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

Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 425 posts

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#271

Post by ghaff »

standardUser wrote: post #103
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.

Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.

It's been a while since I looked it up but I understand the human is about 50% of taxi operating costs. That's not trivial of course but it's also not dwarfing vehicle costs.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#272

Post by ghaff »

bluGill wrote: post #152
anonymous908213 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant pl…

People who drive their own cars are larger than all. You can find single markets where those people are more than all combined world wide.

I think there is probably a healthy subset of people on here who take Uber etc. all the time. I, on the other hand, maybe take it a half-dozen times a year (plus some private cars to the airport).

I'd love a really good driver assistive system for my car (ala FSD today) but I likely wouldn't actually get driven around a lot more unless the economics were more compelling than seem likely anytime soon.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#273

Post by nilamo »

lysace wrote: post #241
rbbydotdev wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.

Because trains are famously awesome for the last mile(s)?

It's a tongue-in-cheek description of how buses and trams work. ie: It's not a new idea, we just tacked "driverless" onto it.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#274

Post by throw310822 »

My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems.

This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#275

Post by senordevnyc »

small_model wrote: post #237
dinobones wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly. There is no unsupervised robotaxi service in Austin and there won't be, for years, if ever. Just like the way "FSD" is not fully self driving and likely never will be.

lol its running now and growing every day, the thing about Tesla's solution is it works globally and the costs are much much less than Waymo will ever be able to achieve (Given there reliance on third parties for most of the hardware) Waymo and uber will be gone in a year.

Been hearing this for years now. But sure, any day now…

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#276

Post by senordevnyc »

small_model wrote: post #238
WarmWash wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?). However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.

Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.

This is totally false. If there are any truly autonomous robotaxis in Austin (a bit if, since Tesla has repeatedly lied and faked things like this in the past), it’s only a handful and they’re limited to a tiny area. The “robotaxis” with a safety driver are the ones that have the bigger area, probably because Tesla sucks at actual self-driving. Still. After a decade of broken promises and shitty engineering practices.

Elon has been blatantly lying about FSD for years, and yet the fans still take whatever he says as gospel. And yet the skeptics are the ones with EDS? lol, ok.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#277

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

rcxdude wrote: post #142
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #132

This is a lie: >> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient…

A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) witho…

This is just quibbling about semantics, and with arbitrary definitions of "safety driver" on top. Waymo's remote operators are clearly safety drivers: they are there to improve the safety of their safe-driving cars. Otherwise, why are they needed?

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#278

Post by kldg »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #194
coffeemug wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating, I didn't know that! What are some example cities/towns where this is common?

Grew up in the midwest and still visit... never seen it. Doesn't even pass the sniff test vs the weather.

yeah, I can say that except for elder areas (not necessarily dedicated facilities, but there are things like "RV parks" which cater mostly to older folks but also families; they usually have 10mph speed limits), I've never seen someone driving a golf cart around town while I've lived in MI, OH, or PA.

I do see people driving horse-drawn carriages, ATVs (probably illegally), snowmobiles (legally in some parts of MI during Winter or condition-dependent), and riding mowers (probably illegally) in and around towns, though. Very rarely, I see someone driving an e-bike; this rareness is mostly because they aren't allowed on the sidewalks here and there's no bike lane, so you need to drive and signal like a car, which is pretty awkward given how many e-bikes don't even come with real brake lights (though many falsely advertise red rear running lights as a brake light, which'd be illegal to drive unless you hand-signal whenever you brake).

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#279

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

gruez wrote: post #147
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself: Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it rece…

>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality. 1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car 2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs som…

>> What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever?

Yeah, good point. If Waymo were honest they'd say their system is "autonomous". Fully autonomous implies 100% autonomy. Otherwise, how is it "fully"?

But, hey, don't ask me. Write a paper with robot that is 99% autonomous but a human has to take control every once in a while and see how easy you can get that past any reviewer in robotics or AI.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#280

Post by senordevnyc »

small_model wrote: post #240
_diyar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value). But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possib…

Lowest cost per mile will win and Tesla's cyber cab doesn't need expensive suite of sensors. They use lidar in their validation/calibration test cars which is the correct use of lidar. People are already driving USA coast to coast without an SINGLE intervention. It's already over, Tesla has won, Waymo cant compete on cost.

Been hearing this bullshit for a decade. Any day now…

Meanwhile Waymo is doing half a million rides a week, and Tesla is doing what, a few dozen? Maybe? Maybe zero? Who knows, because they lie and obfuscate about everything. Meanwhile I can go take a Waymo right now in cities all over America.

Post reply on HN