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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Waymo keeps plugging away. Each year, for the last few years, the number of miles between disconnects they report to the CA DMV has doubled. Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product.

Nobody else is even close.

This problem is slowly being solved, by normal engineering practices. The "fake it til you make it" players are being left behind. Uber has been shown to be totally incompetent. Tesla really just has a good lane follower and an mediocre car follower. Apple has been trying to hand-wave by talking about "significant disconnects" vs. the all disconnects DMV requires them to report.

The LIDAR industry is struggling, but there is progress. Quanergy seems to have been mostly hype.[1] Continental, the big European auto parts maker, bought Advanced Scientific Concepts, which makes and sells a good but expensive flash LIDAR used in DoD and space applications. They packaged it up for automotive use, and are waiting for the self driving industry to catch up. That technology uses exotic indium-gallium-arsenide sensor ICs, which are expensive in small quantities but would probably be affordable if they could sell a few million a year.

This looks like a problem that's being solved. Just not fast enough for startups used to quick payoffs in software.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-08-13/how-a-bil...

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"Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product."

I am skeptical of that, because I expect that even if disconnects are ultra-rare overall, and the testing is representative of normal usage, there will be enough people that frequently use the technology in ways far off on the tail of the distribution that for them, disconnects will be much less rare. And that might create a PR blowup or worse.

I think what is worrying me may be something called "heteroscedasticity".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteroscedasticity

I'm way less worried about this than when Waymo was originally called the Google Self-Driving Car Project.

If Uber and Tesla continue with their current plans, they will have enough accidents that self-driving cars being in accidents will cease being headline news. They just become an actuarial math problem, just like regular car insurance is today.

(This is my opinion and not that of my employer.)

For self-driving cars, what would that be? You can misuse a non-self driving car by speeding, giving you above-average chances of accidents. You can be old, giving you above average chances of being involved in accidents (per km driven). You can smoke, giving you above average chances of getting lung cancer. You can misuse a partially self driving car by somehow convincing it that you do follow the traffic while actually not following it, and then blame any accidents onto the self-drive feature.

But fully self driving cars only have two inputs: starting point and destination. Doesn't matter whether you are old, sleeping, 13 or a dog. Unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others, or manufacturers let people also fiddle with how much a car should risk accidents in order to get a little decrease in travel time, I don't see any way possible. And if manufacturers really do give that option, it's truly their fault.

In the hands of a consumer, don't forget being diligent with maintenance, driving on unsealed roads, choosing to drive in poor conditions. There are probably a lot more. It is surprising how much some people abuse machines.

Waymo's "shipped product" is likely to be a fleet service in several cities, at least at first, so maintenance is their responsibility. Likewise, I'd imagine unsealed roads would be outside initial coverage areas.

(Note that while I work at Google, I don't have any particularly relevant inside knowledge. What I'm saying is consistent with their current pilot in Phoenix and public articles.)

They already have a fleet although in just a part of one city. They will keep expanding the fleet and the area/cities covered over time. Instead of one big announcement that we have selfdriving cars they will keep expanding and improving over decades. And just like people kept harping about driving range of electric cars. They will suddenly be everywhere. Car manufacturers are wary of Waymo so far but the first large manafacturer to join hands with them will probably dominate car/transport industry of the future.

> You can be old, giving you above average chances of being involved in accidents (per km driven).

You have to be very old for this to be true.

It turns out that 16-25 years old is worse than any group until something like 75-80 years old.

> Unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others

By chance do you happen to live somewhere without icy roads?

I live in Minnesota and have my entire life. I hope very much that self driving cars lead to a more sane response to icy conditions, which is to not drive. If the vehicles are in a position to enforce that at a technical level then all the better.

I agree. I was simply pointing out that "unless some roads are more susceptible to accidents than others" certainly happens, very frequently.

But I too am hopeful that machines are better than human drivers in all scenarios.

