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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Waymo is already doing rides without a safety driver to passengers who have signed their NDA. Which means they're confident of their behaviour on some really difficult problems, like pedestrians.

Sure, it'll be at least a decade (if ever) before they can do everything a human driver can do, but a "meaningful product" they pretty much already have.

They don't have to support driving in blizzards or on unmapped roads to be a meaningful product. Uber is useful even though it's only available in large Metro areas, Waymo can be a meaningful product even if it doesn't work in many places.

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> Waymo is already doing rides without a safety driver to passengers who have signed their NDA. Which means they're confident of their behaviour on some really difficult problems, like pedestrians.

If they were confident they'd lift the NDA. I really can't say much more, other than I disagree.

> Sure, it'll be at least a decade (if ever) before they can do everything a human driver can do, but a "meaningful product" they pretty much already have.

As per the blizzards, I'm not talking about a driverless car that can do anything a person can do. I'm talking about a driverless car in any environment (let's say Phoenix) that can compete with Uber or Lyft and possibly maybe someday somehow make a profit.

Another question to ask yourself - why is turnover so high if things are going so well? Nobody wants to stick around to become filthy rich and work on an awesome product that can change the world? Or maybe reality is a little different from the blog posts you read every few months.

> If they were confident they'd lift the NDA. I really can't say much more, other than I disagree.

Please say the little more you can (and thank you for sharing what you have already!) - there's been something overhanging Waymo for nearly 2 years and no one seems to want to even hint at what it is

(also, if you feel comfy, I wonder when you were last privy to the internal narrative there)

> why is turnover so high if things are going so well?

There's _so_ little external information other than Urmson saying this is far away, Cruise is pumping near-production status, Waymo (confusingly) is in production yet if they were, then they wouldn't been doing what they're doing now. Yet all the ride reviews in the latest PR round sounded awesome!

He’s said what matters. I’m adjacent to the field and agree. The main issue is that getting to 5 nines of reliability in SDC is extremely challenging AND it isn’t good enough. There are infinite random issues to deal with from a simulation/modeling perspective (construction, weather, rain/snow/mud/dust weirdly shaped vehicles, random Uber eats cars stopping in the middle of the street etc) then you also have issues with vehicle and sensor maintenance, maintaining enough bandwidth/compute to support a larger network of SDCs, change management in the vehicles that sees challenges w scale, HD map issues etc. All of these problems are solveable but there are a lot of them.

He and the public are familiar with Waymo's solution to edge cases, but after thinking on it, it's unacceptable to get into an accident every 20,000 miles just because the car doesn't realize it needs to dial out to a remote operator

Honestly they don't even have to support most roads and road conditions and still build a useful product. Thinks of malls, sports complexes, university complexes, airport etc. where you can have Waymo shuttles to help ferry people from fixed point A and point B.

Having self driving cars plying from airport to nearby transportation hubs alone could be pretty useful.

I also see the potential for building infra that is specifically for automated vehicles (private roads and such).

Waymo can still be 10 years away from a good autonomous vehicle and still deliver value to consumers.

> Waymo is already doing rides without a safety driver to passengers who have signed their NDA. Which means they're confident of their behaviour on some really difficult problems, like pedestrians.

Unless the NDA is to keep customers from talking about when the remote safety monitor takes over.

For many people the difference between a prototype and a product is very small. In this safety critical business, the difference is huge.

It can still be a useful product even if it often engages a remote driver.

> signed their their NDA

> they're confident of their behaviour

pick one

Killing a pedestrian without a safety driver behind the wheel will kill the company. They're risking that, so they're confident.

but you don't have any first hand data on how much time it's spent with the remote safety driver engaged, while the NDA supports the idea that the ride is not ready for public scrutiny.

Killing the company? Really?

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