Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 415 posts

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

#241

Post by saalweachter »

galdosdi wrote: post #208
atlasunshrugged wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or get a text and get distracted at just the wrong time

These days to qualify as excellent you need good phone discipline. Eg, turn off the phone or turn off notifications, even vibrations. Or at least make a strict rule to ignore it while moving and only look while fully stopped, eg at a stoplight although that's just decent driver grade not excellent driver, because of the temptation the notification will present each time. A great driver also reviews the route for a co…

I had to give up on the smart watch because being able to turn your wrist and read a text is a really bad feature when driving, and I didn't trust myself with it.

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

#242

Post by webel0 »

bitsage wrote: post #227

How scalable is this technology? From my experience at an AV company, every deployment site had to be mapped, and after deployment, sites still needed remote teleoperators to occasionally adjust waypoints and resolve stops.

Waymo's relatively rapid geonet expansion suggests that they have either improved their mapping productivity substantially or gone fully map-less.

I can't speak to their RVA operations.

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

#243

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nradov wrote: post #194
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in China where taxi usage was much more ubiquitous, and…you really live to live in a world where you aren’t expected to live in a car, be it with public transit (Europe, Japan) or public transit + lots of taxis (China) or tuktuks or whatever. But yes, your hobbies tend to be different and adapted, bikes, for example, get you places, and are not taken places, or you get them on the train which actually…

Having to depend on crappy rented sports equipment sounds miserable. Maybe people in the rest of the world will tolerate that but I want no part of it. I'll continue buying my own personal large vehicles so that I can fill them with as much stuff as I want. When I'm out doing something, the car also serves as a reasonably secure private locker where I can store things without carrying them around.

You are an American and have that privilege. If we granted that privilege to everyone else, the world probably couldn’t handle it, self driving taxis or not.

What’s more I don’t think we will have that privilege for long, personal transportation is a luxury in most of the world, it is becoming a luxury here also. We will adapt though like everyone else has.

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

#244

Post by martythemaniak »

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 think a lot of people have uncritically been repeating Waymo's marketing talking points for so long they've started mistaking it for "consensus" or even worse "truth". Waymo's tech is impressive and it works, but that doesn't mean it is the only way to make it work. The Tesla/Waymo approaches are far far more alike than they are different, so the whole debate is about very little.

The question of Camera vs LIDAR+Camera is a narrow technical question about how to construct a 3D scene. That's it. It says nothing about making sense of this 3D world for which you you have a 3D point cloud and it says nothing about how to actually navigate that world. Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says. It doesn't tell you how to drive, how fast you should go, how much space to give the guy with the sign etc. Everything AV-related which is not constructing a 3D scene is actually the same across all AV stacks, which includes the hardest part - the actual driving itself.

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

#245

Post by tzs »

Staple_Diet wrote: post #153
arconis987 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip. Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few time…

>Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do. Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which rout…

> We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven [...]

I expect that robot taxis will be both consumers and producers of that actual data. They will likely report the traffic conditions they experience back to the company that runs the robot taxi service, and that will become input to the rest of the fleet.

If the time it takes for observations from a given robot taxi to be incorporated into the data received by other robot taxis is short enough it might be possible to get interesting feedback loops. It may even be possible to get oscillations.

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

#246

Post by tialaramex »

Mashimo wrote: post #220
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.

Two things about the self-driving trains make that even less appealing than a Waymo

1. They're mostly even more local. The Waymo Driver is in your car, the "driver" for say a DLR train is inside the train too. Unlike Waymo they aren't running multiple live feeds to remote oversight, even the emergency human intervention is literally on board with you. There's somebody wearing a uniform telling those tourists that no, Abbey Road is an outer suburb with a sewage pumping station, they're on the wrong train for the famous Beatles photograph. The person in the uniform is trained to drive the train if there's some reason the automation can't do it, nobody can do that from a control room miles away. In the even higher (and rare) GoA systems where nobody aboard can drive the train even if they need to, remote oversight still may need to dispatch a specialist to rescue a failed train.

2. They're mostly "grade separated" that is, they're either underground or suspended in the air, or maybe in fenced off ground-level areas, so you can't use a "hacked" train to hurt anybody except its passengers or maybe, in some cases, passengers on a nearby train.

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

#247

Post by seanmcdirmid »

nradov wrote: post #229
dageshi wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, I don't imagine they care much about changing everyones opinions. What will happen is your kids and grand kids will reach an age where they would need to get a driving license but won't see the point because they've already been using robo-taxi's for 5 or so years already. Hell there's people who just use uber exclusively now.

Unlikely. One kid already has a drivers license and uses it frequently. I'll make sure the other kid gets one as soon as she's eligible. Not every young person spends all day hiding in their room, doom scrolling on social media. Some of them have to get to sports practice with bulky equipment in places that public transit and robo-taxis don't go.

You just live in a world where that is possible and common. I just mentioned that much of the rest of the world isn’t like that all. Japan, for example, has trains/trams straight to campgrounds, or at least buses. They still manage with sports somehow, but you can imagine that the dynamics are very different than from what you are used to.

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

#248

Post by charlie0 »

bigfudge wrote: post #93
charlie0 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will boil down to availability and price. Taxis are generally just too expensive to use often and also waits are too long. Of course, I'm comparing cost of frequent taxis vs buying a used car.

The other problem is the economics flips over once you also have to own a car. The marginal cost of each trip goes down … but if waymo is good enough for 95% of the time the it might not be necessary any more.

I personally don't think the price will ever drop low enough for it to make sense to most people to drop cars entirely. The US is notorious for being unwalkable, save for a few select areas.

Working remotely helps a lot since there's no need to drive every day, but it's only a fraction of overall people who have this privilege.

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing Waymo at my town. It would make a good DD and backup in case my car needs repairs, etc.

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

#249

Post by ok_dad »

bagels wrote: post #135
ok_dad wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> like a driver looking at you in the face and waving your reading comprehension sucks

Maybe sometimes, but not this time. "With a human I can look at their face to see that they see me."

Did you read the whole thing buddy? Guess not! I guess reading isn’t your thing.

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

#250

Post by grecy »

a_c_s wrote: post #218
maxdo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> at the end of 2020

It seems silly to analyze a 4 year old version of something that is changing extremely rapidly.

Both Waymo and FSD have come a very long way since 2020.

Post reply on HN