How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business • Hacker News Board

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#211

Post by tialaramex » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:03 PM UTC

fire_lake wrote: post #186

greiskul wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can literally just go to a car rental service right now and do that as well. Or use a car service app. Or rob someone elses car. Most people in society don't really have a desire to run amok.

I think OP means remotely control the car.

The problem is that you can't "remotely control the car". If you have the same level of access as Waymo's actual humans you can suggest to a Waymo driver (ie the machine) hey, the way to resolve this situation you are in might be to inch forward into this position - and maybe in some cases you can trick it into causing harm this way. However I'd guess in the vast majority of cases all you do is trap it so that it gets into a situation where it can't see any action it's allowed to take which gets closer to its goals - so it gives up and just sits there.

The most crucial insight for Self Driving Cars is that this is not the trolley problem. "I give up, stop where I am" is a valid answer.

We actually have built automation where "just give up" isn't a valid answer. CAT IIIc autoland (on a jet liner) has "Fail Active" scenarios where the machine concludes just before touch down that it no longer has confidence in its position due to one or more sudden sensor failures but the human pilots can't possibly intercede quickly enough to be safe and under IIIc conditiosn they can't see anything anyway, so, although the aeroplane will tell the human pilots that a failure occurred, it will nevertheless attempt to continue the now unsafe landing in this edge case. Most likely despite the reduced sensor validity, this is successful and everybody lives, and if not it's not as though the humans could have reacted in time anyway. But self driving isn't like that, the plane is flying, if it were to just stop flying everybody dies. In contrast a car can just stop and it's merely annoying.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#212

Post by asoneth » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:04 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #207

nl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely they have cameras? I’d trust that a lot more than a taxi driver keeping their cab clean.

When has that stopped anyone?

It may not stop someone the first time, but it's not hard to block the reserving account and prevent a second time from occurring. For most people the threat of being placed on the "no-fly" list is sufficient to ensure prosocial behavior.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#213

Post by Lewton » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:07 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #210

Certhas wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with kids... What if there is? The presence of dried Semen on a seat on which my kids sit will have zero negative impact on them. At all. Is it Yuck? Yes of course. But it also seems extremely unlikely. And it's a lot less Yuck than thinking about what's in the sand in public playgrounds that all kids visit constantly. And while I have a reasonable chance of preventing them from licking the seats, I have n…

> This is just a bizarre irrational worry... Do you and your kids take public transport regularly? In a failing city/society, that is. Because if the answer is "yes, I do take public transport in a city that struggles to pay its bills and I still don't care that the chairs have weird organic substances on them" then fair-play to you, but for me personally at some point I had to purchase a personal car (when I was alr…

> And these robo-taxis will be worse than public transport

If you soil a waymo taxi, they can ban you from ever booking another one, the same cannot be said for public transport

While I consider this somewhat dystopian, I do think it's pretty clear that they will be much cleaner than public transport for that reason

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#214

Post by endtime » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:14 PM UTC

maxdo wrote: post #209

zellyn wrote: post #107

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into auton…

I don't know why people are so triggered by bottom up approach vs top down by Waymo vs Tesla. Tesla already silently abandoned the "just over the AIR one day" approach with a dedicated car announcement. However the camera+ultra-sonic radars but no lidar is not only Tesla vision, but other companies too. We don't know what it costs Waymo to operate their car. The fact that they charge money doesn't make them a real bu…

I think it's because Tesla's approach seems unsafe and/or misleading (to the people reacting negatively to it).

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#215

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:15 PM UTC

maxdo wrote: post #209

zellyn wrote: post #107

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into auton…

I don't know why people are so triggered by bottom up approach vs top down by Waymo vs Tesla. Tesla already silently abandoned the "just over the AIR one day" approach with a dedicated car announcement. However the camera+ultra-sonic radars but no lidar is not only Tesla vision, but other companies too. We don't know what it costs Waymo to operate their car. The fact that they charge money doesn't make them a real bu…

[deleted]

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#216

Post by rcpt » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:16 PM UTC

zellyn wrote: post #107

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into auton…

> I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…

I have a comma.ai in our minivan and it works great. Much better than Honda's built in lane following tech

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#217

Post by theyinwhy » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:17 PM UTC

influx_redux wrote: post #103

I can!t overstate how depressing it is we managed to figure out private self driving car fleets before we figured out modern public transit funding.

Has been figured out a long time ago, see other countries. It doesn't even need to be state owned, see Japan.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#218

Post by a_c_s » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:20 PM UTC

maxdo wrote: post #209

zellyn wrote: post #107

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into auton…

I don't know why people are so triggered by bottom up approach vs top down by Waymo vs Tesla. Tesla already silently abandoned the "just over the AIR one day" approach with a dedicated car announcement. However the camera+ultra-sonic radars but no lidar is not only Tesla vision, but other companies too. We don't know what it costs Waymo to operate their car. The fact that they charge money doesn't make them a real bu…

Tesla is still years behind Waymo: "FSD 12.3 seems superior to Waymo’s technology circa 2018, it’s not as good as Waymo’s technology at the end of 2020"

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#219

Post by asoneth » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:25 PM UTC

codexb wrote: post #55

jseliger wrote: post #3

I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall... Waymos avoid many…

Maybe if you're under 25 and have always lived in a dense city this seems like a valid take. Taxis aren't new, they have always existed. Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans). No one with kids wants to ride in taxis with kids all the time. Ditto for anyone with hobbies that re…

My family has a couple cars but we still ride with our kids in taxis all the time, for example to the airport or into/out of the city. Even hauling bikes isn't insurmountable -- we've taken weeklong bike camping trips with friends and because biking in a big circle isn't as much fun we hire a bigger vehicle that can haul a dozen bikes to the starting point.

> Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans).

Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around.

If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1.

I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#220

Post by Mashimo » Thu, May 30, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

nevertoolate wrote: post #66

They have a fairly big weakness. If someone takes over their control these taxis are basically weapons. You have to admit that the question is not if this is possible but how will it pan out.

In theory you could also hack the many self driving trains that exists around the globe.