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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

#181

Post by testing22321 »

ilaksh wrote: post #162
testing22321 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

They cannot take over. They can give advice in unusual circumstances. I don't have to argue about Tesla or what other people are saying about Tesla.

These days they can’t take over, but they sure could years back.

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

#182

Post by UltraSane »

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…

Tesla Robotaxi is a Potemkin village con whose only purpose is to inflate Tesla stock. Musk is relying on this more and more, most recently with his claiming SpaceX will put data centers in space.

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

#183

Post by UltraSane »

testing22321 wrote: post #180
dinobones wrote: post #122

Earlier 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.

> 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?

Because camera only simply won't be reliable enough with current technology.

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

#184

Post by UltraSane »

KenSF wrote: post #73
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)

We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0] [0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

replacing a gas engine with an electric motor and installing a battery pack is not hard. The EV1 was a pretty bad car. The real secret sauce of modern electric cars is cheap Lithium Ion battery packs.

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

#185

Post by LoganDark »

Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS...

The image caption reads:

   Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions.
but the image itself for me is blank.

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

#186

Post by jsemrau »

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…

I was thinking in the same direction when I wrote my 5000 word analysis on the current state of VLAMs. https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/visual-language-action-model...

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

#187

Post by LoganDark »

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.

I use an electric scooter to get around areas where a car would be inappropriate or undesired. I keep it in the back of my car always (along with my helmet, gloves and goggles) so that I can pull it out when needed.

Pretty convenient when I unexpectedly find myself needing to use a parking garage and such. The scooter can take me out of the parking garage and into the building with no issue. And then I can keep it with me in the building until it's time to get back to the car.

It's also probably cheaper than a golf cart - mine was just about $3,600 brand new. Though used carts are probably cheaper still, and there are also much cheaper scooters.

I actually used to use only an electric scooter for transit, but then I got hit by a pickup truck who didn't check the bike lane before turning. So I did driver's ed, got my license and leased a BEV.

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

#188

Post by arjie »

LoganDark wrote: post #185

Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS... The image caption reads: Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions. but the image itself for me is blank.

It's a video, mate. Look here: https://videos.ctfassets.net/7ijaobx36mtm/5ZEkKDR8uqlAfiQW7f...

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

#189

Post by refulgentis »

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…

Cosign, there's a reason it took forever and a day for Waymo to actually scale. It's great stuff, changed the way I live, but they gotta wince at the economics.

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

#190

Post by digitalPhonix »

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…

$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)
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