In a patch of Arizona, everyone knows Waymo, but few use it
morningbrew.com
morningbrew.com
Waymo might as well use it in the suburbs where there are less corner case situations if it's at full capacity. The article suggests it is not used at full capacity, but isn't clear.
They could honestly relax that constrain.
> The trial area effectively requires a vehicle for any practical lifestyle, and any of the use cases that I’d normally take a Lyft/Uber for, just aren’t serviced by Waymo.
The trial area seems constrained because in case something goes wrong they still have to dispatch a human. That doesn't really scale.
I don't know what legal constraints/tradeoffs they're operating under but I was flying in planes by myself (as an adult) by the time I was 15. So it doesn't seem unreasonable.
If I were waymo I'd keep that as long as i can because the downside of "child killed by freak accident in waymo car" probably is probably something I'd like to avoid.
I live in Arizona and was going to say exactly this: Waymo doesn't go to many useful places right now. If it even expanded to cover Tempe (where ASU is located) and a good chunk of Scottsdale, it would be a lot more useful. Anyone on the margin of keeping a car or selling it, or not buying it in the first place, is unlikely to be heavily persuaded by Waymo availability because the area covered is so small.
I visit Arizona frequently and I don’t drive. Waymo’s current service area is useless. It’s in an area with a uniformly rectilinear road layout, low population density and lower incomes than its surrounding. It was picked for research ease. Not product-market fit.
On the return trip, I compared pricing to Lyft and Uber. $9.75 for Waymo, while Uber attempted to extort me for $18.25, and Lyft offered a ride for $8.99 with a 3min wait, or $7.99 with a 10min wait. Again, Waymo avoided the freeway, snaking through residential areas instead.
If my Tesla Full-self driving (tried the subscription - I’d recommend against wasting money on even a single month of the subscription at this point) drove like this Waymo, and I could avoid liability for being intoxicated, I’d gladly fork over the $10k Musk is very proudly asking for his offering. I’m skeptical Tesla’s going to achieve Waymo levels in the next 5 years, or ever, without an improvement to the sensors.
The Waymo experience was much better than I expected, however, the car only fits 3 adults! There’s a child seat occupying one full seat, plus the middle in the rear seat. Both front seats were unavailable.
If I were offered an electric car with Waymo for $25k more than a Tesla, I’d gladly pay. It was impressive.
Changes to road hardware for autonomous cars have been happening on civil engineering timescales. For example, Caltrans commented in 2017 that it was increasing lane line thickness from 4" to 6" and phasing out the use of Botts' Dots. (Source: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/07/18/cal...)
I would have hoped a company called "Caltrans" to provide 100 train routes and 1000 bus routes around California.
Shit, that's expensive. I would have imagined autonomous cars to be 1/4 the price of a human taxi or less.
$0.50 + $250k/200k mi = $1.75/mi
$1.75/miles * 5.4 miles actually driven = $9.45, very close to what I paid.
If Google can get the autonomous hardware package down to $50k, then this trip would have been $4.05. At $5k (the absolute lowest possible?), the trip would cost $2.85. At that point, this becomes exciting.
But more broadly, the "learning territory" is bizarrely and truly inapplicable to 99% of the rest of roadways in the USA.
Chandler roads are:
* Unusually flat * Unusually broad * Unusually straight * Unusually well-lit at high sun angles (no shadows) * Unusually good weather most of the time (ignoring Haboob sand storms and monsoon downpours that happen for a few weeks in the summer) * Unusually light traffic (compared to any urban center)
Honestly they are a MINIMUM of 20-50 year away from "any road in the USA" and that still presumes radical and unknown improvements in the technology arriving in a timely fashion!
I'm not holding my breath on this technology! I'm OK if someone wants to blow through some serious cash - that's their choice. But it's not going to pay off any time soon. Fools may believe otherwise but fools and their money are quickly parted and that's on the fools.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/real-robotaxi-service-g...
HD Maps - really aren’t as difficult as you’re making them out to be. Most AV companies can update their maps using sensor data from their own fleet. And the cars need to recharge/service at a facility every few hours anyway. So there certainly isn’t any need for 5g or expensive cell data to make HD maps scale.
DMV has three levels of license for self-driving vehicles.
- "Testing with a driver". This has about the same restrictions as a learner's permit - must have a licensed driver onboard, no vehicles over 10,000 lbs, no carrying passengers for hire. Over 50 companies have that license. Uber flunked this and had their license to drive autonomously revoked in 2016. So Uber went to Arizona and killed a pedestrian. Then Arizona suspended their license and Uber stopped.
