Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/waymos-backseat-drivers-confidential-data-reveals-self-driving-taxi-hurdles?pu=hackernewsfuxi21&utm_medium=unlock&utm_source=hackernews

by ballmers_peak • 7 years ago

142 194 7 years ago

theinformation.com

mdorazio2• 7 years ago

Interesting analysis using comments/rider scores. 10% improvement over 6 months is actually pretty good, though. Even if that rate slows as trickier edge cases get handled, It still implies early 2020s for true driverless readiness in select locations. That's pretty much on track with overall predictions for the autonomous market.

bertil2• 7 years ago

I think standard car manufacturers and insurances would be in awe if their car safety improved at that rate.

onlyrealcuzzo• 7 years ago

Well, there's a ceiling of 100% safety, so it's diminishing returns after a certain point.

mactrey• 7 years ago

10 percentage points, 25% relative improvement (40% non-5 stars to 30%), seems quite good to me.

Although I wonder if seasonality is important here - obviously Phoenix isn't Minnesota but could driving conditions have been worse in Q1 compared to this summer, from the perspective of a self-driving car?

mdorazio2• 7 years ago

Definitely could be a factor. Other drivers might also be more used to seeing them on the road, which could have a positive impact in some way. I think the overall trend is probably pretty strong at that level of improvement, though.

IshKebab2• 7 years ago

That's assuming their rate of improvement is constant and there isn't a long tail of difficulty. But there is. The long tail of difficult driving situations is very very long.

An example from my most recent drive: I drove through a common where cows graze. I doubt a driverless car is programmed to slow down near cows.

The only solution I can see is to whitelist roads and start with the simplest (motorways/highways) then gradually expand to more and more roads. I guess that's kind of what they're doing - suburban America is very easy (although you still have pedestrians and cyclists to deal with unlike motorways), and maybe whitelisting is the cause of the routing complaint.

jacques_chester2• 7 years ago

If you get nagged to answer questions every time you give a 4/5 you eventually stop giving 4/5 and 5/5 everything because you just want to get on with your day.

The whole "if it's not amaaaaazing it's terrible" thing is idiotic.

netinstructions• 7 years ago

I wonder how many people are upset that the vehicles had to drop them off in a valid passenger load/unload zone as opposed to the usual Lyft / Uber tactic of parking in a no parking / no stopping zone, bike lane, crosswalk, etc because it's most convenient for the drivers and passengers (at the safety and expense of everyone else sharing the space)...

That quote at the end:

I guess Lyft has me spoiled. I like getting dropped off in front of the place im going too [sic] not just in the parking lot....

bertil2• 7 years ago

It’s mainly a different lobbying tactic:

- Uber and Lyft and more toe-stepping and will encourage their contractors to paint outside the line, deal with the consequence once the administration has caught up with them and is presented with the fait-accompli that this is voters’ expectations now.

- Google/Waymo has better relationships with local authorities and can obtain the permit to drop people off after they’ve proven they are playing within the line — and can wait for, and eventually finance urban furniture changes.

Both use people’s expectations, but differently.

btrettel• 7 years ago

Cyclist here. In my experience, the majority of the time a driver stops or parks in the bike lane in an urban area in the US (e.g., I live in Austin), there's a legal parking/stopping spot within a reasonable walking distance, often within 50 to 100 feet. (If this isn't true where you live, consider the difference in the location. There are probably exceptions too. I'm told that legal parking isn't typically close in SF.)

Then again, my idea of "reasonable walking distance" seems longer than most people's. Having spoken to many drivers who have parked in the bike lane, I'm amazed by how negatively some have reacted to me recommending that they park as little as 50 feet away. In some cases the non-bike-lane spot is closer but the convenience of pulling to the side of the road rather than doing a more complicated maneuver seems irresistible.

If Waymo follows the law, good for them. Makes me more likely to be a customer of theirs in the future.

jldugger• 7 years ago

I often see waymo vans near San Antonio and El Camino in Mountain View. It's kind of a nightmare drive for all parties. Curbside parking is allowed, there are no demarcated bike lanes, and much of the road is in suboptimal condition. There is often construction going along sidewalks and buildings, and uber dropoffs are common. You occasionally see cyclists, though I suspect most stick to a side street.

