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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#401

Post by chefkoch »

londons_explore wrote: post #390
guimarin wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The industry will change/disappear overnight. Trucking will be 4x cheaper with 2x the transportation capacity when you remove the trucker. Doesn't matter how much unionized, etc. the industry is now. No group survives that.

How are costs divided between fuel, driver, vehicle capital? I'm not sure the driver is the most expensive part...

But it's the part that limits the usable hours of a truck most.

A self driving truck can pretty much drive 24/7 but the driver has to rest more than half the day.

Truck drivers are allowed to work 70h per week.

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

#402

Post by monk_e_boy »

notatoad wrote: post #354
walrus1066 wrote: post #339

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…

Do you really think the companies building autonomous cars haven't thought about all these things? They may not have solved them yet (If they had, we've probably see their products on the road) but I'm sure it's in progress.

I imagine in an emergency the car would show a set of options on a screen and you click one and the car will do it.

For example getting out of the way of emergency vehicles on a blocked road. It will ask you what to do and if you tell it to drive up the pavement or into a bus lane or cross to the wrong side of the road -- the car will just do it.

I do wonder about all the non-verbal human-to-human communication. But a friendly baxter type screen with eyes that move (and messages that scroll across) would solve that.

We have to remember that these cars are all feeding unusual situations back to the google BRAIN that is learning. It'll watch us react to an emergency and learn. It'll see that 20 or 30 times a day and generalise a response.

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

#403

Post by fh973 »

1_2__3 wrote: post #262
arijun wrote: post #116

I still don't understand why every company doing self driving cars is focusing on consumer cars while no major player is doing interstate trucking. Interstate trucking could pretty much be done now, and has several advantages. Driving on interstate freeways is orders of magnitude easier than driving in a city with pedestrians, bikes, cars parked in the road, etc. And there is a great monetization scheme--no driver me…

Because it's all marketing bullshit. In fact that's a good indication that it's marketing bullshit - the fiction that the tip of the self-driving car spear will be consumer vehicles.

I am not so sure. It could also be the Christmas present Larry got for himself. At least more affordable than a rocket company.

I guess it is a mix of both. The SV elite pretending they can do another trick and keeping themselves busy and entertained and Google/ABC pretending they are a growth company (beyond search ads). Why should they bother with worldly billion dollar markets such as office communication equipment (which Microsoft is successfully attacking as we learned earlier today).

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

#404

Post by monocasa »

londons_explore wrote: post #386
arijun wrote: post #116

I still don't understand why every company doing self driving cars is focusing on consumer cars while no major player is doing interstate trucking. Interstate trucking could pretty much be done now, and has several advantages. Driving on interstate freeways is orders of magnitude easier than driving in a city with pedestrians, bikes, cars parked in the road, etc. And there is a great monetization scheme--no driver me…

inter-state . Ie. you're gonna have to get new laws in place allowing empty vehicles in not just one, but many states. Current driverless carpool plans might well only allow use when someone is in the vehicle, and they will likley only operate in a single state. The people-transport industry is also worth more than the goods transport industry.

> The people-transport industry is also worth more than the goods transport industry

[citation needed]

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

#405

Post by dragonwriter »

ghaff wrote: post #398
JCzynski wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving taxis are in principle way cheaper to operate than human-driven taxis. They never have to stop, they can operate at all hours, there's no cost to pay drivers, and if they do stop they can do it somewhere very cheap. And when self-driving cars are a viable option, insurance will strongly encourage it. And by strongly encourage it I probably mean "absurdly high fees for driving your own car", because peopl…

I can buy cars with better safety systems being cheaper to insure, whether you're talking assistive driving systems or something more. But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently?

> But why would the existence of cars with better systems make driving vehicles like most people own today more expensive than currently?

Safer options will, as they become available, be disproportionately chosen by the safety conscious. This can, potentially, make the less-safe legacy option more dangerous (per use) than before the safer option became available, because the safest users of the less-safe option before the new one are users of the new option afterward, and no longer bringing the average risk of the old option down.

