Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kjksf | Hacker News Reader

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What is definition of "mass"?

Waymo almost certainly will launch this year a fully self driving service, accessible to anyone, "within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert" (https://waymo.com/apply/faq/) which is where their pilot program has been running for several months now.

See e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waym...

They already have at least 600 cars in that area and already announced plans to buy 80k cars.

So if by "mass" you mean "millions of cars available world wide" then yeah, maybe not 20 years but it'll take a decade to scale this world-wide.

But to me "self driving works in practice" will be validated within months of Waymo launching in Arizona and then they'll enter a phase of dazzling scale up to other cities.

For comparison it took Uber 7 years to outgrow taxis and I expect self driving to grow a bit faster.

Once the technology works it's just a matter of capital expenditure and physical limits of how fast you can scale car manufacturing.

It'll take many years to deploy this world-wide but I don't think this is the standard most people use when they determine if self driving technology works or not.

What makes you think "works in Phoenix" is anywhere near "works in most places" ?

I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.

Waymo showed off their tech for driving in snow/rain in Google IO this year.

They've also done a lot of their testing in the SF Bay Area, which is a pretty difficult urban area to drive in.

They're obviously launching in Phoenix because it's the easiest major city to drive in, but they're also obviously going to expand to other places once they get successes in Phoenix.

Honestly, to me, the more interesting question is: As self-driving cars slowly expand to other cities, will other cities intentionally start making their lane markings more obvious and doing other things to make it easier for self-driving cars to drive in?

Sometimes, shuffling around blame can cause things to get fixed. Previously, with bad lane markings, you could blame bad drivers for accidents. But with self-driving cars, you can only blame the software. So if a self-driving car company is willing to serve one city with good lane markings but not another city with bad lane markings, suddenly the city government gets the blame for bad lane markings.

Weather is probably one of the easier problems to tackle. Sure, performance will be worse in a snowstorm, but that's true of humans too. Waymo has already showed they can filter out snowflakes. Maybe it wouldn't work in white-out conditions, but in that case, again, humans also can't really drive.

The more complex things that can happen in urban areas though, yeah that's hard. All kinds of weird shit can happen that takes social understanding to know how to deal with. Right now it looks like for those situations Waymo is relying on remote "coaches" that tell the cars what to do at a high level (guidance, but not directly control).

It’s true that the probability of collision is likely lower on the dry, wide, and well-maintained roads of Phoenix, but given the higher speeds (higher kinetic energy), the probability of injury/death per collision is likely higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona

"Phoenix is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With 1,626,078 people (as of 2017), Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide"

Explain the criteria you used to classify it as "suburbs".

Phoenix is the first metro area to launch the service.

Waymo (and others) are testing in other places.

From https://waymo.com/ontheroad/: Kirkland (lots of rain), Bay Area (including San Francisco), Detroit (snow during winter), Atlanta, Austin.

I don't see how you arrived at the 1% and 1% of what?

If it took Waymo 10 years to drive in Phonix, Arizona, it'll take them 1000 years to improve enough to drive in Detroit?

Those things are pretty binary: either they can drive autonomously or they can't.

I lived and drove in the Phoenix metro area for many years, and there are very, very few areas that are as dense as most other cities. On top of that, the infrastructure is relatively new, the roads and lanes are nice and wide, and weather isn't a major concern almost all the time.

GP's assertion that driving in Phoenix is easier than most other places is absolutely correct.

His assertion was that it's 100x harder to drive in Detroit during winter than in Phoenix. Is that absolutely correct?

I don't dispute that Phoenix is easier to drive than San Francisco or Detroit during winter.

It's perfectly rational to debut such service in the easiest possible environment.

I just don't think that it's a fundamentally different problem to make this work elsewhere.

This technology already improved by leaps and bounds. At first those cars couldn't finish a drive in the desert, with no other traffic.

I don't have an inside knowledge on this but the fact that they are already testing the cars in more difficult areas indicates they are working on more difficult problems.

It's anyone's guess how far they are on that front.

My guess is that after launching publicly in Phoenix, it'll take less than a year to launch publicly in San Francisco.

Phoenix could easily be 100x easier than a snowy winter environment.

It is one thing to have broad streets, well marked, with multiple levels of marking, e.g., stripes, plus curbs, plus medians/sidewalks, plus trees/shrubbery. All of these well-designed and well-built modern road features cooperate to make a consistently recognizable environment. And the lack of serious weather is a big deal too.

Contrast that to a city like Detroit or Boston, where the streets are anything from modern to ancient, literally paved over the cow-paths, constantly changing with construction, lucky if the lane markings are still visible, pedestrians in all kinds of odd situations (legal and illegal) -- orders of magnitude more difficult to sort the environment. Now add snow in quantities enough to make it often difficult as an experienced human driver to figure out where you are in the lanes, and then snowbanks in odd places after it is cleared'.

Sure, it's still 4 wheels, power plant, steering wheel, roads, but two quite different games.

Going for a walk in Central Park at lunch and hiking up Denali in Alaska are also ostensibly similar activities, but in actual reality, are very different games.

>I just don't think that it's a fundamentally different problem to make this work elsewhere...

>...I don't have an inside knowledge on this...

So, based on your complete lack of knowledge on the subject, you think that the current solutions will easily extend to more difficult applications? I work in a related field (image/signal processing and ML) and I can assure you that there is no such thing as a general solution here. It is absolutely reasonable to expect that your 70% solution may simpler never work for the remaining 30% and you have to go back to the drawing board.

> Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide

Yes, but that same source for population indicates that Phoenix is only the 169th most congested city in the U.S. It's suburbs are presumably even less congested.

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