What I suspect people are complaining about is that Waymo doesn't do curbside dropoffs at locations with a parking lot -- not common biking routes. I bet Waymo doesn't have the data to know whether a curb is painted yellow, blue, or red, and just avoids them, while a Lyft driver would probably put on hazards and drop people off at yellow curbs and bus stops.

scarmig3• 7 years ago

In the right light, this is a competitive advantage for Waymo. Prove that it's possible to have a ride hailing app that strictly follows municipal stopping/parking rules, and then encourage cities to start strictly enforcing those rules and ticketing offenders. Self-driving cars would presumably be better than humans at following those rules (at least, if we're imagining a world where self-driving cars work safely and consistently).

smelendez• 7 years ago

It seems like there's an overall issue where people feel they can't do anything if the car takes a weird route or drops them off in the wrong place.

Another comment mentioned in the story says the car skipped the drop-off location and inched passed a bus stop, and other people mentioned inefficient routing.

I don't know how the system works, so this might be user error of some kind, but plenty of people are not going to want to get in a taxi if they feel like they have no control over where it's going or where they can get out.

ghaff7• 7 years ago

This is one of the issues with machines vs. people. For an able-bodied person, like I am most of the time, sure I'm fine with being dropped off half a block away. The driver may ask me and I'll be "fine." If someone is using a walker--not so much.

I have to believe the last block or two problem will be a big issue with self-driving whenever it eventually arrives.

threeseed• 7 years ago

I have raised this point many times before.

Uber/Lyft drivers break the law dozens of times a day. In fact the entire experience is predicated on their ability to pick you up/drop you off in places they shouldn't e.g. out the front of your house.

I guess self driving cars will be closer to Uber Pool in terms of experience.

ttul• 7 years ago

The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

Judgmentality3• 7 years ago

I think it parallels nuclear fusion in a lot of ways. The impact is unquestionable, but the feasibility is an ongoing debate.

dumbfoundded3• 7 years ago

Yeah, that's a bit of an overstatement.

We created nukes, landed on the moon, took sludge out of the ground and used it to power the world. We connected this world with wires and glass fibers to build a real-time global communication system that also gathered all of the world's information in a singular and immediately accessible place.

Building a self driving car is hard but really not as tough.

How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade).

paxys4• 7 years ago

All great achievements, but none of these is in the same ballpark of difficulty as creating a general artificial intelligence (which is pretty much what self driving cars need to achieve true level 5 autonomy).

gowld3• 7 years ago

Waymo has a far better safety records than NASA, and it self driving cars. NASA is allowed to kill people. Waymo isn't. The Internet is allowed to be full of malware. Waymo isn't.

obernaru• 7 years ago

Depends what you mean by "self driving car". IMO, building a fully self driving car requires artificial general intelligence, which is so hard I'm not sure humanity will ever achieve it. If we ever manage to create the kind of AI that fully self driving cars require, self driving cars will be one of the most boring and trivial things that is done with that AI.

foobiekr2• 7 years ago

We won’t know how tough it is until it gets done once.

I don’t think we’ve demonstrated anything autonomous beyond the most trivial kinds of autonomy (e.g. the V2) in all of our technology history.

erfgh• 7 years ago

It's way tougher.

alkonaut3• 7 years ago

My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes "100%" of course.

How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year for a decade).

At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars, instead of developing self driving cars to adapt to human infrastructure. But I think that kind of cost is always going to be beyond what's acceptable.

I think the discussion is mostly pointless because of diminishing returns: if you can have "99.9% full self driving" for a tiny fraction of the cost, who would want to pay to go from 99.9% to 100%?

