Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/welcoming-our-first-riders-in-san.html

by EvgeniyZh • 5 years ago

620 665 5 years ago

blog.waymo.com

tofuahdude2• 5 years ago

This is both incredibly exciting and a little terrifying. As a pedestrian, I'm still a little weary around these cars.

mikebonnell• 5 years ago

As a pedestrian, I’m terrified of all cars.

azornathogron• 5 years ago

Language tangent: I have seen this a lot recently from many different people, and I don't know if it's caused by typing on a phone or what, but I think you mean "wary" (cautious), not "weary" (tired).

tofuahdude2• 5 years ago

Indeed I do! I am not tired of self driving cars at all and in fact look forward to more of them. Thanks for pointing out.

boulos4• 5 years ago

Disclosure: I work at Waymo.

At least the current fleets of AVs (Waymo, Cruise, etc.) are "obviously" potentially autonomous. I'm honestly more cautious now as a pedestrian when I see a Tesla coming after the FSD videos. I wish I could know "Is that Tesla owner using the FSD mode?"...

gfodor4• 5 years ago

"obviously" potentially

I count three distinct hedges there :)

It's cool tho, congrats on the expansion!

judge20206• 5 years ago

I wish I could know "Is that Tesla owner using the FSD mode?"...

I wish I could know a lot more about the car and the driver in it too, such as if the car has pedestrian airbags[0] or if the driver is having a heated argument with their spouse. It's all risk management and ultimately the person behind the wheel is responsible for the exoskeleton on wheels they pilot, as the existence of cars at all is a net negative for pedestrian safety.

0: https://www-esv.nhtsa.dot.gov/Proceedings/23/files/23ESV-000...

supperburg4• 5 years ago

What is it about FSD that makes you fear for your safety? It seems a lot more capable than waymos solution.

Edit: can’t reply because “rate limiting”

That video is almost half a year old. Here’s a video from the same channel that’s 6 days old rather than 6 months old. Tesla pushes updates very frequently…

https://youtu.be/y85oGY02gtg

Here’s a video where the title says it all.

https://youtu.be/tdHlKhKKOgQ

I read one of the latest waymo blog posts and was surprised to see how directly you guys reference Tesla. It felt like the whole thing was written for people at tesla… You differ in choice of hardware but could you tell me more about how you differ on software? Is there any meaningful difference?

bluGill6• 5 years ago

The bar to being better than human drivers is not that high. It is a hard problem, but there is plenty of room to be better than humans while still being dangerous to pedestrians.

criddell• 5 years ago

Malcolm Gladwell did a podcast[1] on Waymo and their self-driving cars.

He speculates that something very different will happen. He thinks that self-driving cars that follow the laws and unerringly yield to pedestrians will transfer ownership of the streets from cars to pedestrians. Perhaps travel through cities in self-driving cars will be tedious and slow because pedestrians will jaywalk fearlessly and the cars will always yield. It's an outcome I never really considered before.

[1] https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/i-love-you-waymo/

yupper323• 5 years ago

This is already mostly the case in San Francisco. You always have to assume someone is going to jump out from behind a parked car to cross the street in SF.

nickromano• 5 years ago

As a cyclist in SF, I see the Waymo vehicles every day in my neighborhood. They ALWAYS see me coming and slow down or stop. I've had a few close calls with regular drivers not paying attention and missing stop signs so I'm looking forward to Waymo deploying more vehicles.

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

Last week Waymo said they are driving 100,000 miles per week in San Francisco. That figure is just bonkers. SF MTA only operates about 450,000 miles per week, and that was before COVID-19 shut them down. When one is on the streets of San Francisco does a Waymo Jaguar just drive by every couple of minutes? I honestly haven't been over there in a few months.

seehafer• 5 years ago

They’re all over Potrero Hill. I see at least one daily.

taylorlapeyre• 5 years ago

I see them in my neighborhood at least twice a day. They don't bother me, to be honest. Just like any other car.

specktr• 5 years ago

They’re also in my neighborhood - I generally see one every time I do an errand. They tend to drive 5-10 mph under the rest of traffic which can be frustrating. They also tend to be slow when making lane changes and turns to the point where it holds up other vehicles.

genericone2• 5 years ago

Long story short, yes, you do indeed see the white jaguar crossover with the spinning lidar sensors every few minutes while you are out and about. Always a different person sitting in the driver seat, yes I've checked because I didn't believe the number of Waymo cars at first either.

whimsicalism8• 5 years ago

When one is on the streets of San Francisco does a Waymo Jaguar just drive by every couple of minutes?

I live on Dolores park. They drive by multiple times an hour

Teknoman117• 5 years ago

I saw a few of them when I went to visit my friend in SF a few weeks ago.

STRiDEX• 5 years ago

I'm in glen park neighborhood of sf, it's the suburbs basically. I see them anytime I walk outside, but I don't think I keep track of which company I see driving by. It could be waymo, cruise, etc.

loganlinn• 5 years ago

The are everywhere. I'm fairly certain that I encounter them more often than SFMTA.

My car was broken into over the weekend and I couldn't help but think about whether a Waymo captured the vandalism... Not like it would help, but like all mass data collection campaigns, the potential implications are strange.

domh• 5 years ago

Anecdotally I've seen many more of them in Chinatown in recent weeks, it's not particularly rare to see multiple Waymo Jaguars at the same intersection waiting for the lights to turn green.

They seem to have taken over a previously public parking lot at Pacific and Sansome in the city. There are often 20/30 of these cars parked up there.

I've never seen one without a driver, but occasionally when I look at the steering wheel it is turning independently and just being monitored by the driver.

ecommerceguy2• 5 years ago

Waymo helps widen the gap between haves and have-nots. Lets see the next test in St Louis, Detroit or Baltimore - places where accessibility is orders of magnitude less than SF or PHX.

cycrutchfield• 5 years ago

They don’t have Uber in STL, Detroit or Baltimore?

ecommerceguy2• 5 years ago

Actually getting an Uber in some parts of STL is very difficult. If you ever visited you'd find out first hand.

purple_ferret2• 5 years ago

elon in shambles

rpmisms9• 5 years ago

Waymo and Tesla have very different approaches to autonomy. I think both are valid avenues, but it's fascinating to watch them develop in parallel. You don't have to make it into a spiteful contest.

purple_ferret2• 5 years ago

Most people in the Tesla camp (like George Hotz) believe Waymo is destined to fail.

lifekaizen4• 5 years ago

Definitely both valid business approaches, Tesla more interesting from a startup / leverage approach. As a consumer, I'm less excited about Tesla putting out beta software in situations where mistakes can be deadly https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/05/business/tesla-autopilot-...

Yajirobe• 5 years ago

Cue the haters who said Waymo is a money dump

pavlov• 5 years ago

Expanding to new markets and being a bottomless money dump are not mutually exclusive?

cobookman• 5 years ago

Waymo has raised 5.5B so far. How much does it cost to add a market and how long will it take to recoup those costs?

How much are Waymo vehicle operational costs vs rider revenue? How long do Waymo vehicles last?

Even with this announcement, we do not know if Waymo has a clear path to profitability.

michaelbuckbee• 5 years ago

I'm surprised the numbers for Phoenix are so low (10's of thousands of rides). I'm not sure if that fleet is just very small or my sense of how many rides/day a major metro can generate.

ra713• 5 years ago

They operate in only a small area of Phoenix metro – Chandler and some parts of Tempe. That's why the numbers are small.

My guess is Chandler is purely a testing ground for them to learn to operate a robotaxi service. Things like remote assistance, customer support, emergency protocols, fleet maintenance etc.

judge20206• 5 years ago

The drivable area isn't huge[0] so it seems like it's not a choice in many situations, especially not for commuting from a further-out home.

0: https://i.redd.it/4rsg9pui55531.jpg

poopypoopington• 5 years ago

I'll never forget I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out.

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

I discovered a few years ago that a Cruise will stop dead if it hears a horn. My bicycle happens to have an electric horn from a motorcycle. This provided some occasional amusement. I wonder if they still do that.

nso• 5 years ago

That would not be a very efficient feature to have enabled here in Mexico

chrisco255• 5 years ago

Don't worry, the later terminator models are much more effective.

ThePadawan• 5 years ago

He really does do all his own stunts.

useful• 5 years ago

Yea it is terrifying, I had a reflective vertical zipper on a jacket while out for a run and saw a Cruise swerve towards me after it crested a small hill. I guess I looked like the new lane

aix1• 5 years ago

I almost got murdered terminator style by a Cruise while riding my bicycle around SF... hopefully they figured that out.

I had to google "Cruise". To save others a moment or two, Cruise is a self-driving startup unrelated to Alphabet. In the quoted sentence, "they" != "Waymo" (I wasn't sure).

mulletbum• 5 years ago

That's awful. I am almost murdered daily and I live in a city without self driving cars.

mas-ev• 5 years ago

Can you elaborate more on how?

HN is getting to reddit's status where people make comments and everyone just upvotes because it sounds good to them.

blamazon• 5 years ago

People have been saying “HN is turning into Reddit” for over ten years. There’s a bit of an Easter egg at the bottom of the HN guidelines about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

hadlock• 5 years ago

A Cruise car nearly ran me and my baby in a stroller (a pretty standard model stroller for the neighborhood, too) in the crosswalk by Caltrain station. The rest of the cars have not been so overzealous in running down pedestrians. I give Cruise an extra wide margin of error since then.

t0rt01se• 5 years ago

Can't wait for these to be launched in my city! Love from Dhaka.

pm903• 5 years ago

Considering the Density of Dhaka, it would be much better served with public transportation/metro.

While the US has a lot of Urban Sprawl, dense Asian cities have the option to invest and reap the benefits of public transportation instead. Eg im incredibly excited about all the metro lines in India, HSR in China etc.

stickfigure• 5 years ago

Why did they pick Jaguar for the platform? That seems like an obscure choice.

ocdtrekkie• 5 years ago

Probably got them for free/really cheap. Waymo has regularly looked for partnership deals with car manufacturers, driven by the push to make Waymo look good on the budget sheets.

Also, companies pushing their own self-driving or ADAS solutions may be hesitant to partner with Waymo, excluding some of the large players.

michaelt3• 5 years ago

Well, as long as the tech isn't ready to sell to consumers, 'partnering' with Waymo doesn't have all that much upside for automakers. It's not like Waymo is handing over the secret sauce or promising them exclusivity. I also suspect over the past decade Waymo has found fewer and fewer automakers fighting to make a deal with them.

Jaguar doesn't have a high-profile competing autonomy effort of their own, that would create a conflict of interest and/or invite spying.

The i-pace is electric, which makes integration easier and won't hurt for PR purposes.

And it's luxurious enough that no matter who you're showing the tech off to, it won't be a big step down from their personal car.

lifekaizen4• 5 years ago

Most likely Jaguar is involved financially and it's not a straight purchase. From Wired:

"Jaguar, for its part, gets a large chunk of guaranteed sales and a chance to look like it’s at the forefront of this emerging technology."

- Waymo Expands Its Robo-Fleet with Electric Jaguar SUVs, https://www.wired.com/story/waymo-buys-jaguar-suvs/

willvarfar• 5 years ago

I can’t wait for truly autonomous cars. I live in the countryside and have to drive to collect and deliver kids, or abstain as a designated driver and so on. Self driving will change this.

