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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#491

Post by trome »

lifeformed wrote: post #412
woofyman wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's just a partial list: deep pot holes, construction zones, standing water an inch deep or is it a foot deep?

How do humans tell how deep water is?

Humans generally look at it, make an informed guess and drive accordingly. The recent Tesla accident is a great example of how even the best optics can be blown out by environmental factors like sun, whereas a human would likely readjust their vantage point, lower the sunshade, put on sunglasses or even pull over if they are unable to cope.

Comparatively, the car did not attempt to do any of this and actually didn't even realize its cameras were in a state of failure.

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

#492

Post by tza2016 »

jcranmer wrote: post #312
joeguilmette wrote: post #49

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…

> So I'm genuinely curious as to what the magic sauce is that makes people so giddy for this future.

I think the magic sauce is utilization. A fully autonomous car's utilization rate can be close to 100%.

Higher utilization --> same demand for mobility hours/miles can be satisfied with fewer vehicles --> ceteris paribus, fewer vehicles sold every year.

Viewed through this lens, it seems inevitable that, in equilibrium (ie once the non-autonomous to autonomous fleet transition is complete) annual per-capita demand for vehicles will be lower with the advent of fully autonomous cars.

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

#493

Post by brwr »

dsymonds wrote: post #106
shogun21 wrote: post #79

I feel like they're really getting on the cute-sy theme, from the car's friendly design to the name "Waymo". The lack of control is still kind of terrifying so I think they're trying to make it as non-threatening as possible.

I've seen what happens when humans have control of cars. It's not pretty.

This is the point that I see everyone discounting. Whether autonomous cars turn out to be feasible or not, we know for a fact that humans are bad drivers. Don't we owe it to ourselves to try something different?

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

#494

Post by yohui »

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…

https://www.wired.com/2016/12/google-self-driving-car-waymo

> By early 2015, Fairfield thought they were getting close: The cars were clocking full days at Google’s testing grounds without needing human takeovers. They had driven 1.2 million miles on public roads and could pull over for emergency vehicles. They could detect and brake for squirrels, and read hand signals from cops and construction workers. They knew when to honk politely (Just making sure you see me here) and when to blare it (You’re about to slam into me!). Then the team spent the next year putting another 800,000 miles on the fleet’s collective odometer, to fine tune everything. And it gave 10,000 rides to employees and “guests.”

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

#495

Post by Retric »

walrus1066 wrote: post #487
Retric wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a human on call to remote into a Car is still a viable option in most of the US. This is not a good fit for sub second response times or tunnels, but it vastly reduces the endless .0001% edge cases. ED: Not hitting kids is manditory, not blocking traffic is mandatory, parking in every random stop is optional as long as their are safe places it can drive to.

Yes, it may provide a good impetus to upgrade our mobile data infrastructure. It would have to be ultra fast, ultra reliable, ultra wide coverage. Because if you can't remote in, and the cars caused a huge traffic jam, it'll be very difficult to get the owner companies human in to help out the vehicle. I guess the recovery man can just use a bike :/

It still needs to work 99.99% of the time. I am more thinking extreme edge cases like: "Drove off the highway to avoid collision and stuck in a ditch. Bridge out now what? etc."

Basically, you don't need a perfect solution in every case, just a safe solution in every case. A self driving car that get's to a gas station is a good enough step 1 even if you have some human attendants there to fill up. Sure, it might add $2 bucks per fill up that's still cheaper than highway driving.

PS: Self driving car, only works in NYC is also useful.

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

#496

Post by woofyman »

ticviking wrote: post #466
bhntr3 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My scuba instructor shared this piece of wisdom: "You don't have to swim faster than the shark. You just need to swim faster than your buddy." People get this stuff wrong all the time. Especially when they're drunk, tired or texting. These cars won't be perfect but I think pretty good and conservative under uncertainty will be better than human, drunk and overconfident.

That's a key point here. The cars don't have to be perfectly safe, just safer than the average driver.

It has be better than the best human driver or they'll get sued out of existance. You can't sell a product that you know will hurt or kill a certain number of people.

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

#497

Post by mplewis »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #402
notatoad wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That would absolutely be the wrong time to ask a human for a decision.

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

#498

Post by mypalmike »

nec4b wrote: post #372
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…

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.

> those who live in the urban centres

Per the 2010 US census, over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas.

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

#499

Post by MorePowerToYou »

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.

+1 Forget about trucks. What about trains? That's an even easier problem to solve than trucks.

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

#500

Post by anchpop »

DrScump wrote: post #176
treehau5 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clutter_(radar) Anyways, if this is true, it's a grim future then. Radar is incredibly trivial to interfere with.

And there's a dual risk of interference, too. One is the basic "environmental" interference with competing radar signals from other devices. Imagine how much more complicated this gets when a majority of competing traffic is likewise equipped. But the other risk, which seems to be mostly ignored thus far, is sabotage . Can you design a system that is hardened not only against stray competing EMR but also against atte…

When all the cars on the road are self driving, I don't see why they would need to have all their radars on at once. I imagine they would be able to communicate with each other and form a complete picture of the entire roadway without all of them having their radars on (or perhaps running at a lower power?)

This would be very difficult to train with ML, however. I'm sure there are other downsides I'm not thinking of

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