Initially human remote drivers will take care of the rest. And then there is a very slow commercial race towards using fewer humans that drives the very slow march to 99.9% and 99.99% self driving and so on. Driving the last second of the last edge case route is basically something that requires AGI (as long as we don't adapt infrastructure).

ocdtrekkie3• 7 years ago

My peeve is not the slow progress: My peeve with self-driving companies, Waymo and Tesla alike, is their constant misrepresentation of their capabilities and their timelines for the benefit of stock value and public opinion. The technology doesn't really work, and Google's marketing for the past five years has claimed regulations were the only thing holding them back.

whatshisface2• 7 years ago

Is the market really being fooled? Tesla's stock price falls pretty often, and in a universe where the hype was real it would be a lot higher.

DannyBee• 7 years ago

citation? This feels like you swapped google for tesla (Elon literally said that, i can't find anything that says Google has said it)

ghaff7• 7 years ago

In all fairness, it seems as if a lot of the companies and individuals on Team Right-around-the-Corner have really backed off in the past year or so. I'm not sure how much of this is the deflating of unrealistic expectations and how much is just a tacit agreement to stop trying to top each other given how many hurdles remain.

damq• 7 years ago

The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn’t disclose the information even though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

What's up with this statement? Should I be forced to publicize my phone calls just because I made them while driving on public roads? It's utterly bizarre that the author thinks he is entitled to see Waymo's data.

moomin2• 7 years ago

No, because you get the use of the roads as part of paying your taxes. These are special licenses, providing resources for private research for free with the costs being borne by the public.

lallysingh2• 7 years ago

What costs?

ForrestN2• 7 years ago

I'm not sure if I agree with the writer's statement here, and I'm not sure the right outcome is for Waymo to share data, but I don't think your analogy works.

Your individual phone calls are made as part of your general participation as an individual in society. One of the largest companies in the world, which does its best to avoid paying taxes, is using public roads as a fundamental part of the infrastructure for a project to generate data.

Maybe a better analogy is people who grow large amounts of marijuana in national parks? Yes, it's true that the growers are part of the public, and that the public owns the land, but...

I wouldn't have a problem with stuff like this if corporations were taxed at reasonable rates, and didn't participate so wholeheartedly in efforts to corrupt our democracy. Google donates to many truly vile, despicable politicians in order to shirk accountability, hamper regulation, and accomplish just this sort of de-facto subsidy and others like it.

gowld3• 7 years ago

Corporations are made of people that pay income tax and property tax

icelancer2• 7 years ago

> corporations were taxed at reasonable rates

Corporate tax is incredibly high in the United States. It is why corporations funnel their money into other areas where it is taxed at a lower rate. No one gets away without being taxed. Payroll taxes, property taxes, use taxes, L&I taxes, etc.

kahnjw2• 7 years ago

How about UPS/FedEx? They certainly test new products on public roads and have no requirement to make public the resulting data.

paxys4• 7 years ago

Companies may or may not have agreements in place with local governments, and those agreements may or may not include provisions for compensation, data sharing etc. However, just saying "you used public roads so you have to make your data public" makes no sense.

ocdtrekkie3• 7 years ago

I think the important point here is that Waymo is testing a dangerous technology on public roads. Putting the public at risk for their corporate benefit. If I'm a test obstacle to see if your car stops in time to avoid hitting me, I should probably get something out of the deal.

sockgrant• 7 years ago

All car manufacturers test their cars on public roads.

lallysingh2• 7 years ago

I wonder if they spread out to more areas - where there's more variety of driving conditions - if they could start rating difficulty well enough to estimate when they would be able to operate in each one.

So maybe they could start working in 2 years in sprawled suburbs in hot areas where you don't have many cyclists or pedestrians? Or is that Phoenix already and it's still too hard?

avocado4• 7 years ago

10500 rides, 70% are rated 5 stars (perfect). 10% increase from last year.

scarmig3• 7 years ago

5 stars isn't perfect. 5 stars is "there's nothing so bad that I want to take the time to complain about it."

Waymo employees, who are encouraged to be especially tough, give reviews that are 47% negative. That's likely closer to the metric for perfect.

We don't get perfection from human drivers either, of course. Though part of the promise of Waymo is much better performance than humans, which it apparently isn't close to yet. And this data is for relatively common cases: for the long tail, one-in-a-million case, the conventional wisdom is that humans would do better.

falcor842• 7 years ago

If I were "encouraged to be especially tough", I can promise you that the taxis I ride in would get a much worse score than 47% negative.