Funny. This reminds me of all the comments about apps like Dropbox. "Do you happen to live with strict low data caps?"

Well, guess what, those guys are still on Reddit making snarky comments and the Dropbox guys have IPO'd.

I certainly hope hazardous weather conditions go the way of small data caps.

Haha, or we can get better at dealing with them and introduce ourselves to them as we get better.

But fair play for playing with the analogy. Funny.

Yes, people who can't live in pleasant places will not get some tech early. C'est la vie. We'll get there.

I imagine that computers are a lot better than humans at control tasks like keeping traction on icy roads. I don't think that this is a hard problem in self-driving tech.

>You can misuse a non-self driving car by speeding, giving you above-average chances of accidents.

I feel like it's the opposite... When I drive the speed limit, other drivers around me become more aggressive. Even if they have to exit the highway 20 seconds later they fiercely fight for tiny speed differences of 10km/h, start flashing their headlights, etc.

Maybe on access-limited highways.

But on (sub)urban streets driving the speed limit decreases the chance of causing serious injury to other road users, including pedestrians, even if it may lead to an increase in the total number of crashes between motorists.

I meant speeding in a more general sense of driving faster than what's safe given the circumstances. E.g. you shouldn't get near the all-year limit if there's ice on the road. In dry lit summer conditions with nobody on the road you can drive much faster.

If you are driving during rush hour where everyone is stressful, then idiots will flash headlights, do risky behaviour, etc, that's true. And yeah, driving slightly over the speed limit to be consistent with the traffic around you is generally a good idea. But if they are too much over the limit, it's their doing, not mine, and if the risky behaviour causes an accident in which I'm involved, it won't be my fault if I'm following the rules. Conversely, no judge will accept it as an argument if you speed because of the idiots and you cause an accident.

I personally just let the idiots be idiots. Especially when the limit has a cause, e.g. a construction site or something: they put a lower speed limit for the safety of the construction workers. I won't compromise their safety, not a bit.

I've now seen the word heteroscedasticity twice in 5 minutes and thank you for providing the link to Wikipedia. Although I think the 'meta-variety' synonym was quite apt on the other page.

The last Ars article that I read on Waymo did imply that they had hit a metaphorical wall on their progress, and were keeping things looking good by sticking to lower-speed residential neighborhoods and avoiding situations they had trouble with, like making unprotected left turns onto major streets and passing slow or stopped vehicles on a busy road. Essentially things that require being able to understand that the other cars around are driven by people who tend to react to things, and will probably slow down if you make a turn into a lane that they would be passing you in.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/googles-waymo-risks-rep...

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/12/we-finally-talked-to-an...

What's the problem? If a a robot can drive a car more statistically more safely than a human, that seems like a net win.

Maybe humans shouldn't be making left turns in traffic or passing trucks either. Those are probably, statistically, the most dangerous things you can do when driving. But we do them all the time, because we have no idea how dangerous they really are.

The problem is the other car has a human in it, and those situations are ones where the reaction of the other human is critical to safety analysis, but generally unpredictable.

A computer will be able to react to a sudden crazy movement by another driver far better than a human will.

“Will be”? Yep. Given an infinite timescale computers “will be” able to do lots of things better than people, such as navigate rough terrain or open a door.

Currently, they can’t do any of that better than humans, and probably not for several years.

It sounded like the post you replied to was referring to emergency maneuvers, and I think automated systems are probably better than humans at some kinds of emergency maneuvers even right now.

Performing emergency maneuvers, yes. Predicting the need for emergency maneuvers based on the varied and unpredictable responses of humans in exceptional circumstances, not so much.

Yeah, UPS trucks don't make left turns. Maybe self driving cars can do the same.

Please stop fixating on those California disengagements. They mean approximately nothing. They are unregulated, voluntarily reported incidents. A low number could mean that safety drivers are acting irresponsibly, or that the vehicles are only being used on public roads in known-safe circumstances.

