Live data from Hacker News

Waymo Safety Impact

waymo.com

251–260 of 424 posts

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#251
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over. Most human drivers…

> Only a robot could've safely swerved into another lane and avoid the crash entirely. Do you drive a lot? I feel like humans take evasive actions like this all the time.

Some do and some more successful than others.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike the traffic cops directing traffic that would likely require special programming, "proceed if the other car flashes its lights at you" is completely the kind of thing that could just accidentally fall out of a neural network learning to imitate humans.

Hopefully if they ever go to Sri Lanka they get localised tuning because I was surprised to find out flashing your lights over there doesn't mean "go ahead", it means "if you don't get out of my way I will ram you"

And then there's trucks flashing an indicator to say it's safe to overtake if you're behind them. In the UK it's the nearside indicator, which makes sense: it's a bit like the truck is pulling over to let you pass. In Aotearo, it's often the off-side indicator, so you think the truck is going to pull out in front of you. I've never understood what the Aotearoa drivers are thinking there

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#253

I live in LA and Waymos are the only cars I don't have to play chicken with when crossing the street. Even the drivers that see you will just give you a "sorry, I'm in a rush" wave as they nearly run you over.

I did find the Waymos in SF disconcerting as they approached pedestrian crossings while I was waiting - with a human driver there's many different cues that they've seen you and noticed you - whether it be looking directly at you, or slowing down in preparation for you to cross. I'm sure if I had just started walking across the crossing it would have reacted perfectly, but I wasn't willing - based on the lack of obse…

The lights up on top will show a walk sign when it's waiting for a pedestrian to cross before proceeding.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#254
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over. Most human drivers…

How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.

We do support YouTube Music and actually supported that before Spotify. But we only do ad-supported on Spotify and iHeartRadio (also paid Spotify).

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.

We do support YouTube Music and actually supported that before Spotify. But we only do ad-supported on Spotify and iHeartRadio (also paid Spotify).

It looks like YouTube Music was only added in October? I took the ride in September.

https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16623742?hl=en

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How ironic that an Alphabet company, Waymo, only works with a competitor streaming music service, Spotify, and not their own, YouTube Music. I guess that shows how separate they are.

We do support YouTube Music and actually supported that before Spotify. But we only do ad-supported on Spotify and iHeartRadio (also paid Spotify).

How about some games to pass the time? Make some exclusives so I look forwards to a 20 minute cross-town drive!

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#257

Can they just report directly how many human lives they have saved since beginning operation? (of course, within some error bars) Maybe that's too much of a statistical stretch. But would be a good to-the-point number to have on hand for some waymo debates. "yes they caused some disruption in an intersection in so-and-so scenario, but on the other hand they saved X number of human lives last year"

I think the average is ballpark 1 per 100 million miles, so my guess is that someday they might show this, but they probably want to wait til they have more miles driven.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#258
Great, what's more concerning than crash rates though are impeding emergency vehicles, blocking roads, stalling when traffic lights are down, rolling past school buses with stop arms out, navigating in construction zones and lots of other issues that are left out of this report.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#259
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a photo I took inside of the Waymo outside of an Erewhon. Going to Erewhon and experiencing the $20 Hailey Bieber smoothie was on my brother's bucket list and riding in a Waymo was on mine. https://files.catbox.moe/jdjwy5.jpg https://files.catbox.moe/mh4ivw.jpg I have included EXIF data in an attempt to prove this really happened and I'm not an AI commenting bot.

What was the verdict on the smoothie?

He said it was overpriced but bought it again from a different Erewhon so I assumed he liked it (Canadian understatement).

There's apparently a quality gap between locations. The pre-Waymo one was from Erewhon Grove and was freshly blended. Erewhon Beverly Hills on Rodeo Drive premade a bunch of them and left them lying around for a while before selling.

My brother's theory is that Erewhon Grove customers are people who legitimately wanted a smoothie and Erewhon Beverly Hills customers just want photos with the smoothie since it was very popular on Instagram at the time.

Most surprising fact was despite being a licensed product, it was better than the best non-licensed smoothie (coconut cloud).

Licensing deals should make the product worse because the royalties cut into the product margin. The company cuts costs or doesn't take creative risks as a result. But somehow Erewhon resisted these pressures when designing the Hailey Bieber smoothie. We had a discussion about why that was the case but couldn't come up with an answer.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#260
post #53
post #3

Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans. The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they…

Waymo saved my life in LA. When I visited LA, I rode in a Waymo going the speed limit in the right lane on a very busy street. The Waymo approached an intersection where it had the right of way, when suddenly a car ignored its stop sign and drove into the road. In less than a second, the Waymo moved into the left lane and kept going. I didn't even realize what was happening until after it was over. Most human drivers…

They support YouTube Music now, thank god
Post reply on HN