The aspect I dislike is the move towards hiring cars on demand instead of owning them, though.

bluGill6• 5 years ago

hiring cars on demand makes sense in dense cities where most trips would not be by car even if you owned one (walk, bike, transit...). When most trips are by car anyway you are better off owning your own car.

travisporter2• 5 years ago

Actually, if the cost of hiring is less than insurance, maintenance and fuel, I'm all for it. Don't have to be sober, find parking. Don't know if that will happen in rural areas though

ra713• 5 years ago

It's fantastic to see Waymo's progress. SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ). They've been quietly very confident of their tech, but this is a real test.

Tangentially, I've also noticed that Waymo has picked up pace ever since the recent leadership changes. They are publishing more blog posts, offering more insights into their tech and generally seem to have increased their PR game. I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency.

bluGill6• 5 years ago

It may not scale to rural areas though. There are some roads were you don't need to look at the road in front of your: it is there and nothing else is. Instead you need to watch the ditches in a wide area around because that is where wildlife will jump out of in front of you.

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

The superiority of a blended computer vision system for this task, over a human performance, is almost impossible to overstate. The computer is not going to overlook even one deer.

Filligree• 5 years ago

So they’d need more training data. It doesn’t sound difficult to get.

ra713• 5 years ago

Is there a market for taxis in the rural areas? They have little incentive to expand there if there's no money to be made.

pnathan• 5 years ago

Having driven many rural roads, that is something I would be much more comfortable with an automatic system on: staring around for deer at night is the classic attention task where humans tend to fail.

What I wouldn't be as comfortable with is the "random sheet of ice" or "oh look, rocks" or "suddenly washboard dirt road".

bobsomers5• 5 years ago

It may not scale to rural areas though.

Most products, including this one, don't need to do everything to be both useful and profitable.

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

SF is a real nightmare to drive. If they can nail it there, that's 2/2 for busy, urban street driving (SF) and "boring" suburban driving (Chandler, AZ)

Both are low-hanging fruit. When it can navigate a snow-covered road at night while it's still snowing, get back to me.

bryanlarsen• 5 years ago

Doing that better than the average human is a pretty low bar.

joebob42• 5 years ago

But the bar to be better than a human in this case is also wickedly low.

I basically can't do this. If it was absolutely necessary I would go out there and drive like 5 mph and be terrified the whole time, but otherwise I would just treat whatever I needed to drive to in a snowstorm at night as temporarily inaccessible. I have lived in places where it snowed in winter before.

Lammy8• 5 years ago

SF is a real nightmare to drive.

'cause they decided not to build most of the roads: https://www.cahighways.org/maps/1955trafficways.jpg

mjmahone17• 5 years ago

Wait do you mean? As in, the highways proposed in 1955 weren’t built?

I’m not sure how highways going through SF would make it easier to drive in SF (outside of the highways): wouldn’t that generally increase traffic and conflicts?

jcranmer• 5 years ago

Cities that did decide to tear up urban areas for freeways aren't really any better. Consider places like Los Angeles, Dallas, or Houston.

What makes SF difficult to drive in (from my perspective of only ever being a pedestrian there) is a) extremely hilly terrain, b) the general difficulty of a dense urban environment anywhere, and only a distant third is c) traffic, which is merely an added stressor to the complex choreography that is an urban street.

pfarrell3• 5 years ago

There's a second Oakland/SF bridge that doesn't exist. Well, I assume it would go to Oakland. It's marked with "???" and just says "Crossing". I presume that hypothetical bridge wouldn't have Yerba Buena Island to connect through, so would be really impressive and long (compared to the Golden Gate and Bay bridges).

danielrhodes• 5 years ago

This is a bizarre thing to say when all of those roads exist, more or less, except for the Embarcadero which was removed after it collapsed in the 1989 earthquake (and was a crazy eye sore).

It is certainly true that the taste for elevated highways through cities has waned given the pollution and dust and general unsightliness that it produces. In the 1950s, when cars were all the rage, people were very excited by these things.

cascom2• 5 years ago

Supposedly more road construction doesn’t alleviate traffic, in only induces more demand (which is moderated by high traffic levels)

Source (great read if your interested in the subject): https://www.amazon.com/Traffic-Drive-What-Says-About/dp/0307...

nradov4• 5 years ago

SF is hardly a nightmare to drive. Try Boston during a winter storm.

pvarangot3• 5 years ago

This cars don't even work with a light drizzle.

_ea1k6• 5 years ago

Honestly, I think Boston is harder even without a winter storm.

paxys3• 5 years ago

I think people vastly overestimate the challenges of weather conditions for self driving. With modern car tech (traction monitoring, ability to redirect torque to a specific tire, ABS, radar) an automated car is going to have an easier time navigating snow/ice/rain than a human driver.

The real challenges when navigating city streets are the human ones – delivery vehicles blocking lanes, municipal worker fixing a manhole with a single cone to redirect traffic, pedestrians/bicyclists appearing out of nowhere, no one following traffic signs. This is the kind of stuff that tests "intelligence".

travisporter2• 5 years ago

What if the car/service just doesn't work or is planned to be offline based on the weather? It would suck to be stranded because it started raining, but would it still be valuable to have an automated taxi service on good weather days in big cities? I am inclined to say yes, and also delighted that this is the question I'm asking, but I'm an optimist.

whimsicalism8• 5 years ago

Lived in Boston for quite a while, and grew up driving in a city.

I find SF much more challenging to drive in, at least wrt the other drivers. In Boston, drivers are aggressive and take calculated, dangerous risks to meet their goal.

In SF, a lot of people on the road act like it's their first time driving in like 5 years and they're still figuring it out. There's no rational risk-taking towards a goal, but more people bumbling around unpredictably while unsure of what their goal even is.

spywaregorilla2• 5 years ago

Try a southern state that has never seen snow before but got half an inch and is losing its collective mind.

delecti• 5 years ago

In my experience with snow driving, a well maintained car (including good snow tires) goes a long way, and a fleet of commercial vehicles (like these) will have that as an edge over the average driver.

afavour2• 5 years ago

SF is a real nightmare to drive.

Yes and no. The weather conditions are probably close to perfect for a project like this. A city that spends months with icy roads... _that_ would be the real nightmare.

ra713• 5 years ago

Yeah, fair enough. Only adverse weather they'd encounter in SF is fog and may be light rain. But I still consider driving in SF pretty challenging, especially for an autonomous vehicle – narrow roads, people not following rules, pedestrians everywhere, cable cars in the middle of roads. Certainly more complex than Chandler, AZ.

bobsomers5• 5 years ago

I wonder if that was a mandate from Alphabet leadership to show some urgency.

Surely Alphabet has noticed that their competitors are nipping at Waymo's heels. If they don't pick up the pace, all sorts of business books will be written about how Waymo squandered a decade-long lead in the industry.

Groxx2• 5 years ago

SF is unpleasant to drive as a human, but slow, dense traffic seems like a near ideal scenario for autonomous. SF needs lots of social calculations if you don't want to get honked at, which is mentally taxing, but they're far from necessary for safety.

Even fairly simple autonomous tech will have better peripheral vision at near-to-mid range than one human can manage, so for all those bikers, crazy walkers, and chaotic 15mph cars you shouldn't hit, it stands a pretty good chance of being better. And when it's not, come to a stop and you're fine (barring some honks) - few are moving fast enough to hit you dangerously hard in those human-complex areas, and you don't need to stop instantly, just fast enough.

---

Honestly, I'd put SF at dramatically easier than either residential or highway roads. Residential (and adjacent) has fast-moving cars ignoring signs with obstructed vision, and inattentive humans at relatively high speed (bikers used to low traffic and swerving, kids and animals running literally through bushes adjacent to roads, general lack of care around vision-blockers like fences due to perceived low risk, etc). Who's-at-fault doesn't matter - in car vs human, humans lose, and people rightfully get upset.

Highways also seem harder, if highly specialized: accurate decisions 100+ feet in advance are absolutely critical due to the speeds involved, computer vision at that range has fairly low detail compared to humans, and lidar is practically braille for "car". Radar has trouble distinguishing stopped cars from the road because neither are moving. Ultrasonics as an ultimate backup really only work up to around 10m (and that's about the distance to stop a car at 25MPH, which you'll regularly encounter in dense city traffic).

I'll also point out that more people have died due to Tesla's autopilot on highways than Waymo, Uber, Cruise, heck all self-driving companies I'm aware of at any size combined. They're riding all the terminology lines they can to get away with it, and they may very well have an order of magnitude or two more miles, but I believe the point still stands - highways are hard.

dilippkumar2• 5 years ago

We can’t wait to hear from more San Franciscans as they experience the Waymo Driver themselves. Beginning later today, San Franciscans can sign up for the Trusted Tester program and help us shape the future of mobility in this city. Just download the Waymo One app to get involved.

Anyone else got this to work? I only see a message that says "It looks like you're not in our service area..."

zachberger• 5 years ago

"beginning later today"

jjulius• 5 years ago

Perhaps they really do mean, "Beginning later today" and it will be available for your area later today?

dilippkumar2• 5 years ago

I skimmed past that detail. Thanks!

lifekaizen4• 5 years ago

I was able to complete the signup process: requires a gmail account, email link to a qualtrics survey which asks things like name, age, where you live (if SF proper, neighborhood?). (I do live in SF and gave it location access)

mostdataisnice2• 5 years ago

Delete the Waymo One app and reinstalling worked for me when I saw this bug.

gfodor4• 5 years ago

Kind of interesting to consider how this adjusts priors on these outcomes:

- Self driving is not possible

- Self driving is not possible anytime soon

- Self driving is possible, but requires LIDAR

- Self driving is possible, and can be done with normal cameras

I've engaged with a lot of people who presume self-driving reduces onto AGI, therefore it will not be achieved anytime soon if ever. I wonder which of their assumptions is wrong, if this ends up being successful.

beaconstudios2• 5 years ago

The big concern is that driving as a human skill is reactive and adaptive, whereas ML (and software in general) models are pre-baked. If something happens outside the car's model, it will react unpredictably, and strange circumstances can arise while driving. AGI, as based on human cognition, would have the capability to adapt to as-yet-unseen circumstances.

XorNot3• 5 years ago

I would suggest visiting r/idiotsincars sometime. Humans are terrible at reacting to situation outside of their experience, and essentially do random things all the time.

If an AI system's default response is "come to a stop safely" then it's going to be way ahead of a lot of human "unexpected situation" handling in cars.

akiselev• 5 years ago

You forgot a fifth one: Self driving is possible but follows the 80/20 rule that states that the last 20% of work requires 80% of the effort. We probably haven't even started on that 20%

gfodor4• 5 years ago

That's the "not possible anytime soon" answer, which is probably the most common choice.

judge20206• 5 years ago

Self driving was never impossible, just infeasible with tech at the time. Surely it'll be standard in a few decades, despite that being quite far into the future.

MattGaiser3• 5 years ago

I assume that they just don't solve the really wacky edge cases which might require AGI.

Many people assume that a self driving car must be 100% successful. To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20%/bottom 80% of drivers.

So the car will crash if a seagull flies in front of the camera and there is a deer just beyond it. The human would probably crash too.

boplicity• 5 years ago

To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.

Computerized safety systems can, should, and are raising the bar, in terms of safety for the top 20% of drivers. "Self-Driving Cars" aren't competing in a static environment, similar tools are raising the safety bar that they have to compete against. This means it will get increasingly difficult to beat non-self-driving vehicles.