CloudYeller• 7 years ago

When are they going to just seal off an area so it's self-driving vehicles only, and test them there? In a 100% self driving environment, edge cases are probably much easier to reason about. And if the future is 100% self driving, they should probably get some training data from that environment anyway.

icelancer2• 7 years ago

> When are they going to just seal off an area so it's self-driving vehicles only, and test them there?

Talk about your all-time overfitting problem.

tlb• 7 years ago

Waymo has quite a large autonomous-only test facility. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid... They also use it to populate simulations with realistic traffic models.

berdario• 7 years ago

They already ran plenty of tests in a controlled environment:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-waymo-self-driving-car-ca...

javagram• 7 years ago

With bicycles and pedestrians sharing the common roads, a 100% self driving environment anywhere but the freeway is never going to happen though. They need to be able to handle the chaos.

xivzgrev• 7 years ago

Despite the complaints, this is fucking amazing. I remember just earlier this decade I was pissed off at a taxi company for saying a taxi will come in 20 minutes...maybe, dispatcher can’t promise. Now we got Uber/lyft, and then...DRIVERLESS vehicles?? Always seemed like science fiction but the future is here...

The bitch of this business is the long tail of possible scenarios - before people have confidence you need to solve the long tail which is hard because not as much data / much less predictable. Sounds like from article though they are making headway!

moomin2• 7 years ago

This might just be me, but it strikes me that the biggest problem self-driving cars has is that no-one actually needs them. Don’t get me wrong, you try to sell me a car that has the (fully capable) feature I’d definitely want it. But need it? Well, you’re not going to solve the problem of too many cars and the slow traffic that results with cars. It’d be hard to get special treatment for cars with a premium feature. Then there’s the taxi model, where the aim of the game is to undercut people that Uber has already managed to push below minimum wage. I mean, there’s a margin there, but is it really “Next Google” sized? Even with dedicated vehicles, that’s a lot of hardware to maintain.

Now let’s assume it’s successful and sustainable. Let’s say we also manage to get it to work for freight. What have we achieved? Well, we’ve put a couple more of the jobs available to low-skilled workers on the scrap heap. There will be consequences to doing that, but I doubt Waymo will be footing that bill.

gpm• 7 years ago

There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US [0]. They are paid at least minimum wage. Alphabet has 148.299B revenue per year [1]. A conservative estimate of the revenue waymo could earn just by replacing truck drivers is 7.25 (minimum US minimum wage) * 40 (working hours per weeks) * 50 (working weeks per year) * 3.5 million = $50 billion a year.

I think once you expand past the US, and past trucks, this is definitely "Next Google sized".

[0] https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...

Noos• 7 years ago

That's a pyrhhic victory though. You'd essentially convert trucking into retail, making a semi-skilled workforce as well as small entrepreneurial one into a just-in time near contract workforce with high barriers to entry to start businesses.

josephagoss• 7 years ago

Disabled people need them, very old people need them. Drunk people need them.

Lots of people could do with a driverless car.

paxys4• 7 years ago

I personally think there are very few things we need today more than self driving cars. Driving is one of the most dangerous things we willingly do in our daily lives. There is an insane amount of valuable space in cities devoted to roads and parking, which is all used inefficiently. Valuable time is wasted in commutes and traffic.

Now imagine if every driver on the road followed all rules. Traffic flowed smoothly and there were fewer accidents. Your car dropped you in the middle of the city and drove out of sight till it was needed again. No one ever drove drunk or impaired. You could catch up on work or just watch something during your daily commute.

rimliu• 7 years ago

Now imagine strong wind brought down a tree branch on the road. A strong rain crated a big puddle. Etc. There is a lot more to driving than just following the rules. And I do no see how self driving car reduce the need for roads. Or parking. And the time spend waiting for them to arrive can be significant.

alkonaut3• 7 years ago

So long as I need to watch it, I don't feel a huge need for my personal car to be self driving. It doesn't free up any time for me, so I'm not ready to pay for it.