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

#406

Post by icebraining »

user837387 wrote: post #177
DamnYuppie wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with you but people said the same thing about amazon for over a decade....

Amazon can collapse really fast. My bet is that if it does it will be almost overnight and everybody will claim that nobody saw it coming. The reason I believe that it may collapse is because now when I want to buy something online I rather go to Walmart,Target or to the specific brand store. When I think of Amazon the picture that comes to mind is of shady people trying to scam me out of my money. My perception, eve…

I really doubt they'll let it reach a tipping point. Major companies keep tabs on user sentiment, etc, and tweak their operations accordingly. Small losses like some people finding them shady are expected in a profit maximizing model, much like lawsuits by burnt people are an accepted cost by McDonalds to avoid having the rest of their clients complain about cold coffee.

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

#407

Post by jedberg »

marssaxman wrote: post #369
jedberg wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of anyone who was saying self driving is only five years away in 2011. It was still a fantasy then. Now we actually have working software and hardware, and real people are experiencing self driving. I live in the bay area, but not a month goes by that I don't see a self driving vehicle at some point. And that's not counting the Teslas that are autopiloting their way down the highway next to me that I don…

How is it that "real people are experiencing self driving"? I was under the impression that Google's autonomous vehicle and other projects like it were still all technology research prototypes. There is a very big difference between the sort of next-generation cruise control driver assistance features Tesla and others are providing, and the sort of fully autonomous wheeled robot people are fantasizing about when they…

They're more than just prototypes. Their employees are using self-driving cars for their daily lives. If you have a friend who works at Google (well Waymo now) who is using the car, you can get a ride. Also, as a driver on Mt View roads, I have experience self-driving as someone behind and next to the vehicle. They aren't the "robotic" drivers you'd expect, but fit in pretty well. They still show signs of being a robot (like the way they approach a turn with a biker is very mechanical) so you can tell it is self driving, but it clearly works.

And also there is Uber's self driving fleet. They are actually taking people from place to place who use the Uber app in a self driving vehicle.

In all cases someone is still at the wheel, but they aren't doing anything other than monitoring and logging the ride and cases where the car didn't behave like a "normal" driver.

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

#408

Post by londons_explore »

dgacmu wrote: post #117
mtgx wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla already seems to have that, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3DbrYx-SN4 The issue is Google is doing it with (prohibitively) expensive hardware, so we don't know yet if Google's self-driving system works with cheaper Autopilot 2.0-level hardware that the other car makers are going to use as well.

"The person in the driver's seat is just there for legal reasons" -- but note just how closely that person's hands are to the wheel, in an obvious state of readiness. That person is 100% ready to take over the car if it messes up. Tesla had the luxury of running test drives until they had a success. This is a different thing than putting a car on the road with no steering wheel and saying bon voyage. The first is a d…

Googles car only does 25 mph. They might have made that video when they only have a 95% success rate, because in the 5% chance of collision it would be at low speed, with a very light vehicle, and very unlikely to cause a fatality.

https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...

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

#409

Post by ygjb-dupe »

anonymousDan wrote: post #316
jcranmer wrote: post #312

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?

They don't need to be cheaper, they need to deliver better service.

Depending on the city, better might be faster, more available, less racist, less intense experience, cleaner, etc, etc, etc.

They don't need to be cheaper in most places, at least not yet.

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

#410

Post by obmelvin »

ajross wrote: post #381
walrus1066 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But so what? Full autonomy needn't even be a business goal of Waymo. They just want full deployment. Having a system in place which reduces or eliminates many/most of the accident root causes would be worthwhile to install on any vehicle on the road even if it technically had a human driver. The "goal", such as it is, is to have a technology worth using. It's not to transcribe whichever comic book utopia someone has…

Their stated goal is indeed full autonomy.
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