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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#51

Post by andybak »

analogmemory wrote: post #23
mberger wrote: post #16

Interesting that they built the site with Angular 1.5.7. I thought they would want to showcase Angular 2.

Showcase what? It's just a basic marketing site. Did they even need angular?

The problem is that many people learning web development nowadays don't realise there is anything other than impressively complex client-side MVC frameworks. They are taught that traditional HTML pages are a dinosaur and doing progressive enhancement with some simple jQuery or vanilla JS is something for amateurs and old-timers.

I'm really pleased I was forced to learn the web in layers. I learnt basic HTML, then CSS came along. I realised I needed some dynamic behaviour so looked into CGI/Perl and later PHP. The DHTML became all the rage and I picked up a bit of javascript. PHP began to show it's weaknesses and luckily Django and Rails popped up. Ajax became a thing somewhere in all that and returning JSON instead of HTML snippets was sometimes useful.

If you start now and dive into learning Angular/React/Ember/Whatever - you are so insulated from the lower layers it must get a bit baffling trying to understand how all the parts fit together and why some things are done the way they are.

tl;dr - Get off my lawn.

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

#52

Post by positr0n »

pookieinc wrote: post #44

This is really exciting! I see these cars all over the place in the Bay Area, so it's nice to see that they're at least one step closer in making it into a product and thus bringing it to reality. I wonder about the internationalization of this product, especially if (or when?) it's brought to other countries and regions, such as the Middle East. In some of those countries, women aren't allowed to drive and men drive…

Women aren't allowed to drive in, e.g. Saudi Arabia, because they aren't allowed to be out of their home without a blood relative or husband. That could lead to mingling with the opposite sex or something like that. “What would happen if a woman got in a car accident? Then she would be forced to deal with the male driver of the other car, a stranger, with no oversight." [0]

So I don't think self driving cars will solve that problem at all, sadly.

[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/-ne...

Quora answers from people that appear to be saudi: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-women-not-allowed-to-drive-in-...

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

#53

Post by ucaetano »

ddoolin wrote: post #33
ucaetano wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"how they compare to Tesla" Given that Tesla doesn't even have emergency braking and auto-steering, I'd guess they compare quite favorably...

Tesla models equipped with Autopilot enhancements do in fact have some form of emergency braking (automatic emergency breaking) to avoid rear-end collisions and primitive auto-steer.

Yes, but they aren't sold anymore.

And "autopilot" has been on the market for over a decade, it's OEM off-the-shelf equipment.

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

#54

Post by bluehawk »

hellcow wrote: post #31
visarga wrote: post #6

At least they could have given a more up to date report on what they are doing. 7 years passed since 2009 and all we've seen is a couple of promo videos with scant actual information. We have no idea how they compare to Tesla or other self driving car startups.

Tesla has lane-assist, adaptive cruise control and a few other goodies. Many auto manufacturers have those things. You still have to manually follow GPS directions. Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge. Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to…

> Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to the supermarket.

That's exactly what Tesla is marketing and working on with their new self-driving features, and you can buy cars that will allegedly be capable of this today.

"All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed. When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."

From https://www.tesla.com/models/design

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

#55

Post by heywire »

On days like today, when there are several inches of snow on the ground and more to come, I always wonder how autonomous vehicles will handle such situations. What happens when snow (or mud, etc) accumulates on the camera or sensors? I don't doubt that a computer can react quicker and with more precision in an "event", but what about when it simply can't "see"? I don't see a steering wheel in these videos, so I guess there is no manual failsafe?

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

#56

Post by scarmig »

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…

Is there a particular reason to think Uber is going to be last to autonomous vehicles? I can see a good argument that they're head of the pack today, between Tesla's not-really-autonomous vehicles and Google's perpetual inability to execute.

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

#57

Post by bdrool »

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.

Or, if everyone has a self-driving car of their own (or one that can be converted to self-driving), people will rent out their cars AirBnB-style when they aren't using them. I mean, why not? You've already got a garage, a driveway, etc. Might as well make a few extra bucks with your vehicle...

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

#58

Post by aoeu345 »

hellcow wrote: post #31
visarga wrote: post #6

At least they could have given a more up to date report on what they are doing. 7 years passed since 2009 and all we've seen is a couple of promo videos with scant actual information. We have no idea how they compare to Tesla or other self driving car startups.

Tesla has lane-assist, adaptive cruise control and a few other goodies. Many auto manufacturers have those things. You still have to manually follow GPS directions. Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge. Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to…

>Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today.

It should be obvious that Tesla is going to win this race. Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November. And they build real, production cars. "Real artists ship", as Steve Jobs said.

If you a manufacturing ace, would you join the company with a long list of failed projects and no actual production cars, or would you join the company that is building 500,000 of the most advanced autos right now?

If I was a hardware expert, would I join Google who shies at giving a fraction of it's cash to hard tech, or Tesla who buys german automation companies?

Or plain old software. Tesla has magnitudes more data and can update neural networks to hundreds of thousands of cars at a whim. Soon millions.

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

#59

Post by stormbrew »

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…

Uber is literally all over the world, though. Google can barely launch a keyboard app outside the US. Or a payment system. Lyft is still constrained entirely to the US and a handful of large Asian cities.

I think people severely underestimate Uber's worldwide push in preparing themselves to be a force to be reckoned with when the autonomous vehicle takes off.

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

#60

Post by Animats »

tedajax wrote: post #14
joezydeco wrote: post #12

Interesting that this very same day, the US Government is looking into proposals to require vehicle-to-vehicle communication in passenger cars to enhance safety. http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-call-on-cars-to-chat-...

Seems a little premature to require this as we don't necessarily know that this would help.

Chris Urmson, back when he headed Google's self driving car effort, said car to car communication was unnecessary. The car has to have good enough sensors and decision-making to deal with all the things that aren't communicating, from pedestrians to deer.
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