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

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

#391

Post by rcxdude »

m348e912 wrote: post #346
jeffbee wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no Teslas that have ever taken a trip without an operator behind the wheel. The idea that there will be a near-future discontinuity after which a Tesla will be able to serve as a robotaxi is pretty ridiculous. I just watched the latest video from AIDRIVR on YouTube. AIDRIVR is a TSLA pumper-and-dumper who has dedicated their channel to uncritical praise of FSD. In the first third of the video FSD v12 runs t…

>This stuff is not even a little bit ready for fully supervised operation. https://youtu.be/fpoXr_z_6a4?t=565 Thanks for sharing. I skimmed through the video and watched a fair amount of it. I got a different impression. I thought it was impressive how FSD 12 navigated narrow winding roads with parked cars and oncoming traffic and flaggers holding signs that alternate between stop and slow. My impression was while it…

Waymo spent a long time at about that level as well, and it's a common situation with AI: you can get 80% of the way there really quickly, and then that next 19% takes orders of magnitude longer, and the next 0.9% is even harder, etc (pretty much anyone who's ever tried to actually apply a neural net for anything will have encountered this). Self-driving cars need a level of reliability basically unheard of for AI or even a classical software system of similar complexity (there's more complex software systems, and systems with higher reliability, but the product on self-driving cars is extreme).

A liability-viable self-driving car needs to be reliable enough that you would expect to see zero significant errors in a typical journey. That's around the point where you will only have a few articles about one of your thousands of cars going wrong each month. Commercially viable needs better than that.

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

#392

Post by rcxdude »

fourseventy wrote: post #323
E39M5S62 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla 'intends' to do a lot of things, but rarely seems to be able to actually DO them.

Ya, other than becoming the best selling EV company and revolutionizing the entire EV industry...

Doesn't necessarily mean they'll succeed at everything they try.

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

#393

Post by rcxdude »

martythemaniak wrote: post #333
ra7 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says. But Waymo never said you don't need cameras. Hell, they have 29 cameras in each vehicle compared to Tesla's 8. Your point about their approaches being mo…

Indeed, cameras are absolutely necessary for self-driving. They're the only ones that can read lane markings, signs, etc. LIDAR alone is not sufficient - you cannot navigate the roads using nothing but an unlabled 3D scene. It simply does not have the necessary information for you to drive ie, is that hexagonal sign a STOP or a GO, pretty important bit of info. So the question is: is LIDAR also necessary or are camer…

It's not necessarily a case of "LIDAR is necessary": it's more a case of how much more difficult it is to extract the necessary information with the necessary reliability from cameras alone (one important aspect I think is that LIDAR + HDmaps is very reliable at telling you 'something is there', even if it's not able to distinguish details. From the point of view of the car operating safely, that's a big deal). As it stands Tesla is behind waymo and making things harder for themselves (fundamentally because they've been trying to make it a consumer product, which constrains costs much more than aiming for robotaxis). It might mean they eventually get a much more cost competitive product, but that won't matter if they're beaten to market by 5-10 years (at the moment you can argue tesla is ahead in the areas their driver assist can operate and number of vehicles, but I think it's going to be much easier for waymo to scale up and to different areas than it is for tesla to progress their tech).

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

#394

Post by rcxdude »

zellyn wrote: post #349
martythemaniak wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people have uncritically been repeating Waymo's marketing talking points for so long they've started mistaking it for "consensus" or even worse "truth". Waymo's tech is impressive and it works, but that doesn't mean it is the only way to make it work. The Tesla/Waymo approaches are far far more alike than they are different, so the whole debate is about very little. The question of Camera vs LIDAR+Ca…

The whole thing is largely probabilistic in many ways/parts, and it seems like more sensors, especially more sensors that operate in different modalities, is better, assuming your sensor fusion is working properly so that each additional sensor adds certainty to your predictions. There are atmospheric conditions and obstructions that lidar can see through that cameras can't. Cameras also seem prone to being blocked b…

Camera obstructions are big problem, yes. A combination of hardware fixes (making it less likely for obstructions to happen in the first place), redundancy, and detection of the issue coupled with an escape plan, is the general approach to fixing it. (the escape plan is a big one: a lot of effort goes into making sure the car can stop/pull over safely if something goes wrong)

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

#395

Post by asoneth »

1oooqooq wrote: post #385
asoneth wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how can you read my comment and infer that killing someone is a metric they don't care about??? that's musk level shit.

I apologize if I was unclear. In response to a cyclist saying they prefer being near Waymo vehicles to human drivers you said:

>> that's cool. until it's not...same with code updates that will make cyclist life worse...you're not really their main concern

I agree and expect that the wide safety tolerances driverless cars currently have will become tighter as they gain more experience, and that this will make them more efficient but potentially less pleasant to be around than they used to be.

But even if pedestrian and cyclists lives are not a main concern for self-driving car companies, some concern is better than none. For some human drivers their concerns seem to be things like not getting arrested, getting to their destination as quickly as possible, checking social media to satisfy their boredom, and not scratching the paint on their vehicle. Some drivers consider vulnerable road users like cyclists to be sub-human [1].

My point is that the bar in the US has been set so incredibly low that even if the code updates make their products worse for cyclists than they used to be or even killing some vulnerable road users that may still be safer and preferable to the incompetence and complete indifference on the part of human drivers.

Having said that, the same calculus may not apply in countries that don't issue drivers a license to kill people, so the bar for driverless cars is likely to be much higher in such places.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136984782...

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

#396

Post by banannaise »

jeffbee wrote: post #20
choppaface wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo has notably escaped any investigation of the "Prius vs Camry" crash induced during unsafe testing done in pursuit of a demo https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal... > The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the s…

I am having trouble imagining this scenario in a way that makes Waymo look as bad as you imply. It sounds like the human-driven vehicle if it was "boxed in" on an on-ramp needed to slow and merge, rather than racing to pass on the right, running off the road, and causing a spectacular single-vehicle wreck. The way it's described in that paragraph seems to be ironclad proof of the need to promptly relieve humans of dr…

Yeah, the worst read about the car here would be "it's not very courteous in merge situations" in which case I implore anyone reading to drive in Maryland one single time.

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

#397

Post by kiliantics »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #92
vincnetas wrote: post #79

As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.

No need to be afraid. Public transport will evolve to include small autonomous vehicles. The economies of scale you get by packing people in larger vehicles mostly have to do with the cost of fuel and staffing. Electrical autonomous vehicles don't have a need for a driver and electricity is relatively cheap. So you don't get much economies of scale by making them bigger. Most city journeys would be under a kwh. Even…

obligatory link to the road space picture that shows why this would not be a good move for urban transit systems:

https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/

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

#398

Post by watwut »

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…

Sure. But the important thing is that manufacturer trusts its own system enough to take legal liability on himself. And that matters.

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

#399

Post by [deleted] »

simion314 wrote: post #134
threeseed wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet. And not sure why you think running stop signs or any anti safety measures would increase profits.

>And not sure why you think running stop signs or any anti safety measures would increase profits. Because this big companies like Google are actually evil. As an example the mobile YouTube app does not let you use it if you turn off the screen. So Google decided that wasting energy and killing batteries is an acceptable thing to do, this is pure evil - I would accept they adding more advertising or whatever but kill…

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