Notably, "At the start, Waymo-trained drivers will be riding along to supervise our vehicles for riders’ comfort and convenience."
Edit: Re-reading my comment, it sounds negative, so I want to acknowledge that I think this is a big deal. No matter how "soft" this launch, it's still a historic moment.
> We’re never done learning, and our early rider program will continue as a way for a select group to give us ongoing insights. They’ll help test early features before those new capabilities graduate to Waymo One. For example, we’ve already offered fully driverless rides to some of our early riders.
And the number of people with access to Waymo One is going to steadily increase over time[1]:
> We’ll first offer Waymo One to hundreds of early riders who have already been using our technology. Over time, we hope to make Waymo One available to even more members of the public as we add vehicles and drive in more places.
So with that in mind, let's imagine if, for example, at some point in the near future 10,000 people have access to Waymo One and 1% of Waymo One rides are being completed without a safety driver. Would that satisfy your milestone? What about 100,000 people with 10% driverless rides? If Waymo eventually reaches a point where 95% of rides are fully driverless, and 1 million people have access to the app, would Waymo opening the app up to everyone _really_ seem like that significant of a milestone anymore?
[1]: https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-one-the-next-step-on-our-self...
However anticlimactic it may be when it arrives, that day is nonetheless the day when, in my mind, self driving cars have officially gone from zero to one. There will be no apprenticeship this year.
And it's still unclear to me if everybody is having their NDAs lifted, as they are making a distinction between early riders and Waymo One but not specifying if everybody is making the transition or just a handful of people (or hell, even any).
As always, time will tell - the rollout of this technology has been slow to those of us who have been following it over the years.
"Oh shit I'm late to the airport!" Get in car, car says, "Critical Updates required before start, please wait 5 minutes". Then 30 minutes goes by, update is at 99%, "Finalizing".
When its done, you say, "Ok car, get me to the airport ASAP!". Car says, "Sorry, why we optimize the download, speed is limited to 30mph, The ETA to your destination, the airport, is NaN"
EDIT: -silly \r\n +dangerous
That's the only difference of this "launch".
The next announcement from Waymo will be that they are cutting staff "mostly from R&D". The announcement after that will be that they are opening up the Waymo app for anyone to be a driver. The announcement after that will be that they are closing up shop or being sold to Uber.
But since Waymo will handle the vast majority of rides we'll just tune out those comments.
Handling all rides & conditions is a very hard problem and it'll take decades to solve.
But scaling from "a few" to "most" is a much easier problem and one that I have confidence that Waymo will achieve. And "most" can be very useful & profitable.
> We could even tolerate a little bit more errors because accidents would not be harmful too much.
instead of "harmful too much" you can simply use "fatal". 30km/h is a pretty magic value: below that speed pedestrian collisions are very rarely fatal. Serious perhaps, but not fatal. Above that speed they are often fatal.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footspeed
But I’m not sure that the average human could even run 100m these days.
Maybe if this was Microsoft, and Waymo was the Zune.
Alphabet has given it some 9 years just to get to this soft launch, I think they have the patience to see it through. There is enough money and interest in this space internationally that I'd give it some time.
They can't come out right away and say "guys we failed at self driving, it doesn't work", that would tank the personal careers of everyone important in the company. They have to slowly move the needle away from self driving, and then they'll give us the bomb drop, "we could only build better safety systems, not self-driving systems" and nobody will care because they are happy with safe-driving.
If they truly had self-driving tech, they'd be doubling down on that with their messaging. Not only to let everyone know there's a new sheriff in town (bye Uber!), but also to let their competitor's know to start their death clocks.
I can imagine there are other scenarios where Waymo PR makes this post, even though Waymo has not totally failed at producing self-driving cars, but perhaps I'm being insufficiently cynical.
Calling Wqymo an Uber with employees is a pretty big insult to the most advanced sdc company so far. Uber's self driving attempt has failed. Uber is nothing without it's drivers.
If Google believes its tech is that far ahead, it makes way more sense to minimize risks associated with the public perceiving Waymo's system is dangerous, and let people get comfortable with being in a self-driving car.
That's exactly what would happen if a newly developed product killed some people. A human assisted rollout is a cautious strategy that allows them to learn in the real world without exposing their massive R&D investment to the fate of Uber's.
Eventually they will go the way of the elevator operator.