But if we had "full" self driving, as in the car can drive empty, that opens up new possibilities.

First of all, I could avoid owning a car all together. I could be part of a car sharing/pool system where I can summon a car when I want it instead. Those pools exist but their biggest drawback is you have to get TO the car instead of having it on your driveway.

Second, I could get driven home after having a drink. Where I live the legal limit is 0.02 so one drink equals a Taxi.

Those are features I'd very much be willing to pay for.

gok• 7 years ago

What a strange thing to have leaked. Not details how the tech works, but the database of customer ride reviews?

yifanl• 7 years ago

I imagine ride reviews are considerably less confidential than training data.

m3at• 7 years ago

Yes, also a few hundreds of terabytes of data are much less convenient to upload and share.

scarmig3• 7 years ago

What's HN's stance on publishers posting links directly to HN?

To be clear, this isn't meant as a blast against The Information or ballmers_peak; they're transparent about their affiliation and that this is an article white listed for readers referred by Hacker News. It's also a totally appropriate article for HN.

That said, I kind of wish there was some in-line indicator of a motivated submission source. I guess a downside would be unethical publishers just laundering their submissions through ostensibly unaffiliated accounts, but I'd feel more comfortable knowing that we did have some kind of system here to encourage transparency.

minimaxir• 7 years ago

HN doesn't have any rules against self-promotion as long as it's not spammy/low quality content.

Additionally, this is an interesting case as the custom link is an official way to bypass the paywall, which is the more frequent HN complaint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20414141

Comments are a different story, e.g. if a startup employee that works for the startup comments on a post about the startup, they should disclose it.

abtinf• 7 years ago

As long as HN has effective vote ring detection, I don’t see any issue with directly posting links.

The crowd helps us here and paternalistic rules can only prevent it from functioning correctly. If the post is good, it will move up. If not, it won’t.

deminature• 7 years ago

The Information is some of the highest quality and well-researched tech journalism out there. They frequently break stories months in advance of other publications, and are one of the few tech outlets that actually warrant having a paywall, and are not just rehashes of press releases. I personally have no issue with publication staff posting content.

Animats2• 7 years ago

That's useful info. I wonder where they had trouble with erratic steering. One Cruise video shows that where driving is alongside parked cars on a narrow street and the parking is irregular. The self driving vehicle is trying to stay in its half of the street unless absolutely necessary.

Waymo still has to use "safety drivers". So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers". Which makes it useless. That's the big milestone to look for. When Waymo can get rid of the safety drivers, which they tried briefly last year, they're getting close to something useable.

Some products take a long time to bring to market. Xerography - first copy made in 1939, commercial success 1959. Although we're now 15 years after the DARPA Grand Challenge, so we're coming close to that 20 year wait.

Television - first broadcast, 1928, commercial success, around 1948. So 20 years agaon.

Roller bearings - Timken founded 1898, Timken bearings in 80% of US cars by the 1920s. 20 years again. (Although it took a really long time for them to convert railroads. First locomotive with roller bearings, 1923. In 1949, they were struggling to get railroads to put roller bearings on freight cars.[1] In 1991, roller bearings became mandatory for US inter-line interchange of freight cars.) Air brakes and automatic couplers only took 7 years, but that's because the U.S. Congress made railroads convert and standardize between 1893 and 1900.

What took a really long time, in post-1900 technology? (Before 1900, manufacturing infrastructure wasn't really ready for fast deployment.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ

wpietri4• 7 years ago

Yeah, I think this is going to be a long one. Rodney Brooks, AI researcher and Roomba cofounder, says he doesn't expect a real robot taxi service before 2035: https://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/

When Waymo can get rid of the safety drivers [...] they're getting close to something useable.

I suspect that they can cheat this one a little. As long as they're in an area with good connectivity and the cars are smart enough to pull over if they don't get human guidance, I expect they'll move the backup drivers to a central location. Call it SAE level 3.5. It wouldn't be good enough to sell cars, but it would be workable for a ride service, and would allow them to undercut Uber, etc, quite handily.

