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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#281

Post by mhermher »

NolF wrote: post #245
pg314 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, in the former case, that is the fault of the driver (or another driver). In the latter case, it would be the fault of the manufacturer. It's not even remotely the same thing. Remember those out-of-control Priuses, where the manufacturers were at fault. Toyota got plenty of backlash for it.

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

#282

Post by dragonwriter »

rubicon33 wrote: post #189
rorykoehler wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't be worth anything because autonomous ride-sharing will be a pricing game. Anyone who undercuts Uber, and there will be plenty of willing and able companies, will beat them.

Here's a crazy business idea: You know how a person nowadays can register for uber and drive people around? In the future, maybe people will register their CAR (which can drive itself). So they sit at home, getting work done, while their car is off autonomously driving itself and picking people up. When you want it to come home, just call it home.

> In the future, maybe people will register their CAR (which can drive itself).

Until an optimized business supporting lots of cars supporting fewer people undercuts the individual owner on price per ride, sure. Uber with individual driver/owners makes some sense, because you need the individual driver no matter what the ownership structure is. But with autonomous cars, fleet ownership is going to win over individual.

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

#283

Post by Kalium »

slapshot wrote: post #254
Kalium wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your average car occupancy count goes from one-point-something to two, it would be a huge change in number of cars required and traffic congestion.

It could. It could also go from one-point-something to zero-point-something. Until now, the floor for car occupancy was 1. It's now zero. There is the possibility of empty trips (repositioning for next shuttle run, driving to distant parking lot, etc) adding rather than subtracting traffic.

I agree that a certain amount of repositioning trips is likely, but I also expect that they will be calculated for when they are fastest and cheapest. Even in an all-electric-car-all-the-time scenario, fuel isn't free and sitting with the engine off is easier on the car than idling on a highway.

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

#284

Post by uw_rob »

ksrm wrote: post #93
boxcardavin wrote: post #32

Google's commitment to SDCs has always seemed half hearted so I wonder if this indicates that they are getting more serious about it. Moonshots at X have been getting the axe, the SDC stuff seems to be the only obviously viable one right now. To the surprise of many folks (myself included) it has turned out that SDC tech is probably for existing manufacturers to develop versus software guys learning how to build cars…

I haven't been in either. What differences do you mean?

I think mostly it is the fit and finish. I've been in a 2016 BMW 750i and a 2013 Model S, for about a total of maybe 30 minutes in the BMW and 10 in the Tesla.

The interior of the 7 series seemed special to me. All of the buttons felt great, seats looked beautiful and were super comfortable to sit in. The control panel had many small OLED displays and they looked great. And small details like when I went to adjust the seat, by placing my fingers on the buttons, information about my seat configuration popped up on the center console, so I could see what I was changing. Also the rear passenger seats and rear windshield had power sunscreens.

Here is a picture of the iterior of the BMW: http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2015/11/2016-BMW-75...

Here is a video of the 7 series interior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHDMAibH1G4

In comparison, the Tesla's interior felt mostly large and empty.

Here is a picutre of the interior of a 2016 Model X: http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2016/03/2016-Tesla-...

Don't get me wrong, Tesla makes some super amazing cars. But the high price tag isn't for the interior.

(Disclaimer: I own a lowly 3 series so I may be slightly biased to BMW)

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

#285

Post by bb611 »

walrus1066 wrote: post #261
bb611 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ev…

The weather problem needs to be solved if you want fully autonomous vehicles with no human on standby, otherwise when it snows you'd have a bunch of autonomous vehicles stood still, blocking the road not knowing what to do.

There are tens of millions of US customers who live in areas that never receive snow and rarely receive rain. It's clear there are a few different technical solutions, and probably the engineers working on these problems will think of a few more in the next decade, if it's a major challenge SDCs will just be targeted at minimal weather markets to start out.

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

#286

Post by haberman »

aoeu345 wrote: post #58
hellcow wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla has lane-assist, adaptive cruise control and a few other goodies. Many auto manufacturers have those things. You still have to manually follow GPS directions. Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge. Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to…

>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…

> Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November.

That video, for reference, is: https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...

I'm not super convinced by that video. That drive had almost no challenges/obstacles. No bicycles, no construction, basically no pedestrians, no other vehicles behaving erratically.

Google has cars that can respond to everything from a cyclist making hand signals, to a school bus (which must not be passed), to a police car pulling it over, to a woman chasing a duck across the road: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=8m49s

I'm also not sure this is a simple case of "throw data and hardware at the problem." If it were that easy, it wouldn't have taken Google so long to get to where they are today.

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

#287

Post by shostack »

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…

And the fallout for the economy will be interesting. What does it do to home prices when a long commute is less of an issue? What happens to all the cottage industries built around the assumption of someone owning and driving their car? Etc.

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

#288

Post by davej »

jrowley wrote: post #260

How long until someone puts a personal gym inside a self driving SUV, so you can workout during your commute? I can imagine people running on a treadmill inside a car while it is stuck in traffic. Or at least sitting on a trainer.

And feed the energy back into the motor. Or even directly power the wheels. It could work if you make the car more lightweight and use a pedal system on gears instead of treadmill. Let's call it a... "Bicycle". :)

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

#290

Post by ocdtrekkie »

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…

As haywire said, if you live where it snows, you drive regardless of whether or not you can see the road. I got a job to do, computers don't fix themselves, and my job is necessary even if the weather sucks outside.

While I think it's plausible to teach a self-driving car to drive in snow (like I do, generally following in the tracks of the cars ahead of me), I honestly think this is one of the best justifications that cars should continue to have steering wheels and pedals: Because automated snow driving is going to take a lot longer to become a solved problem than fair weather driving.

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