> Redundant: Because there is no human to take over, proactive safety and redundancy are natively built in. Our compute is designed like two independent engines. While they normally operate as one unit running full parallel workloads, if one experiences a fault, the other seamlessly takes over.
uhhh i've been in a situation where a remote human took over before
it's rare but it can happen (or at least it could 1.5 years ago-ish)
the specific situation was a tight alleyway with cars parked on either side and people doing things like opening car doors and crossing randomly. the waymo obviously wanted a much wider safety margin than what was available and stopped to wait for things to clear up. the remote human driver instead drove more aggressively towards the pedestrians so they would clear the road.
Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most impor…
I just took a Waymo in San Jose, having taken a few from San Francisco - it dropped me off in a place that would have made sense in SF (across the street from my destination at a light, avoiding a U turn) but was terrible in the suburban streetscape where the road was literally 10 lanes 4 / 4 / 2 turning and no one would ever drop someone off like that instead of U turning so they didn't have to cross scary giant tra…
30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.
Different 30 people in the US. I’d drop my car if Waymo was around and financially made sense. You’ll never catch me wasting my time on a bus though. We’ll never even be close to Europe or elsewhere wrt where public transit was even decades ago in those places. People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them. Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and h…
> Waymo could make a bus too anyway
Oh hell no. Cars are bad enough from the damage they can cause by kinetic energy, but a bus? Especially a bus where people don't wear seatbelts or, worse, are standing?
Most of the cost comes from paying the drivers, but also cost is a proxy for emmissions?
Yes? Why is this strange? Drivers emit a lot of CO2, just like every person in the US. A driverless car allows these emissions to be reallocated to other more productive areas.
You're counting emissions from a person's breathing as part of the vehicle's emissions?
> Redundant: Because there is no human to take over, proactive safety and redundancy are natively built in. Our compute is designed like two independent engines. While they normally operate as one unit running full parallel workloads, if one experiences a fault, the other seamlessly takes over. uhhh i've been in a situation where a remote human took over before it's rare but it can happen (or at least it could 1.5 ye…
They mean no human at the wheel to take over if the hardware dies. If you are driving full speed down the highway and your gpu packs up, you’d better have a backup to bring the vehicle to a safe stop.
No contest when the bus is full, but the overall efficiency (/"greeness") of the system is much less clear considering: buses are rarely full, most buses are diesel, heavy buses tear up the pavement on their routes (especially near stops), and buses don't take riders directly to/from their destinations.
Most of the city buses in my UK home town are now battery electric double deckers. These carry up to 85-90 people (with 25 standing), weigh 11 tonnes, and is 10.5m long. A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long. So the double decker bus should be more environmentally efficient with maybe 5 passengers making independent journeys, though operational co…
This is the right way to think about it. Larger buses make sense when there are a lot of people going to and from the same places at the same time, but I think that is much more rare in my city after remote work became widespread.
I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhere on Zorhan's to-do list :)
Yeah but the plan of "ban them because the taxi drivers union said so" is ludicrous. Why not have a partial integration with re-training programs for existing taxi drivers, and work with the city council to establish laws that effectively strip Waymo of its profits for operating in the city, making them only barely break even, and siphoning the rest of the funds into the aforementioned retraining programs and transport infrastructure more broadly. Even a 3% profit margin in one of the largest markets in the world is better than none at all, Waymo is effectively forced to comply with any measures NYC imposes. This doesn't have to be the case nationally either: many areas are relatively underserved by even Uber and Lyft, and there is plenty of room for Waymo in those markets, and I imagine those "empty" parts of the US, in total, eclipse the size of NYC. There, it will be nothing but a boon. But in established cities like NYC, it is almost certainly best practice to keep as much profit in the local economy as possible, since Waymo is not, in the end, drastically multiplying economic productivity in those cities.
>high-fidelity data from 13 high-resolution cameras is it me or their example photo doesn't look even like 1 high-resolution camera (and very noisy at that, looks like a pretty high ISO setting). Their example looks similar and i'd say a bit worse than what my Fuji camera did 25 years ago in the dark after i'd adjust dynamic range of the image in GIMP. (and the cameras on the Waymo cars i see around have about the sa…
That night image looks very heavily cropped based on the field of view.
Different 30 people in the US. I’d drop my car if Waymo was around and financially made sense. You’ll never catch me wasting my time on a bus though. We’ll never even be close to Europe or elsewhere wrt where public transit was even decades ago in those places. People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them. Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and h…
Bus was just fine in Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco.
Bus is fine in select areas at current fares, but would be less popular if people realize each drive costs more like $16 in total instead of the $2 fare they pay.