I strongly suspect that the quest for a low disengagement number is what got that woman in Arizona killed by Uber. These reports really should be sealed from the public. AV startups seem to be using their disengagement rate as a way raise money. They are aided by journalists hungry to make sense of a highly secretive field publishing these figures completely out of context.

> These reports really should be sealed from the public.

Yeah, the public has no right to know what vehicles on public roads are capable (or incapable of).

And we wouldn't want pesky innocent deaths to impede with Uber's ability to "bring self driving to market"...

The public has a right to know how unaided AVs on public roads operate. The "number of disengagements" of prototypes reported by corporate research programs has no relation to this.

What's a better metric or way of measuring it?

Really? I'm pretty sure it was irresponsible staffing and unsafe software: Uber reduced their drivers from two to one per vehicle. That driver was watching a cell phone video and not watching the road, but Uber should have known that was a risk and taken action to mitigate it.

The Uber self-driving program was trying to move too fast, before the software was ready. That and the operations failure made it inevitable that someone was going to be killed.

You should take Waymo's numbers with a healthy dose of skepticism. They are very selective about which disengagements they report. Here are the details from their 2017 letter to the DMV:

This report covers disengagements following the California DMV definition, which means “a deactivation of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous technology is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver disengage the autonomous mode and take immediate manual control of the vehicle.” Section 227.46 of Article 3.7 (Autonomous Vehicles) of Title 13, Division 1, Chapter 1, California Code of Regulations.

Waymo has developed a robust process to collect, analyze and evaluate disengages for this report. We set disengagement thresholds conservatively for our public road testing. The vast majority of disengagements are not related to safety. Our test drivers routinely transition into and out of autonomous mode many times throughout the day, and the self-driving vehicle’s computer hands over control to the driver in many situations that do not involve a failure of the autonomous technology and do not require an immediate takeover of control by the driver.

To help evaluate the safety significance of disengagements, Waymo employs a powerful simulator program. In Waymo’s simulation, our team can “replay” each incident and predict the behavior of our self-driving car if the driver had not taken control of it, as well as the behavior and positions of other road users in the vicinity (such as pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles). Our engineers use this data to refine and improve the software to ensure the self-driving car performs safely.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/42aff875-7ab1-4115...

Waymo is ahead but only as a Taxi service in dense urban cities. Tesla however can deliver one day that will self drive 90% of the time. Many, especially in North America will only want the later. In North America, a car is still seen as a freedom enabler, one that lets you go to the beach, go on a hiking trip, and go on a few offroad track in a park during weekends. All of these will not be possible with a Waymo car but still possible with a Tesla Model S/3/X

People take their commuter Teslas off-roading? Every time I try it ends with strange looks from the tow truck driver.

> Three more doublings, and that number will be bigger than average miles between accidents for human drivers. Then they can ship a product.

They can ship a product that can drive under the conditions they're testing under. Which would be appropriate for autonomous taxi service in certain municipalities, but presumably not for the general market.

Granted, that's been their business plan for a while now.

So can Tesla. They don’t have to enable full automous driving in all conditions.

Do you have hard numbers so we can establish a trendline?

My perhaps false recollection was that Waymo disengagements had flatlined 2017 to 2018.

You're right; 2016 to 2017, not much improvement. Then, twice as good in 2018.[1] (CA DMV stats run on a year from December to November, so the most recent data set is for 2018.)

[1] https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/02/12/disengagem...

I spam this on every waymo mention, so I apologize, but can they please automate highway driving first and then work on getting me through taco bell? I care way more about taking a nap between cities with autorecharge than automating a 4 minute trip to a fast food joint.

If they really are doing this well with non-freeway driving, then that just tells me they could have released freeway driving about 4 years ago.

At least Tesla has an actual product you can buy? Where’s Waymos product? Will they sell to consumers or the incumbent car makers?