_rpd• 5 years ago

To me it is sufficient to beat the top 20% of drivers.

It's interesting that you set the threshold there (I presume you meant 'beat the bottom 80% of drivers'). Rationally, we should be happy if their driving performance is above average. I fear that the public (and the courts and the insurers, etc) will require airline levels of per-mile safety and still be wary.

dzdt• 5 years ago

I think self driving can work with AGI to match a horse. It doesn't need to understand with a depth and clarity of a human.

That is still a pretty high ask for current software.

morpheos1375• 5 years ago

Most important one you missed:

Given sufficient qualitative and quantitative investment self driving may be technologically feasible at some point in the future but not price competitive with human driving.

Self driving proponents seem to assume the tech is free. Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost.

BugsJustFindMe2• 5 years ago

There are enough people in the developed world who are physically unable to drive or use public transportation in their area and who also don't want to be homebound that the economics could still work out even if they were the only market, which they aren't.

Just keeping sub meter scale 3d street maps up to date has a massive cost.

True, but probably not actually necessary.

oppositelock• 5 years ago

I make these kinds of maps for a living.

Yes, it's expensive, however, as we refine algorithms, and the processing systems, it gets cheaper, especially amortized over more cars, where the per-car cost becomes affordable.

ML doesn't work well enough for offline maps generation either, and all the high quality maps require human editors for final touch.

All this work is currently done because realtime perception doesn't work well enough, and you can have a much more reliable system with the aid of the maps. Having a 3D base map of the world makes the realtime perception problem far simpler, and it makes fancy sensors less critical.

In the US, where the cost of labor is very expensive, self driving will make sense, even if it's expensive, but someplace like China or India, where a middle class person can afford a driver, it probably makes less sense, though the push for it in China is probably the strongest that I've seen anywhere in the world.

notshift• 5 years ago

Waymo already "self-drives" today, it just is extremely slow at making turns when the road is busy, and if there is any kind of unusual obstacle on the road (such as construction cones that require you to drive partially in another lane) it just stops completely and has the rider wait for twenty minutes for a manual operator to come and take over.

Those two obstacles won't be overcome until AGI. At best their frequency will be brought down a bit but not by nearly enough orders of magnitude.

zone411• 5 years ago

Completely disagree. This doesn't require AGI.

valine3• 5 years ago

Why would faster turns require AGI? Assuming the position/velocity of the all nearby cars is known it's not a hard problem.

Also even Tesla handles the obstacle in the road situation well. Their FSD beta will happily enter the left lane to go around obstacles.

TillE2• 5 years ago

Yeah it's been really odd to see the take that self-driving must require strong AI. It needs to be done carefully, but it's clearly a manageable engineering problem if you have good sensors.

Mangalor• 5 years ago

If there's a person at an intersection directing traffic, it will be very hard to have the car itself communicate with them as easily as a human can. Edge cases like that is where AGI would be needed it seems.

bob33212• 5 years ago

self-driving is more of a language problem than a technology problem. In 2005 grad students had cars driving themselves on a course. Tesla and Waymo both have cars that very drive well on many roads. self-driving is here, now all that is left is for people to argue about what "L5" means as the systems improve. They will improve as there is a clear path to improvement.

I don't expect that we will ever see the day where everyone is OK with self-driving cars on the roads regardless of the safety statistics, because there will always be edge cases of crashes and personal preferences around driving styles.

aaroninsf• 5 years ago

I am in the AGI camp, but have wondered and still wonder,

Why are efforts not focused primarily on interstate/highway travel, specifically, collaboration with DoT for mesh/distributed/coordinated long-term travel?

I don't need a self-driving taxi. I would pay 20K for a car which participated in a federally-regulated framework which let me let go of the wheel when I get on a highway and let teh emergent cloud determine how best to move my car and all the others on dedicated/reserved lanes in coordinated "trains" for hours.

The wins here seem like no-brainers. Sidestep all jurisdictional nonsense; optimize commerce and personal travel; automatically handle emergency vehicles and other unusual conditions; etc ad infinitum.

All my car needs to be able to do other than existing lower-tier self-driving/driver assist basics, is join the borg.

Coordination for traffic flow management seems like an unbelievable win.

But no, all we seem to be getting is cyclist-terminating taxis which cost $250K each and are, IMO, doomed in target-rich environments like SF to not forseeably adequately the last 8% of anomalous novel cases.

Just don't get it.

martinald• 5 years ago

I agree. I think the problem has been the ride hailing companies shifting all the attention to being self driving taxis.

For 95% of people I think the value is in letting them do other stuff while driving long distances/times instead of stuck behind the wheel. This seems many orders of magnitude easier than trying to tackle inner city driving.

peddling-brink• 5 years ago

Highways and big cities first. I predict non-self driving cars will be made illegal in areas like Manhattan, NYC.

ggreer2• 5 years ago

If you just want a car that drives itself on freeways, get a Tesla. Probably 80% of my car's 15,000 miles have been on autopilot. It automatically changes lanes to pass and automatically gets out of the passing lane afterwards. It takes offramps and interchanges. It automatically brakes for obstacles. It aborts lane changes if someone else gets in the way. It even works in rain and light snow.

Other car companies are a few years behind, but even something as simple as adaptive cruise control + lane centering is a huge help on freeways.

nradov4• 5 years ago

GM Super Cruise already allows you to take your hands off the wheel while driving on many freeways.

https://www.motortrend.com/reviews/cadillac-super-cruise-is-...

laichzeit02• 5 years ago

- Self driving is not possible anytime soon

Define “soon”. For me it means 50 years. That’s an infinitesimally small amount of time. If we can have level 5 autonomy in 50 years I will say that progress was rapid and we really excelled.

gfodor4• 5 years ago

I'd put 50 years in the "not anytime soon" camp. 50 years is an eternity nowadays with regards to tech.

goldbattle• 5 years ago

I think from the original DARPA challenges most researchers knew that while self driving is possible or more correctly "a promising direction", but its application to the realworld and its robustness was a far larger barrier back then.

We have the advantage of retrospect when looking at these claims which now may seem more possible then before due to our better understanding of the difficulties and technologies to address them.

I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality (ranging from robustness, infinite number of edge cases, perception, insurance, or public policies).

rurp2• 5 years ago

I think many people confuse their excitement for the promise of having self driving cars and the actual technical and political barriers that still need to be addressed to bring this to reality

I think most of the confusion is due to deceptive marketing. Sales people like Elon Musk have been saying that the big dream of true self driving is just around the corner for years now, even though they were nowhere close.

paxys3• 5 years ago

Self driving for taxis is a very different problem than for personal vehicles. For the latter you can always rely on the human driver to handle the last 1% or 0.1% edge cases and still provide a ton of value. Taxis don't have that option, so it really is perfect level 5 automation or bust. "Good enough" doesn't cut it.

cyrux004• 5 years ago

Taxis do have the option. Cruise remote operators "guide" taxis once every 5-10 miles during peak hours and thy expect to do so after public launch https://youtu.be/sliYTyRpRB8?t=212

eachro3• 5 years ago

SF seems like not the best place to pilot this from a risk management perspective (ex: homeless people messing with the cars).

pm903• 5 years ago

It says they will have a human onboard at all times.

eachro3• 5 years ago

I remember this one bit from a video on self driving cars back a few years ago where someone basically said that self driving cars would not work well in cities because people will always want to mess with the cars just because they can.

Consider how in the early 2000s when people would mess around with AIM's smarterchild chat bot and gave it outlandish scenarios just to see how it would react. I have to imagine you might see something similar here with these cars but you're right that having a human onboard would probably curtail these interactions.

enahs-sf• 5 years ago

I guess all that driving around the avenues in the middle of the night paid off.

dotBen• 5 years ago

Yes and the marketing copy that says "grab a bite in Sunset or visit Golden Gate Park" kind of implies the Ave's will the service area. I don't think it's going to be downtown and Soma, yet.

aRandomCynic• 5 years ago

It is heartwarming to see that Google is doing its part to solve San Francisco's homelessness problem.

reaperducer2• 5 years ago

When it's cheaper and easier to summon a Waymo than to find a public toilet in San Francisco, expect need to find solution.

judge20206• 5 years ago

Well, yes https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/1-bi...

cyberlurker2• 5 years ago

That announcement was from 2019. Honest question, how can I see the progress made from this investment? Did they build any, some or all of these homes yet? It does sound great though, I hope they did.

0xy• 5 years ago

Whoosh.

lifekaizen4• 5 years ago

Yes, haha. To be fair it's more of a government role and they do support the government with "2.1 billion in state income taxes" https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/04/15/which-bay-area-compan...

espadrine3• 5 years ago

Waymo is currently the only SAE Level 4[0] self-driving car in use, right? The wheel must not be used. Even though it is limited to two cities.

Their technology seems an order of magnitude above the rest, although factoring in its cost could make it look worse. (Can it turn a profit, when including the development costs?)

Tesla FSD is at best SAE level 3 (can need human fallback), and at worst level 2 (needs constant human monitoring).

[0] https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/revealing-our-approach-to-saf...

tshaddox3• 5 years ago

Those SAE levels apparently don’t specifically mention the geographic range the vehicle can operate in [0], but at some point that’s pretty important. Having “full automation” on a very tiny section of roads is hardly what I would call “orders of magnitude above the rest.”

[0] edit: that's incorrect, L4 and L5 are primarily defined by differences in geography range.

ericye16• 5 years ago

The difference between SAE level 4 and 5 is explicitly whether the autonomy is geographically limited or not. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car#SAE_Classific...

crznp• 5 years ago

Expanding the geographic range for Waymo is straightforward: do the same thing in a new place (plus new hurdles like snow, but that isn't currently the limitation to growth).

It isn't clear how Tesla goes from "FSD" to "full automation". They are working on the "draw the rest of the owl" step.

sjcoles• 5 years ago

FSD is still technically level 2. In Tesla's eyes and the law's eyes you are driving and in liable for what happens.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

It's also (and this is important for Tesla owners to keep in mind) not-italicized-technically level 2.

As in, "This system is known to degrade in ways that require immediate human manual intervention under risk of serious injury or death. Do not operate it without constant driver supervision and preparation for takeover."

nnadams• 5 years ago

In the automotive industry we called this "level 2.999." I've moved on from automotive now, but in my experience nearly all of the new vehicle features in development, big or small, are developed at that level.

pbreit5• 5 years ago

Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4.

I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?

marcellus232• 5 years ago

Did anyone claim _this_ was decades away? The claim is usually about when self-driving cars will actually be viable for anyone to use in arbitrary areas, not when experimental pilot programs are launched in individual cities.

afavour2• 5 years ago

I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?

What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4.

The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was and is around the notion that the vast majority of us would be sat in self-driving cars by now. That was always wildly optimistic. We're making progress and that's great! But there were a lot of breathless predictions years back that have not come to fruition.

pvarangot3• 5 years ago

AFAIK no one recently claimed level 4 with a safety driver was decades away, and I was working on self driving until a few months ago so I was kinda "plugged" into the news. A handful of serious companies have plans and funding to deploy L4 taxi fleets or L4 features to consumer cars in 4/5 years.

