"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs" Nice abbreviation.
You can tell they're enjoying their job.
Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
141–150 of 425 posts
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#142This is a lie: >> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient…
A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) without some extra guidance. Whether Waymo's business model makes sense primarily depends on how often these agents need to intervene (unlike safety drivers where you need one safety driver per vehicle and you're just running an expensive taxi).
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength. No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure,…
Even if it doesn't allow you to resolve the ambiguity, knowing that there is an ambiguity is extremely valuable. Say the lidar detects a pedestrian but the camera doesn't. Which one do you believe? Well, you propagate the ambiguity and take appropriate action, i.e. slow down, change lanes, etc. Don't drive through an area where there's a decent chance that you're going to kill someone by doing it.
Yes, absolutely. Knowledge about the fact that a conflict between sensors exists is valuable in its own right, it means you are seeing something that needs more work than simple reinforcement.
Fail safe, always. That's what I tried to get at with 'absence of quorum', it means you are in uncharted territory.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.
I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too. I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I…
I suspect they have a long tail problem with FSD. It might work fine 99% but that's simply not good enough.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#145The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time. It's weird how many people there are like that still. But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
> They have been fully autonomous for many years.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>The market value of all taxi companies combined was pretty small when Uber started.
Were there even reliable metrics for this? They only seem small like car dealerships seem small - not of consolidation.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...
Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself: Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it rece…
>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car
2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs some technician to come to get a drink unstuck does it make sense to get up and arms about how it's not "fully automated" or whatever? In all contexts why people would care (eg. unit economics, safety, customer experience), there's no meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 inter…
I hate how much space in cities is devoted to cars, and I wish we had much better transit of all sorts.
But - I'm just not sure your analysis is right. Someone who drives a self-owned car will park it in a downtown area for hours. Someone who takes a taxi of any sort will use much, much less amortized parking spot space. New York is a pretty good example of this.
Good public transit beats the snot out of cars, but a dense taxi deployment seems to get more people moved per total car-dedicated-space than private car drivership does.
And if we can reduce the amount of space dedicated to parking, we can increase density, which reduces the need for driving.
So the problem will be if we have self-driving whatevers at the expense of public transit, but perhaps not if it's at the expense of private car drivership.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're very public about the data that makes them look good, but they went to court to keep their safety data from the public. ( https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/22/waymo-to-keep-robotaxi-saf... )
That lawsuit was about trade secrets shared with DMV. And DMV advised them to file a restraining order against a third party seeking redacted info.
It was actually about all kinds of information about the safety of their cars, how the company handles collisions, how they decide to make human drivers take over, details of injuries caused by their cars, etc.
The DMV required them to submit their safety data before allowing the vehicles on the road. Waymo claims that the data the DMV needed about the public safety of their cars, and the emails they exchanged about it with regulators, were entirely "trade secrets" to keep them hidden from the public who understandably felt like they should be able to access that information since those cars are going to be on their streets.
Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.
According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.
Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver?
https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...