident. It's…
Spreadsheets are the best and most open way to share data because it lets other people analyze it. But they put out plenty of their own research if you want to read that.
I'm really not sure what you mean by "infrequently". They release new raw data every 3 or 6 months or something, and every single accident is trumpeted in the news. What other industry has more publicly accessible safety data?
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#113I remember almost 10 years ago, maybe 8 i first saw one of these up in the city. It was parked and the technician was outside of it with an ipad, and i happened to strike up a conversation with the gentleman. I was just curious and at first he was remarkably cagey, i was quite confused and just continued to be friendly and express hope for the projects success and for automation in general. I got the feeling that man…
In the future, when you're old and quite possibly disabled, you might rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing. I mean, it's easy to say "just walk (or ride a bike)" when you're 22 years old and in prime health, but the population in most First World countries is rapidly aging.
> when you're old and quite possibly disabled, you might rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing
Manhattan is incredibly senior friendly.
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber has partner drivers which have their own companies, their own rating, and can be punished for their behaviour. Once a company completely vertically integrates (like Google would like), meaning they have their own cars, they no longer want to punish themselves for bad behaviour/cars. Since they have to choose between short term cost of higher maintenance fee or long term cost of loss of quality of service their m…
Waymo is posiionting itself as a premium product. Defending that brand precludes letting the cars go to shit.
Yup. Plus, if Waymo can clean its cars with greater efficiency at lower cost than Uber can, then all other things being equal, Waymo will have cleaner cars.
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#115I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…
Is there any kind of limit to them besides the geofence? Can you get a Waymo at night? In the rain? I suppose it never snows there. How about roadworks? How do they react to vehicles with emergency signals? Can they follow directions of a cop in the street?
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of stopping abruptly. source: I commute by skateboard in SF daily. Just yesterday an empty Waymo cruised straight through a fresh red, narrowly missing my entry into the crosswalk. But don't get me started on what I've seen human drivers do on the same streets. Just annoyed that Waymo's aren't better.
Have also nearly been hit as a pedestrian by a Waymo. I also last week saw a Waymo blow through a yellow-red very aggressively, so I think the downvotes on above comment are intensely biased.
The way you can tell that a mode of transport is very safe is there are tons of people online whining that they almost got killed by it.
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#117Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…
I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment: Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passeng…
I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that they have remote humans monitoring every vehicle so the whole thing is an illusion and we don't know the truth of how safe truly autonomous vehicles are (since they don't exist.)
> Except that they have remote humans monitoring every vehicle so the whole thing is an illusion I think this argues the opposite of what you think it does. Monitoring != driving and if you had humans pesudo driving, the experience would be insanely bad cuz the human would be interjecting way too much.
We don't know how often the humans interject. That's my whole point. It's an illusion that the car is operating alone. When I drive a Tesla on FSD i only need to interject periodically, but it's enough that the car cannot be called autonomous IMHO. How many remote human supervisors are needed for Waymo vehicles? How often do they interject? Without that data it is absurd to call Waymo autonomous.
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've taken 38 Waymo rides so far. Every one of them has been very clean, cleaner than the average Uber ride.
Is that a function of the limited population in the beta though?
No idea. I'm just reporting on what's already actually happened in the past (my ride experiences) instead of speculating on what might happen in the future.
Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation information and what the car can see. Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic…
> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads.…
Google already has a fleet of vehicles driving around continuously taking new street view photos.