I agree with your statement about Tesla’s marketing of self driving. My Grand Cherokee isn’t so far off their mark. It has lane assist, adaptive cruise control with stop, parallel and back in parking. I’d bet Jeep could do summon and more stuff on the highway.

> At least Tesla has an actual product you can buy?

What self driving product do they have? Elon's "Oh yeah, we will have full self driving coast to coast in [8 months]" is horseshit to the point of "How is he allowed to say this on an earnings call?"

Other competitors, widely recognized to be ahead of Tesla estimate 5, more likely 10 YEARS. Coast to coast? Your Tesla will navigate a Pittsburgh winter storm on poor roads in Level 5 autonomy... this year? No.

So then we're with "sophisticated driver assist". Actual products you can buy with sophisticated driver assist are sold by: Toyota, Honda, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Chrysler...

My Jaguar has: adaptive cruise, four way sensors, lane assist, including ability to prevent you from changing lanes if a blind spot obstruction is noted, adaptive front lighting and high beam assist, driver condition monitoring (detects multiple 'drift', lane departure events or sub-optimal braking), traffic sign recognition and adaptive speed limiting, rear traffic monitoring including the ability to avoid, if possible, full auto parking, and so on.

My wife’s car has a similar long list of “features” (Mercedes DISTRONIC package with active lane keeping) and it is nothing even remotely comparable to driving my TM3 with autopilot.

Those cars do not steer themselves. The difference between having to steer the car and not having to steer the car is extreme.

It totally changes the way you drive. Instead of looking down your lane and keeping the car centered, you scan all around you and keep situational awareness of the drivers around you while the car keeps itself in lane. It’s a totally different experience.

> The difference between having to steer the car and not having to steer the car is extreme

Assuming you keep your hands on the wheel as required what exactly is the difference? I only found it to be a distraction as it takes me considerably longer to reengage (in less than expected situations) as the human driver after a period where I just let go a little.

That’s your experience as a Tesla driver?

I don’t have any “reengagement lag” as you might say. When I want to start steering the car again I just start steering. There is a slight resistance felt in the wheel if you turn past the autopilot without flipping the right stick up to explicitly disengage AP first.

There is a massive difference in the driving experience. How long did you try it for?

And my wife’s Acura will completely steer itself (with a much shorter list of features), but requires your hands on the wheel. It works without your hands, but it gets testy if you don’t move the wheel slightly every 15 seconds.

It’s significantly nicer to drive long stretches with this system, but I can’t imagine doing it without your hands on the wheel. When the sensors fail (weather or poor lane markings), you need to be able to take over immediately. Granting too much autonomy to the system is just too risky (and the point of the article).

Are you taking about LKAS? [1]

Not trying to be rude, but that is nothing at all like driving with AutoPilot.

[1] - https://youtu.be/iKWBdySgssE

You’re not being rude. It is the lane keep assist, and it is nothing like Tesla’s autopilot. But that was the point I was trying to make. It’s a very good, but limited, drivers aid. But because it’s likited, it won’t make (or rather let) you get complacent. This was the gist of the original article — the Tesla autopilot system is very risky when the system needs to hand over to the driver. The driver is likely to trust the system too much and therefore let down their guard and lose key context that is needed when the autopilot sees something that it can’t cope with. In those situations, a more limited system is likely safer because the driver is forced to be more engaged throughout the trip.

Your wife's Acura does not steer itself the same way a Tesla steers itself. Your wife's Acura will try to keep the car from exiting a lane.

I had the same experience with Subaru's EyeSight system. I drive very rarely (you can count the number of times I drive in a year on one hand) so after a day of driving I'm usually completely beat. But after a day of highway driving with the EyeSight lane keeping/adaptive cruise control I was remarkably less fatigued.

Active Lane assist features also steer themselves? At least for all VW brands they do (VW, Audi, Seat etc). Pretty sure the Mercedes active lane keeping does the same. They just don't sell it as an autopilot.

