How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by twoWhlsGud » Thu, May 30, 2024, 4:36 PM UTC

asoneth wrote: post #230

1oooqooq wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's cool. until it's not. it's very easy to release an upgrade of stopping less on stop signs and see data increasing profit and not increasing accidents. same with code updates that will make cyclist life worse, unless there's actual change in a kpi they track. you're not really their main concern, specially after they ipo and get acquired by Apollo or billionaire du jour

In the United States there are few legal repercussions when a human driver kills someone as long as they are sober and utter the phrase "I didn't see them". Therefore, biking on US roads means trusting in the inherent goodness (and attentiveness) of the drivers around you. Driverless cars run by a company protecting itself from reputational and legal risk seems less dystopian than the status quo.

Yes, I don't understand how anybody who's ever ridden a bike in a major American city isn't super excited about high-quality self driving vehicles. The crazy stuff I see on a daily basis while out biking in Seattle (and statistically we are one of the best places to bike in the US) means I can't wait until these things take over :-)

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

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Post by jogjayr » Thu, May 30, 2024, 4:47 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #282

nullc wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Tha…

An injury every 1.6m miles isn't amazing. That is almost a 1/3 lifetime chance of injury if you drive an average of 12k miles annually for 50 years. (Sidenote: human units are easier to read).

A comment I wrote 3 years ago has more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26950254

The old "look at the person to your left, now look to the person on your right" meme comes to mind. One of you will probably have an accident with an injury in your lifetime.

I ran the same calculation for dying in a car accident and got a lifetime probability of 0.7%, but I'm not sure I did it right.

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

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Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 30, 2024, 4:47 PM UTC

skipkey wrote: post #254

arconis987 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip. Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few time…

I have video from my dashcam of a Waymo taxi doing a sudden three lane change, in moderately heavy traffic, to do a left turn to enter a freeway. This was a month or so ago. I really hope a human was involved in that. If not, there’s no way I would consider riding in one. If an officer had seen it, they would likely have written a ticket to a human.

[deleted]

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

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Post by golol » Thu, May 30, 2024, 4:50 PM UTC

codexb wrote: post #55

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…

Maybe if you're under 25 and have always lived in a dense city this seems like a valid take. Taxis aren't new, they have always existed. Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans). No one with kids wants to ride in taxis with kids all the time. Ditto for anyone with hobbies that re…

The only problem with Taxis is that they are expensive und possibly not available. Both of these issues are very much the kind of thing a robotaxi might fix.

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

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Post by wstrange » Thu, May 30, 2024, 4:56 PM UTC

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.

I had the FSD trial for one month.

I am very skeptical of the "weeks without intervention". It's cool technology, but I never had a single trip where I didn't need to intervene at least once.

It would regularly blow through school zones, failing to read the posted sign.

On a couple of occasions it veered off the road on to the shoulder.

My thinking is the car will never be level 4. It doesn't have sufficient sensors or NN compute power.

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

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Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o » Thu, May 30, 2024, 5:05 PM UTC

For the last ten years or so, there's been an argument on this forum (and others) about whether cutting safety in the pursuit of an earlier rollout is a good thing. If it's beneficial to humanity, then a few deaths now is massively outweighed by the many deaths avoided by earlier rollout of this tech, or so the argument goes.

This seems like a good time to point out that the argument makes too many assumptions to be useful, like that moving fast and breaking things will in fact lead to faster progress overall. In the case of robotaxis, the group moving carefully and deliberately is the clear leader, and many competitors who took the faster/less careful approaches have shuttered along the way. When uber's self-driving division killed someone, for example, it didn't lead to an earlier arrival of self-driving.

This is relevant to all sorts of business stuff where we're always asked to move faster than we can reliably move. It's astoundingly easy to forget that sometimes bad rollouts can shutter a project even worse than slow rollouts.

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

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Post by 1024core » Thu, May 30, 2024, 5:07 PM UTC

I wouldn't call it a "real business" just yet.

I've heard they do 50,000 rides per week in SF, LA, Phoenix combined.

Assuming they make $20/ride, that's still $1M/week, or $52M/year. I'm sure they spend in Billions/year.

They would have to scale out to every major city in America and add another 10000 cars before they can turn a profit.

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

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Post by rurp » Thu, May 30, 2024, 5:08 PM UTC

brandonagr2 wrote: post #195

nradov wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Mercedes-Benz apparently has gradually improved lane keeping all the way into autonomous driving. The Drive Pilot system is only at level 3 while Waymo is up at level 4, but consumers can actually buy the Mercedes product today and use it nationwide. It will be interesting to see how far they can push it.

They can not use the incredibly restrictive level 3 system nationwide, it can only be enabled on very specific highways in nevada or california in very specific situations (day time, clear weather, less than 40 mph, behind a lead car). Calling it level 3 is a marketing gimmick that you fell for.

Wait, you think that accurately classifying a driving system as level 3 is a marketing gimmick?

Your mind is going to be blown when you hear about Tesla and the name they give their assisted cruise control.

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

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Post by topher6345 » Thu, May 30, 2024, 5:09 PM UTC

Waymos also follow traffic laws with regards to loading-unloading zones, which is inconvenient for the passenger.

Compare to a rideshare driver that will often drop you off right in front of your destination, even if that is an illegal maneuver.

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

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Post by CharlieDigital » Thu, May 30, 2024, 5:10 PM UTC

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #298

jefftk wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. The auto manufacturer approach is also showing progress. In CA and NV you can buy and operate a Mercedes with Drive Pilot, which is Level 3 certified. In the right (very restrictive conditions which essentially come down to "sitting in highway traffic on your commute") you legally do not have to pay attention to the…

There's still plenty that can go wrong in a hurry even if you are just streaming along in lane. All it takes is for something non-routine to happen such as a car ahead reacting to an animal, or swerving as the driver reaches for something or spills coffee on themself, or a wheel come off a car (I've seen it happen to a car in front of me), or a car crosses the center median in opposite direction (which left my ex-bos…

    > All it takes is for something non-routine to happen such as a car ahead reacting to an animal, or swerving as the driver reaches for something or spills coffee on themself, or a wheel come off a car (I've seen it happen to a car in front of me), or a car crosses the center median in opposite direction (which left my ex-boss hospitalized for 6 months)

Inherent in this statement is the assumption that in such types of events, a human would necessarily do better than the machine. Each of these are extremes and I doubt that most human drivers would be able to react to avoid an accident or damage most of the time.