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Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

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Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#201

Post by pavel_lishin »

whytaka wrote: post #192
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #13

The world would be a lot better off if Tesla and Uber get smoked on this. Tesla's public testing of beta quality industrial control software and Uber's attempt to lilypad jump across the backs of financially unsophisticated drivers are contemptible. I'd be very glad to see neither strategy actually work in the end.

I am now convinced that Uber/ride-sharing is responsible for the deterioration in our high-trust societies. Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.

> Uber made it ok for regular drivers commit road violations with impunity.

Can you say more about this?

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#202

Post by bhouston »

Waymo has to start moving faster, and democratizing the space by making it available to all car makers is smart, because it seems that Elon Musk is pushing Tesla to make RoboTaxis their #1 priority:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-elon-musk-prioritize-r...

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#203

Post by RC_ITR »

brummm wrote: post #182
standardUser wrote: post #180

I know we Americans just love to own cars, what with the rapid depreciation, constant maintenance and massive storage requirements. Who could resist? But isn't the promise of self driving vehicles that we don't all need to own, maintain and operate a 4000lb machine? I know it's hard to resist dropping the $30k, $40k or even $50k and paying that monthly insurance we all love. But wouldn't it be better if we could just…

That's already possible and called taxis/uber/etc. In what way would self driving cars incentivize not owning your own car?

I have to pay to store my manually-driven car 90% of the day, because there's nothing else it could be doing while it waits for me.

A driverless car can very easily do things and make money while I'm waiting for it.

In some scenarios, people rent out their owned cars during the day to avoid this massive opportunity cost, but I doubt that will be the most efficient model.

In what other asset class ever has it made sense for the capital owners to be an extremely long tail of people, rather than a large corporate owner? Especially something as high velocity and fungible as cars.

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#204

Post by hnav »

Retric wrote: post #126
princevegeta89 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, we should also realize that they've been super wildly successful at getting people to move towards clean energy vehicles. Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree. It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicle…

Hybrids are a dead end. There’s already EV’s doing 1MW charging. That’s practically gas pump speeds while also being able to charge at home, and the underlying technology keeps improving. 8% of new cars in the US, 14% in the EU, and 27% in China are EV’s. Toyota’s EV sales are anemic by comparison.

Toyota does not want to sell a lot of EVs, because that could mean investing heavily to scale up the manufacturing of a dead-end technology that ends up losing out. Meanwhile they've been iterating on their hybrid tech and are selling 50 MPG vehicles by the millions. When the dust settles, a lot of EV companies will be out of business and their products will be e-waste with 0 spares anywhere. Toyota on the other hand generally uses the same technology for decades to build very predictable appliance-like vehicles. This is why a 3 year old EVs have 40% residuals while used Toyotas are 60%.

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#205

Post by sorcerer-mar »

tjbiddle wrote: post #173
sorcerer-mar wrote: post #13

The world would be a lot better off if Tesla and Uber get smoked on this. Tesla's public testing of beta quality industrial control software and Uber's attempt to lilypad jump across the backs of financially unsophisticated drivers are contemptible. I'd be very glad to see neither strategy actually work in the end.

Seems like a mixed bag. Parents, eldest sister and eldest all have Teslas and have done cross-country road trips with no problems, and use FSD very regularly. Brother, also the most cynical (and probably on HN), swears it's out to kill him and claims it nearly put him under a truck had he not taken over.

“A mixed bag” for a safety critical system is a synonym for “dangerous” or “dogshit”

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#206

Post by proudestmonkey »

vachina wrote: post #189
lxgr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development. Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.

FSD is something you can BUY and USE right now. Toyota is writing an MoU. They’re not the same.

Waymo is something that actually drives itself and you can hail right now. FSD is not actually “full self-driving”.

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#208

Post by billti »

timewizard wrote: post #110
mperham wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny thing is that I've owned Gen 3 FSD for five years now and only in the last few months has it gotten noticeably better. It's actually respectable at driving around my city now, can handle roundabouts, make turns, etc.

The funny thing is that a nearly perfect template of your comment appears on nearly every post which includes a criticism of FSD. It's always magically "just recently got better!" As well as "being able to do some selected basic driving despite being called FULL self drive."

I have no 'recently' to compare to, as I'd never been in a Tesla before. I was dubious because of all the "this year for sure" history, but after test driving one, I bought the new Model Y, and it now pretty much drives me to work and back every day with little to no intervention.

Knowing how prone to exaggeration Elon is, my bar was low. But it blew me away honestly. After nearly 30 years working in software and with some background in machine learning and computer vision and generally just trying to make software that works reliably, it's a pretty jaw dropping experience.

Would I take a nap in the back seat and let it drive? No. But does it allow me to sit there focused on a technical podcast or an audiobook so I feel like I'm getting back an hour or two a day instead of worrying about driving? Absolutely.

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#209

Post by adrr »

vachina wrote: post #189
lxgr wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will EXPLORE collaborating on ACCELERATING development. Compared to "FSD this year", every year for the past five years, I honestly find the approach pretty refreshing.

FSD is something you can BUY and USE right now. Toyota is writing an MoU. They’re not the same.

FSD can’t self drive on any street though. Its just L2 like cruise control and lane centering.

Re: Waymo and Toyota outline partnership to advance autonomous driving deployment

#210

Post by doublescoop »

Retric wrote: post #126
princevegeta89 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, we should also realize that they've been super wildly successful at getting people to move towards clean energy vehicles. Prius is the world's highest selling Hybrid car, and it's been that for more than a decade now. This means Toyota has helped cut down emissions from consumer automobiles by a significant degree. It's not the 1000 EVs out of the 100k vehicles that matter, but rather the 10k hybrid vehicle…

Hybrids are a dead end. There’s already EV’s doing 1MW charging. That’s practically gas pump speeds while also being able to charge at home, and the underlying technology keeps improving. 8% of new cars in the US, 14% in the EU, and 27% in China are EV’s. Toyota’s EV sales are anemic by comparison.

Hybrids are the only choice for the vast majority of the country that doesn't have the needed infrastructure to support EVs. If you never leave your urban enclave, then sure, EVs are great. But hybrids are perfect for _right now_, even if EVs are the future.

The Toyota hybrid engine is also rock solid and has been for more than a decade. They don't have a reason to abandon that right now when the industry is highly unstable and government funding for infrastructure that isn't Tesla's is being cut left and right.

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