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

waymo.com

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

#281

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

senordevnyc wrote: post #159
gruez wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Come on, you know what the fixation is. Nothing riles up the Tesla fanboys like the clear unambiguous fact that Waymo is doing 1000x better at “full self driving” than Tesla ever has.

Oh dear. You sussed me out, didn't you?

It's like that time with Facebook and MySpace. A while ago now. I was in a student group at uni and this student, call her Alice, asked me for my Facebook. I said I don't have one, I don't like Facebook, and the conversation continued. Later another student came in, call him Bob. Alice told Bob "Where were you, we just had a big fight about Facebook over Myspace". I asked when that happened since I was there and didn't remember it and Alice said "that was me and you. We had a big fight about it. Did you forget?". I said, nonplussed, that I didn't think we had a fight. "But you said you don't like Facebook. So you like MySpace". Said Alice. Oh Alice.

From that I understand that you, like Alice, must be a very astute observer of human behaviour. No hidden motive stays hidden for long, with you, does it? Well done. You got me. I'm a Tesla fanboi. That's what I am, through and through.

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

#282

Post by [deleted] »

mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

[deleted]

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

#283

Post by throw-qqqqq »

kjksf wrote: post #93
mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD. Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program…

> And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo

Tesla is far behind Waymo on all meaningful measures.

Waymo sells more than 450k rides every week. Tesla is nowhere near that number.

Waymo offers rides in six cities. Tesla does two.

According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ Tesla has ~250 taxis in total. Waymo has +2500.

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

#284

Post by bluGill »

ghaff wrote: post #272
bluGill wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For most people the economics won't every work out. Uber/Taxis make sense if you only need them a few times per year. However even if the driver is free, if you are using your car daily as most people do it won't work out.

People who yell "share" forget that most people are driving during rush hour, and so the car will be idle the rest of the day anyway. As such there isn't that much money to save by sharing a car.

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

#285

Post by Dumblydorr »

fhd2 wrote: post #13
0xffff2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.

It wouldn't keep them from equipping _new_ models with additional sensors, spinning a story around how this helps them train the camera-only AI, or whatever.

It’s vaporware and it’s dollars and cents. Tesla EVs are already too expensive. He has no margin to include thousands more on sensors, alternative being the lawsuits that would follow if he admits it was all vaporware.

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

#286

Post by Dumblydorr »

inerte wrote: post #54
0xffff2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't thing it's purely stubbornness. Tesla sold the promise of software only updates resulting in FSD to hundreds of thousands of people. Not all of those people are in the cult of Tesla. I would expect admitting defeat at this point would result in a large class action lawsuit at the very least.

I know it's "illegal" and technically sold as FSD (assisted), but just 2 days ago I was in a friend's Model Y and it drove from work to my house (both in San Jose) without any steering wheel or pedal touch, at all. And he told me he went to Palm Springs like that too. I shit on Tesla and Elon on any opportunity, and it's a shame they basically have the software out there doing things when it probably shouldn't, but I…

Nice illusion of competence on easy conditions…Until it hits a person and Tesla EV performs far worse than the Waymo both during th crash and afterwards PR wise. Guarantee you Elon will throw the driver under the bus for not watching, not his sketchy system.

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

#287

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ra7 wrote: post #133
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 don’t have remote drivers. Your own link says that. > The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. … > The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.

Pay close attention to the wording: "The Waymo Driver ... remains in control of driving". That means it applies the controls needed to go from point A to point B on its own. However, it does not choose point A and point B on its own: a human chooses them. That's autonomous path planning, but not autonomous navigation, and certainly not "fully autonomous" anything.

Waymo prevaricates about the "influence" the human operator has on the path taken by the Waymo Driver [1] but it is clear there are situations that the Waymo Driver cannot choose point A and point B on its own, at least safely, otherwise Waymo would not be paying for humans to do it. They'd let the system do it on its own. It can't. It's not "fully autonomous".

We can play with words and accept whatever terminological obfuscation Waymo wants to impose in order to pimp its wares, or we can accept that current systems have limitations, and choose to understand the real SOTA over marketing.

_____________

[1] Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider idib.

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

#288

Post by gruez »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #277
rcxdude wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>This is just quibbling about semantics, and with arbitrary definitions of "safety driver" on top.

Dunno, you're engaging in the same "quibbling about semantics" and "arbitrary definitions", when for all intents and purposes, Waymo is fully autonomous. Is there any meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous? If we're sending a space probe to alpha centauri, then the last 1% would be very important, because help is light-years away, but the same isn't true for autonomous cars. What's more misleading, claiming that 99% autonomy is "fully autonomous", or claiming that waymo "uses safety drivers" while omitting the fact that they're rarely used, in contrast to other vendors (eg. uber, when they were doing tests) where they also have "safety drivers" monitoring the car all the time?

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

#289

Post by devmor »

ted_bunny wrote: post #234
devmor wrote: post #66

Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.

I do a lot of driving in Austin for a living. I am not a fan of these for several reasons. But on average they're quite competent and I see humans do dumber stuff all the time. I can also cut them off in traffic without repercussions!

I disagree, but maybe it’s because I only drive in the areas they operate during rush hour - when everyone’s decision making in traffic is extra impactful about causing delays.

The places I see the most human error are the places Waymos don’t operate - interstates, highways and older narrow neighborhoods.

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

#290

Post by rhubarbtree »

roryirvine wrote: post #261
rhubarbtree wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you need evidence to understand it. I’d recommend listening to Andrej Karpathy talk about it. But I note that human drivers do not rely on LIDAR or radar or a high res map of the road.

Are there any successful autonomous driving systems that don't use lidar? Sure, Wayve did some experiments with just radar + vision, but now incorporate lidar across their fleet. Waymo, Pony.ai, and WeRide have always used it. You can shout "you don't need it!" as loud as you like, but the people who are actually building and running these systems seem to disagree.

Except for everyone at Tesla.
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