Waymo shows off what it’s like to ride in a truly driverless self-driving car

That makes no sense when they're not required to have a driver with their ass in the seat, are the elderly passengers from 00:33 going to unbuckle and jump over the front seat to take over driving?

Longer term this is a problem for Waymo. Their supposed partnership with Fiat Chrysler isn't a full-blown, intergrated manufacturing partnership. Waymo is mostly just buying Pacifica mini-vans from FCA and retrofitting them with Waymo's own custom designed hardware at a separate facility in Nova Michigan.

This is not cost effective, and not viable as a long-term strategy. If Waymo does have a strategy for producing robotaxis in the tens of thousands, they've been very quiet about it.

With every year that goes by building an autonomous OS gets easier. Best practices have been established, knowledge continually disseminates throughout the industry, there is, every year less software and hardware that needs to be built from scratch. Automobile mass production, on the other hand, isn't getting any easier. It's as hard as it ever was. So really, over the long run, it's the legacy automakers who have the true competitive moat, and the real bargaining power.

This may mean more about the progression of cheap postscript-compat printers than Linux.

But the wireless mdns discovery thing works, which is really nice.

You may get a significant boost in ability with LIDAR, but it's possible that over-reliance on it will hamper those companies' ability to develop passive image recognition and they will end up stuck.

That opinion certainly seems possible, and Musk does seem to have a track record of being very intelligent and perceptive, and is known to develop his opinions from first principles. So... I'm generally inclined to believe he's correct.

But it looks like we're wrong. First of all, there have been crashes with even Tesla's autopilot, and it didn't seem to affect anything.

For another, this same logic would've probably meant that driving itself would never have become popular in the first place, or would've been set back many decades because of car crashes. That doesn't seem to have been the case.

I'm not saying these things can't kill an industry, but I think people are pretty tolerant of even unthinkable dangers beforehand, if the incentive is high enough.

People driving have accidents all the time right now that could have been avoided if proper automation was in charge.

At some point if you have an accident and kill someone, and it can be shown in court that if you'd been using the easily available technology that person would still be alive, people will start being prosecuted for gross negligence or worse.

Consider the alternative: autonomous cars theoretically get no production use and then suddenly go "on sale" for any buyer to use them in whatever route or condition they want. This would result in an extremely chaotic situation where suddenly there is no opportunity for gradual production deployment to slowly find the edges of their capabilities (which in some cases could result in accidents) -- instead the whole buyer-base of autonomous cars would be exposed to those edge cases, in full, from the moment the cars became available.

edit: Also I'm not sure what you are asking about direct knowledge: I'm stating observations of reality that self driving cars are already being rolled out incrementally in places/routes that they are best suited to.

Not all days in Phoenix are sunny, but only 5% of days are rainy, and 0% are snowy. As compared with many midwestern cities, which get precipitation about a third of days. And all of which have snow, sleet, and ice to deal with much of the year.

The current program says: "We’re searching for early riders in parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert." So it's definitely not the 600 square miles you claim, and I've seen no evidence that riders can go absolutely anywhere even in the test area. And I note none of the video was at night.

Even the article you cite is clear that this is very limited, and that Waymo is intentionally avoiding disclosing a great deal, including where, when, who, and how much.

Yes, this is very cool. But Waymo, as it should have, has clearly picked the easy place to start. For a domain this complex, the 90/90 rule definitely applies.

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

It'll be very interesting to see where it goes. One of the discussions I've had with friends is the extent to which private ownership of cars goes from near-universal to niche. Reactions are all over the map, but my personal bet is that a lot of the kids who grow up with the idea of autonomous cars will never develop that very American attachment to personal car ownership.

The real question is whether self-driving cars would be less dangerous than human drivers. I don't think the data so far has been convincing, to put it mildly.

As far as I understand, the 5 million miles driven by Waymo were mostly under human supervision, so it does not tell us a lot on how safe those cars really are.

The motion-sickness reducing benefits of staring at the horizon is usually ascribed to the horizon being very far away and not moving along with the car. Until your projections are holographic, it won't help.

The up front cost of a vehicle is something like 1/3 of the cost per mile (probably less for commercially operated vehicles), so even a pretty big decrease in the purchase price will only have a moderate impact on overall cost.

This concept has been brought up numerous times and has never taken off (ha). I don’t think passengers would react well unless it was literally indistinguishable from a window, and we’re a long way from that.

I hope that's not the case. Even if self-driving cars are only as good as the median human driver, a universal rollout of that tech would save countless lives. I really hope that when the first self-driving fatality happens the media or public fear doesn't blow it out of proportion.