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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#601

Post by icebraining »

serge2k wrote: post #75
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…

> in 5yrs bold prediction: They won't have fully autonomous cars.

Define "fully".

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

#602

Post by legolas2412 »

MorePowerToYou wrote: post #483
monk_e_boy wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Bringing human decision making into the loop makes things messier. If any of these human decisions need to be made quickly in the interest of safety, then the driver needs to be paying attention at all times. That won't happen. This is very dangerous. This is also complex in terms of liability. If the car hits something while driving partially autonomously, where does the responsibilty lie? The software, the driver,…

But giving a computer complete control of the car with no human oversight is much more dangerous.

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

#603

Post by icebraining »

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'm not seeing where they're claiming that. This is just the landing page targeted at consumers.

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

#604

Post by frankosaurus »

aetherson wrote: post #523
mypalmike wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression. Only if you're an engineer. To a marketing person, you bundle groups of features together and price them at various tiers.

Er, I wasn't talking about pricing complexity, I was talking about the ability to actually get the vehicle that meets your needs. It doesn't do you any good to know that "a vehicle with three or more constraints costs $1.50/mile" if you get a vehicle whose three constraints are "4WD, Bike rack, Dog area" when what you wanted was "carseat1, carseat2, large storage area." And if the fleet can successfully meet arbitrar…

Perhaps a fleet of self-driving cars could reconfigure on-demand.

e.g. Customer orders a self-driving car with 1 infant car seat. A robot bolts-in a modular infant car seat at the depot and sends it off.

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

#605

Post by amelius »

serge2k wrote: post #551
amelius wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yet somehow self-driving vehicles are supposed to completely change the mix of transit use when it's not really adding any capability changes. Self-driving vehicles could be at your door within a 1 minute timeframe (say). That's a huge change, and will nullify the benefits of owning a car. Of course, this will be possible because driverless taxi companies will have the logistics in place to make this happen (they k…

> will nullify the benefits of owning a car Except I like owning my car. I can take it where I want. When I need it, I have it. I can leave my stuff in it if I want to (e.g. if I decide to go to the park for the day I can leave my coat in the car if it is warm). If it's pouring rain I don't have to wait, I can just get in it and go.

If you are using your car like a giant purse, then I'm afraid all is lost :)

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

#606

Post by ghaff »

IanCal wrote: post #581
serge2k wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh huh. and just what is the definition of urban area?

It's a definition in the census. I find it somewhat disappointing to see such a dismissive response when the answer is so easy to find. Here's a link to the definitions of urban and rural: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_urbanrural.html Here's the 2010 figures for the split between the urban and rural: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.htm...

I think the point was that the "urban area" definition in the census was quite broad. I live in an "urban area" on a decent plot of land with a Christmas tree farm on one side and a working farm/apple orchard on the other. Probably not what most people think of as urban.

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

#607

Post by erikpukinskis »

rtx wrote: post #555
agildehaus wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ridesharing currently requires human drivers which limits them to where the drivers want to be and limits them to how many drivers are in your area. When human drivers are not required you have neither of these problems. It will be significantly easier for ridesharing companies to provide availability in non-dense areas. Hell, they'll be able to control where these vehicles go by algorithm, so it will simply be a mat…

Why would ride sharing companies behave diffrently than human drivers. I don't think laws of economics will change.

It takes time to sign up human drivers and onboard them. Buying new cars can be done in bulk at scale.

Also, you can easily send a car from one city to another. A human driver needs to get home to their family. You can't just say "drive to Miami and work there for three weeks".

Also, simply decreasing the cost per mile by cutting labor costs makes further flung areas more accessible. You can't sell a $10 ride if it costs $10 just to pay someone to drive to the area and back. But if it costs $4 to send a car, that ride becomes financially viable.

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

#608

Post by legolas2412 »

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.

Not to get personal, but I'm getting tired of seeing this argument.

Why are people looking at the extremes? Only human drivers or a completely self driven car? What about a driver assistance system, that corrects a Human's stupid mistakes and still lets the human drive. I'm sure this hybrid (which is the current industry) is safer than both your extremes

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

#609

Post by legolas2412 »

swamp40 wrote: post #455
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…

They don't need to make them foolproof. They just have to make them safer than human drivers. And these days with everyone swerving as they text, the bar isn't exactly set very high.

They need to make it safer than average driver being adviced by driver assistance systems.

That system can fix the negatives of human drivers without affecting the advantages of humans over machines

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

#610

Post by ageofwant »

marssaxman wrote: post #594
ageofwant wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only needs to be a better driver than you for you to be safer, and its that already. I can guarantee you that on a one to one driving skills shootout between you and the software you will loose 98% of the time.

That may well be the case, but it does not follow that a 98%-complete self-driving car would actually be a viable product. It's not good enough that the robot can beat a human in a head-to-head skills test; the robot also has to be as versatile as a human, across an unpredictably wide range of circumstances. That's hard.

If a autonomous car can pass a standard driving test it should be allowed to drive. They always do, every time.
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