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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
241–250 of 769 posts
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#242"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…
In fairness, Humans do not drive well in inclement weather.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#243More power to anybody who's willing to put their children in a car and not pay attention to the road or have control the outcomes of relentless traffic threats all around them.
In my view, all of this technology is much better suited to aid the human driver as a safety enhancement system rather than a full replacement for vehicle navigation.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#244"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…
Everyone working on autonomous vehicles is facing a similar issue, and it's also one that human drivers are pretty bad at. Most people solve it by not going outside as frequently with snow on the roads.
Tesla's goal is high fidelity GPS mapping of roads and their landmarks, so that the car can navigate down a lane in the absence of normal visual signals (i.e. clear road markings). It will be interesting to see how everyone else deals with weather conditions, but it's also not a problem that needs to be solved instantly.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today. It should be obvious that Tesla is going to win this race. Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November. And they build real, production cars. "Real artists ship", as Steve Jobs said. If you a manufacturing ace, would you join the company with a long list of failed projects and no actual production cars, or would you join the…
If Tesla executes perfectly they might stand a chance. They don't have much margin of error though. One lost lawsuit because of an accident caused by a bug in their software, and they are out of business...
I find that notion very frustrating. 30,000 people die on the road in the US every year and no one seems to bat an eye, a self driving vehicle has one and it's the end of the world. The expectations seems rather unrealistic and the media seems to love creating a controversy.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really think it hasn't occurred to WayMo/Google that maybe they should test their cars in snow/rain/sleet/fog/confetti?
Well, they only tested in US cities, so it's unclear what has occurred to them. How will it work in small crowded streets in India, China, or just Italy?
I agree it is unlikely to work on non-US roads for a while but I can't really blame them for starting in the easiest conditions. It doesn't have to work everywhere at the outset to be useful.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#247I'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.
Why wouldn't Toyota just launch Toyotas On Demand? If the cost of the car and fuel are the only significant costs, Toyota could probably do it more cheaply than Uber.
Uber's network effect is its driver network. It will find it a lot harder to compete if you no longer need drivers, when it has to compete with real car companies that could be able to undercut them on cost.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#248So when does the Waymo app come out that I can use to get an autonomous car to drive me to the store?
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#249Earlier 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.
Well I certainly care if my commute gets longer regardless of how I'm commuting because there's a lot of things I can't do with my time while I'm commuting.
Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
#250I'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 But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. If you don't own a car, chances are you won't get one when you need it to get to work on time. Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will…
It's much easier to coordinate ride sharing when there's an interested third party in place. ad-hoc ride-sharing for a reduces cost could result in the average car traveling at much closer to full capacity much of the time. If you set it up ahead of time, it could even optimize a route that picks up and drops off along an optimal route.
Don't think of it as replacing what historically was walking outside and hailing a cab, think of it as setting up a carpool with office mates except you don't have to know them, and you don't have to work out all the details, it will be handled for you.