181–190 of 235 posts
I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around. They seem to have a mix of robotaxis (like the ones pictured) and decked out Toyota Highlanders that look like Waymos but not as well "packaged", though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel. Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only oper…
Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
The most useful thing I expect from robotaxis is speed regulations. What's considered normal for humans, driving higher than the speed limits, will not for automatic cars.
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
3. Yay again!
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Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.
> Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles Have you been to San Francisco or LA?
Utterly disturbing announcements and rollouts like this aren't prominently linked with comprehensive testing videos.
"We're a tech company, just trust us"
The only thing I like about this is the potential to make Tesla look bad.
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Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
It still snows in Vegas from time to time. Also, sandstorms are not great for visibility.
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I would bet against the imminent commodification of autonomous vehicle technology. Way too early. No consensus on the technology approach. Here's a speculative but plausible take: Zoox and Waymo are both products of cloud computing and data gathering giants. Maybe that's the important factor.
>No consensus on the technology approach Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Pony.ai, Baidu's Apollo, Argo.ai and Aurora all have/had very similar approaches to the technology. Tesla is the major outlier and they haven't accomplished much in spite of the hype.
It's a product area that is very far from being able to horizontalize. Waymo Driver is going to run on Waymo hardware for a long time to come. Toyota is supposedly trying to use Waymo technology for personal vehicles. I expect adapting it will take years. The software is nothing like an app running on an operating system. All of these systems probably require years of effort to move them to a different hardware platform.
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I wonder if there are barf bags for the backwards-facing passengers.
I routinely had 8+h drives in the rear-facing seat of my family's circa 1970 Plymouth Satellite station wagon growing up. Completely unsafe, and very boring, but I don't recall barfing. My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
I am curious: Unsafe because a " 1970 Plymouth Satellite" or because "rear-facing seat"?
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I disagree wholeheartedly. I think the most useful thing about robotaxis is that you can count on them to pay attention and react within a given timeframe and that speed limits will either be expanded greatly, eliminated or calculated as a function of the capabilities of the individual hardware in question rather than our best guess as to how an average person would probably react. I'm looking forward to driverless c…
Speed doesn't matter at all in city driving on regular roads. Going from 35mph to 25mph doesn't materially affect the trip time. Think about SF, its size is (famously) around 7 by 7 miles. So it'd take 12 minutes to cross (as the bird flies) from one side to another at 35 mph and 17 minutes at 25mph. Which is completely unrealistic, because real travel times are dominated by traffic lights and congestion. This calcul…
...dramatically reduces likelihood and consequences of a crash