How are you going to say Tesla doesn't have a product and then go on to list a bunch of worse products as if they are better?

Tesla has effectively incorporated Lane Keep Assist/Automatic Cruise Control into a single product called Autopilot that has vastly better software than other similar products.

Simply put, if other companies had a product that would have allowed for billions of miles to be driven hands free feet free, they would have it, but they do not, not even close. Tesla does.

>Tesla has effectively incorporated Lane Keep Assist/Automatic Cruise Control into a single product called Autopilot that has vastly better software than other similar products.

Is it? This[1] implies that, contrary to what you say, most other manufacturers do offer equivalent features in equivalent luxury vehicles. Tesla might have gotten beaten many of them by a year or so, and might sell more Xs than Toyota sells high-trim Lexus's, but neither of those things really say anything about the quality of the driving technology. And from what I've seen, Tesla's isn't particularly spectacular.

[1]: https://www.cars.com/articles/which-cars-have-self-driving-f...

Vastly better? I'm not sure the last time my car did an uncommanded lane change on a well painted road with good ambient light. Yet, I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing exactly that.

I'm not sure the last time (actually I am - it has not) my car treated a roundabout with a shallow center median as "entirely optional, follow the circle or go straight over", but I can find multiple videos of Teslas doing that.

The two cars I've driven that are modern (2017 and 2018 Audi and Jaguars) also didn't hit a big white pickup truck in broad daylight in parking mode, but I've seen Teslas doing that, too.

So, how are we defining "bunch of worse products"? "Less advanced, but better tested"? If that's the case, I think I'll take that.

Weird, when I search "Jaguar self driving" or "Jaguar Hands Free" I don't find any real videos of it at all. Are you sure it's not Jaguar that doesn't have self driving?

Do you actually drive your car hands free and feet free for more than 30 seconds ever?

I'm pretty sure that your comment falls under Poe's law somehow. I just can't tell if it's meant seriously.

> Do you actually drive your car hands free and feet free for more than 30 seconds ever?

Fairly certain in many cases that's illegal. And apropos of anything else, doesn't Tesla itself require steering wheel contact/torque every 15 seconds?

At least Tesla has an actual product you can buy?

I have a self-driving automotive product you can buy. It doesn't work as advertised, either.

Calling a lamb's tail a leg doesn't make for a five-legged farm animal. This reminds me of the conversations about, say, phone authentication using facial identification. "Samsung had it before FaceID!" Yeah, I had one of those Samsung phones. It did not do what it said on the tin. So, yeah, Tesla has a product you can buy, but it is not a self-driving vehicle despite what they might tell you.

What do you call it when a Tesla drives me 90% of the way to work where I don't do anything but observe?

It's not full self driving but it definitely is driving it self and providing value.

^Exactly. I think Tesla's marketing is shit around this. Elon needs to shut the hell up on twitter as well.

Stop coming at me with Waymo is 10 years ahead of Tesla... Ok great, are they shipping & delivering any value to paying customers? Waiting.......

In 5 years time, do you really think Waymo will have paying customers and have gained regulatory approval? Hell no...

Tesla at least realizes they can't get passed the regulatory hurdle. Keep driver at the wheel, provide a value, automate and refine.

Very much this. I see it as a waterfall vs agile approach when you use software development methodologies as a comparison. Tesla put out a minimum viable product, and is quickly iterating on it. It isn't the ivory tower dogmatic example of perfection, but it is really good, and is tons of fun. Waymo on the other hand, is trying to just skip putting their products seriously in the hands of users and are doing limited trials in limited mostly perfect driving conditions (like Phoenix, AZ).

