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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#131

Post by __loam »

Abroszka wrote: post #34
xnx wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you get this information? There are definitely people ready to respond to any requests from the car or passenger when they come up, but I've never read anything to indicate that each ride is actively monitored by a person.

Search for "driver monitoring system". As soon as there is something unexpected there is an actual driver taking care of it. Also the reason why it's not level 5, but stuck at level 4 self driving.

Nobody is driving the car remotely, that would be an enormous liability. The car calls in and either asks the operator to make a decision for them or tell it where to go. Once they do that, the car handles the how. You're making a lot of proclamations about this stuff without a strong understanding about how it works.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#132

Post by TulliusCicero »

bangaladore wrote: post #128
Workaccount2 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google already has a fleet of vehicles driving around continuously taking new street view photos.

Google Maps seems to update at a frequency of 2-8 years. Maybe longer in some areas and we don't know what they do other than stitch it together. HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated frequently and immediately when any construction occurs. It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't think that is possible.

The obvious thing to do is to just have every Waymo robotaxi or car with licensed Waymo tech report in its daily mapping/obstacle data to the mothership, so you can get new changes almost immediately.

I dunno if said data would be as high quality as dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every Waymo car has.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#133

Post by bangaladore »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #110
bangaladore wrote: post #102

Earlier 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.…

> That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated.

IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5.

Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time and get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#134

Post by jeffbee »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #113
Turing_Machine wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

NY is an AARP top-10 most livable city alongside other pedestrian-centric cities like Boston and San Francisco. Orlando and Tulsa conspicuously absent. Aging in car cities sucks.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#135

Post by kajecounterhack »

jessriedel wrote: post #112
kajecounterhack wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Every software release is a totally new driver. If they release software at a cadence of say, 6 or 8 weeks, would you feel comfortable riding? You don't know how safe the car was during that time -- any part of the driver can regress. You're basically trusting that they know how to do simulation, that they bore the cost of running that simulation, and that their simulator is realistic enough to yield trustworthy statistics.

Sadly, our regulatory agencies are currently set up for very delayed decisionmaking. Since every company can release software at any time, you could imagine a regulatory platform that tracks software releases and their corresponding safety statistics in real time.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#136

Post by TulliusCicero »

orbisvicis wrote: post #24
prasoonds wrote: post #14

I 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…

Another comment, another thread mentioned that Waymo requires more walking than an equivalent Uber ride - to the pickup location, from the drop-off location. Anyone know why this might be true?

Human taxi drivers are okay parking illegally to do pick-ups/drop-offs, and we as a society usually tolerate that, as long as they're quick about it.

But Waymo probably isn't comfortable telling its cars to park in many illegal parts of streets, even if it's going to be quick. Partially because determining which illegal parking jobs are socially acceptable vs unacceptable is a hard determination for a robot to make.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#137

Post by jeffbee »

greenthrow wrote: post #94
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine 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…

1) Waymo has not "solved" robotaxis as a business. They are not profitable and the vehicles are not truly autonomous (the humans monitoring the vehicles are merely remote. We don't know how many humans are needed per vehicle.) 2) Tesla has zero even remotely monitored, let alone autonomous, miles driven. So no, there is no reason to believe Tesla is close to true robotaxis.

Really, you can't repeat this point enough. Tesla has zero experience in autonomous operation. Their vehicle has not ever driven itself any distance, under any circumstances. There is no reason to believe their software is on the cusp of a sudden improvement. They simply release new major version numbers that have different sets of flaws.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#139

Post by TulliusCicero »

notyourwork wrote: post #100
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine 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…

Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.

Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort.

Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it seems like it must be fairly infrequent.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#140

Post by LeoPanthera »

jessriedel wrote: post #88
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #83

For anyone else curious about the exact service area: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en

To be clear: Waymo can take you to basically any address in those city limits, but it doesn't do so by taking the freeways like 101 and 280 that pass through it.

I saw a Waymo on 280 the other day. Maybe it was being driven by hand, but the lidar was spinning.
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