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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#111

Post by lacker »

Alive-in-2025 wrote: post #88
lacker wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of…

Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down. At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossi…

It's funny to use "the market value of all taxi companies combined" as a proxy for how valuable the self-driving market will be, because that's exactly the reasoning that led people to underestimate Uber. The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.

That said, you could be right! Maybe self-driving will never be worth more than that. It's really hard to tell what business models will be like in the future. But this is the cultural mismatch, it seemed like GM leadership did not want to be in a risky business where they were betting billions of dollars on the success of self-driving. Clearly, to some people, that seemed like a really good bet to make. Time will tell.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#112

Post by hadlock »

abraxas wrote: post #86

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going…

If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#113

Post by hungryhobbit »

abraxas wrote: post #92
mclau153 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?

No, it's orthogonal. But cars that can drive everywhere will show up everywhere, all of the time. Watch the video in its entirety. It makes very strong arguments for why this is a dystopia in the making.

Why are you trying to make people on a text-based site watch a dumb video.

Just say what you want to say ... with words!

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#114

Post by qwerpy »

nutjob2 wrote: post #63

"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens." Nice dig at Tesla.

I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#115

Post by netsharc »

weirdmantis69 wrote: post #97
netsharc wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?". Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they'…

I've always wondered how people who are not 1/10th as smart as Elon convince themselves that he is not intelligent after solving robotics, AI, neuralink, and space all simultaneously.

And what fraction Elon-Intelligence is needed to believe he actually invented/solved all that by himself?

Or did I miss the sarcasm?

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#116

Post by RupertSalt »

kccqzy wrote: post #107

I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?

The latter.

They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.

The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.

This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.

From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#117

Post by g947o »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #95
mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.

You might want to look up the price of lidar in 2026 before talking about affordability.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#118

Post by g947o »

kjksf wrote: post #93
mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD. Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program…

> it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Nobody is talking about any of this using past tense. It is 2026 now, not 2016.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#119

Post by kccqzy »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #94
abraxas wrote: post #86

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going…

I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit. I can appreciate this technology might negativ…

I think this thread conflating between walkable and having good transit. A walkable city means almost everything you need is within walking distance. That doesn’t mean there are buses or trains to take you out of this area. I live in a walkable part of the city. Within a 15-minute walk, there are three supermarkets, perhaps twenty restaurants with different cuisines, four pharmacies, one each of USPS/UPS/FedEx for shipping, four different banks, three dry cleaners… you get the idea. The only transportation tool I need is my two legs.

Now of course sometimes I’m not content staying within this 15-minute circle. Then I simply choose the fastest method of transport to get there. Is BART or Muni faster than the Waymo trip? Then yes I’ll take pubic transportation. That’s what good transit is for.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#120

Post by abraxas »

kccqzy wrote: post #109
abraxas wrote: post #86

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going…

Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congest…

But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested.

In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.

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