The best thing is that as much as people want to argue on the internet about "which is better", it is somewhat inevitable they'll both succeed in their own way. Waymo will eventually crack the nut for Level 5 autonomous driving with Lidar just like Tesla will crack the nut for their full self driving (defined as driving from the east to west coast without any involuntary disengagements) with machine vision. I actually (potentially incorrectly) suspect Tesla will win this war first as they simply have a multiple of any competition when it comes to amount of driving data. How many more hundreds of millions of miles has Tesla autopilot logged compared to Waymo? Reminder: Tesla is building ~5,000-6,000 cars per week and tends to sell them pretty well. Their data moat only continues to widen. Once they figure out the right models for really pulling it off, they'll make HUGE leaps with the data they have. Some nights, my Model 3 will upload 10G of data up to Tesla. Hopefully, it is from Shadow Pilot to train the fleet.

TL;DNR: There is nothing stopping both Tesla AND Waymo from solving full self driving using competing technology and different approaches. It is an exciting time to be alive!~

It's not full self driving

I call the same thing you call it, apparently.

What kind of traffic and road conditions does that trip involve and how much are you an observer vs. you hanging on to the wheel and paying attention to everything as if you were driving yourself (staying engaged) as you are required by the law and by common sense?

And if you don't mind me asking, how would you quantify in real money the value added by the system?

The 90% I am talking about is a 12~ mile stretch of poorly maintained highway near Detroit usually in stop and go traffic and yes I am paying attention.

I wouldn't quantify the value in real money. I would say the main benefit provides is that I have much less decision fatigue and am less stressed after my commute. I also don't care how fast I really get there anymore since I just optimize for less stress, and my trip is enjoyable.

The other main value I commonly see overlooked is safety from distracted people. If we can assume people are going to keep texting and driving ( they are ), would you want them to do it while actually driving or with this system engaged?

> and yes I am paying attention

...Then what is the point of that system?

Tesla's 'self driving' is incredibly dangerous because it puts the driver in a set of conditions that make it very difficult to maintain attention on the road. And yet the driver must be able to take over from the 'self driving' system with subsecond warning if things go awry.

That's not value adding, that's a huge risk. I would not use that system even if someone offered to install it for free in my car.

Tesla's autopilot is a marketing twist on lane keeping adaptive cruise control - a technology available in almost every car at a similar price point. It is not a step towards actual autonomy.

What's incredibly dangerous is thinking of this sort of system as "self-driving". But a car that can make most of the low-level driving decisions for the user, such as attempting to steer itself to stay centered in the lane, is going to make for a safer driving experience. It's just incredibly idiotic to market this sort of advanced driver assist as "self-driving" or "the car driving itself", and as something that allows the driver to lose focus; much of the controversy about Tesla is due to them having done exactly this in the past, and in some cases still doing it.

I'm also in Detroit and my roommate owns a TM3. Ive drivin in it with him for hundreds of miles in autopilot and agree with you completely.

> I have much less decision fatigue and am less stressed

Then you're not engaged. It's scientifically proven that your brain is no longer alert if you are not constantly engaged. And you can't be magically less stressed by decisions while being fully engaged and alert in order to verify each of those decisions. It's like saying a calculator makes you life easier because you no longer have to calculate yourself to get the result, you only have to calculate yourself to verify the result.

You're either less stressed because your mind simply offloaded tome tasks to the car contrary to the law and common sense, or you're actually engaged and your brain is doing what any driver would normally do so the whole effect is placebo. Which is cool I guess but this last one can be had for a lot less.

Driver assists are there as a backup, not to rely on them to do what you no longer feel like doing because it's too stressful. And if you feel less stressed letting a pretty dumb AI (compared to a human driver) with poorer eyesight than yours to drive you around you must be a pretty laid back person anyway.

Can you show me a Waymo product of any kind? I can buy a Tesla today and the car can drive for extended periods on the highway using their driving tech.

So did a lot of rocket companies, until SpaceX came along and revolutionized the market. As far as I see it, Tesla is building a state-of-the-art driver assist product, but the approach they are taking is unlikely to reach full autonomy for a very, very long time. Waymo, while in a much higher risk position, has the chance (however large or small) to completely revolutionize the way we commute.

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