311–320 of 468 posts
The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all along.
If they truly rely on teleoperation, that's at least 20ms in the best case, and can grow a lot with interference.
I always assumed these things have some autonomy.
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The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars did exactly as you requested and treated the intersections like 4 way stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive drivers who simply slowed and rolled. How many non-Waymo accidents happened at intersections during this time? I suspect more than zero given my experiences with other drivers when traffic lights go off. Apparently, Waymo's numbers are zero so humans are…
> The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput. Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse . They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go around them, making things less safe. We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a…
There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for both lawsuits and reputational death.
The fact that everybody else chose throughput over safety is not the fault of Waymo.
Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?
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> The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput. Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse . They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go around them, making things less safe. We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a…
> Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse. There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for both lawsuits and reputational death. The fact that everybody else chose throughput over safety is not the fault of Waymo. Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the free…
Something I had pounded into me when I drove too slowly and cautiously during my first driving test, and failed.
Those Waymos weren't moving which is a pretty egregious example of obstructing traffic.
An old rule of thumb is every time a service expands by an order of magnitude there are new problems to solve. I suspect and hope this is just Waymo getting to one of those points with new problems to solve, and they will find a way to more graciously handle this in the future.
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> The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput. Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse . They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go around them, making things less safe. We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a…
> Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse. There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for both lawsuits and reputational death. The fact that everybody else chose throughput over safety is not the fault of Waymo. Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the free…
In my state, that would itself be a traffic violation, so yes I would. The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. An autonomous vehicle cruising in that lane (regardless of speed) would therefore be programmed in a way that deliberately violates this law.
Enforcement is its own challenge, whether robots or humans.
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Locking down the roads creates a lot of potential injuries too. And "don't blow through an intersection with dead lights" is super easy to program. That's not enough for me to forgive them of all that much misbehavior.
> is super easy to program What?!? We’re talking about autonomous vehicles here.
Compared to the overall self-driving problem which is very much not a super easy problem.
Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet). Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles fro…
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What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.
That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.
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> The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted. And my question is why did it halt instead of pull over?
How much to move once you decide things have gone off the rails is a hard question, but I’d assume they have put some thought into it.
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> Or maybe the doors just unlock and any human can physically enter and drive the car up to X distance. Do the even have physical controls to do that at this point? I’ve never been in one so I don’t know how different they are from normal cars today.
The Waymos still have all their normal driver controls. There is a process where law enforcement can enter the vehicle, call Waymo and verify their law enforcement status, and then switch the vehicle into manual mode and drive it as normal. Here is their instructions for law enforcement in the Waymo Emergency Response Guide: https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-uploads/files/first%20r...
Didn’t Google have little self-driving vehicles without controls that were limited to pre-planned routes on non-public roads on their campus?
Obviously a hugely different problem domain.
Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone, presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos were lacking connectivity.
There is of course also a possibility that the total demand exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human intervention.