- "Testing without a driver". This is tougher to get. There are specific technical requirements. There are communications requirements. A "law enforcement interaction plan" ("How do we stop this thing?") SAE Level 4 or 5 is required; 3 is not good enough. Operation may be restricted to certain types of roads (freeway, campus) and limited in speed. Eight companies have this license now, which is encouraging.
- "Deployment". Only one company has qualified: Nuro, which makes slow-speed shuttle buses. This is the Commercial Drivers License level for self-driving vehicles.
DMV has a staged approach. It seems to work. Companies can test, and failures get reported and publicized. Complaints about the California DMV being too restrictive about testing have subsided. Most of the companies that couldn't meet the requirements are gone.
There's slow, steady progress. Alphabet/Waymo and GM/Cruise are getting close to deployable systems.
Only one example I remember. I was going down a residential street to a midblock through street, usually I wouldn't expect any other cars. I pull up and find my self 6 cars back behind a Waymo to turn. And waited. The Waymo would just not turn whereas all the humans would have. The street has relatively constant traffic.
The only thing I can think of is that people are annoyed by them going the speed limit. Some streets in Chandler are 45 and I swear everyone is trying to go 60, so I suppose people that people that want to be going well over all the time get mad if they are stuck behind a Waymo. In Tempe the traffic tends to seem slower and more controlled so possibly they aren't as bothered by it.
Have you considered they might be training the vehicles on you, not the roads? At some point roads become a solved problem and understanding/anticipating other drivers becomes thr hard problem.
It's likely they can't deploy in some areas because snow/rain are just too hard to navigate safely at this point.
The trillion dollar question of course is are they 'almost there' or is this an 90/10 thing where the last 10 is really the 90.
I realize a fair number of readers here probably live in cities and maybe don't have cars. But, in my case, I live outside a major city and, while in normal times, I do take reserved cars back and forth to the airport, I haven't taken a taxi/Uber/Lyft around where I live for many years. I do take them maybe a dozen times a year but that's when I'm traveling.
So the fact that there's relatively little use of Waymo in the Phoenix suburban sprawl where it operates doesn't seem especially noteworthy.
Trucking will be up-ended. Freight will change. People will in a short period of time stop owning cars and call them as needed.
I'm just not sure we'll ever get there.
* London - I used to live there and commute on the tube. Not everyone uses a car on a regular basis, except maybe to go to the supermarket. I didn't find it particularly hard to bring my sportswear in a bag and put a kindle in my jacket pocket. I assume New York is the same!
* Amsterdam and The Hague - I used to travel to these cities often, and these societies exist almost entirely on bike.
I have a car, but also manage to walk into work and not bring everything with me everywhere. It just seems like the assumption is "it will only work if it can support me doing exactly what I do now", but this sort of technology has the potential to completely change the way people work and live.
This might cut price in half? A lot of people seem to assume that this makes taxi rides almost too cheap to meter relative to owning a car or taking an Uber. And I'm pretty sure that's not true. You don't pay yourself to drive and the US IRS deduction for mileage is something like 50 cents per mile. That's probably a pretty good floor for a robo-taxi including the mileage it takes to get to you.
It is quite possible and even more convenient to live in a place with walkable areas and good public transit.
You could make specialized cars that would be way more convenient than the typical suv, but no person would keep as their permanent car configuration. I could see vans with roll in bike racks for example, which is more convenient than latching it on top of the typical suv sports rack for example. Groceries and other retail shopping I could see you just drop in the little cart drone and it gets to your house before you do, already in the pantry, etc. Grocery drones will be well insulated coolers, which is better than your typical suburban shopping trip freshness wise. No more melted ice cream anxiety when you remember something.
I agree.
However this really remains to be seen. If Waymo got everything working as right as they could it might still fail. This is a culture shift you're talking about, and even when past tech has required less to shift some has failed.
then the question becomes chicken and egg.
It’s basically Uber, but the driver is your grandma that is fine waiting several minutes to make a left turn “just to be safe.”
Is the benefit of self-driving taxis purely cost reduction?
You can pay less and have an artificial intelligence drive you, or pay more and have a human (non-artificial intelligence) drive you?
How much cheaper will the self-driving taxis be?
If you can't answer my question, maybe the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
Apart from costs, I think removing the need for attention on the road and other drivers is a benefit for self driving cars, you can spend time engaging loved ones or whatever pleases you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3DxyTxdUU
I don't see why more people aren't taking advantage of it.
This commenter covers it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28338580
I have seen many descriptions of the tech, some of it at a pretty high level on how it navigates but never anything how it ensures that the passenger has had a successful exit.