There's no commercial value at L4 whatsoever if you still pay a safety driver. It's usually even more expensive per hour than a normal human driver and the cars don't work under adverse weather conditions.

panick213• 5 years ago

Most commercial value is at Level 2 for quite a while.

jessriedel• 5 years ago

I would think most commercial value comes when you eliminate the human labor from driving, which is the dominant cost of transporting when there is less than ~10 passengers. What makes you think Level 4 is the most economically impactful threshold?

arduinomancer• 5 years ago

How is there commercial value if you still need a driver in the car?

jdavis7032• 5 years ago

The program was first publicly revealed nearly 11 years ago. People saying this project would take decades aren’t wrong.

pavon5• 5 years ago

That things are progressing about as expected. More specifically, Waymo is doing a bit better I than my general expectations, Cruise is about on par, and the rest slower.

Waymo has been at it for a bit over 12 years now. We'll have to see if Waymo's progress ramps up after San Francisco, but to me this is still looking like an 80/20 problem, with the added twist that each new region they expand to will have it's own unique 20% to learn that adds another 80% to the schedule. But that just validates Waymo's approach even more in my eyes.

mchusma• 5 years ago

I think almost no commercial value is at 4. I'm fact, it could be negative value. Because you need the expense of a "digital driver" and the expense of a human driver.

It's basically level 5 or bust.

mbesto3• 5 years ago

Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4.

There are two markets:

- Level 4 driverless taxis (~$500B market)

- Level 5 driverless cars for every human being (~$10T+ market)

So, most of the commercial value for Uber, Lyft, etc. is from L4, but L5 is where the most overall economic value is.

But L4 has to be achieved in all locations, otherwise that TAM is highly variable.

runarberg2• 5 years ago

AFAIK most of the cynicism around self driving cars is not that it is not possible, but rather that it doesn’t solve the problems they claim to be solving. E.g. self driving cars won’t solve traffic (busses do), they won’t be safer (trains are), they won’t be convenient (unless you are rich enough to afford one), and at the end of the day, they are still massive things that takes tonnes of space and infrastructure and pollute a bunch. Just like human driven cars.

fastball3• 5 years ago

SAE levels are pretty garbage.

chrisseaton3• 5 years ago

Why does Waymo use a niche British luxury car for their platform? Must be very expensive and what are the benefits?

judge20206• 5 years ago

- They likely were able to get a commercial volume purchase discount

- if that's the car their devs are testing on, it's going to be the fleet car, at least at first

- Alphabet has $135B cash on hand[0]

0: https://abc.xyz/investor/static/pdf/2021Q2_alphabet_earnings...

kjksf• 5 years ago

I'm guessing they want to start with premium feel to give people good first impressions. That's why their other car is $60k Pacifica minivan and not $25k Honda Civic.

I'm also guessing that they want an electric car. At the time they made a deal to purchase those cars (was quite a while ago) Jaguar i-Pace was one of few premium electric cars available (if you exclude Teslas, which obviously Waymo wouldn't want as it's a competitor).

At this stage cost is not a big problem.

ra713• 5 years ago

Electric and manufactured by the same company that does upfitting for Waymo vehicles (and also a Waymo investor) – Magna International.

keewee7• 5 years ago

Is Jaguar still a niche brand?

Most taxis in Denmark and Germany are Mercedes-Benz so it's not uncommon for the taxi industry to use luxury brands.

chrisseaton3• 5 years ago

Niche in that they only sell a hundred thousand or so a year, yes. If Waymo are planning to seriously scale up they'll be using every Jaguar they're making!

MontyCarloHall3• 5 years ago

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now”

This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco. The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix.

Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5, since it is still heavily geofences and requires those remote safety monitors. I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI. Would love to be proven wrong!

id• 5 years ago

Is this not a legal requirement?

ra713• 5 years ago

Also, just a reminder that Waymo in Phoenix is nowhere close to being level 5

Because they are not even trying to be level 5. They've made it very clear that will only ever be a level 4 company and level 5 is not feasible.

shadowgovt2• 5 years ago

Level 5 isn't feasible as much for legal reasons as technical ones.

I don't think any company wants to sign off on the notion that their software will handle all classes of problem, even ones they have no data for at all.

dheera3• 5 years ago

Anyone who says L5 is bullshitting honestly.

L4 is enough to be viable and safe, and is all that is needed.

In fact this level crap is bullshit. It's the speak of MBAs at Bain and McKinsey at who think they understand tech, not engineers.

Real engineers don't stare at their debugging screens going "check out this data, is it L3 or L4?"

Instead engineers look at things like safety-critical interventions per kilometer, non-critical interventions per kilometer, accidents per kilometer, etc.

actusual2• 5 years ago

Definitionally, the achievement of self driving vehicles does not require AGI. Doing one task very well requires a subset of AGI called Weak AI.

kspacewalk23• 5 years ago

Stacking shelves in a warehouse is one task. Driving is not one task. There are too many corner cases for a modern-day AI system to perform as well as a median driver in, say, 95% of environments and settings in North America and Europe. I think the argument is that such a system might as well be AGI.

burnished5• 5 years ago

Part of driving well requires a diverse of array of abilities, right? You know what is litter and what is debris because you can make a guess about material properties based on some observations, like looking at something that moves without being touched and is translucent, you probably conclude that its a plastic bag of some sort and not a hazard. Similarly you probably use a wealth of experience to judge that a small piece of tire is not a hazard, but a chunk is a hazard and a whole one is definitely a hazard.

Or, on seeing an anomalous <children's toy> enter the road you can probably guess that a child might follow shortly after.

I'm not suggesting that the problem cannot be solved without AGI, but you can see why some people might think that though, right?

My personal feeling is that we shouldn't be setting the bar at making a car that can handle any situation anywhere way better than any human at any time, but that we should also try to make roads that are more suitable for self driving vehicles. I'd rather we move to driving agents that don't get bored, frustrated, or angry.

bpodgursky• 5 years ago

They are not legally allowed to not have a human driver onboard. It's a legal requirement that is not a relevant signal one way or another.

thesausageking• 5 years ago

Level 4 is where most of value is. If a system could drive in all cities and highways, that's more than 90% of benefit.

snarf21• 5 years ago

Agreed 100%. There will be special exit/on ramps built along highways and the trucks will largely just stay in their lane even if slower. It would cut the number of truckers needed by probably 50+%.

pavon5• 5 years ago

The more I travel, the more I consider myself an SAE level 4 driver :)

ghaff5• 5 years ago

More likely driving on most highways in decent weather which is a big win. I'd pay for that.

hammock• 5 years ago

“All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now” This tells me that we’re still a long way

Did you expect something different? I can't really see a boardroom writing a roadmap that goes straight from

  test rides (no passengers) with a backup driver onboard

  actual rides with passengers - no backup driver onboard

with no in-between steps.

VelkaMorava3• 5 years ago

I wonder where "a country road with no lanes which barely fits 1.5 car in winter in the Czech republic" is on your scale... Something like this, just imagine the snowdrifts around it https://www.google.com/maps/@49.080269,16.4569252,3a,75y,307...

oldsecondhand• 5 years ago

For the computer it doesn't make much difference if there's a passanger or if there isn't.

sandworm10110• 5 years ago

Middle steps: (1) Board members use product to travel to board meetings. (2) Board members use product as replacement for personal vehicles. (3) Board members demand pay increases.

Back in 1999 the Chinese government announced that airline execs would be airborne at the changeover as reassurance that aircraft were safe from Y2K. Like or hate them, the incentive logic was sound.

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/y2k-in-china-caught-in-midair/

https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/chinese-airlines-won-t-be-bi...

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

Waymo is already doing test rides with neither passengers no backup drivers in CA, so they wouldn't be jumping from no passengers plus safety drivers to paid passengers without safety drivers if they did offered paid, full-driverless rides.

grlass• 5 years ago

The book Halting State by Charlie Stross (2007) [1] had an interesting self driving car model, where it was autonomous on simple roads like highways/motorways, and a human driver took over remotely for more complex city streets.

Of course the book showed some failure modes for that, but I wonder if network coverage and latency, as well as "backup driver response time" could be considered good enough, perhaps this sort of model could have an acceptable risk trade-off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State

spoonjim• 5 years ago

Beating humans doesn’t require AGI. Just not drinking, texting, or falling asleep will get you halfway there.

baxtr• 5 years ago

I still think that true level 5 (i.e. ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver) requires AGI.

This might be true. Most of the time (95%) I am on complete human brain autopilot when I’m driving but those other 5% need my full focus and attention. I shut of the radio and tell other passengers to be quite (if I have the time for it).

birdman3131• 5 years ago

Anybody who rides with me on a normal basis have come to learn to recognize the sudden stop halfway through a word when I switch from autopilot brain to active driving. There are times when you need more focus on everything than others.

Closi• 5 years ago

This assumes that the challenges that are hard for a human are the same challenges that are hard for a self driving car - that might be the case, but self driving cars may have some theoretical advantages such as 360 cameras/lidar and an ability to follow satellite navigation without having to take its eyes off the road.

Put another way, the 5% of times I need to focus are usually the times where I am somewhere new and don’t necessarily understand the road layout - which something like Waymo may avoid through mapping for instance.

It might be true, but plenty of problems that have been thought to require true AGI have later been found to not require it after sufficient research - for example it’s not long ago that we thought good image recognition was entirely out of reach.

CoryG893• 5 years ago

It's only AGI until someone achieves it. Then it becomes statistical analysis.

aero-glide2• 5 years ago

It doesn't matter for the rider though, unlike a Tesla where you still have to keep your hands on the wheel.

spyckie2• 5 years ago

The key metric is probably "obscure incidents" per miles driven, probably classified manually into various levels of danger. Once the "incidents that lead to disaster" count reaches 0 statistically, it will definitely roll out en masse without the need of safety drivers.

My guess is that they know how many miles they have to drive in order to reach that number, and it's a whole lot. Statistics and math stuff but you can probably pin it down to the month or quarter based on trends. Either that, or it's about driving every road in the city with all sorts of weather / traffic / pedestrian conditions until there's no issue. This isn't generalized AI driving (L5) but it's a much more logical approach to getting autonomous driving coverage where it's the most valuable.

My guess is that each city will involve a safety driver rollout until they have enough data to know the incident rate is zero. There might be a lot of variance between cities - maps data, weather conditions, customs, etc. Then remove the safety drivers.

I'm sure they also are experimenting with disaster/safety protocols while they do the roll out.

My prediction is that waymo will be a mainstream option within the next 5 years.

eagsalazar2• 5 years ago

You are making a ton of assumptions about what is driving this decision.

ren_engineer• 5 years ago

Would it be easier to just build a "futuristic" test city built around the idea of self-driving cars to make it easier for them to work? If self-driving cars are so great people will move there naturally due to improved quality of life. Trying to make self-driving cars work in current cities is like building around crippling technical debt

Seems like Google and a few other tech companies could easily bootstrap a small city by planting some offices somewhere

tdeck3• 5 years ago

If we're building a futuristic city from the ground up, wouldn't it be better to rely on mass transit? Self driving cars still have almost all the same problems that human-driven cars have.

kart23• 5 years ago

A futuristic city would have public transport and bikes. 5,000 pounds of metal for transporting one person is horribly inefficient.

dagmx• 5 years ago

This is legally required today. It's not necessarily a reflection of Waymo. Whether their system was perfect or not, it's legally required they do this till the government changes their minds.

minsc__and__boo5• 5 years ago

Yeah, the commenter straight up assumes that a person is present because the L4 tech doesn't work, when in reality there are legal, liability, and even user comfort reasons to have someone on board with this new pilot.

pavon5• 5 years ago

California DMV regulations do allow testing of autonomous vehicles without a safety test driver if certain conditions are met, spelled out in Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1 Article 3.7 Section 227.38 [1]. The most technically challenging of these is that the car must be capable of operating at SAE level 4, which goes back to the OP's comment. CUPC licensing for commercial passenger services also allows this [2].

