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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

#321

Post by small_model »

senordevnyc wrote: post #280
small_model wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lowest cost per mile will win and Tesla's cyber cab doesn't need expensive suite of sensors. They use lidar in their validation/calibration test cars which is the correct use of lidar. People are already driving USA coast to coast without an SINGLE intervention. It's already over, Tesla has won, Waymo cant compete on cost.

Been hearing this bullshit for a decade. Any day now… Meanwhile Waymo is doing half a million rides a week, and Tesla is doing what, a few dozen? Maybe? Maybe zero? Who knows, because they lie and obfuscate about everything. Meanwhile I can go take a Waymo right now in cities all over America.

[flagged]

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

#322

Post by TulliusCicero »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #82

Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this ( https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet... ) new vehicle design? I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)

They've already talked about this new hardware many times, this is just announcing that said new models are starting fully driverless operations.

Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.

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

#323

Post by TulliusCicero »

abraxas wrote: post #86

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going…

Okay, so the video is just random predictions? Why should we believe any of this is true?

I regularly bike, which is why I'm hugely in favor of self driving cars; they're way safer for me when biking than human driven cars.

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

#324

Post by TulliusCicero »

throw310822 wrote: post #274

My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real d…

The initial moat will be enormous, because it's such a difficult problem.

Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.

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

#325

Post by small_model »

WarmWash wrote: post #294
small_model wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope is open to the public and covers bigger area then Waymo. EDS is limiting a lot of people here's ability to critically evaluate the current autonomous auto rollout.

The unsupervised area is a tiny subset of the supervised area.

Any evidence of this?, even it its true right now, and they are being ultra cautious, (they are hardly going to just dump 100k unsupervised teslas in one week), it won't stay that way for long. They will overtake Waymo in a few months, then kill them by the end of the year.

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

#326

Post by soperj »

RivieraKid wrote: post #127
soperj wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What path is that? Their self driving took a huge step back when they dropped Mobileye and honestly I don't think it's been the same since.

1. Leveraging data collected from Tesla owners. In theory, they have the data to learn the driving behavior from almost everywhere in the world. 2. Going directly for vision-only, no geofence system. Waymo's strategy has been to start with a proof-of concept and gradually expand geography and capabilities.

Tesla has already done a geofenced system in Austin (in the shape of a penis). It went poorly.

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

#327

Post by rayiner »

rbbydotdev wrote: post #230
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…

I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.

Anything that isn’t point to point transit, or requires interacting with the public, is a non-starter for most people in the developed world.

Even in Japan, half of commutes are by car and that number has been growing.

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

#328

Post by surajrmal »

digitalPhonix wrote: post #190
gcanyon wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years. Tesla's market cap is $1.3 trillion. Granted the company itself doesn't have access to all of that, but surely if they wanted to spend, say, $10 billion per year on something big like FSD, they could have. > didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware A little more extreme, but: Tesla…

$50k? The sensor kit on the Waymo’s ipace is north of $300k. (Which completely inverts that calculation)

You are either intentionally lying or very confident about facts you don't know. Could you please source your numbers?

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

#329

Post by small_model »

throw-qqqqq wrote: post #283
kjksf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well Tesla just launched their robotaxi 6 months ago whereas Waymo has been going for a decade? Just looking at a point in time is a bit silly, look at the change over time.

The bottom line is cost per mile and Waymo can't complete here, there is also style, Waymo's vehicles are extremely ugly looking cars vs the Cybercab. Tesla also has integrated everything from the chip up. Waymo is a cobbled together solution from multiple third party (very expensive) components.

Is the consumer going to pick a more expensive, ugly, non integrated vehicle for their trip?

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

#330

Post by MarkusQ »

coffeemug wrote: post #157
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…

From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will…

Interesting that this seems like a slam-dunk argument for why reusable rockets and other improvements are practically impossible (e.g. "we might be able to achieve a microscopic improvement in efficiency or reliability, but to make any game-changing improvements is not merely expensive; it's a physical impossibility"), and wouldn't matter in any case for structural reasons (e.g. "market inelasticity (cutting launch cost in half wouldn't make much of a difference)", yet in the fifteen years since it was written launch costs have fallen to a third of what they were, continue to fall, and the number of payloads to orbit has gone up by an order of magnitude or more (so much for "market inelasticity").
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