Uber showed us what we can do with an app, now the job is to adapt our mass transit systems to these new ways of reasoning about traffic.
The car will probably never drive with the door open and all modern cars have sensors to detect this.
Second, their cars (and any competent self-driving car) needs to have a very accurate awareness of its surroundings. True it might be difficult to get a clear view of a person just barely outside the car but I'd bet that they have cameras/radar/lidar positioned to see if at least something is there.
Lastly, they have internal passenger cameras that can detect whether a person is inside the car.
[1] https://twitter.com/Ryandoofy/status/1410253369420226560
> Waymo has also partnered with organizations—most recently, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
This is odd to me. I don’t see the connection. What am I missing?
> Waymo walked away from the term “self-driving” this January in favor of a more precise, multisyllabic “fully autonomous driving tech.”
I assume this is because Tesla marketing had polluted the term?
>This is odd to me. I don’t see the connection. What am I missing?
The SCLC is a civil rights organization that advocates for social justice. Waymo partnering with them is a signal they want to make sure the Waymo cars don't avoid poor parts of town, are too cost prohibitive, etc.
The SCLC also has a strong "get voters to the polls" effort. I can see Waymo volunteering rides to people's polling stations.
I mean, the catalytic converter is going to be like 800° and there's not exactly a big integrated lidar aftermarket yet, so maybe not a great imagined reason to preemptively redline anyone.
Like tesla cars going straight into concrete barriers on highway exits instead of down the 2 lane options on autopilot mode.
Proof? 13 American soldiers died in Afghanistan in a combat zone and people are up in arms. 1800 Americans died yesterday from covid while going about their daily lives and it's pretty mum.
There's a reason self-driving cars aren't being deployed yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... [2] https://blog.piekniewski.info/2021/05/12/ai-mid-2021/ [3] https://carsurance.net/blog/self-driving-car-statistics/
The real world.
See also: https://blog.piekniewski.info/2021/05/12/ai-mid-2021/
Self-driving aint happening until we get AGI drivers.
Reading these comments trivialising the driving task makes me wonder if such commenters have ever actually driven or if they are just prone to magical thinking.
As of 2021 computers can not reliably and flexibly out reason people about open ended real world problems. Safe driving in the real world requires such reasoning. It is edge cases all the way down. Ergo self driving is not happening anytime soon.
When I see HN commenters say the robocar sees or thinks I wonder if these people are for real.
It would probably be easier to make a robo physician who gives more reliable diagnoses than a human physician than it would be to make a self driving car that out performs humans.
I would say it's a testament to the human ability to reduce very complex tasks to very simple descriptions that can be kept out of rational awareness. The impressive thing is that even the wrong beliefs of a given person work for them. Remember, the people effectively arguing that driving is "easy" still understand that humans fail at it regularly. So it's mismatch in their understanding of how smart humans are, something that probably doesn't impact their daily lives.
That's something underdiscussed. A lot of driving is predicting other driver's behaviours. After a while you get a sense of what people will do, and in which broad category they fall under.
With self-driving cars, now we have new actors on the road that don't act naturally. And each software update might change these behaviours. This has some interesting feedback implications. As we get more of those on the streets, we might see more accidents after software upgrades. Not because of the software, but because people got used to the old behaviour and didn't anticipate the new one.
This is interesting though...
"Waymo says it provides hundreds of rides a week"
Which almost certainly means less than 100 rides per day. Typical Uber drivers do 4-6 trips in a 4 hour shift.
Downtown Phoenix, or ASU (students), or downtown Scottsdale (drunk night life) would have been the better test locations.
Chandler? Wow
Senior citizens who aren't comfortable driving anymore? When other family members have taken all the cars but you still need to get somewhere? When your car's being repaired?
I think the real answer here is they clearly don't really want people to use it yet. They just want to say they are the first robotaxi.
It's when you have a reason for doing or not doing something, and you assume you're the only one, but really, everybody else has the same reason.
As a result, everybody is passive and doesn't act like they would if they knew everyone agreed.
It's the opposite of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect
Ah, this is it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
The nice thing about a "false consensus", of course, is that someone who believes in it can tell others they are victims of "pluralistic ignorance" and once enough people are brainwashed, it's a true consensus!
"FHP Orlando @FHPOrlando · 10h Happening now: Orange County. Trooper stopped to help a disabled motorist on I-4. When Tesla driving on “auto” mode struck the patrol car. Trooper was outside of car and extremely lucky to have not been struck. #moveover. WB lanes of I-4 remain block as scene is being cleared."
[1] https://twitter.com/FHPOrlando/status/1431565185899171840