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

Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 651 posts

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

#171

Post by ra7 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #121
ra7 wrote: post #11

Add freeways and airport rides, both of which they are very close to doing, Waymo will become much more of a complete service and a true Uber/Lyft replacement. In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US governmen…

> 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities) If I had to guess, I'd say Atlanta, San Diego, Houston and Miami.

They’re testing in DC and giving media rides there. So DC is a candidate too.

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

#172

Post by yunwal »

hypeatei wrote: post #85

I can't imagine this turning out well if there is any social media movement around these cars. It's reminding me of that one robot travelling across the country which ended up getting destroyed by some people.

People already have gone around putting traffic cones over the car sensors.

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1196487085/anonymous-protesto....

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

#173

Post by pb7 »

cwillu wrote: post #78
dventimi wrote: post #47

Earlier 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?

It's a function of the filtered population. The cars are at full capacity day and night so the increased number of users won't affect a single car's cleanliness nearly as much as the type of people that will be riding in them.

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

#174

Post by ra7 »

ajcp wrote: post #151
ra7 wrote: post #11

Add freeways and airport rides, both of which they are very close to doing, Waymo will become much more of a complete service and a true Uber/Lyft replacement. In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US governmen…

1: Airport rides are already available in Phoenix between 10PM and 6AM. 2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed of travel required. That is: the sens…

I meant airport rides to the terminal at all hours of the day.

Waymo is already giving driverless freeway rides to employees in Phoenix, so I don’t agree that it’s far away. It’s definitely a different challenge though.

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

#175

Post by entropicdrifter »

Swizec wrote: post #155
pengaru wrote: post #63

Earlier 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.

Competing anecdata: Yesterday I was running downtown and a Waymo stopped for me at a green light because it wasn't sure if I was gonna jaywalk (jayrun?). Only once I stood still for a few seconds did it continue to make its turn. This was in a turn-left-only intersection with a separate pedestrian light. Maybe the Waymo got confused and thought I also had green.

Could also be that they're taught to be overly cautious to avoid suicidally stupid humans

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

#176

Post by 999900000999 »

dventimi wrote: post #145
999900000999 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people depend on those job to survive. We need some type of off-ramp if we're going to just wipe out a large section of the economy . I've worked horrible jobs before, and I needed the money to survive. Not everyone can write Ruby code and make 300k a year.

> We need some type of off-ramp Now, we're talking. Often, there will be handwringing about low-wage jobs from people who wouldn't dream of working low-wage jobs and who benefit from the existence of low-wage jobs. Often, that will be invoked as a rebuke to automation. But, automation in general isn't a threat to workers or well-being. In fact it's productivity gain which benefits well-being by lowering costs and rai…

Oddly enough people are self-regulating, so few people are having children now because modern economics makes it a bad idea for most people .

In my grandfather's time you could work a normal job and buy yourself a three-bedroom house in what's now one of the most expensive cities in America.

If I wanted to buy the same house at the same city, me and a partner would both have to make 150k to 200k each. And even then we'd barely be middle class, we wouldn't really be doing exceptionally well.

Homeownership shouldn't be regulated to the top 5% of income earners.

However I don't realistically imagine a tech utopia. I think we're headed towards unholy levels of income inequality. And income inequality isn't a problem by itself. Hypothetically if Billy Bob makes 60k a year, but he owns a house worth 400k and he's able to leave it to his kids, that's just fine .

The problem emerges when he's renting his home from a mega corporation that raises rent by 15% per year, until he ends up either homeless ( unhoused, shelter challenged, pick your semantic softening) or sharing a room with 2 other people.

It's a complicated problem with no clear solution.

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

#177

Post by ra7 »

thegrim33 wrote: post #170
TulliusCicero wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mu…

FWIW a quick google search turns up Waymo reporting they have 0.41 incidents with injuries per million miles driven [0], whereas Tesla vehicles using autopilot had 0.152 incidents with or without injuries, per million miles driven [1]. So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without injuries. Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different numbers, b…

This is a ridiculous, apples-to-oranges comparison. You’re comparing fully driverless miles to driver assist miles with humans actively preventing accidents without controlling for any variables.

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

#178

Post by mike_hearn »

rootusrootus wrote: post #147
bangaladore wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat Eyes which are orders of magnitude capable than the best cameras, and Teslas come with mediocre cameras, not the best. Eyes which are connected to a brain, and ML is a looooong ways from rivaling that. > That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve. Robotaxis do not need to account for things jumping out unexpectedly in front of them?

Orders of magnitude more capable than the best cameras? I wish. I need corrective lenses for my eyes to even work at all. With that fixed they feed my brain an image that's upside down, black and white except in the centre, which is covered in blood vessels and which has a blind spot. They also take a long time to adjust to sudden changes in lighting conditions, don't do any true depth sensing, suffer frequent frame drops and can't run for more than about 20 hours at a time before they basically stop working.

My brain tries to hides all this from me, and makes me think that I see the world in glorious 3D technicolor all the time, but that's a lie as revealed by the many amusing optical illusions that have been discovered over the years.

Meanwhile, today I used ML that knows more than me, can think and type faster than me, which is a much better artist than me and which can read and react far faster than me to visual stimuli. Oh, it can also easily look in every direction simultaneously without pausing or ever getting distracted or bored.

Somehow it doesn't feel like I have a big advantage over computers when it comes to driving.

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

#179

Post by ra7 »

bangaladore wrote: post #102
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…

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…

> HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities.

Waymo have said time and again they don’t rely on maps being 100% accurate to be able to drive. It's one of the key assumptions of the system. They use it as prior knowledge to aid in decision making. If they got "lost" whenever there was a road change, they wouldn't be successfully navigating construction zones in San Francisco as we've seen in many videos.

They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout changes to the entire fleet. See https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

At this point, the whole “HD maps are not practical” is just a trope perpetuated by the Tesla community for years.

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

#180

Post by bangaladore »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #141
bangaladore wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes is way higher than cameras. Dynamic range is another. Also, Cruise and Waymo are some of the only companies that have hard internal data / ability to simulate how well their safety drivers do, and in the v…

> For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes is way higher than cameras.

I don't think it's exciting to say that you must have theoretical parity with something to use it for this use case. Tesla's solution monitors ~6? cameras at once with accurate depth in each. That's 6x more views than a human can see. I wish people would stop comparing apples to oranges.

> Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would be able to avoid.

I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying attention.

Post reply on HN