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

291–300 of 651 posts

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

#291

Post by bragr »

Couple of anecdotal data points from a new rider. Here's the first time rider spiel they give you [1]. Overall experience is pretty polished. It's handled some tricky situations with confidence like this left hand turn from a two way stop on the inside of a blind curve [2]. Then other times it drives like the most cautious newbie driver. Maybe it didn't like me being so closed to the road, but this time it awkwardly failed to pull close enough on pickup [3]. Definitely got some stink eye from drivers trying to squeeze by.

[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/apNmS7JNbQ4Cau8dA

[2] https://photos.app.goo.gl/JdUYkTYkJJZYmUt99

[3] https://photos.app.goo.gl/USvznpWqRrY3fnqL9

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

#292

Post by dventimi »

groby_b wrote: post #269
dventimi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by the type of people who will be riding in them?

That new group is people who aren't at the frontier of trying out new tech. The way this will manifest is the drunk idiot who'll puke all over the car. The bored asshole who carves his initials in the seat. The edgelord who gets their jollies out of destroying other people's stuff. Good chance you had some in the original group as well, but early adopters are usually mostly people who deeply understand tech. Once tha…

I'm sorry. You lost me.

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

#293

Post by FireBeyond »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #247
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…

> is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's? Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win. Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.

Waymo doesn't have to convince its vehicle owners to let strangers ride in their car unsupervised.

Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.

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

#294

Post by standardUser »

The big hope to me is the idea of cheap, cheap rides due to the lack of labor expenses, tipping and eventually gas. I don't see how that happens if there isn't competition, but I don't see how it doesn't happen if there are competing companies that can offer a similar service.

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

#295

Post by FireBeyond »

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.…

> For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing.

This one in itself continues to kinda surprise me. High end Audis have full-blown thermal cameras, and will literally flag heat producing objects on the console: https://www.audi-technology-portal.de/en/electrics-electroni...

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

#296

Post by fragmede »

standardUser wrote: post #294

The big hope to me is the idea of cheap, cheap rides due to the lack of labor expenses, tipping and eventually gas. I don't see how that happens if there isn't competition, but I don't see how it doesn't happen if there are competing companies that can offer a similar service.

They've invested untold billions into getting this to work and now they need to recoup their investment. They'll get "cheap" eventually, but don't hold your breath.

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

#297

Post by the-rc »

greenthrow wrote: post #166
foota wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo operators do not ever drive the vehicle. My understanding is that Waymo operators can specify things like "take this path" (e.g., by drawing on a map or something) or "yes that's safe" but this doesn't correspond to the actual driving inputs.

I'd appreciate if they were open and honest about the reality of how they operate. But since they keep it very secret, I have no choice but to assume the worst. If it was impressive rathee than detrimental to their valuation, they'd be open about it.

Except that they don't keep it very secret:

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

"the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver."

But let's assume they're lying and you're right: what kind of throughput and latency do you expect to be required between the car and the remote driver for this to work safely? How does the car know if the remote driver is actually looking at the data and acting on that? What happens if the connection stutters? Does the car take control again? How would it decide when to alternate between remote and local control? What if the two sides disagree on what to do?

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

#298

Post by ra7 »

flutas wrote: post #267
ra7 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

> 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. Which leads to mapping failures being unchecked, as the system that generated the data is the one checking the data by driving it. See bullet point 1 in their recent recall for an example. > Prior to the Waymo ADS receiving the remedy described in this report, a co…

The changes can be checked additionally by humans, although not always.

> We’ve automated most of that process to ensure it’s efficient and scalable. Every time our cars detect changes on the road, they automatically upload the data, which gets shared with the rest of the fleet after, in some cases, being additionally checked by our mapping team.

Doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.

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

#299

Post by linearrust »

pengaru wrote: post #63
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…

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.

> So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of stopping abruptly.

Surprised traffic lights aren't updated to communicate with cars directly. Why not have traffic lights broadcast 'stop' message along with turning red?

I suspect traffic lights, roads and cities will have to be updated to work with driverless cars.

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

#300

Post by diebeforei485 »

ra7 wrote: post #266
diebeforei485 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how true this is anymore. FSD has improved significantly this year that they're on their new NN architecture. It's worth remembering that Waymo required their users to sign NDA's during beta, while the Tesla FSD beta was open to everyone with no NDA. So there was a lot more Tesla content being posted and going viral.

Waymo hasn’t required an NDA for at least a couple of years now. They only had a waitlist for access, you could share anything you want publicly.

There were various stages of rollout. The earlier stages required an NDA, the later ones did not.

Meanwhile Tesla hasn't required NDA's except for employees running internal builds.

Post reply on HN