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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

#171

Post by nasreddin »

gcanyon wrote: post #126
kjksf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have. > didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware A little more extreme, but: Tesla…

This is probably the most "techbro understanding of finance" moment if there ever was one. Laughable stuff.

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

#172

Post by SecretDreams »

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.

This yes.

> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.

This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.

We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.

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

#173

Post by garbawarb »

xnx wrote: post #6
garbawarb wrote: post #4

I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)

As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out. Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.

Cruise was always run as a separate business from GM until they shut it down. I think they got too nervous about committing to the Silicon Valley investment style: high capital, high risk, long time horizon, high reward.

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

#174

Post by bobsomers »

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…

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

Parity is not defined by how willing one is to let their robots kill the general public.

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

#175

Post by calvinmorrison »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #128
hnuser123456 wrote: post #64

Earlier 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…

> one-in-a-million events

So we just made driving a million times more efficient for human labor input

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

#176

Post by jeffbee »

Rohansi wrote: post #106
jeffbee wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FSD doesn't "work fine" driving directly into the sun. There are loads of YT videos that demonstrate this.

For which car? The older the car (hardware) version the worse it is. I've never had any front camera blinding issues with a 2022 car (HW3). The thing to remember about cameras is what you see in an image/display is not what the camera sees. Processing the image reduces the dynamic range but FSD could work off of the raw sensor data.

Nobody cares that you think v14.7.22b runs well on HW3.1. Literally nobody.

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

#178

Post by nielsbot »

nektro wrote: post #137
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…

the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that

Yup. I came in to ask that same question. Lot of money potentially “left on the table”.

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

#179

Post by coffeemug »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #164
coffeemug wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will…

In the Midwest, golf carts are exactly what people use to get around in small towns. It's not unreasonable that neighborhoods might be closed to large vehicles and use other forms of transit within their boundaries.

That's fascinating, I didn't know that! What are some example cities/towns where this is common?

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

#180

Post by testing22321 »

dinobones wrote: post #122
kjksf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

> and there won't be, for years, if ever.

That is a lot of confidence. Do you work in the autonomous vehicle space?

What makes you so certain?

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