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Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

blog.waymo.com

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Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#481

Post by bluGill »

bobsomers wrote: post #408
bluGill wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So long as it is only urban areas it is a band-aid for the lack of good transit options. Not that you are wrong, just that you should be wrong because if cities actually had useful transit rural areas would be a much larger share of demand despite not having many people.

Very true, but retrofitting good transit into a city that didn't plan for it is extremely expensive and disruptive. I see these kinds of services being a great complement to public transit in cities that have struggled to make them attractive. For example, I am way more likely to take Cal Train into SF if I can use a point-to-point service like Uber/Lyft/Waymo to get me the rest of the way there. Without that missing…

The best time to do good transit was 20 years ago, the second best is today. SF needs to quit making excuses and make transit good. What they have is not good even if it better than everyone else in the US.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#482

Post by dabeeeenster »

ketzo wrote: post #421

Many comments in this thread are variations on a theme of "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human drivers, who aren't actually all that great." I think it would be nice if this were true, and I suppose it is from an actuarial perspective, but it's also an extremely flawed point. From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth,…

People get on passenger planes every day and there are loads of instances of those crashing for extremely unorthodox reasons.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#483

Post by rudyfink »

sandworm101 wrote: post #235
hammock wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard to actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard with no in-between steps.

Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases. Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound. https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-ch…

I think of that as a parachute-rigger solution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_rigger).

Historically, people packing parachutes could be randomly selected to jump with the parachute they had packed.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#484

Post by nixpulvis »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #59

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix. Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being…

Ah yes, the SF elite will gladly shell out fortunes to ride around in a car just for the opportunity to witness the gross power of AI! Not to mention it's a nice Jag. I wonder if they are hiring models for the "autonomous specialist" role?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#485

Post by tylerrobinson »

ggggtez wrote: post #383
pitaj wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How well do sensors and vision systems handle winter conditions like snow and lack of lane markers?

Easy, my dumb level-0 car can tell me when it's icy. And finding lane markers is one of the easiest tasks in self driving (the hard part is knowing when to ignore them).

You're being downvoted for the flippant and dismissive tone of your comment, but I do wonder how computer-driven cars will determine when it is acceptable to violate lane markings and road signs. Boston in winter is more than just traction control. There are snow piles that might be icy, ridges left from a plow, shifting conditions, and bad visibility. I suspect it IS a hard problem.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#486

Post by newsclues »

paxys wrote: post #308
nradov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. With modern car tech (traction monitoring, ability to redirect torque to a specific tire, ABS, radar) an automated car is going to have an easier time navigating snow/ice/rain than a human driver. The real challenges when navigating city streets are the human ones – delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal worker fixing a man…

If a pedestrian slips in deep snow while crossing a street and is no longer visible because the snow obstructs them, does the car see a clear path and kill someone or not?

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#487

Post by ra7 »

pvarangot wrote: post #465
MichaelZuo wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a big point if true. What’s the source for that info?

Not sure if I can tell so I'll have to pass on answering that. You can take a look at this though: https://youtu.be/0oyjYH6v0b8?t=434

Those are their previous generation vehicles. The I-Pace in SF are the newest generation with upgraded sensors.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#488

Post by jdavis703 »

pbreit wrote: post #89
espadrine wrote: post #47

Waymo is currently the only SAE Level 4[0] self-driving car in use, right? The wheel must not be used. Even though it is limited to two cities. Their technology seems an order of magnitude above the rest, although factoring in its cost could make it look worse. (Can it turn a profit, when including the development costs?) Tesla FSD is at best SAE level 3 (can need human fallback), and at worst level 2 (needs constant…

Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4. I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?

The program was first publicly revealed nearly 11 years ago. People saying this project would take decades aren’t wrong.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#489

Post by JohnWhigham »

whimsicalism wrote: post #389
nradov wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

Lived in Boston for quite a while, and grew up driving in a city. I find SF much more challenging to drive in, at least wrt the other drivers. In Boston, drivers are aggressive and take calculated, dangerous risks to meet their goal. In SF, a lot of people on the road act like it's their first time driving in like 5 years and they're still figuring it out. There's no rational risk-taking towards a goal, but more peop…

That's a great description of driving for literally everywhere in the country that's not the Northeast. It's also why I think driving in the Northeast is the safest. Driving on highways in the South is scary.

Re: Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

#490

Post by delecti »

nradov wrote: post #92
ra7 wrote: post #19

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test. Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering m…

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

In my experience with snow driving, a well maintained car (including good snow tires) goes a long way, and a fleet of commercial vehicles (like these) will have that as an edge over the average driver.
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