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Waymo's big self-drive car report

arstechnica.com

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Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#31

Post by Retric »

ManuPop wrote: post #22
jfoster wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had cars driving all over the place for years. If they've got the driving part "done", the other parts of it are about product stuff; how to request rides, in-ride experience, etc. They definitely would've had that all happening in parallel with refining the autonomy tech. I don't have any information, but it seems plausible to me that it could be 2018.

They have mostly been driving in sunny areas with very nice weather. Driving with strong weather hasn’t really been tackled by anybody yet. Additionally the legal side is still not (officially) resolved.

Waymo says its cars can handle nighttime driving and light rain, but its cars will be geofenced

Nice weather driving is predicable out ~6 hours and easily 98+% of driving conditions nationwide. If the system simply checks a weather service before driving and says no if there is problems with the route that's fine for version 1.0

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#32

Post by tdb7893 »

MrQuincle wrote: post #20

How will people react? I think it's too early. + Jealous cap drivers, truck drivers, neighbors can easily put some chewing gum or paint on one or a few sensors. The system will be too brittle to cope with that, so all the time your/the sweet self-driving car doesn't even want to start. + Joyriding and pranks. Put your silly little brother or the dog who you've to babysit in the car. Bye bye! + Criminality. Just put y…

Most of these things with self driving cars already apply to normal cars. Also with self driving cars having tons if sensors and Internet connectivity you should have a good scan of whoever messes with one and quick police response if anything goes wrong. For stuff like bogus insurance claims they could just add a few internal sensors in the car or something to make sure a real person is in there. None of these problems really seem all that insurmountable

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#33

Post by icebraining »

Roritharr wrote: post #19
nopinsight wrote: post #3

Waymo's car safety systems engineered in from the ground up bode well for their reputation and also distinguish their system from other vehicles with self-driving "tacked-on". The latest statistics suggest that Waymo's car requires about an order of magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers. If these systems are a key reason for that or will further boost their safety records, it will be a long while before c…

I wonder how the different error modes are detected so the redundant systems can take over.

For a glimpse of that, this interview with a responsible for System Health Management for NASA rockets is interesting: http://omegataupodcast.net/100-system-health-mgt/

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#34

Post by golfer »

skywhopper wrote: post #29
pgodzin wrote: post #9

It's certainly smart to start this as a ride-sharing service rather than DTC ownership model. By being able to choose which trips it is confident in taking, it removes a lot of the remaining question marks that would come up by a car owner trying to take it anywhere.

The question is: can this be a viable commercial product if it doesn’t actually do what people expect from a taxi service? And how extensive is the deployment going to be that people will choose to use Waymo over just driving? If I have to plan ahead or wait 15 minutes for a car to arrive, I’m a lot less likely to even try the service.

They have to start somewhere. It sounds like this will be an initial rollout.

Obviously they won't be limited to Chandler Arizona forever.

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#35

Post by icebraining »

skywhopper wrote: post #29
pgodzin wrote: post #9

It's certainly smart to start this as a ride-sharing service rather than DTC ownership model. By being able to choose which trips it is confident in taking, it removes a lot of the remaining question marks that would come up by a car owner trying to take it anywhere.

The question is: can this be a viable commercial product if it doesn’t actually do what people expect from a taxi service? And how extensive is the deployment going to be that people will choose to use Waymo over just driving? If I have to plan ahead or wait 15 minutes for a car to arrive, I’m a lot less likely to even try the service.

If they do it right, the user doesn't have to care. You call a car, and either a self-driving or a non-self-driving one will show up, depending on the trip you selected.

But that's for the future; for now I'm pretty sure every car will have a driver, even if just as a backup/supervisor.

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#36

Post by golfer »

szczepano wrote: post #28

I think Tesla idea of tunnels with self driving cars is more competent then those autonomous vehicles driving on roads with other cars. At least they got some data from their cars with real world usage not predictions.

Waymo has hundreds of vehicles logging millions of self driving miles on the road. They have plenty of data.

Tesla's "tunnels": I assume you are referring to elon's Boring Company? How many decades of tunneling do you think that will require before it even covers a fraction of routes people want to take?

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#37

Post by icebraining »

szczepano wrote: post #28

I think Tesla idea of tunnels with self driving cars is more competent then those autonomous vehicles driving on roads with other cars. At least they got some data from their cars with real world usage not predictions.

Tesla, the company that already got people killed?

Waymo has real world usage, both from self-driving cars which already use real streets, and from their worldwide street mapping fleet.

Besides, real world data is only as good as you can capture it, and Teslas are much more limited in that regard compared to Waymo's LIDAR.

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#38

Post by tyingq »

nopinsight wrote: post #3

Waymo's car safety systems engineered in from the ground up bode well for their reputation and also distinguish their system from other vehicles with self-driving "tacked-on". The latest statistics suggest that Waymo's car requires about an order of magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers. If these systems are a key reason for that or will further boost their safety records, it will be a long while before c…

Waymo does seem very disciplined.

However, on this:

"Waymo's car requires about an order of magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers."

I'm a little skeptical about using interventions per x-distance as a metric for comparison.

There's just too many different things that could skew that. Like driving the same routes over and over. Or more/less stringent rules about when to trigger intervention. Or choosing when not to drive, like poor weather. Or purposely choosing difficult scenarios and edge cases for your routes.

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#39

Post by icebraining »

ManuPop wrote: post #22
jfoster wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've had cars driving all over the place for years. If they've got the driving part "done", the other parts of it are about product stuff; how to request rides, in-ride experience, etc. They definitely would've had that all happening in parallel with refining the autonomy tech. I don't have any information, but it seems plausible to me that it could be 2018.

They have mostly been driving in sunny areas with very nice weather. Driving with strong weather hasn’t really been tackled by anybody yet. Additionally the legal side is still not (officially) resolved.

Mostly, yes, but Waymo has been testing in Kirkland, WA since February 2016.

Re: Waymo's big self-drive car report

#40

Post by zaphar »

majestik wrote: post #11
CamelCaseName wrote: post #2

Can anyone comment as to how realistic the last line is? >But it's clear that Waymo is aiming to bring its product to market soon—likely in 2018, if not this year.

There’s a big difference between running a project like this in “R&D mode” vs “full on production mode” and I mean that from every angle: hardware, software, operations, legal, etc. So I’m skeptical on a 2018 delivery. Call me cynical but this looks more like Google gave Waymo a deadline and now they’re trying to ship a MVP to keep the funds coming.

Google doesn't do deadlines. They also don't announce until it's ready. It's deeply ingrained in their culture. They dabbled with a deadline a couple times and the results were a disaster. I know technically waymo is a different company but it incubated in Google itself. My experience with how Google operates runs counter to your experience.

This is all anecdotal on both of our parts of course but I wouldn't bet against Waymo on this. They have what looks like a massive head start against the competition here.

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