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Waymo: Google's self-driving car company

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

#741

Post by IanCal »

aetherson wrote: post #384
robszumski wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a huge fleet of self-driving cars, there would be enough capacity to have permanently configured cars for child seats, bike racks, dog areas, etc. eg. "I need a 4wd vehicle for 2 adults and 2 bikes to take me to X park at 10am tomorrow."

Not without seriously increasing the costs for car rental. The cost savings for car rental are predicated on increased utilization. Increased utilization is predicated on each car having more people using it on any given day. And these things don't scale infinitely -- each car can only serve a particular locality. The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression. Kids 0-12 months or so need d…

I've wondered whether some of this would lead to a personal "pod" like thing. I am happy buying a box with comfy seats and a TV and kids seats, etc.

But I don't need or want to buy a wheel, batteries, cameras, lasers, etc. Those also should be upgraded as technology gets better but my box doesn't really need to be anything but a box.

So what if I could sit in my box and have a transporter thing come over and clip onto me and take me away? You could have child seats and I could have a lazyboy chair, or I might need 8 seats and you need storage space.

This would then let the actual transporters take other types of cargo too, rather than having a people vs items split. It would allow a pony-express style swapover rather than needing huge range in a single one. It would even allow completely different types of transport, what if my pod could just be clipped onto a big train and whip me to the other side of europe?

This would all likely have other downsides, but is a fun thing to think about.

TL;DR shipping containers

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

#742

Post by goferito »

gohrt wrote: post #701
awful wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't add anything profound, but I will say that 40+ years ago I camped at Disney's Ft. Wilderness campground, with all my many brothers and sisters. The electric trams had a routine schedule that came around and stopped almost in front of your campsite, all of kids would simply jump on, go to anywhere in the park like the stores, the showers, the outdoor theater, and hop off again. It was incredibly liberating and…

Yes, but Disney never solved the problem of how expensive it is to run that service -- they just got people to pay. Will self-driving cars be cheap enough? They save money on the driver, but cost money in the automation hardware and security against vandalism/theft.

I think that's the key. Without the driver and gas costs, it should be as cheap as a public bus, but taking you from front door to front door.

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

#743

Post by lhopki01 »

kbenson wrote: post #624
linkregister wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If everyone took a Lyft or Uber or Grab to work, then the congestion would be unbearable. San Francisco's BART takes about 400,000 would-be passengers off the road daily. Mass transit remains the most viable method of transporting people over dense, multi-mile terrain. The last mile and "normal" metros like Memphis, Baltimore, or Cleveland, where it is not dense enough to justify a comprehensive subway/light rail sys…

I actually wonder about this. Is it a matter of most cars being mostly empty, or is it inherently impossible to match the mass transit capacity. If we look at it as passengers carried over space required and time spent, here's how I see it: Rail mass transit does not as efficiently use the land it's on a occupancy basis (there's not always a train on a specific square foot of track). In peak times, cars are more effi…

You're comparing a 4 lane highway to a 2 track rail?

Crossrail in London will have a train every 2.5 minutes with a capacity of 1500 people per train.

Trains also do not slow down to a crawl at high capacity.

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

#744

Post by MagnumOpus »

EdHominem wrote: post #697
kbenson wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Toyota could probably do it more cheaply than Uber. I agree. The fact that autonomous cars will likely reduce ownership will put a squeeze on car companies, and it might make sense for them to branch into service areas, as they can get the cars at cost. I guarantee that for 10,000 Camrys purchased by Uber and 10,000 Camrys built and shuffled to a ride service division by Toyota, Toyota's ride-sharing division will…

It isn't efficient for Toyota to fully stock every city in the world for peak demand, and yet that's what they'd have to do to compete with the surging multi-manufacturer fleet of Uber.

They don't need to stock for peak demand. They don't need a monopoly (nor will they be permitted to get one).

To succeed worldwide, they simply need to be as good as Uber, but cheaper. And if the capital cost of the car becomes half of the cost base of taxis, a 10% saving matters.

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

#745

Post by Retric »

kvz wrote: post #569
walrus1066 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :/

And if you can remote in, I'm worried about hacks. Imagine the chaos if a terrorist group got in and turned the wheel of an entire fleet in a random direction. It seems to me anything can get hacked/any individual can be pressed, and it's alsways just a matter of if it's worth the trouble. Seems a hack like this is would be worth some, to some groups. Also: they only need to succeed Once. The rest of us need to have…

If you can call for a driverless Taxii then there is some level of remote access. So, it's going to be a concern in either case. However, you can set the car to dial out when it's confused rather than waiting for remote connections which reduces the attack surface.

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

#746

Post by joezydeco »

Animats wrote: post #60
tedajax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google is about platforms. The auto industry will need a common standard and platform if V2V is going to happen.

Wouldn't Google want to be first in line to get something out into the field? Morphing Waymo into a V2V base would be a smart thing to do IMO.

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

#747

Post by redwood »

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…

What you're missing is "how do humans cope with these scenarios?" -- by either cautiously slowing down or by following those humans ahead or both. Machines can do the same

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

#748

Post by aargh_aargh »

5ersi wrote: post #719
xyzzyz wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, not really as buses don't go where all the people live. They do, though, you just haven't been to places where this is standard. Try finding a place that's more than 10 minutes walk from public transit: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Warsaw,+Poland/

On a first try: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Ruczaj+40,+02-997+Warszawa,+...

Look again!

They have fricking helipad that takes them to the bus stop!

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

#749

Post by legolas2412 »

ageofwant wrote: post #665
londons_explore wrote: post #638

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Op has a good point. You might want to read the web in the back seat, but if you supervising the computer makes it safer, will the public let you doze in the back seat putting your life and the lives of others at increased risk?

If I have to supervise, there is no point. Having a human intervene in what should be 100% automated is putting my life and others at risk. Look at road death statistics: the vast bulk of incidents are are caused by humans sucking at driving - why should anyone want to continue doing that ?

I would say that humans should drive and computers should supervise and correct obvious mistakes, that however is status quo right now. It doesn't sell as futuristic fiction

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

#750

Post by legolas2412 »

MorePowerToYou wrote: post #648
legolas2412 wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agree 100%. This back and forth between fully-autonomous and partially-autonomous highlights the largest obstacles for "self-driving" car adoption. The fully-autonomous route runs head-first into the inevitable, messy problems with software: security, maintenance, feature creep, complexity, unreliable networks etc. In theory, humans could nail all of these in car software. In practice, it's highly unlikely. The softw…

I still don't see what's wrong with current systems (driver assistance systems)

Say an always on self driving car, but it doesn't drive. Human has to drive, and the computer can correct any obvious mistakes the human does. Keep a really high liability for the car manufacturer though

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