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

waymo.com

381–390 of 425 posts

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

#381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1qvf7hu/te... It's unsurprising someone so out of the loop on its true status is so hyped on it's future... If robotaxi was doing legit rides, Elon would be posting about it 20 times a day.

Reddit is extremely anti Musk and Tesla, that sub reddit being the typical example. Let's just wait and see where we are in 6 months.

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

#382

Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.

Waymo already has a teen mode for this.

Yeah but I mean consumer versions I can use in my semi rural area. I doubt we will have a Waymo taxi service out here anytime soon.

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

#383
post #262

There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".

Everything you’ve mentioned don’t do anything to diminish the magnitude of this achievement in the slightest. It’s clearly just FUD and most people see it as that. There are dozens of refutations of everything you’ve pointed out in this thread already. Maybe besides DoorDash, what’s that about?

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

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge.

> None, it's just obvious to anyone who has a high school level of business knowledge. That's a highly ironic statement given your position on "cost per mile". With a small amount of business acumen, you'd know that betting on technology staying expensive is a bad idea. This is seen in all industries, but especially electronics, where there are many competitors continuously optimizing for cost. E.g., we're at the poi…

Phones were about $400-500 years ago now they are over $1k which is not 'a few hours of wages' well not for most of us. I agree technology prices decreases over time but Waymo is starting at 5x the cost, by the time a Waymo costs even the same price as a Model Y, let alone a Cybercab it will be too late. That's my prediction, I could be wrong though, maybe Elon and Tesla are lying and so are all the users of least version of FSD.

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

#385
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.

Power could be delivered by overhead catenary wire. Battery and/or ultra caps could handle if it has to go off wire.

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

#386
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…

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.

Funny.

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

#387
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of…

Waymo has been attracting outside capital just fine. I think the bigger issue is that Cruise was not succeeding at building the driver. Cruise was shutdown after a safety incident, same as Uber.

I feel like the bigger issue is that Cruise evidently had an unsafe company culture (like Uber): It wasn't just that they had an incident, it's that they lied about the incident and tried to cover things up.

This has been a pretty consistent pattern -- Cruise was always less transparent about its safety data than Waymo, and its claims tended to be opaque and non-measurable, whereas Waymo was partnering with insurance companies to get hard data.

Waymo is going to have incidents, too, but I think they have made the (correct) decision that being open and transparent about safety stuff is the way they move past those; Cruise made a decision in the opposite direction, and it killed them.

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

#388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the sarcasm. Driverless trains for mass transit are in operation in lots of places around the world and have been for some time (eg the Docklands light railway in London) https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/dlr/ Driverless personal transportation is the unsolved problem.

Weirdly, DLR trains still have an attendant onboard. A better example of a fully centrally operated train would be something like the SkyTrain lines in Vancouver.

Not all DLR trains. They do things like keep an eye on people and check tickets - there aren't any ticket barriers.

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

#389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensor fusion allows you to resolve that ambiguity, I wonder if Elon is really as in touch with this as you would expect. No single sensor is perfect, they all have their problematic areas and a good sensor fusion scheme allows you to have your sensors reinforce each other in such a way that each operates as close as possible to their area of strength. No single sensor can ever give you that kind of resilience. Sure,…

Last time I checked I relied entirely on vision to drive autonomously.

And birds didn't invent jet engines, so obviously we don't need those either, right?

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

#390
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.

They actually invented something like that called a train around 1804 and very soon when they've developed it a bit more it will solve all our traffic problems.
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