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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

waymo.com

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#81

Post by rgmerk »

wolrah wrote: post #41
_diyar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. However, if you think about this for 2 seconds with even a rudimentary understanding of sensor fusion, more hardware is always better (ofc with diminishing marginal value). But ~10y ago, when Tesla was in a financial pinch, Musk decided to scrap as much hardware as possib…

> I fully agree with your first point: Musk has shown tremendous ability to manage companies to become unicorns. He's clearly skilled in this domain. I would firmly disagree with that. What Musk has done is bring money to develop technologies that were generally considered possible, but were being ignored by industry incumbents because they were long-term development projects that would not be profitable for years. W…

Home batteries are being installed at insane rates in Australia at the moment. Very few of them are Powerwalls because Tesla have priced themselves out of the market (and also Elon’s reputation is toast).

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#82

Post by SeanAnderson »

Is the TL;DR of the article that they're launching this (https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...) new vehicle design?

I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#83

Post by nradov »

devmor wrote: post #66

Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.

Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#84

Post by harikb »

mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.

What you envision might happen in 2100+

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#85

Post by devmor »

nradov wrote: post #83
devmor wrote: post #66

Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.

Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.

Yep! I'm not sure if they're waiting to pick people up or what, but they are straight up blocking traffic regularly in Midtown Atlanta. Usually its at least in the rightmost lane of a dual lane going the same direction, but a couple times now I've had to drive into the opposing traffic lane to get around them.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#86

Post by abraxas »

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing:

https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t

[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:

"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#87

Post by AlotOfReading »

mlsu wrote: post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#88

Post by Alive-in-2025 »

lacker wrote: post #61
garbawarb wrote: post #4

I'm forever baffled that GM gave up on Cruise just as soon as Waymo was proving that autonomous driving is feasible. (Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)

It seems tough culturally. If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making. So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of…

Using tesla valuation is not useful. It's a meme stock, has AI bs overvaluation over it. It's value is completely unconnected from reality. The car business is declining steadily. It's a good day when the famous CEO doesn't do something incredibly destructive to the brand name. It's just going down.

At the same time, if Musk went away, the stock would crash back to reality but a non-idiot leader could just do impossible, crazy, hard stuff, like ... working on obvious new models and basic steady improvements.

Tesla PE is 398 today (after a drop). Toyota's PE is 13. Toyota at the least is not hemoraging market share, sales, revenue, profits. Tesla is losing on all thoes things. Tesla would need a 30x price reduction to get down to much much more stable and profitable toyota. It's gets worse because Tesla's sales and profit keep going down each quarter.

There's no doubt value in self driving but the overall value is questionable. If there are many companies providing it, and at least waymo is doing great, plus there are many many other companies in China in good shape, the value multiple won't be there.

What's the market value of all taxi compannies combined in the us? It was about $230 billion in 2024 (https://www.skyquestt.com/report/taxi-market). Will tesla get 100% of the us self driving business in the future? No, waymo at least will be a serious market competitor, tesla's service doesn't really work.

Because there are going to be muiltiple competitors with working products (we'll see if/when tesla ever gets there), Tesla's huge valuation will never make sense. Robots are much farther behind than robotaxis (there's no brain, no prototype of a learning system, maybe one day).

This got way too long, I think GM just saw it as a money sink. I think that was a big mistake, though.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#89

Post by netsharc »

youarentrightjr wrote: post #12
xnx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.

According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor) The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450

> The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind.

Long-distance amateur psychology question: I wonder if he's convinced himself that he's a smart guy, after all he's got 12 digits in his net worth, "How would that have been possible if I were an idiot?".

Anyway, ego protection is how people still defend things like the Maga regime, or the genocide; it's hard for someone to admit that they've been stupid enough to have been fooled to vote for "Idi Amin in whiteface" (term coined by Literature Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka), or that the "nation's right to self-defense" they've been defending was a thin excuse for mass murder of innocents.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#90

Post by mclau153 »

abraxas wrote: post #86

I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going…

Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?
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