That said, I agree with others that this is the natural progression of testing rollout and doesn't tell us anything about the pace at which the rollout will occur, in particular whether it will be faster or slower than Phoenix.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-p...

[2] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...

_ea1k6• 5 years ago

Notably, SAE level 5 is actually well below the standard that you've laid out here. The vehicle simply has to be able to make itself safe in situations that it can't handle. This allows room for remote assistance or a human takeover in certain situations.

jedberg• 5 years ago

This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4

The only thing it tells me is that regulations are more lax in Arizona than California.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

This tells me that we’re still a long way from full level 4 (and certainly level 5) autonomy in a busy city like San Francisco.

I think its in part regulatory relating to paid rides in autonomous vehicles in CA, which is why Cruise is dodging it with passenger-carrying but unpaid rides that are fully driverless. I can't find a good summary of the rules, but I infer from the coverage I've seen that the threshold for having no safety driver when offering paid passenger rides is different from that without paid passengers.

Johnny555• 5 years ago

The edge cases requiring immediate human attention are still too frequent for the human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix.

I think you can only determine that if you know how many times the human attendant takes over.

Just having a human behind the wheel doesn't tell you much, I don't see how to get full self-driving without an intermediate step of human supervision.

pcurve• 5 years ago

I'm guessing if all cars become Waymo right now, there will probably be reduction in vehicle fatality by 99%.

But people have hard time accepting with the notion that unmanned vehicle may be part responsible for that 1%.

crackercrews2• 5 years ago

I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI.

In case anyone else was wondering what AGI means, its Artificial General Intelligence. [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

BurningFrog• 5 years ago

I suspect the main "roadblocks" are about the environment for the SDC.

All traffic signs and signals need to be machine readable at a distance. That is, a traffic light might beam out "I am light 'SFTL783', will be green for 8 more seconds". The location and other data for SFTL783 is in a preloaded database. Same for speed limits and other signage.

An updated 3d map of all roads would also help a lot. As would car-to-car communication systems.

dougmwne7• 5 years ago

Note sure about the AGI requirement. The current systems will always need the heavy involvement of human intelligence to be able to rescue stuck cars, drive in new areas or monitor for changing driving conditions and update the driving model. There does seem to be at least some hope these systems will be able to run a true driverless taxi service with minimal geofencing. On the other hand, a human can go to a new country with different road markings, signage, rules, and traffic flows and be able to drive safely pretty much immediately or maybe a quick Google search. That would truly require AGI.

RobRivera• 5 years ago

This tells me that you can show progress and draw magnifying glass criticism from people.

can only please some of the people some of the time.

spywaregorilla2• 5 years ago

ability to drive autonomously everywhere with zero human oversight with a safety record equivalent to the median human driver

I think this statement is off the mark. Comparing to a human is hard. Not many accidents happen because people are bad at driving. Driving is honestly pretty easy. They happen because people are distracted, tired, drunk, or perhaps just an asshole driving recklessly for thrills or for speed.

A self driving car might be a lot "worse" than the average human driver but could still be a huge improvement in terms of expected safety record for driving overall.

They don't need to be better than humans, they just need to be not shit 100% of the time unlike humans.

TulliusCicero• 5 years ago

human safety driver to be remote, as is the case in Phoenix.

It's not a remote human safety driver, it's more like a remote human safety coach.

The difference is giving high level directions vs directly driving the car. They don't remotely drive the car because that would obviously be super dangerous w/r/t connection stability/latency.

rkagerer• 5 years ago

I still think that true level 5 ... requires AGI

I agree today's AI tech is a long way off from completely supplanting a human driver. I'm surprised the average consumer I talk to about this seems to think we're on the cusp.

But as vehicles with neural nets become more prevalent I expect we'll see the problem morph as it gets tackled from other angles as well. e.g. Self-driving corridors with road infrastructure aimed to improve AI safety (whether that be additional technology, modified marking standards, etc).

Once upon a time street signs with speed limits, curve warnings, and such didn't exist. After faster cars supplanted horse-drawn carriages, highways became a thing. Eventually when the only reason humans drive is for recreation (e.g. off-roading) the problem from the car's perspective will look somewhat different than it did during the transition.

nixpulvis• 5 years ago

Ah yes, the SF elite will gladly shell out fortunes to ride around in a car just for the opportunity to witness the gross power of AI! Not to mention it's a nice Jag. I wonder if they are hiring models for the "autonomous specialist" role?

kgin• 5 years ago

L4 with ability to phone home for remote assistance is good enough.

By the time L5 arrives people will have been happily riding around in vehicles with no steering wheels for decades. L4 cars that phone home less and less every year.

Eventually someone will notice that no L4 car has phoned home for a whole year and almost nobody will care. Just a footnote to an era that already feels taken for granted.

freyr• 5 years ago

Is remote assistance good enough though? It probably works fine when you have a fleet of 100 cars on the road, but 10,00? 1,000,000?

How many of those cars have caused a traffic jam at a given moment because they’ve encountered a traffic cone? How long does each issue take to resolve? It seems like, in addition to the technical hurdles, there are many more logistical hurdles before this can be rolled out at scale.

michaelt3• 5 years ago

There's no such thing as a remote safety driver.

Cell data connections aren't reliable enough, and having the car emergency stop (and potentially get rear-ended) when it loses signal wouldn't be acceptable.

moralestapia• 5 years ago

I still think that true level 5 [...] requires AGI.

Oh, but of course! I'm still surprised by people who think otherwise. The amount of corner cases that you have to solve while driving is pretty much limitless, you cannot "train" something on that, heck, some humans are not even fit for that. We are *FAR* from truly autonomous vehicles.

jillesvangurp• 5 years ago

All that tells you is that they are cautious in the famously litigious California yet confident enough to actually launch their service there. In the unlikely event something goes wrong, even if it is not their fault, they had a person onboard. It's the difference between that being just a minor incident or getting a class action lawsuit with millions/billions in damages. The law is by far the biggest obstacle to level 4 and 5 driving. So, launching in San Francisco is kind of a big step for them.

Once it has proven itself for a bit of time and they know how to set up their geo-fences and which streets to avoid, they can probably get rid of the person. That would be evident by that person never actually doing anything long before that.

The remote safety monitoring is a smart feature but it's not going to help much for the type of accidents people worry about most where something unexpected happens very rapidly. AIs are actually really good with dealing with those situations. Arguably better than humans for whom this is probably a leading cause of traffic fatalities. The way Waymo operates without hands on the wheel (i.e. level 3 & 4), basically means they have safety nailed already in those kind of situations.

There's no way a remote person would be quick enough to intervene. That person is there for other reasons. It's complex traffic situations that cause AIs to get stuck occasionally that require human intervention. Usually this is less of a safety concern and more of an annoyance.

The key metric of interventions per hundreds of thousands of miles of distance traveled is the key metric that both Tesla, Waymo, and other companies use for this. Both companies boast some pretty impressive statistics for that. Though of course it's hard to confirm those independently.

It's interesting the way Tesla and Waymo approach this problem in different ways. Waymo goes for level 4 but only in areas they've thoroughly vetted. It's taken them many years to start moving to new areas other than relatively safe and easy Phoenix. Tesla on the other hand offers their AI features just about anywhere they can but positions it as level 2 that is really aspiring to be a level 4 but with a requirement for hands on the wheel just in case (which means it's level 2). Level 2 is a legal tool to dodge a lot of legislation and bureaucracy. It basically means that if anything goes wrong, the driver is at fault. It will stay in place a long time for that reason. Liability, not safety, is the key concern here.

Arguably, Teslas would probably do pretty well in the areas that Waymo has vetted as well. But they are not in the ride sharing market and need to sell cars world wide and not just in specific geofences in Phoenix and San Francisco. But I wouldn't be surprised to see Tesla offer a similar ride sharing service in similarly geo-fenced areas at some point to get to level 4 & 5. I suspect that race is a lot closer than some people seem to think.

grogenaut• 5 years ago

I was at Yellowstone this last week. https://ridebeep.com/ had some shuttles there doing a pretty straight forward navigation on one straight road, they had human minders as well. The day I went to try them, it was mildly misting, just barely able to see it on the glass. They were not running the machines because they kept stopping because they saw the water drops as obstacles initially. The humans had made the call that it just wasn't an acceptable experience.

jstx1• 5 years ago

What's the biggest technical challenge that they have right now? And how much time and effort will it take to overcome?

I feel like there is a lot of disconnect between the different media pieces and opinions I come across specifically when it comes to Waymo's self-driving - from "we're already there" to "it won't happen in the next 10 years".

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

If Waymo has a 10-year lead, the people who get paid by the word to write about the horse race don't get paid. That's why you'll often see articles on self-driving cars that don't even mention Waymo.

exikyut• 5 years ago

Maybe I'm just out of the loop on corporate presentation overload (I don't watch TV at all, and it's mildly jarring watching advertisments and whatnot), but this video feels so... formula-driven and lacking in depth and interestingness that would give me the room to explore the concept and form/own my own view about the service's safety, efficiency and relevance... that it just feels boring. I love tech and self-driving, but the way this is presented, I'm completely turned off the idea.

And then there's the fact that there's a shot of a driver in the front seat shown for like 400 milliseconds. What's up with that? Why is a token driver required to be in the front seat? I thought the foundation of the service was automated self-driving that obviates that...? If for whatever reason it is required, alright, then own up to it and properly integrate it into the video so it doesn't feel so awkward.

Overall this presentation feels like it's hiding something, simply because it's so poorly put together.

noneeeed4• 5 years ago

As someone who lives in Bath, an old european city with roads (and other drivers) that can give experienced human drivers a nervous breakdown I'm rather more interested in how they do in SF than their current deployment in Phoenix.

From what I've heard repeatedly, SF sounds much more irregular and messy than Phoenix, so it should be something of a stepping stone to making them usable more widely if they can crack it.

I've been expecting it to happen for literally decades, but always been disappointed.

Ftuuky• 5 years ago

Same with Coimbra, Portugal. Would love to see a Waymo car trying to navigate those old intricate roads.

whimsicalism8• 5 years ago

I wonder if Waymo can use street mirrors.

noneeeed4• 5 years ago

Just checked it out on google. What a beautiful place.

My scepticism around SD cars in places like that and Bath is not even the roads themselves, but the traffic.

The are quite a lot of roads around me that are quite narrow and frequently drop to single lanes. I feel like any self-drive system will need to develop quite an advanced theory of mind to perform the weird silent negotiation that happens when I'm driving a long, with three cars behind me, and come face-to-face with a bus coming the other way, and somehow we have to either backup en-masse, or perform the squeeze dance as we edge past each other with inches to spair.

mosdl• 5 years ago

Yeah SF is very messy configuration wise and is more "european" in that way.

skohan• 5 years ago

Partly due to challenges with the landscape right?

notyourwork• 5 years ago

100% Phoenix is basically a big grid with a relatively flat elevation. SF is quite contrary to that organization with elevation changes, more dense traffic and irregular roads being common.

standardUser2• 5 years ago

The streets of pre-pandemic San Francisco were an unmitigated clusterfuck, arguably the worst in the nation at its 2019 peak. I imagine it's much easier these days for an autonomous vehicle.

throwawaycuriou• 5 years ago

Other than reduced volume has San Francisco done something to unfuck its clusters?

whimsicalism8• 5 years ago

arguably the worst in the nation at its 2019 peak

Not even close - I've lived in the DC metro, Boston, and LA and all three are certainly worse than SF, and I think that is also backed up by evidence.

exdsq• 5 years ago

I recently lived in Oxford where they have a few self-driving car trials (notably Oxbotica) that essentially just went round and round the station because of how awkward some of the junctions were.