PhasmaFelis• 7 years ago

I dunno, it's hard to imagine any safe way to drive a car in traffic via cell. I don't see how you could get all-round vision with acceptable resolution, frame rate, and latency. VR might solve the viewing angle, at least, but would greatly magnify the effect of frame rate/latency drops. You don't want your driver getting VR-sick five minutes in.

And that's leaving aside reliability. A 99.9% solid connection is not nearly good enough.

inflatableDodo• 7 years ago

Run the live video feeds from the vehicles through a style transfer AI that has been trained on Mario Kart, then secretly stream the result to a mobile app disguised as a free taxi driving game. All the app needs is a feature where the app turns off adverts if the player keeps completing taxi journeys without crashing the vehicle and you are good to go.

ggggtez• 7 years ago

Which makes it useless.

I dunno about that. Maybe it's not immediately valuable in terms of being cheaper than picking up an Uber, but there is still value in getting your sorta-working prototype on the road for data gathering. Your Uber drive isn't going to have a vehicle with dozens of sensors to help your ML bootstrap, that's for sure.

The value is in the data, not the immediate convenience.

zdragnar2• 7 years ago

So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers".

A common saying around here is that we have two seasons: winter and (road) construction.

Construction zones have pretty much every obstacle to automated driving you can think of:

* painted lanes that don't correlate to the temporary lanes marked by cones

* lanes that don't correspond to pre-programmed maps / gps

* irregular and unpredictable vehicle and pedestrian entrances and exits (construction workers and trucks)

* Areas where traffic is reduced to a single lane for both directions, and must take turns coordinated by humans with signs at each end of the lane

* speed limits marked by temporary signs

* rough, temporary transitions between pavement and gravel

Unless we can somehow get every state to compel every road construction company and every autonomous vehicle maker to use a single communication protocol, implement it at every construction site (so autonomous cars are made aware of these dangers) it's not going to happen.

Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads.

It's conceivable that the coordinated effort could happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath (due to the sheer increase in cost to the government) nor will I trust that said protocol will have fail-proof security.

falcor842• 7 years ago

Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force them out of their lanes on normal roads.

Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange vest.

zaroth2• 7 years ago

If it’s possible for remote drivers to assist a vehicle with no in-car steering apparatus through areas where the algorithm can’t go, then I think it can be done.

Getting to absolute 100% will require either AGI or an incredible infrastructure investment. Now personally I think FSD is worth on the order of $1 trillion per year to the economy, so it’s the next great Moon Shot, and totally worth every bit of infrastructure investment we can throw at it.

But it makes sense to see how much further we can get with in-car algorithmic driving before the infra investments start coming in earnest to fill in the gaps.

Another possibility is there could be ways for a passenger to assist the algorithm without actually using a steering wheel and pedals as input.

I believe the level before truly perfect FSD allows the car to get stuck as long as it does so safely. Approaching and stopping at a single lane construction zone, for instance.

The current Tesla AP does remarkably well on highways with missing lane markings. A stretch I drive every day is ground down in prep for new pavement and just has the occasional white square marking, but it’s enough for AP to lock in on. It also seems to do fine with cones.

It’s worth noting that construction zones aren’t even particularly safe for human drivers (accident rate skyrockets). So technology to make construction zones more passable overall is important, even if it just enables self driving as a side effect.

Nokinside3• 7 years ago

Remote operators solve these issue.

Once you have autonomous cars that driving safely, but can't manage complex situations like you describe, you delegate those for remote pilots that are allowed to operate car in slow speeds. You need 5G network coverage with mission-critical features (mcMTC) to archieve that. BLER 10^-6 and E2E latency < 5- 10 ms. Construction work crews might be required to erect 5G mini cell tower before they can start working to make sure that traffic goes smoothly.

Taxi fleet of 10,000 vehicles might need only 100-200 remote operators to manage the fleet. That kind of reduction in workforce provides huge savings.

