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Comment by jbob2000 | Hacker News Reader

jbob2000

Mark these words, "At the start", because we'll be hearing them for the next 10 years until Waymo closes up shop. That they are going to market with drivers in the car means that the business has pivoted from "can we do driverless taxi" to "can we make money as uber-but-with-employees".

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.

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Mark these words. In 10 years time we'll still be hearing the same comments about Waymo & their competitors because there still will be certain combinations of passenger, route & conditions that Waymo will refuse to take without a safety driver along.

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.

I assume we're talking about city driving. I'm not sure about the USA, but being in Europe, the average speed my car says I go is 28.5 km/h. Do you think we could not solve traffic for 10 years if we slowed cars down to 30 km/h? With assumption being that a city-wide driverless system would easily 'swim' through the city without encountering red lights or slowdowns due to unpredictiveness of other drivers. We could even tolerate a little bit more errors because accidents would not be harmful too much.

I'm a big fan of Sweden's Project Zero, one leg of which is setting and enforcing a speed limit of 30 km/h on any road or street without fully separated pedestrian & cycle infrastructure. I don't know if self-driving will help accomplish this everywhere, but I'd be ecstatic if it did.

> 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.

About the speed of a sprinting human, unsurprisingly.

The average human cannot sprint that fast. I'd peg the average person sprinting closer to half that (obviously there's a lot of variance, but I think only the top 1% of athletes could run 30 kph even for 5 seconds). For a frame of reference, try to run at the top speed of a treadmill (most max out at 15 mph, and most people can't go that fast - at least not at the gym).

You're both right because 30 km/h = 18,6 mph

The fastest athletes can max out at nearly 45 kph when given a running start.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footspeed

But I’m not sure that the average human could even run 100m these days.

Average human (not a child or pregnant) before cities (ie., when human morphology evolved)? Quite likely I would guess.

An oft-repeated adage in the self-driving engineering circles is "the last 10% is 90% of the work"

Isn't that just the 90-90 rule?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule

Pareto Principle? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

I assume safety drivers will be used when they expand into new cities to make sure they are able to learn the traffic patterns, etc.

>until Waymo closes up shop

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.

That's a prediction, but why do you think that's how it'll turn out?

The news would be different. This news item is focused around the driver and safety. They are slowly changing their messaging from being about self-driving to being about safe-driving.

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.

> 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.

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.

Waymo used "self-driving" in the article's title and twice in its first sentence, literally doubling down with that messaging.

No, that's part of the strategy of shifting the messaging: Use both phrases together so people associate them, and then slowly drop the phrase that you want to go away.

Yeah, but the alternative bet is that they want the "safety driver" part to be the part that eventually goes away. If they want public acceptance, it will make sense to keep safety drivers.

Eventually they will go the way of the elevator operator.

Maybe I haven't seen enough large-scale corporate failures (and the associated damage control, which is how it seems you are characterizing this post), but it feels like you're making this prediction on the basis of not enough data.

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.

Yes, I agree that I don't have enough data. But previous to this article, I was really supportive of Waymo. When I read the headline about "next steps", I thought we'd hear about some great new systems being rolled out or advancements towards the goal of self-driving, NOT about safety safety safety, drivers drivers drivers. This is how MBAs speak, not engineers.

Uber has poisoned the well with the type of reckless behaviour you are talking about. Self driving cars are no longer assumed to be safe by default. They kill people just like human driven cars, prrhaps they are even worse than humans at driving. So far Waymo has kept it's reputation as one of the few self driving companies that hasn't killed any of it's passengers.

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.

As the article mentions they were always about safe driving and saving lives. I remember the founder talking about it ages ago. It's not really a change of messaging.

I don't buy this. Strategically, it makes way more sense to roll it out as a driver-assisted system. Instead of dealing with the negative PR associated with a mishap or accident (like Uber in Arizona), you can place blame on individual drivers while you gain adoption.

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.

I agree strongly that the market for true self driving is a mirage. It's being sold as new free time in your vehicle, but it'll just end up more time for ads to saturate eyeballs.

You realize those drivers won't actually be driving most of the time, right?

Doesn't matter, it's not self-driving if you need a driver. And when that driver takes control of the vehicle away from the AI, it's going to be at a startling and dangerous moment when the AI makes a really bad decision, like directing the car towards a barrier or a stopped bus.

If the driver has large uneventful periods of time where he/she has nothing to do. He/she will not react in time for an emergency.

If the software driver is bad enough that the safety driver will feel compelled to pay attention at all times but not quite take control unless the car does something actually warranting it. It'll be like teaching a 16yo to drive but without them actually getting better (because the software will need to be tuned to keep the driver on edge). Doing it that way is kind of a backhanded approach but it would force the backup driver to pay attention.

Worst of both worlds!

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