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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

241–250 of 691 posts

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect when it's being thrashed.

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

you automatically charge $500 to the passanger's credit card, and self-drive back to the depot to be cleaned

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#242

If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this. It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.

Google is struggling to get hardware integrated with their self driving solution. Retrofitting cars with self-driving sensors is not easy, and Google does not have the scale yet to convince OEM partners to retool assembly lines for the Waymo fleet.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#243
post #19

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering m…

> I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency.

Surely Alphabet has noticed that their competitors are nipping at Waymo's heels. If they don't pick up the pace, all sorts of business books will be written about how Waymo squandered a decade-long lead in the industry.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect when it's being thrashed.

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

> Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

System locks all doors and calls police?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#245

If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this. It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.

>> who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Fools and their money. Like most every expensive car, Teslas are luxury vehicles and fashion statements. People buy them because they are cool. That product was delivered. As for future features, nobody should believe Telsa's advertising any more than we do Microsoft's advertising about how the next version of Windows will solve all our computing problems. The hamburger nev…

I believe the person you're responding to was referring to specifically to the add-on pre-order for full self driving, not the entire car.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#246

Why does Waymo use a niche British luxury car for their platform? Must be very expensive and what are the benefits?

Electric and manufactured by the same company that does upfitting for Waymo vehicles (and also a Waymo investor) – Magna International.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#247

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…

This is legally required today. It's not necessarily a reflection of Waymo. Whether their system was perfect or not, it's legally required they do this till the government changes their minds.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

Or an ambulance going on the opposite direction (because that’s the only available choice) on a boulevard in a busy capital city like Bucharest. Saw that a couple of hours ago, the ambulance met a taxi which was going the right way but of course that the taxi had to stop and find a way for the ambulance to pass (by partly going on the sidewalk). I said to myself that unless we get to AGI there’s no way for an “autono…

You don't even need to go that far, the other day I saw an ambulance going down on Burrard Street in Vancouver, BC without lights or sirens then I guess a call came in , it put on both and turned around. It's a six lane street where normal cars aren't allowed to just turn around. It was handled real well by everyone involved, mind you, it wasn't unsafe but I doubt a computer could've handled it as well as the drivers did.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between SAE level 4 and 5 is explicitly whether the autonomy is geographically limited or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#SAE_Classific...

Am I the only one seeing the change between l4 and l5 abysmal? Also L5 description, at least in the Wikipedia article, is much more vague than the rest

In terms of convenience, it can be irrelevant.

However, in terms of technology, level 5 is a big step up.

Consider for instance that a level 4 system can assume that the ground is purely flat (an assumption that Tesla’s FSD vector space makes), while a level 5 system needs 3D information to navigate some vertically-diverse terrain.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…

In Phoenix, people are being driven without a safety driver. They are doing these in between steps.
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