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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#221

Post by rajeshp1986 »

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…

But that doesn;t mean companies should be afraid to try new things. History is evident that more companies died resisting the change than anything else. Car ownership going down should not mean companies like Uber should not venture into self-driving cars although by burning huge VC money. Even the VC's who funded would want Uber to the fore runner in the self-driving cars. The other factors why companies are still investing although they might loose money are:

1) It will take atleast 5-7 years for self-driving cars to become ubiquitous. Till then there is good uprising market for every player to make money. secondly, if you have a product ready, it might open up new markets in future which currently no one realizes.

2) Car ownership will still be there. People who can afford it will still prefer private self-driving car than waiting for Uber/Lyft. I would say self-driving private car will be seen as a new luxury status.

3) car manufacturing will definitely go down with less demand but car manufactures will venture into different pricing model with ride companies. Right now, a car is a one time sell for a manufacturer. It might be subscription which ride company uses.

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

#222

Post by antisthenes »

dictum wrote: post #37

This is such a minor nitpick, but I'm bothered by it because I see so much performance-shaming coming from some Googlers: The site loads large pictures for all viewport widths (ideally they'd load downscaled images for smaller viewports — it's wasteful to load a large image for small devices) and the image files are PNGs when they should be jpeg or webp (example: http://waymo.com/static/images/journey/streets.png )

How about It loads a fucking video ?

That's pretty much all you need to know about performance.

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

#223

Post by coroutines »

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…

All I see when I look at a car is a very costly set of risks. I'd rather pay for someone else to manage those risks. Car subscriptions++

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

#224

Post by duaneb »

stormbrew wrote: post #59
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…

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.

They're already a force to be reckoned with. How do you compete against a company that might as well burn cash in the streets?

The rich are buying the future on the backs of the working class. When uber goes under, the jobs won't come back, but transit can't be that cheap. It's not like the cost of a ride was actually based on the cost of the car OR the labor.

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

#225

Post by homakov »

rajathagasthya wrote: post #185
Camillo wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I stopped using Uber because it completely stopped working once I set location access to "only while in use".

AFAIK, Uber doesn't even allow to set location access to "while in use". It's either "always" or "never".

I confirm, only those 2 options in iOS

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

#226

Post by ilaksh »

cr0sh wrote: post #174
cjcole wrote: post #68

"The average US city gets 26 inches of snow per year." http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/mountain_v... "Snowfall is 0 inches." http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/arizona/phoenix "Snowfall is 0 inches." http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/texas/austin "Snowfall is 1 inches." http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/washington/kirkland "Snowfall is 4 inches." I hope they are driving far enough from…

I have my doubts that any of the current systems out there - even Google's - work well in extreme inclement weather. I doubt many work well in even "normal" inclement weather (ie - light rain or snow). The biggest problem is sensors. I am not a self-driving car expert (software or hardware). Nor am I an expert in ML, computer vision, etc. But I do have minor experience in each of those. Currently, I am enrolled and t…

Google and Nvidia and maybe Tesla (probably just using Nvidia's system) as well as perhaps a few others _have_ solved those prpblems using things like deep learning, LIDAR and sensor fusion.

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

#227

Post by devy »

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…

Where is Apple's in that list? ;)

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

#228

Post by zellyn »

dictum wrote: post #37

This is such a minor nitpick, but I'm bothered by it because I see so much performance-shaming coming from some Googlers: The site loads large pictures for all viewport widths (ideally they'd load downscaled images for smaller viewports — it's wasteful to load a large image for small devices) and the image files are PNGs when they should be jpeg or webp (example: http://waymo.com/static/images/journey/streets.png )

Hmmm. I'm more usually aware of helpful, insightful, useful articles on how to improve performance, and a constant stream of optimizations to web technology to the same end.

Not that the site in question isn't bloated brochure-ware. Just that I wouldn't characterize Google that way.

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

#229

Post by randomdata »

scarmig wrote: post #86
zfedoran wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These cars will likely have many sensors of different types at overlapping locations, its not likely to keep going if all are completely unusable. But I wonder about the snow though. How does the car know where to go when there are no identifying lane features? Maybe its not as hard of a problem as I believe it to be?

I really don't get these questions. "How will the car drive in whiteout conditions where the road is frozen over and not at all visible?" Same way a (smart) human drives: it will pull over. For substantially less crazy conditions, you can infer where the lanes would be by (a) looking at the spots of the road you can see, (b) prior knowledge of the road from experience, and (c) looking at oncoming cars and the flow of…

> Same way a (smart) human drives: it will pull over.

You mean carefully get to the nearest settlement as soon as possible? Some of these storms can last for days at a time. Stopping to wait it out in the middle of nowhere, especially if you don't have a full tank of fuel to keep the car warm for extended periods, is a pretty scary situation.

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

#230

Post by Florin_Andrei »

virmundi wrote: post #178
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Retooling" sounds like such a great idea when you're a 20-something urban male single software engineer, you've got nothing to lose, and the world is yours to take. It also sounds like a great idea when you're independently wealthy and you don't have to work for a living, so you can afford to bloviate from your ivory tower. Most other demographics have very a different perspective on that concept, and for good reaso…

I'm with you entirely. I have no idea how to solve this problem. My cousin's husband is a truck driver. He makes a six figure income running between Indy and Chicago (bang, bang). He's going to retire before they can get rid of him, but this is a huge issue. I tried to explain this problem to my father, who's a CPA. I've pointed out that his firm can get by with a dramatically smaller office than it use to due to tec…

> I'm not a huge fan of UBI since I think that makes people slaves of their State.

When America will be able to shake off its own mythology about this notion of the "State" as an inherently bad actor - then, perhaps, America will be able to get out of the current rut it's stuck in.

Yes, the "State" can be bad (I should know, I grew up in an actual bad "State" in the Eastern Bloc before the revolutions). But at the other extreme, societies can sabotage themselves from within, trigger the social equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and collapse from endemic distrust in the system - which to me is pretty clearly the direction America is going now.

There surely is a better middle ground somewhere.

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