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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

waymo.com

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

#321

Post by dyauspitr »

Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #261
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…

I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.

Every rider’s identity is known. That’s going to play a huge role in how people treat them.

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

#322

Post by TulliusCicero »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #257
TulliusCicero wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an extraordinarily disingenuous comparison. A big reason why Tesla superfans have such a poor reputation is because of bad faith arguments like this that frequently pop up in these discussions. Tesla cars with FSD have a driver behind the wheel who can instantly take over if the car is about to crash into a stationary object. Any time a Tesla would've crashed into something an object but its human driver save…

> Many Tesla owners have reported that they have to regularly disengage FSD because it's trying to do something dangerous or looks like it's headed for a crash. With Tesla the responsibility is on the person in the driver's seat, so there is a (rightfully!) a bias for overreaction on the part of the driver. We will never know many of these disengagements were necessary. The only way to get a true comparison of data i…

It's true that not all of them would be crashes, but many would be, because, well, the car was about to crash. The car isn't just joking around when it swerves towards some parked cars.

> The only way to get a true comparison of data is to compare robotaxis with robotaxis.

100% agreed. And so far, Tesla hasn't taken the step of actually letting the cars be driverless.

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

#323

Post by ladon86 »

the-rc wrote: post #272
diebeforei485 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo does have safety drivers, they're just driving the vehicle remotely when it's in certain areas instead of being in the vehicle. So it isn't "full" self driving either. > Tesla, who use cameras only, have not demonstrated full self driving There are entire youtube channels with hours of continuous video showing Teslas driving around SF, but also other parts of California, with no human intervention.

Are you saying that there are times when a Waymo car's ability to respond to events is at the mercy of a random Internet connection? What happens if the safety driver is steering remotely, from another town, and there's packet loss for a couple of seconds in the middle of a curve?

Again, they don’t drive or steer remotely. What sometimes happens is a multiple choice question is presented to the operator in an ambiguous situation:

Can I drive through here? [Yes] [No]

When this is happening, the car is stopped and lets the passenger know that it’s reaching out for remote help to figure out what to do. For me this has happened two times across my 125 Waymo rides (571 miles) so far, and was resolved in under 20 seconds. Though I must say, 20 seconds feels like ages when you’re in the car and blocking traffic!

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

#324

Post by greenthrow »

the-rc wrote: post #297
greenthrow wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One blog post lacking in any detail is not being open about how it works, and I think you know that. I was very clear in the kinds of detail I think they should legally be required to provide to operate on public roads.

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

#325

Post by Zenzero »

majormajor wrote: post #305
Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.

The biggest problem with cleaning is that compared to Uber where there's a human driver, the autonomy factor will almost certainly lead to more people fucking shit up simply because they can. Look at anything else that goes unattended in the public way: ebikes, delivery bot things, scooters... nasty combo of "I want to fuck with The Man" and "haha nobody is here watching I don't need to be as careful with my messy sa…

That's my biggest concern too. My fear is in 20 years nobody will be excited to go in these because the interiors will be whittled down to dilapidated NY subway seats.

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

#326

Post by diebeforei485 »

ra7 wrote: post #312
diebeforei485 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NDA's ended when they were confident enough in their system that the good press would outweigh the bad. So essentially we're comparing footage from Waymo when it was at the end stages of its development to footage from Tesla at the early stages of its development.

We agree that Waymo's and Tesla's development stages are wildly different at this point.

I don't know if they're wildly different at this point. Sitting in the shotgun seat, comparing the latest FSD vs the latest Waymo, on the same pickup and dropoff in San Francisco, I couldn't tell much difference. On the one hand, Waymo definitely chooses slower, quieter roads, and weird pickup/dropoff points - which means it's a slower ride. On the other hand, most people don't have access to actually try FSD so they rely on videos which are typically older FSD versions and spliced to only show "highlights" instead of being a raw 20 minute ride footage video.

I don't think we'll actually know until Tesla has an actual robotaxi product. When Cruise had one, most people who had tried both Cruise and Waymo said Waymo was better. That was my opinion as well.

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

#327

Post by TulliusCicero »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #254
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…

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.

I've heard "Autopilot/FSD has improved a lot recently" or "the next release is going to be a huge improvement" many times from Tesla superfans. And certainly there has been improvement, but it's still at a stage where it's making very basic mistakes in operating the car.

It's not even at the point where the challenge is handling weird edge cases with construction or strange intersections, it's still struggling with not running into parked cars and walls. How many years do you think it should take a self-driving system to be able to handle those basic tasks in the general case? Because Tesla has been working on self-driving for almost a decade at this point, and they still seem to be barely past the starting line.

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

#328

Post by hot_gril »

sangnoir wrote: post #290
hot_gril wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there a law against being armed in the airport dropoff/pickup area there?

No, I added the pick-up locationbut to make it clear the driver knew I was unarmed as I was coming off a flight, since one can't legally fly with a gun.

It's legal to fly with guns in checked bags, but I don't know the specifics of the interaction with the driver.

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

#329

Post by TulliusCicero »

Abroszka wrote: post #48
bryanlarsen wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "always a driver monitoring". They're not actively monitoring all of them all of the time, they're responding to requests from the car. And they're not drivers, they're supervisors. They don't take over driving, AFAICT they issue high-level commands like "safe to proceed", "take the right lane", et cetera.

There is always somebody ready to respond. Of course they can't take full control, that would be stupid dangerous, but they can still control the car. They even have people who go to your car to get it unstuck manually when needed.

They can tell the car what to do like a human navigator in the front seat, but they don't directly operate the car. Those are very different things.

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

#330

Post by ra7 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #326
ra7 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We agree that Waymo's and Tesla's development stages are wildly different at this point.

I don't know if they're wildly different at this point. Sitting in the shotgun seat, comparing the latest FSD vs the latest Waymo, on the same pickup and dropoff in San Francisco, I couldn't tell much difference. On the one hand, Waymo definitely chooses slower, quieter roads, and weird pickup/dropoff points - which means it's a slower ride. On the other hand, most people don't have access to actually try FSD so they…

> Sitting in the shotgun seat, comparing the latest FSD vs the latest Waymo, on the same pickup and dropoff in San Francisco, I couldn't tell much difference.

Well, except for the fact that one is doing it completely driverless. And it has to do that every single time without having the luxury of a driver to prevent accidents.

Big difference in reliability, which makes them wildly different.

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