Waymo: Google's self-driving car company • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#201

Post by jcranmer » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

yessql wrote: post #30

ucaetano wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"how they compare to Tesla" Given that Tesla doesn't even have emergency braking and auto-steering, I'd guess they compare quite favorably...

Tesla will have 100,000 prototypes being trained in shadow mode for a billion miles per year across the globe within a year. Tesla will compare quite favorably

And how many of those miles are in conditions like:

* that road with the one-foot deep pothole (it's more like a sinkhole at that point, though) in the middle of a lane

* the perpetual construction zone where there are five layers of lane markers, only one of which is the actual layer of lane markers

* the 10% grade two-lane winding road in the dark with 2 inches of snow on the road and more coming

* open highway with a constant 30mph crosswind

* dense fog with less than 100m visibility

* torrential downpour with so little visibility you can't even see the lane markings on the road right in front of you

Those are all conditions I've driven in, and I can think of several other horrible driving conditions that I haven't yet had the (mis)fortune to drive in. Just because you can drive well in good conditions doesn't mean you can drive well when things get tougher--as the driving records of many human beings can well attest.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#202

Post by melling » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

pg314 wrote: post #157

melling wrote: post #76

The hardest problem to solve will be the humans who bully the polite self-driving cars: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/17/humans-will...

It seems that could be easily solved with regulation. The self-driving cars could even automatically send a video of incidents to the police.

You want to regulate politeness?

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#203

Post by zubspace » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:38 PM UTC

arijun wrote: post #116

I still don't understand why every company doing self driving cars is focusing on consumer cars while no major player is doing interstate trucking. Interstate trucking could pretty much be done now, and has several advantages. Driving on interstate freeways is orders of magnitude easier than driving in a city with pedestrians, bikes, cars parked in the road, etc. And there is a great monetization scheme--no driver me…

It's obvious that truck driving will be the automated sooner or later. But it will be a tough fight. How will the industry react/adapt?

Take a look at the distribution of current jobs [1]. What perspective can you give people working as a truck driver right now?

I believe, america first has to find an answer to this question before there will be automated trucks.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#204

Post by aetherson » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

DamnYuppie wrote: post #155

celticninja wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User is ubiquitous only because of its ability to burn an astonishing amount of money. Their bet is that they am do this long enough to make themselves the market leader. I am not convinced that they can continue to lose money at the rate they currently are for the future potential as a monopoly provider. At some point investors are going to ask for a return or bail on the company.

I don't disagree with you but people said the same thing about amazon for over a decade....

Amazon's biggest quarterly loss ever was about $437 million. That's roughly Uber's average quarterly loss, and Amazon did it on quarterly revenues of $20B, while Uber's revenues are optimistically $5B.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#205

Post by j2bax » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #193

joeguilmette wrote: post #49

I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…

> Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I really dont agree with this. Cars a so cheap now and I'd much rather use my own than some dirty shared car. Already renting a car is annoying as you never know if you'll get charged for some damage that you didn't cause, I can't imagine having th…

Presumably, in a shared autonomous vehicle, the only thing you'd be responsible would be the interior. I would think this would be fairly easy to monitor on a user to user basis.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#206

Post by bhups » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

jamesfe wrote: post #122

stormbrew wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is literally all over the world, though. Google can barely launch a keyboard app outside the US. Or a payment system. Lyft is still constrained entirely to the US and a handful of large Asian cities. I think people severely underestimate Uber's worldwide push in preparing themselves to be a force to be reckoned with when the autonomous vehicle takes off.

Uber is everywhere except China - http://fortune.com/2016/08/07/uber-china-didi-chuxing/

Facebook and Google are also everywhere except China.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#207

Post by bduerst » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #189

rorykoehler wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be worth anything because autonomous ride-sharing will be a pricing game. Anyone who undercuts Uber, and there will be plenty of willing and able companies, will beat them.

Here's a crazy business idea: You know how a person nowadays can register for uber and drive people around? In the future, maybe people will register their CAR (which can drive itself). So they sit at home, getting work done, while their car is off autonomously driving itself and picking people up. When you want it to come home, just call it home.

That just proves pricing is even more relevant.

Anyone could spin up an app that let's people lease out their self-driving cars. The existing ride-sharing consumers are not loyal to the apps.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#208

Post by kmkemp » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:39 PM UTC

sbov wrote: post #169

tedajax wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fully autonomous fleets of cars will push societal changes we can't yet predict. Right now everyone shows up to work at about the same time. Is that a fixed position society will always uphold? I don't know, there's a lot of things I don't know. The only thing I can predict is that in the same way the personal automobile upended the social structures of the day, autonomous vehicles will likely do something similar.

Always? No. Will autonomous cars change it? Doubtful. In fact, it could make it worse, because who cares if your commute is 3 hours instead of 2 as long as you can watch American Idol while you're doing it.

I'd love to see what the average household pays for vehicles. If you don't think that money is high on the motivational list for people, you need only look at what happened the last time gas prices were $1/gallon higher than today. In any case, I doubt car ownership will "fall off a cliff". It will be a gradual change. Many people won't trust the software, there will be a few incidents that get tons of media coverage to scare people off (no doubt funded by entrenched interests). Some people won't trust that the amount of time it takes to get a ride will be low enough, especially in more rural areas. Many people like the culture of car ownership. But at the end of the day, if it saves hundreds of dollars per month and is roughly as safe and convenient as owning a car, the value proposition will be too strong to ignore. But that's a change that will take (IMO) 15-25 years to see widespread adoption.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#209

Post by bduerst » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

bhups wrote: post #206

jamesfe wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber is everywhere except China - http://fortune.com/2016/08/07/uber-china-didi-chuxing/

Facebook and Google are also everywhere except China.

I'm not aware Facebook and Google are burning $1B to be in China though.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#210

Post by yessql » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 7:41 PM UTC

ucaetano wrote: post #161

yessql wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a super conservative prediction which has zero growth from current sales numbers in it. Tesla grows has historically grown at about 50% per year.

Not talking about the number of cars sold, talking about that translating into self-driving capabilities. And in that sense, it is a very aggressive prediction, given that Google has had fully-autonomous, no-backup-driver, public-road-testing for over a year. So you can say that Tesla is at least 1-years behind. More like 4-5.

Tesla is definitely behind Google now, but I'm saying their trajectory is orders of magnitude better, because they are collecting real world training data much faster. Humans show the minimal set of sensors needed for driving, and Tesla have a superset of that being delivered to customers today, which is being used to train their model. They get a lifetime of real world driving experience on those sensors every day.