If we want to really test self-driving cars, introduce them to Milton Keynes 'Magic Roundabout'

https://www.google.com/search?q=milton+keynes+magic+roundabo...

paddez• 5 years ago

I'm not sure the Magic Roundabout would pose any problem for any sort of automated driving. It's basically just a nested roundabout- where you essentially have to give the right-of-way to traffic already on the roundabout.

If you can navigate a roundabout, you can navigate the magic roundabout - you just apply the same rules.

If anything, this is the sort of thing an automated system would excel over humans at - where the automation won't get confused by an uncommon application of a familiar ruleset.

sterlind• 5 years ago

Apparently Brits hate the Magic Roundabout, but it seems so shiny.. just the idea of a roundabout of roundabouts where the inner flow of traffic is reversed is really pretty. I'm sure it's one of those things that looks great in traffic flow simulations but falls apart when panicked drivers are trying to deal with each other and the unconventional traffic patterns.

daveslash• 5 years ago

Re>> "that can give experienced human drivers a nervous breakdown"

A couple of years ago I took a wrong turn and got lost in the Long Beach harbor - and had neither GPS nor phone. Holy Cow man.... holy cow... (admittedly, low quality comment)

hn_go_brrrrr4• 5 years ago

I wonder if the cars will always have a human chaperone. Not as a safety driver, but to prevent riders from trashing the car.

XorNot3• 5 years ago

You wouldn't achieve any scaling benefits there. But also - trashing an autonomous car (aka a car full of cameras and sensors, which you charged to your credit card) seems like one of those self-limiting problems as the people who do it go bankrupt or to jail.

hn_go_brrrrr4• 5 years ago

There's a neverending stream of way-too-drunk people who need a taxi (or at least there were, in the beforetimes). I don't see that happening.

Also, I don't particularly want to ride in a car with a bunch of sensors and cameras monitoring my every move.

sandworm10110• 5 years ago

There are plenty of rail-based transports that have no driver (Vancouver's SkyTrain is the largest iirc). They seems to get by without being ripped apart by passengers.

hn_go_brrrrr4• 5 years ago

The other passengers serve as the social discouragement in that instance. Most human-driven rail transit isn't monitored by rail employees.

jefftk• 5 years ago

They don't in Phoenix; the article links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdrV9wqXyH0 as an example.

(Disclosure: I work for Google, speaking only for myself.)

sidibe• 5 years ago

It's interesting the number of comments I've seen since it launched many months ago that completely ignore that this has been deployed somewhere without safety drivers. However unimpressive you find the geofence/HD maps/lidar etc., you'd think more people would know about it

hn_go_brrrrr4• 5 years ago

Thanks! I'd love to see their data on rider behavior. AIUI, they have hand-selected a group of riders into their pilot program there. I suspect those people probably behave better than your average taxi passengers. Either way, fascinating to see.

WalterSear• 5 years ago

If you can teach a car to drive, you can teach a car to detect when it's being thrashed.

lotsofpulp3• 5 years ago

Unless it comes with the ability to eject participants, how would that help?

kspacewalk23• 5 years ago

This problem has been solved when it comes to hotel rooms, or rental cars. What would be fundamentally different when it comes to autonomous cars?

alex_young• 5 years ago

If a human has to clean the car between rides that seems like a pretty big problem

r00fus2• 5 years ago

It's not exactly solved - your examples are close but not equivalent.

Hotels have many people who work there and cleaners who enter the room daily (no Hendrix hotel a la Altered Carbon yet). Rental cars are secured with your credit card so there's a massive disincentive to trash the vehicle.

Perhaps pervasive recording of the vehicle interior would suffice.

lhorie2• 5 years ago

I'm curious how Waymo deals with the human aspects of cab hailing. With a human driver, you can say "hey looks like traffic is bad between where the car currently is and the pick up spot, can I meet you at X instead and save us both 10 minutes?"

To "good morning dear, do you think you could help me load my bag in the trunk"

All the way up to completely degenerate scenarios like "my friend was drunk and tried to take over command of the car to see if it would work" or "I had to call customer support because when my ride arrived to pick me up, there was a homeless guy hogging the backseat and cursing at me".

Surely there's more to commercializing the tech than just not killing pedestrians. The absence of a driver should create some new weird dynamics.

IIRC Uber et al spend a considerable amount on customer support. I wonder if Waymo can break free from Google's bad reputation on that front.

thinkharderdev• 5 years ago

For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you somewhere else.

If there's no driver, then there's nobody to ask to help with bags.

For various degenerate situations I'm not sure being driverless really changes the situation all that much. A drunk passenger can grab the wheel of a manned vehicle as well. With a self-driving car you might even be able to avoid that situation entirely by preventing the passengers from using any controls without authorization. They can grab the physical steering wheel but can't turn it until they punch in an authorization code (which they don't have). Likewise you prevent unauthorized passengers from entering the car by keeping the doors locked until the authorized passenger gets there. And if someone does manage to sneak in you just shut down the vehicle and call the cops (just like if someone jumps in a cab without permission).

But humans are great at flummoxing countermeasures like that so it will be an interesting thing to watch for sure.

dave5104• 5 years ago

For the first one, I'm guessing you would just change the pickup location just as you tell the drive to meet you somewhere else.

To add on, maybe even Waymo tells/asks you if you'd like to change pickup locations to save X minutes off your trip.

Feels somewhat in line with how Google Maps will ask you if you want to save X minutes by taking a new route that was previously not as good as when you started using directions.

kenjackson• 5 years ago

There are a different problems with no-driver, not necessarily worse problems. For example, some problems with drivers that don't exist, or exist to a lesser extent with no-driver:

1. How much should I tip?

2. The driver tried to rape me.

3. The driver seems drunk/high, and is driving horribly.

4. The driver didn't pick me up because, pick your reason: I'm black, had a bunch of kids, etc...

5. My friend was drunk and tried to pick a fight with the driver.

lhorie2• 5 years ago

Yeah, definitely goes both ways, and I can foresee many anecdotes about how not having to deal w/ a driver is nicer in some way or another. Hence why I said I'm curious about human-factor issues. I don't believe there's precedents anywhere for what to expect once the tech rolls out at scale, so it's going to be interesting to see what kinds of operational issues they end up running into.

sschueller• 5 years ago

If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this.

It's time for Elon to pay the piper and refund all users who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD. Especially people who's cars are nearing end of life.

ffggvv• 5 years ago

if they don’t have fsd then they are just an electric car company. if they are just a car company their stock should be at 50 dollars right now. hence why he’d never admit it and instead will double down with his robot that will never materialize

panick213• 5 years ago

Nonsense. Go look at some of the models by different analyst. Even if you include no software revenue at all, you can justify a much higher stock price then you suggest. Some never include anything for FSD in the first place.

And even if they don't reach FSD, they could still generate a lot of software revenue from Autopilot features.

And beyond that Tesla still does more then final assembly of EV and selling them to dealerships.

burnished5• 5 years ago

Their current assist packages are already incredible even though they come short of full self driving.

EDIT: In case my point isn't clear, if your position is predicated on the idea that anything less than full self driving is worthless garbage, you should know that is a pretty hot take. If you are instead having an emotional reaction and feel deceived I don't know what to tell you, you might have a very valid point but that doesn't appear to figure into evaluating whether a stock is under or over priced.

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 5 years ago

As I understand it, they just started selling the "fsd capable" stuff a few years ago. Are any of those cars nearing end of life? That would be an even greater cause for concern IMO.

dragontamer• 5 years ago

Its not "end of life" vehicles that should be concerned, but instead "end of lease" vehicles.

People who bought a 3-year or 5-year lease from 2016 with the $5k full-self driving package probably should feel pissed for wasting money.

burnished5• 5 years ago

I'd be surprised, I've heard (and can not immediately substantiate) that they are generally very reliable vehicles. I guess part of it is that they just don't have as many mechanical points of failure.

sandworm10110• 5 years ago

> who were hoodwinked into purchasing FSD.

Fools and their money. Like most every expensive car, Teslas are luxury vehicles and fashion statements. People buy them because they are cool. That product was delivered. As for future features, nobody should believe Telsa's advertising any more than we do Microsoft's advertising about how the next version of Windows will solve all our computing problems. The hamburger never looks as good as it does in the commercial. Demanding such things post-purchase, after the test drive demonstrates the deficiencies of the real product, is simply buyers remorse.

argc• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure the USA has consumer protection laws against deceptive advertising, so a company can't just say whatever they want when selling a product in order to convince someone to buy it. Maybe Tesla protected themselves with clauses in the purchase contracts that absolves them from having to pay the purchaser back in the event of their own failure to deliver, but I think a FSD purchaser might have a case just based on Elon's verbal promises that have failed to come true over and over again.

nullc• 5 years ago

I believe the person you're responding to was referring to specifically to the add-on pre-order for full self driving, not the entire car.

coding123• 5 years ago

That hamburger sure TASTES better than it does in the commercial.

Wheaties466• 5 years ago

while it is disappointing that the true FSD may never materialize on cars that paid for it nearing EOL. The FSD beta 9 looks pretty impressive and from some videos i've seen have made some very difficult driving decisions.

minhazm2• 5 years ago

Google took a completely different approach and relies heavily on pre-mapped environments. Tesla has several orders of magnitude more vehicles, more data, and a more diverse set of data given their cars are in many different countries. It's not implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at FSD faster than Google.

alphabetting• 5 years ago

I'd contend Waymo has more data but data isn't really the hurdle. It's AI/ML and simulation needed to get the final 1% right.

Good thread on ground Tesla would need to make up to catch AV leaders here. https://twitter.com/Christiano92/status/1428671634131628033

kevin_thibedeau• 5 years ago

Tesla relies on geographic whitelists to suppress problematic signals from their radar. Not what I'd want from an FSD machine.

diegocg2• 5 years ago

The idea that data will somehow magically translate into FSD is laughable. It relies in the delusion that we just need to train neural networks with the proper data and then we all can go to sleep.

There are many issues with Tesla's autopilot that are completely unrelated to the amount of data they have, and they will not be fixed with more data, and having more data will not make it easier to fix it. At this point, I would argue that the discussion about who owns more millions of miles of data is completely irrelevant.

staticassertion• 5 years ago

I can't really see how Tesla would have more data than Google, who have been mapping the entire world for decades.

mdoms3• 5 years ago

It's not implausible to think that Tesla could arrive at FSD faster than Google.

It absolutely is implausible.

thereare5lights2• 5 years ago

pre-mapped environments

this raises the question of: what happens when those environments change?

leesec4• 5 years ago

"If Google can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this."

