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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#371
How is this news? So what, they slapped a new name on the project. What about actual progress on the tech?

Honestly, with Google's track record, I'm starting to doubt that this will ever ship. It just seems like a huge marketing tactic at this point. Plus. all of the talent has moved to companies like Otto and comma.ai; who are making tangible progress in this space.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#372

I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…

> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…

I think that people who believe that private car ownership will fall are those who live in the urban centres and have little understanding of the needs and living styles of rural or suburban population. It could just as well be that the opposite will happen, because cars will suddenly become much more accessible for people who can't or don't know how to drive.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#373
post #6

At least they could have given a more up to date report on what they are doing. 7 years passed since 2009 and all we've seen is a couple of promo videos with scant actual information. We have no idea how they compare to Tesla or other self driving car startups.

They provide monthly reports: https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/ (some more detailed than others)

Looks like that page got killed in the Waymo switch. Archive.org is missing the PDFs, but it looks like they still work if you follow the archived links straight to the URL.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161016050722/http://www.google...

[1] http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-09...

EDIT: I think I triggered them all to be archived, links in [0] should work now.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#374

I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs: • Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers • Waymo directly rolling their own fleet • Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides • Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up • All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hop…

It's too bad these companies are not working together on this stuff since any improvements to safety would be a win for everyone.

I would disagree: fierce competition is what will get us there the fastest. Every company is already a team of people working together. Let the games begin, and may the best team win. And may we, the consumer, forever reap the benefits :)

In a cooperative environment, bad players bring everyone down. In competition, they drown, and only the strongest survive.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#375
post #347

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

I'm not sure what your point is. Fully autonomous is still in progress, and still has work to do.

His point is that the remaining 5% of a problem can take considerably longer to solve than might initially be anticipated by looking at the quick progress made on the first 95% of it. A textbook example of that is voice recognition.

It's also not particularly clear that the costs will drop rapidly to zero or even to a level that leads to mass adoption (see air travel at Mach 1+, Segways...).

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#376

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

I get that we have to be open with tech. After all most tech seemed "impossible" "unrealistic" and "unfeasible" even a couple of years before they go mainstream.

But you have touched some use cases that are more frequent than most people think. London is a great example. My hometown Athens is much more closer to London as far as driving is concerned as opposed to LA or NY. I guess many other metropolis also.

How will AI brand A communicate with AI brand B about life critical decisions ? Hey we can either both crash to each other or kill that kid on the pavement. ( just an example , I don't want to go to the morality of the situation)

I assume there is going to be a "standard " . But have a look at your everyday tech. Standards are not easy. There are still WiFi routers/repeaters that cannot talk to each other nicely, just to give an example.

Usually in life critical systems you don't have interoperability issues because there is no interoperability. Huge fail-safe systems from a single vendor.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff. I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment: Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why? All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicl…

Exactly, unless self driving cars become cheaper than taxis then what is the point?

[deleted]

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#378
post #347

It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example: - communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block th…

I'm not sure what your point is. Fully autonomous is still in progress, and still has work to do.

That people are talking as if it's just round the corner, that taxi drivers and truckers are about to become obsolete. Whereas I understand the technical challenges are much greater than is stated, it may even be they won't be all overcome.

Re: Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So all the cars also drive back out of the city around 9am and back in again around 3pm? That sounds like more cars on the road (over the course of a day) rather than less.

It's more cars on the road per car trip, but fewer car trips per person per day for the reasons already explained upthread.

Upthread I see arguments for why there won't be many fewer cars, because everyone still needs to get to/from work and they do that at roughly the same time. Ride-sharing is what helps. Parking outside of the city has nothing to with demand for cars.
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