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

fortune.com

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

#281

Post by SoftTalker »

dventimi wrote: post #83
codetrotter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have to worry about tipping I can almost guarantee that if they don’t already, the robo-taxis will eventually start asking for tips. This is already the case at self-checkout in some stores for example. As long as the companies can get away with it, they will tack on any number of extra fees and charges even if those fees and charges really don’t make any sense. Hell, even tipping people does not really mak…

I do not accept your guarantee.

They won't be tips as such, but the average amount of the tip will be baked into the price.

If people are willing to pay base charge + tip for an Uber, then that is what robo-taxies will charge too. Especially if one company is allowed to keep a monopoly on the technology.

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

#282

Post by tzs »

nullc wrote: post #94
jseliger wrote: post #3

I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall... Waymos avoid many…

Humans are astonishingly and unreasonably good at driving. There are, indeed, a lot of traffic deaths but this is because we drive a mind-boggling amount so even a very low rate of fatalities adds up to a substantial number. A significant portion of traffic deaths also occur in special conditions-- at night, with intoxicated persons, in bad weather. Existing self driving cars won't even drive in those more difficult…

> Humans are astonishingly and unreasonably good at driving. There are, indeed, a lot of traffic deaths but this is because we drive a mind-boggling amount so even a very low rate of fatalities adds up to a substantial number

To put some numbers on it in the US cars are driven about 3.2 x 10^12 miles per year, and around 4 x 10^4 people are killed in car accidents (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists).

That's one death per 8 x 10^7 miles.

There are around 2 x 10^6 people non-fatally injured in car accidents per year in the US. That's an injury every 1.6 x 10^6 miles.

There are around 4 x 10^6 non-injury car accidents per year in the US, which is one every 8 x 10^5 miles.

If we assume all miles driving are equally risky and that we drive 40 miles per day 365 days a year, then we would expect to be in a non-injury car accident around once every 55 years, be injured in a car accident around once every 110 years, and be killed in a car accident around once every 5500 years.

Of course almost no one drives all their miles at times and in conditions when the risk per mile is average so when estimating your personal risk you need to take that into account.

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

#283

Post by kgwgk »

ddalex wrote: post #163
namaria wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

If companies can do stock buybacks, they theoretically can buy back 100% of the stock, giving ownership of the company to itself, basically its own assets ? I dont see the problem.

You don't see the problem but after companies repurchase shares the company is always owned by the remaining shareholders - who essentially always own 100% of the stock.

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

#284

Post by iamdelirium »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #265
returningfory2 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk That’s an interesting way of saying you live in London ;) (Phoenix urban area is more populous than every urban area in the UK except for London)

Manchester not London. According to Kagi the population of Greater Manchester is 2.8 million vs 1.61 for Phoenix.

You're comparing a county area (Greater Manchester) with the direct city population.

Phoenix's metro population alone is 4.8m.

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

#285

Post by SoftTalker »

83 wrote: post #261
boulos wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I work for Waymo. We handle both dense fog and heavy rain on the latest vehicles. The best blog post is probably https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ but you can find a lot of videos in the rain. Snow and very cold weather is a challenge for sensor cleaning. We've done some testing in both NYC and Buffalo ( https://waymo.com/blog/2023/11/road-trip-how-our-cross-count... ) to collect data.

I'm rooting for you, but I live in snow country and always have a chuckle any time someone says self driving will be ready soon. There's so many situations that need to be handled when driving in winter and some of them I can't even imagine how you'd address in software. Winter here changes daily between - no road lines visible - snow packed into ice randomly making the road a a camouflage pattern - snow is fresh/dee…

What will happen is that you just won't be able to go anywhere until the roads are cleared. That is probably not a bad thing, it will allow plow trucks to clear the roads more quickly without having to navigate around people driving (or trying to drive) on the uncleared roads, spun out/stuck vehicles, crashes, etc.

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

#286

Post by kelipso »

cjensen wrote: post #267
martythemaniak wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+Ca…

Camera vs Lidar+Camera is not a narrow question. Cameras lack sufficient dynamic range to work in many situations, and therefore cannot alone be used for a real self-driving solution where the driver naps. Your example of needing to read a stop sign isn't a great example. At least in North America, a hexagonal sign is always a stop sign. A better example of your point would be a speed limit sign.

Yeah, world of difference between having Lidar or not. Tesla demonstrably has issues detecting objects with their cameras.

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

#287

Post by andyjohnson0 »

iamdelirium wrote: post #284
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manchester not London. According to Kagi the population of Greater Manchester is 2.8 million vs 1.61 for Phoenix.

You're comparing a county area (Greater Manchester) with the direct city population. Phoenix's metro population alone is 4.8m.

You're right. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think my point stands, that even large urban areas in the UK have no SDVs.

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

#288

Post by harmmonica »

badcppdev wrote: post #185
harmmonica wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this on HN before as well, but I've turned into a full-on Waymo evangelist (Los Angeles user here). Couple of things to add to Jake's comment... The driving experience itself is on par with the "best" drivers I've ever ridden with (things like stopping at actual stop signs, for instance, and not racing from one traffic light to the next, and being courteous to bikes and pedestrians), not to mention just the…

Can you just clarify in the situation where, 'the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane', whether the behaviour of the Waymo was 'safe' although obviously incorrect for multiple reasons?

It was absolutely incorrect on the Waymo's part. I was trying to counterbalance my positivity with a mistake I've seen a Waymo make. That said, I would not call it unsafe because where it was located it was not going to lead to an accident. It was confused by the intersection, which also happens to human drivers at that intersection. That is not to excuse the Waymo ("oh, it's just like a person so that's ok!"), just trying to point out that it may be a great driver (again, my opinion), but doesn't mean it's infallible. Of course others on this thread have pointed out statistics about how Waymos are faring, but I was just trying to share my experience riding in one.

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

#289

Post by ra7 »

leesec wrote: post #266
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…

Lol Tesla has made significant progress and doesn't show much sign of slowing down. There's no reason to think there approach can't work at this point. People go weeks without intervention.

> People go weeks without intervention.

https://www.teslafsdtracker.com puts miles to disengagement at 30 and miles to critical disengagement at 300 for all v12.x.y versions. Note: this is crowdsourced data and the users themselves get to decide what's critical and what's not.

As far as numbers required to make it fully self driving, it's at least 3 orders of magnitude worse than the big players. Waymo and Cruise routinely had 30,000+ miles per disengagement during their California testing. That's one disengagement for roughly 3 years of driving.

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

#290

Post by vineyardmike »

ddalex wrote: post #163
namaria wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

If companies can do stock buybacks, they theoretically can buy back 100% of the stock, giving ownership of the company to itself, basically its own assets ? I dont see the problem.

Share buybacks don’t put shares on the balance sheet. It reduces outstanding share count. It’s the opposite of dilution.
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