Balgair• 7 years ago

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/06/flickering-car-ghosts.html

Essentially a POC that the car can see, but is so brief that the human cannot see anything.

daniel_iversen• 7 years ago

Mary Meeker's internet report this year is one place where you can see a summary chart that suggests that not only is technology innovation happening exponentially (which a lot of people agree to) our adaptability is also growing (which I guess it has to in order for innovation growth to continue like that?):

https://www.bondcap.com/report/itr19/#view/156

(however what's most interesting about that slide is that we no longer can adapt to the rate of change/innovation in technology)

So don't think things need 20 years anymore - how quickly before Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Google became mainstream?

Animats2• 7 years ago

That's not data. No scale, no data.

Actually, the period of greatest technical change in human history was probably 1860-1910. Steel, electricity, autos, airplanes, subways, radio, elevators, skyscrapers, machine guns...

tjmc• 7 years ago

What took a really long time, in post-1900 technology?

Fusion reactors. Still not there.

agent008t3• 7 years ago

Note that all of your examples had working prototypes; it just took 20 years to make them affordable/scale them (along with some incremental improvements).

With self-driving cars we have no such prototype and I would not expect one in the next 20 years. Unless we are talking about driving on specially equipped roads/lanes or in some special situations, where we might see them much sooner.

lrem• 7 years ago

The DARPA challenge mentioned was for providing a fully working prototype, all these years ago. And not a highway, but through an unmapped obstacle course.

snarf21• 7 years ago

I firmly believe that autonomous taxis are 30 years away. The big benefit will be for long haul trucking. That will be here in 10 years or less. They will have special rest areas where the autonomous trucks will park. From there they will only drive on interstates for long distances. When there, they will park at similar special rest areas. Local drivers will then take over and do the more difficult driving. It could really reduce costs as these trucks can drive 24/7 and we can even have them immediately turn around with another load from another company. This could all be completely automated. These rest areas are also a great place to put in charging stations to move these all to electric. By removing most of the narrow streets, cross traffic and unexpected pedestrians, it will be a lot safer.

jacques_chester2• 7 years ago

It's taken more than a decade to get to autonomous trains and autonomous mine trucks (Rio Tinto have sunk a lot of money into it), so I wouldn't hold my breath.

treespace8• 7 years ago

I know it's an out there theory but I believe the problem is much more fundamental. It's switching from an analog operator, to a digital one.

Pervious analog to digital transitions have been easier because we could afford to lose information. (IE Audio, from records to CDs.) It was just a matter of getting the digital sample small enough. Information was still lost, but not enough to matter.

But with driving, it matters. We can't digitize the world to a point where a computer can drive better than an alert trained human.

rammy1234• 7 years ago

why autonomous cars get so much attention ? Why they are always on news , why they always trend. Apparently for a common man why we are excited when we should be skeptical and more careful. so anything other than excited.

But for some reason these driverless cars do get most attention.

jeffk_teh_haxor• 7 years ago

A week ago Lyft driver who drove like a maniac. Will he get a saucy exposé too?

DiogenesKynikos3• 7 years ago

If you're planning on cloning him millions of times and putting him behind the wheel of every car, then yes, he does deserve an exposé!

dmix3• 7 years ago

The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn’t disclose the information even though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

Why would it riding on public roads matter when it's about what happens inside a private vehicle during a high-value R&D experiment? They got permission from Arizona to run the tests and it will likely benefit Arizona's economy in return being the first to get the most training data.

jessriedel3• 7 years ago

That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

calcifer• 7 years ago

It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public, not private benefit?

navigatesol• 7 years ago

It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

It's tiring reading commentators say things like this. Saying a professional journalist lacks "journalistic integrity" is bold. Why don't you step up and make this argument directly to the author, rather than being snide and posting it on a forum he will never read?

Here's his Twitter; have at it:

https://twitter.com/amir

IshKebab2• 7 years ago

Yes! The public definitely has an interest in how dangerous other cars on public roads are. Imagine if the data showed that they'd had tons of near misses with cyclists for example.

dmix3• 7 years ago

That's not what the quote is talking about...

Barrin923• 7 years ago

because other drivers and pedestrians on public streets have a very strong interest in knowing how safely these cars perform and how they glitch out given that they could cause accidents at any point?

JoeAltmaier3• 7 years ago

How's that different from any human driver on Saturday night?

Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles

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