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Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#191

Post by andromeduck »

kpw94 wrote: post #157
austinkhale wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers - The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell - You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely. - They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive - You get to play your own mus…

> The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell If they scale, that will become a problem: - people puking in car - people having sex in car - people eating greasy fries in car These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely), but the big difference here is that users won't be anonymous. The next waymo rider (or waymo staff if the car…

Arizona is a shall-issue State.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#192

Post by HALtheWise »

wolfram74 wrote: post #173
abecedarius wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is a 20th-century mass transit system actually preferable to robocars once the technology is mature? My guess is it's the cities like Austin, planning new transit systems without designing for synergies with robocars, who are failing at urban planning.

From an energetics perspective it's incredibly hard to beat walking, biking or rails. If your occupancy on the car is reliably greater than 1, that is an improvement over single occupancy cars, but those boxes are just huge compared to a bicycle.

I spouted this line for a long time, but was recently corrected by commenters pointing out that 2-3 occupancy electric cars actually beat the vast majority of subways and trains in practice, because you don't need to accelerate and decelerate every passenger at every possible stop. Cars are designed to be remarkably aerodynamically efficient, especially compared to motorcycles or bicycles, and an electric battery+motor is much more efficient at producing power than your muscles.

Delivering on this requires some sort of "Uber Pool" like algorithm to put a few people together in a vehicle, but doesn't require large busses.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#193

Post by mdorazio »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #158
boulos wrote: post #40

For folks that are interested, the discussion at /r/selfdrivingcars [1] picked out some of the salient numbers. Brad Templeton also did his own write up at [2]. I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples p…

How well does this scale? At some point do you just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country, or are you reliant on ongoing large amounts of support for the cars which means that the costs for expansion make it currently non viable?

Not OP, but I work in the industry. It's not as simple as opening the tap for three primary reasons: 1) localization, 2) operations, 3) cost.

Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-driving companies slowly expanding availability areas after their test cars have been running around for many thousands of miles in the area.

Operations is all the stuff that's not the car driving itself around. The cars need a home base where they can park when not in use, recharge, get cleaned, have sensors checked and calibrated, and get maintenance when needed (scales linearly with number of vehicles). The cars are also not 100% flawlessly handling every situation and rider issue - there still needs to be human support in the loop, both in terms of a dedicated remote support team (scales linearly with number of rides) and in terms of local rescue people to get cars when they're really stuck (scales linearly with number of vehicles).

Cost is the cost of vehicles, tech (ADKs), and operations. Waymo and Cruise are currently operating at absolutely massive loss and will continue to do so for years. It's generally not a great idea to open the faucet on a money-losing business until you at least have a solid way to get to profitability. Yes, I know, Uber and other giant startups basically never made money, etc. etc. but the market has changed and owners are looking to decrease costs of tech and operations before really scaling up. It's going to take a couple years still.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#194

Post by bobthepanda »

HALtheWise wrote: post #192
wolfram74 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an energetics perspective it's incredibly hard to beat walking, biking or rails. If your occupancy on the car is reliably greater than 1, that is an improvement over single occupancy cars, but those boxes are just huge compared to a bicycle.

I spouted this line for a long time, but was recently corrected by commenters pointing out that 2-3 occupancy electric cars actually beat the vast majority of subways and trains in practice, because you don't need to accelerate and decelerate every passenger at every possible stop. Cars are designed to be remarkably aerodynamically efficient, especially compared to motorcycles or bicycles, and an electric battery+mot…

In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk.

Average occupancy of a car is 1.5 in the US, and that number shrinks as household size declines.

(It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason that automated technologies wouldn’t also spread to buses and trains. In fact, you can already automate trains. The big win there, is that buses represent massive fleet commonality.)

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#195

Post by mkaic »

RobinL wrote: post #125

With all the hype about AI this year, does anyone know whether it's translating in any meaningful sense into self driving? Can they use transformers? If so, is there a step change in performance? Has this already happened?

Already happened and still actively happening! In Tesla's latest annual AI day presentation they gave some insights into their training procedures and architecture choices. Lots of transformers, lots of bleeding-edge stuff.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#196

Post by boulos »

mdorazio wrote: post #193
AndrewDucker wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well does this scale? At some point do you just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country, or are you reliant on ongoing large amounts of support for the cars which means that the costs for expansion make it currently non viable?

Not OP, but I work in the industry. It's not as simple as opening the tap for three primary reasons: 1) localization, 2) operations, 3) cost. Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-dri…

Good summary! (I was away for a bit)

I would only caution that people shouldn't overindex on mapping costs. When you're talking about entering a major metro area, you need lots of vehicles and depots and so on anyway just to provide the eventual service. So the upfront initial map build out is certainly a component of starting in a new geography, but I think people assume it is somehow dominant. It's not.

The current approach then for ride hailing, which requires depots, means that:

> just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country

is not happening anytime soon.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#197

Post by fallingknife »

jeffbee wrote: post #48

The Waymo approach has proven itself. Targeted testing, running the driver in hard mode as much as possible, is better than the Tesla approach. Tesla’s plan was essentially “machine learning underpants gnomes”. Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ??? -> profit. Didn’t work and now Tesla is recognized as being dead last in the game, behind dozens of no-name Chinese players. Now what I wonde…

Last based on what metrics? I've never seen anything better than the Tesla FSD except for the LIDAR robo taxis, but they are solving a very different problem with different constraints. Most recent cost estimate I can find shows a cost per vehicle of $130-150K for Waymo vs the Tesla system that needs to go in a vehicle costing $40-50K which makes using a Waymo style sensor suite impossible. Would be interesting to see how the Tesla software would perform with the sensor input of something like the superior Waymo suite, but we won't ever find out unless costs come down by a massive amount.

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#199

Post by boulos »

toss1 wrote: post #95
agnosticmantis wrote: post #74

Really love what waymo have been achieving with a relatively small team, but more importantly, they’ve had their heads down working and solving hard problems instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises (e.g. delivering robotaxies that make you $30k/yr by next year!), getting into ideological (sensor) wars, etc. (How many people know the name of their CEO? An…

Yup, I very much liked the broader approach of solving the general problem, but this actually seems to be doing better. The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems. Meanwhile, the approach of map-ever…

> The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?

That's certainly the intent with Waymo Via for trucking, and we drive multiple routes today including say Dallas Houston for beer [1]. The video at [2] includes some footage of the trucks on a highway.

[1] https://www.ttnews.com/articles/waymo-ch-robinson-driverless...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lon1vRv2wQ8

Re: Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF

#200

Post by boulos »

drusepth wrote: post #72
icey wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here (downtown Phoenix area) -- the driverless Waymos have been awesome. Occasionally they get confused but it seems pretty rare. They're better than a lot of the other drivers on the road out here. I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impo…

Does the fourth passenger sit in the "driver's" seat, or is it a three-packed-in-the-back kind of situation? Never seen a self-driving-car in person, but I assume it's the standard 4-seater sedan layout, right?

Yep, three in the back and one up front, driver seat empty. (The door won't open for you anyway)
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