10 years ago this might have read:

"If General Motors can't do it with its massive resources and sensors don't ever expect a Tesla to perform better than this."

ancientworldnow• 5 years ago

Of course this ignores that super cruise is considered safer and better on the same tasks that it's allowed to do as Tesla FSD by third party analysts. The difference is GM is less willing to allow it to be enabled for dangerous beta driving unlike Tesla which clearly doesn't care about consistency or safety.

dragonwriter3• 5 years ago

General Motors is offering unpaid but fully driverless rides in California now. They, like Waymo, are ahead of Tesla, and likely to remain there.

Tesla’s unique strength, when it comes to autonomy as opposed to battery-electric vehicles, is selling hype.

blueblisters• 5 years ago

Google is struggling to get hardware integrated with their self driving solution. Retrofitting cars with self-driving sensors is not easy, and Google does not have the scale yet to convince OEM partners to retool assembly lines for the Waymo fleet.

ra713• 5 years ago

Source for them struggling? All the hardware upfitting is done by Magna, one of the biggest names in auto manufacturing, who are also a Waymo investor. There’s a reason they chose the Jaguar I-Pace which is also manufactured by Magna.

ElFitz3• 5 years ago

While I do get your point and have my own doubts, I fail to see how this is a fair argument:

If Google can't do it with its massive resources

The companies behind the SLS had and have an enormous amount of resources. Yet, they have failed to even launch it.

Arianespace has a huge amount of resources and experience too. Yet, when asked, they said landing a rocket couldn’t be done. Then, back-pedalling, that it was pointless and would never make any economic sense.

Yet, SpaceX has developed three generations of rockets (Falcon 1, 9 and heavy), builds them, launches them, iterates on them, lands them, reuses them, and is now working on a fourth rocket (SuperHeavy).

They have also created 4 different rocket engines and are working on two others.

Honestly, where are Boeing and Arianespace?

Another example? Microsoft, their incredible wealth of resources and superior position falling flat on their face with smartphones.

Funnily enough, Google getting the greatest share of the global smartphone OS market, despite having had no real experience with operating systems, consumer hardware, or licensing operating systems before.

Kodak, which had some of the first patent on digital camera sensors, going pretty much extinct despite their massive resources and market position.

Xerox, failing to ever enter the personal computer market despite designing what everyone else would copy for the next 10 or 20 years.

Sure, the amounts of resources and experience seem to help, a lot, but it also certainly doesn’t seem to help reliably predict any outcome.

diegocg2• 5 years ago

The problem with your comparison is that the company that is "the spacex of FSD" is Waymo. And even them can not get FSD right.

ctvo• 5 years ago

Yet, SpaceX has developed three generations of rockets (Falcon 1, 9 and heavy), builds them, launches them, iterates on them, lands them, reuses them, and is now working on a fourth rocket (SuperHeavy).

What does SpaceX have to do with Tesla? They're owned by a billionaire with his attention split, but otherwise are structured differently, are in different industries, and most likely have different cultures.

The cult of worshipping a single person has got to stop.

tibbydudeza2• 5 years ago

FSD v2 hw with DOJO - we definitely got it right this time.

supperburg4• 5 years ago

Actually FSD works better than waymo. It hasn’t fulfilled promises of robot taxis but it’s the best and most advanced self driving system in the world, not to mention the most widely deployed, and so accusations of blatant dishonesty don’t really hold water.

https://youtu.be/SuZYACWhYSI

ANDREWB0SE• 5 years ago

Lol. Out of all the vehicles they could have chosen. Why the Jaguar?

ryan93• 5 years ago

Probably cut a good deal since jaguar could use the marketing.

ahnick• 5 years ago

Are there any thought pieces on how cities can adapt roads to accommodate SAE level 4 cars to facilitate rolling out a wider deployment more quickly? I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations and also only allow the service to be operational during clement weather conditions. It seems it would be beneficial to have fully automated routes to and from specific spots even today, for example an airport to a downtown location, for many cities to help reduce transportation costs and safety issues as compared with Uber/Lyft.

zimprop• 5 years ago

I'm thinking of something like cities could designate specific routes and lanes for L4 cars with designated drop-off locations

I always find it interesting that the further down the road of self-driving we go the more it seems like its a techy version of a known but morre low tech paradigm. This if taken without the self driving part just sounds like a bus lane with bus stops. In fact the driving of a car would be a less efficient mode of transportation considering that they usually only carry one person at a time.

I used to be very pro self-driving cars, but tthte moree I explored urbanism and transportation the more it became apparent that, self-driving is over optimization of an already bad paradigm that is car-centric development. You could cut out the middle man of needing a self driving car if you didn't live far away from the things you needed or if the public transit was efficient and reliable, that seems way easier than trying to figure out how to make cars drive themselves!

TillE2• 5 years ago

The optimistic vision of self-driving vehicles is as a publicly run transit system, where you have a fleet of automated vehicles of varying sizes able to dynamically, collectively route based on demand. A hyper efficient, fully electric bus system.

That would be a pretty exciting development even in, eg, European cities with decent public transit.

tzm• 5 years ago

All rides in the program will have an autonomous specialist on board for now

If you drive a Tesla w/ FSD, is it chic to refer to yourself as an Autonomous Specialist?

kfarr• 5 years ago

Perhaps Crash Test Dummy is the preferred term?

shadilay• 5 years ago

'headless driving enthusiast' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgV-YnHZeE

Animats• 5 years ago

This is encouraging. But it's only for "Trusted Testers".

Do you have to have a Google account?

Shank• 5 years ago

This is a clever reuse off a little known thing Google used to have called “Trusted Testers” for friends and family of Google employees to test new features. However, I don’t think it requires a Google account. The TT program would just NDA you heavily and required an invite from a Google employee.

This is likely to be more open, but again, requiring NDA.

criloz2• 5 years ago

Self-driving is not the solution and will show its crack in the future, the solution is probably a cloud service administrate by the city that feed direction to the cars and rules (that reduce or increment the degree of freedom of choices), do optimization and sort many other things, cars probably will still need cameras to take small decisions, but this can be made optional.

dexter89_kp3• 5 years ago

Kudos to the Waymo team.

I was a self driving skeptic 2-3 years back. Now given the advances in both hardware and NNs, I do see possible solutions in the next decade.

leesec4• 5 years ago

Wow, 12 years in and they've spent about 6 billion and achieved a limited ridership Uber competitor in 2 fair weather cities. I'm sure the full solution they're pursuing is right around the corner though.

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 5 years ago

I just signed up and actually skimmed the privacy policy (because hey, it's Alphabet). They record video of you during the ride and didn't mention anything that I caught about ever deleting it. I get that they need video in case I do bad stuff in the back, but it's really disappointing that they didn't bother reassuring you like "we delete it after a month" or something.

I'm hoping I just missed that line. But I signed up anyway, so I guess that says more.

switch007• 5 years ago

Everything to do with more tech in cars is a privacy nightmare.

plussed_reader• 5 years ago

Does Waymo plan to chisel it's drivers like Uber and Lyft did with Prop22?

crackercrews2• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what the cost of Waymo rides is?

gibsonf12• 5 years ago

You cannot predict the future with patterns from the past, regardless of how many patterns you crunch - the world is always changing. ML can just never solve FSD - conceptual understanding and causality is needed to achieve human level driving capability. We instantly classify things conceptually from our perception, instantly understand how those things may behave, and then learn the specifics of what that thing is doing to instantly predict what might happen and how it is interacting with other causally connected things in the environment.

If ML could predict the future, there would be some very rich stock brokers right now.

Autonomous driving efforts need a major pivot to start working with concepts, causality, and the integrated space time model of the world we humans use.

fyrn-• 5 years ago

I think you uave some major misconceptions about how this stuff works. Most vision models output the current state of the world, to be integrated with other sensor data like lidar that is then used for planning. There are models that try to guess things like the crossing intent of pedestrians, but even those models just output a confidence of them crossing. I work for a different self driving company, but this high level stuff is pretty much the same everywhere.

gibsonf12• 5 years ago

Exactly, that is how that stuff works. Past patterns in the Ml neural net generated from massive data and training try to figure out the label of things from various sensors, and then given that label, try to figure out other things that might happen based on the label and event stream. These patterns can recognize with a certain probability similar patterns, but they have no way to cope with brand new patterns. Those brand new patterns, although they may only occur 1 out of 100 experiences - or lets say 3 days a year when your're driving, something fully novel occurs, this will kill you if you are relying on FSD. Until the systems try to think like humans, they simply wont.

throwawaygh• 5 years ago

Autonomous driving efforts need a major pivot to start working with concepts, causality, and the integrated space time model of the world we humans use.

Dear god, no. I don't know what you think AV companies are doing past the perception layer, but they would be pivoting away from controls and planning -- you know, stuff that actually works outside of neurips/iclr/&c fantasy land.

thkm• 5 years ago

I'll know that we've achieved full self driving when it can brave thru the streets of a South American city :)

eastof• 5 years ago

How do I get an invite!? Do you just have to know someone at Waymo?

ketzo2• 5 years ago

Many comments in this thread are variations on a theme of "self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, they just need to be better than human drivers, who aren't actually all that great." I think it would be nice if this were true, and I suppose it is from an actuarial perspective, but it's also an extremely flawed point.

From a public confidence perspective, it doesn't matter if a self-driving car crashes one tenth, even one one-hundredth as often as human drivers.

If you see a self-driving car cause an accident, particularly a lethal one, in a situation that almost any human driver would have avoided, you've totally destroyed any and all confidence in this car's driving ability, because "I would never, ever have crashed there."

As we've seen, there are lots of scenarios like this. The Tesla crash from last year, where the car simply didn't see a white truck against a light background. Or imagine an adversarial image attack, where some tiny insignificant detail is placed onto a stop sign or a "do-not-enter" that turns it into nothing from the perspective of the AI driver.

These kinds of scenarios obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, because intuitively, you immediately realize that you're "a much better driver" than this car! Even if that's untrue 99/100 times, it only takes one visceral example to drive this kind of wedge.

Self-driving cars don't just have to be better than human drivers. They have to be as close to perfect as is possible, because that's what people will expect.

sillysaurusx• 5 years ago

Here's a particularly spicy viewpoint: It doesn't matter if you obliterate public confidence in self-driving cars, or if there are lethal accidents that would've been avoided.

As t approaches infinity, what are the chances that self-driving cars won't take over the world?

thereare5lights2• 5 years ago

pretty high if people won't use them because they don't trust them.

abstrakraft• 5 years ago

I imagine Waymo's investors want a return before t reaches infinity...

MontyCarloHall3• 5 years ago

human drivers, who aren't actually all that great.

A large fraction of human drivers are actually all that great. The majority of accidents/deaths are caused by a minority of terrible drivers, or good drivers who found themselves in terrible but rare circumstances. The majority of drivers drive hundreds of thousands of miles without any accidents that were their fault, or even any accidents at all.

In other words, it's probably easy to beat the mean human driver, which is greatly dragged down by a minority of terrible drivers. It's probably very difficult to beat the median human driver, and near impossible to beat the top 20% of human drivers.

not2b2• 5 years ago

I don't think it's easy to beat the mean human driver and to demonstrate with solid data that you've done so.

In 2019 in California, there were 1.06 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled. Any self-driving automobile technology that doesn't have at least 1 billion vehicle miles of data is in no position to claim that it is safer than human drivers and less likely to kill people.

