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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

#341

Post by mgh2 »

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…

How is pricing? https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/18abac9/pr...

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

#342

Post by diebeforei485 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #322
diebeforei485 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Older versions of Tesla FSD tended to make steering adjustments that were short in duration, but at a higher turn angle. Human drivers in a similar situation would turn the wheel slightly but keep it turned for longer before returning to centerline.

People saw the steering wheel turn and perceived it to be the system going haywire, or thought that "the car was about to crash" as you put it, and intervened.

The newer NN based FSD acts more like what a human would do.

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

#343

Post by TulliusCicero »

tayo42 wrote: post #31

How much do these cost? Is it cheaper then uber/lyft, taxis? Muni? That would be pretty crazy

They're not cheaper right now. Might be possible as they scale up. A lot of people seem to prefer them to Uber/Lyft even as it is, though.

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

#344

Post by TulliusCicero »

blackeyeblitzar wrote: post #89

Is much known about the science behind Waymo? I am impressed that the cars can operate autonomously in real life when I see them around me. At the same time, they have an enormous number of sensors like multiple spinning LIDARs (?). I also read that they have to map everything ahead of time to be able to operate in an area. That seems a bit like cheating to me. It may work and may even be valuable to customers, but i…

> it doesn’t seem like as big a breakthrough as achieving autonomy with the same sensors as humans.

As far as I know, nobody is currently attempting to do that. Even Tesla has way more cameras on their cars than you have eyeballs, covering far more angles than your head can. There is that one org that does L2 automation with just a phone IIRC, but I don't think they're trying for full autonomy.

Realistically, it's hard for the car to be as smart as the human mental model while driving, and so having vastly superior sensors helps compensate for that.

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

#345

Post by ModernMech »

mlboss wrote: post #205
ModernMech wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say the same, maybe. But yesterday I had an Uber with a guy that had a degree in history and a love for SF lore, and told me about the tomb of Starr King, and then I went on a quest to find it with my friend. Just saying that there’s magic out there that’s not technological.

Not so difficult to add this feature with the help of human like voice and LLM backend.

That kind of misses the point; it was the human that was interesting to me and the interaction we had, not that he gave information.

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

#346

Post by TulliusCicero »

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.

Some people will get real mad, but eventually they'll become so commonplace that they'll be accepted in general. Nobody's gonna be smashing up the self-driving cars they see every single day.

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

#347

Post by TulliusCicero »

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…

You need an account, probably with a credit card, if you're gonna ride. If you intentionally mess up the car, you'll probably just get banned from the service.

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

#348

Post by Zenzero »

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.

You are assuming Tesla is anywhere close to the capabilities of Waymo. Ignoring Elon and his history of hyping things far beyond reality, Tesla does not appear to have the equipment, data, or organizational culture to achieve what Waymo has done.

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

#349

Post by diebeforei485 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #327
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.

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 n…

> it's still at a stage where it's making very basic mistakes in operating the car.

> it's still struggling with not running into parked cars and walls

Based on the phrasing of your sentences, I must ask which FSD version you are running, and if you can share footage.

> 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.

Waymo/Google has been working on this since 2009, which was itself based on a Stanford project (whose team was hired from Stanford to Google) that started in 2004. So that's either 15 or 20 years depending on how you count, and it doesn't include the much harder tasks of mass producing vehicles and making electric vehicles commercially viable.

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

#350

Post by TulliusCicero »

Fatnino wrote: post #241
aetherson wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are freeways within the geofence in SF. My understanding is that Waymos will not drive on those freeways without a safety driver for now.

Freeway driving is easier than surface streets. Maybe merging in is the hard part.

It's "easier", but if you screw up, the consequences are MUCH worse.

Also, when Waymos get confused on surface streets, they can just stop. Can't really do that on a freeway.

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