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Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

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Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#111

Post by traceroute66 »

themafia wrote: post #97
KellyCriterion wrote: post #55

Very impressive video! What you can clearly see: If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge" And this technology will come on a…

> If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D I ride a motorcycle. Unless you make this illegal, then no, "manual driving" is not over anytime soon. Some people actually _like_ driving, although, none of them appear to frequent hacker news. > there is nothing that can stop this? We learned the lesson of over automation in aviation very quickly. The best solution is very often, turn off autopil…

> You don't want pilots with their heads down in a computer making changes when they can, and should, just fly the plane.

There is a famous video on youtube, 'Children of the Magenta Line', an extract from an American Airlines course decades ago.

Well worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#112

Post by mlrtime »

themafia wrote: post #97
KellyCriterion wrote: post #55

Very impressive video! What you can clearly see: If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge" And this technology will come on a…

> If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D I ride a motorcycle. Unless you make this illegal, then no, "manual driving" is not over anytime soon. Some people actually _like_ driving, although, none of them appear to frequent hacker news. > there is nothing that can stop this? We learned the lesson of over automation in aviation very quickly. The best solution is very often, turn off autopil…

I want both tbh, I want the people who have no concern for learning how to drive safely that just want to commute to use these, as I believe they will be statistically safer over large numbers.

On the other hand we'll never see a full self driving 911. And I plan to drive one until I can no longer safely drive myself. It's the best therapy I've paid for.

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#113

Post by blueblisters »

digital-cygnet wrote: post #86
blueblisters wrote: post #39

Surreal. Almost like an optimistic science fiction film. After all, self driving cars have some of the highest positive to negative externality ratio of any modern technology

Can you explain more why you think this? As I see it, cars in general remain very highly negative-externality, and self-driving doesn't change it much. Regular ICE cars: - air pollution from tire wear and brake dust - air pollution from exhaust - embodied carbon - noise - endangering other road users - traffic congestion - land use (sprawl) - long term health impacts (encouraging sedentary lifestyle) Switch to all-el…

I guess I place a premium on safety over land use and congestion.

I also suspect any future congestion and land-use problems will get better after an initial dip. Urban living becomes more desirable as city parking lots disappear.

If roads are used exclusively for self driving cars, this would probably improve traffic flow. Robot cars multiply current highway and city street capacity by coordination. They can smoothen traffic flow due to hard braking, and drive much closer to each other.

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#114

Post by Ylpertnodi »

ufmace wrote: post #71
spwa4 wrote: post #60

What amazes me about Waymo is how expensive the rides are. They're at least 20% more expensive than Uber (the much more expensive Uber of today, not the Uber of 2-4 years ago), sometimes 100-150% more expensive. If they can't be cheaper, then what's the point?

Having ridden a few of them in the area, I think they're worth it. Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the…

> And no chance of....loud conversation in some foreign language,

Ah!

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#115

Post by Cockbrand »

rootusrootus wrote: post #25
bgwalter wrote: post #10

There are also neighborhood self-help groups who try to "stack" the Waymos into alleys so that they can sleep: https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-bat...

That would drive me insane, they have my sympathy.

How it can be legal for Waymo to operate a noisy lot like this right in a residential area is absolutely beyond me. Also, did Waymo really not consider the neighbors before setting up the lot? That sounds hardly credible to me.

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#116

Post by nilsherzig »

dllu wrote: post #20

Very neat. I recently went to the Waymo depot in Bayshore (Toland St) and snapped a couple of pictures of the new Zeekrs for Wikipedia. [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_... [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...

I know nothing about photography, but i really enjoyed your work. Especially the line scan cable car and „ 1390 Market Street“. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#117

Post by Mawr »

dang wrote: post #6
Mawr wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? "Oh, who cares." is not an ok way to respond to someone's work on HN, and is particularly bad when a thread is just getting underway. " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (of course I understand that it's disappointing when you'r…

God forbid someone expresses an opinion that's not blind praise of every random thing anyone does. OP pointed a camera at a parking lot "at some personal risk of injury". I should have pissed myself in awe.

Go do something useful, like moderate the actual trolling i see here literally every day. Too subtle for you to notice I guess.

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#118

Post by anonymous »

Mawr wrote: post #117
dang wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please review and follow the site guidelines? "Oh, who cares." is not an ok way to respond to someone's work on HN, and is particularly bad when a thread is just getting underway. " Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (of course I understand that it's disappointing when you'r…

God forbid someone expresses an opinion that's not blind praise of every random thing anyone does. OP pointed a camera at a parking lot "at some personal risk of injury". I should have pissed myself in awe. Go do something useful, like moderate the actual trolling i see here literally every day. Too subtle for you to notice I guess.

No post body was provided.

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#119

Post by Thorrez »

socalgal2 wrote: post #83
Thorrez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases. Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90…

You have a point. At the same time insurance companies are getting out of insurance because they can't afford it. Apparently (I didn't verify this), the cost to repair cars has gone up so much that the economics don't work out. So they're leaving the market. Maybe less crashes would bring them back? Pick a source: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+insurance+companies+leav...

I believe in CA, the reason for pulling out is that CA limits the amount the companies can increase premiums[1]. So less crashes is one way to bring them back. Allowing them to increase premiums more is another way to bring them back.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c7lm5b/...

Re: Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

#120

Post by Thorrez »

KellyCriterion wrote: post #59
Thorrez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases. Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90…

Oh sure, they have! e.g.: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from... And sure, insurances are fine with making profits, but if they can get less catastrophes, they are fine with that as it reduces overall risk etc. Feel free to check the corp publishing section on https://www.munichre.com/en/insights.html

That 1st link is the CA government, not an insurance company. Also, it doesn't seem to be a regulation requiring people to do something. It's something people can optionally do, and if so, get a discount on insurance. That's not insurance companies pushing for regulation, it's insurance companies offering a competitive price to both high-risk and low-risk houses, similar to how car insurance companies base their rate based on how risky of a driver they estimate the person to be.

But fire insurance is different from auto insurance. Insurance companies want uncorrelated risk. Insurance companies want a high rate of car crashes, but the exact same rate of car crashes each year, because that makes planning easy. If there's a risk that in a some years way more crashes will happen than other years, that's correlated risk and makes planning difficult; they don't want that.

For cars, there's not much correlated risk. For fire insurance, there is correlated risk due to wildfires. So to reduce correlated risk, insurance companies do likely want to reduce wildfires, while still wanting to increase non-wildfire fires.

Self-driving cars will increase correlated risk, because there could be some software update with a bug that's pushed out and causes a ton of crashes. (That risk does also exist with cars today, due to the various software in cars, but self driving increases the risk.)

The 2nd link is an insurance company, but it as well doesn't seem to be advocating for regulation.

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