Self driving cars don't make the same kinds of mistakes as human drivers do, but they make different kinds of mistakes. Some of these can be fatal.

erostrate• 5 years ago

Do you have a source for that?

MichaelGroves3• 5 years ago

Exactly right. Furthermore, most risky behavior is a choice. Crashes aren't random "acts of god" that strike anybody with equal likelihood. If you choose not to drive drunk, drive in bad weather, or for many hours without rest, then you can greatly improve your odds and almost certainly reduce your risk below the average. In these discussions I often see far too much fatalism; "Everybody thinks they're above average but half of you aren't". ignores both the fact that crashes aren't distributed like that, and the fact that the riskiest behavior is a choice. The mean number of miles driven drunk is greater than zero, but the number of miles I drive drunk is zero.

snarkypixel• 5 years ago

Not sure about that. I'd say from the people that are very close to me (friends & family), I wouldn't want to be a passenger with half of them. AI is /so much better/, can't wait for it to be mainstream. And it's not just about the AI driving, it's about the AI reacting 100X faster and having eyes all around the car to avoid accidents before they could even happen.

I wonder what humans will actually do better than AI in 50 years. I have a personal theory but I'm a bit off topic here

foota• 5 years ago

I agree that these incidents are concerning, but you mention Tesla's crashes, yet people are still buying it? I think you are underestimating people's laziness.

dougmwne7• 5 years ago

The world doesn't work in idealized ways. Yes, perhaps ideally self-driving cars would need to be nearly perfect in order to win wide public acceptance. At the same time there was an article on the front page today investigating literal gulag labor camps in the USA, and I doubt those are popular or going away any time soon. Once this is working technology that can turn a profit, it will depend on who stands to gain, how deep their pockets are, who gets bribed, which talking points get pushed, and which votes get bought. Whether the public ends up particularly happy about the outcome is at best, secondary, and at worst, irrelevant. Don't think I've run into too many people happy about our healthcare system, yet that remains stubbornly broken. No one I've met really wanted to lose our lower-middle class to China, yet there it went.

make34• 5 years ago

Well a large difference is that consumer goods companies like Tesla are reliant on their public image for sales.

acchow• 5 years ago

I'm a bit surprised by how negative a view HN has towards human adoption of technology.

What technology is perfect? What code is perfect and doesn't have bugs in it? And yet we adopt automated systems anyway. Yes, sometimes it is painful and an entire airline grounds all planes for half a day... But that doesn't stop the unending march towards efficiency and technological progress.

TaylorAlexander• 5 years ago

I think the point is that the general public is fickle and their trust in self driving cars is tentative. If the public loses confidence in the technology it will make it very difficult for them to roll it out. So this isn't really about what HN thinks, it's about what HN predicts the general public will think.

cactus2093• 5 years ago

Counterpoint - nobody actually cares about traffic fatalities. Nearly 40,000 deaths a year in the US, and the majority of people get in their cars every day without ever thinking about this risk and go about their lives (or to put that another way, the risks are already so low as to be negligible to most people, and anything else within the ballpark of negligible is still negligible). Normalcy bias is incredibly strong and as soon as self-driving cars are "normal" people will get on board without thinking twice. Tesla is slowly acclimating people to self-driving, basically everyone is familiar with the idea at this point, and as soon as it's available and someone tells you it's "just as safe as driving yourself", most people will just go with it. Especially given how big the upside is - you don't have to deal with the stress of driving anymore, you can just relax in your car. Or in terms of getting a ride, maybe it's 1/4 the price of a taxi driven by a human. Sounds good, people will roll with it.

Of course the more it starts taking off, there will always be a vocal subset of the population that is strongly opposed to it, just like there are vocal anti-vaxxer groups and there were anti-seatbelt protests back in the 80's. But I can't imagine the naysayers having a very big impact on the progression of the technology, the upsides are just too enormous.

PartiallyTyped• 5 years ago

This is arguing that because humans are stupid and biased, they will believe they are better drivers despite all the evidence to the contrary, and therefore, a solution needs to be close to perfect so that humans stop being fearful.

We have seen this before with autopilots in aircraft and ship, elevator operators and so on.

All it needs is time and adoption, not perfection, and as adoption increases, the roads get safer and safer, bringing us closer to the ideal, and as time increases, the closer we get to adoption.

fouc• 5 years ago

Even if public confidence was low, so what? People will still buy self-driving cars and fall asleep in them. Laziness triumphs over safety.

aiisjustanif• 5 years ago

Self-driving cars don't just have to be better than human drivers. They have to be as close to perfect as is possible, because that's what people will expect.

Though I disagree because people expect a lot of things and alternative outcomes happen when there are incentives (Current cars, airplanes, and elevators come to mind). Waymo seems to be aware of this from this recent video. [1]

1. https://youtu.be/yjztvddhZmI

hellbannedguy2• 5 years ago

I was a doubter for awhile.

Watching the Waymo video just changed my viewpoint.

They have a "Pull Over" lever in the back seat.

Would I trust a self-driving vechicle without Lidar--probally no.

Would I use use a self driving vechicle commuting, and around the city--yes. Two driving chores I hate. I hate them to the point that the philosophical argument over dying by my own hands, or a computer, is put in the trunk.

On a personal note, the thought of a computer driving me off a cliff while driving to Stinson beach is not something I would chance. Even if they are statistically better drivers than most humans.

I can't imagine tumbling down a cliff, and thinking if only I drove today.

I still foresee most trucking jobs, and most driving jobs, completely gone in a few years.

Yes--it's time for a Basic Income.

dabeeeenster• 5 years ago

People get on passenger planes every day and there are loads of instances of those crashing for extremely unorthodox reasons.

bitsoda• 5 years ago

I'm happy for their efforts and hope my kids never have to drive unless they want to, but I still think we're 20+ years out from level 4+ autonomy. Maybe when Waymo tests in a city that has weather -- like anywhere in the Northeast -- I'll be more enthusiastic.

dougmwne7• 5 years ago

Given the number of people here saying self-driving cars require AGI (a.k.a. sand that thinks a.k.a. fairy magic), I would say we have definitely hit the bottom of the trough of disillusionment. But since Waymo is launching in a second city, this is perhaps the very start of the slope of enlightenment.

dylan604• 5 years ago

start of the slope of enlightenment

that would be more like staircase of enlightenment. or up the down escalator to enlightenment

s09dfhks• 5 years ago

Interesting timing given this article which was just posted a day or so ago on HN

https://www.autoblog.com/2021/08/22/waymo-is-99-of-the-way-t...

CyberRabbi• 5 years ago

Does anyone know what city official is responsible for approving this?

nemonemo• 5 years ago

I can think of a few milestones in the future for AVs:

  * the first accident between two fully automated AVs.
  * the first such accident within AVs from the leading company.
  * the first fatality in fully automated AVs
  * when uber or lyft or any similar company starts to use AVs more than human drivers in a metropolitan.
  * when a city gets half the driving hours in AVs.
  * when human drivers no longer get insurance coverage by a major insurance company.

I wish the order in reverse.

mleonhard• 5 years ago

Does the Waymo One app require a Google account? If Google arbitrarily freezes my Google account, will I be unable to use Waymo and unable to talk to any human about it?

boulos4• 5 years ago

Disclosure: I work at Waymo.

This is big news, and I encourage you to apply if you're in San Francisco. For the HN crowd, I'd also recommend last week's blog post [1] which includes some more technical material on "how" we're driving.

[1] https://blog.waymo.com/2021/08/MostExperiencedUrbanDriver.ht...

supperburg4• 5 years ago

https://youtu.be/SuZYACWhYSI

ulisesrmzroche• 5 years ago

What if self-driving cars develop personalities? Like, let's say to be able to drive, you need x level of intelligence or whatever, and just happens to be the level where consciousness emerges

I'm sure I got all the science wrong but do we really want cars with souls? Do they become non-human humans? Do they get the right to vote? Are they considered slaves?

Even if its just horse-level smarts, that's still enough to develop consciousness, maybe. Let's just say sure. But then, what kinda relationship do you have with your car then?

Another thing is that, now that everyone's working from home, there's a lot less incentive to buy cars. Who are the going to sell these cars too? Maybe they'll all be self-driving taxis. And that's a whole can of proverbial worms on its own. Politically, self-driving taxis are dead ducks.

dorianmariefr• 5 years ago

Why not have a remote driver? Like call centers but for driving?

defaulty• 5 years ago

The entire entire leadership team just quit and then they announce this?

That makes me worried this was rushed

bowl• 5 years ago

What do you mean? It was just 1 person, albeit the CEO, who left

gpsx• 5 years ago

Are there any plans for a Mountain View trial? I live there.

cgrealy3• 5 years ago

I feel like people here are missing the other factor that will drive adoption of self driving vehicles: economics.

Safety is obviously important, but we already accept a decrease in safety over money and convenience (otherwise, we would have a 30kph speed limit everywhere).

But most people use their car for commuting, groceries, dropping the kids to sports, etc. They may make one or two road trips a year for vacations or business.

To facilitate this, a middle class family will often own two vehicles, pay tax, insurance and maintenance on said vehicles, pay for parking, etc.

If that suddenly wasn't necessary, that would be a massive saving for most people. You no longer need the capital investment in something that loses value.

Even better, you don't need to bring little Suzy to football, you can put her in a waymo instead (once she's old enough obviously).

And when you want to go drive to see grandma, you rent a car for the longer trip.

All of that depends on affordable self driving transport of course.

danpat• 5 years ago

Economics has also already given us lots of information on how much money people are prepared to sink into transportation - the owners of the self-driving cars/rental companies will attempt to extract that value.

I don't doubt there will be a shift in the overall economic picture, but it may not be as large for the car _user_ as we would hope. It will need to be better/cheaper in some dimension for it to get adopted, but the rent-seeking vultures are always circling, spoiling the utopia :-(

throwaway20372• 5 years ago

I'm confused why many people automatically assume robot taxis will be cheaper.

Financial Times (Alphaville Blog): The questionable economics of autonomous taxi fleets: https://www.ft.com/content/aa05823d-e58f-33ee-a99c-d50f2fd0c...

... quotes this Harvard/MIT study: Autonomous Taxis and Public Health: High Cost or High Opportunity Cost?: https://psyarxiv.com/6e94h

<<<Drawing on a wealth of publicly available data, Ashley Nunes and his colleague Kristen Hernandez suggest that the price for taking an autonomous taxi will be between $1.58 to $6.01 on a per-mile basis, versus the $0.72 cost of owning a car. Using San Francisco’s taxi market as its test area, the academics examined a vast array of costs such as licensing, maintenance, fuel and insurance for their calculations.>>>

I can imagine that as the world grows more urbanised, and wealth concentrates in urban areas, that people will want to pay for the convenience and safety of a robot taxi.

s1artibartfast3• 5 years ago

Notably, your 2nd paper puts the cost of a traditional taxi at $3.50 per mile. At the low end of the autonomous price range, it is still a half price taxi.

For the autonomous taxi calculation they also include a 250k medallion plus interest paid off over 5 years, but don't include this for regular taxis. They also include a 200K/year to supervise the auto taxi for the high end ($6/mile).

With all that said, Auto taxis are unlikely to be a cost effective replacement to owning a car for distance commuters. Even with lower costs than traditional taxis, taxis are horribly cost ineffective way to get to work and back for any significant distances.

robotburrito• 5 years ago

Would getting hit by one of these things basically mean you won the lottery?

Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

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