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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

So does my Tesla:( I always take control when entering any construction site.

I don't think any other than waymo has solved this yet. My telsa is good but the amount of times I have to take control from it is way too high. Snow is another area where autonomous driving sucks at the moment, and as a Canadian, man that makes my Tesla's self driving not useful 5 months of the year.

Waymo seems to be way out front and everyone else seem to be fighting for second here. Though I'm very happy that we're atleast at this stage and not where we were 10 years ago.

I just view it as we now have working lane keeping and adaptive cruise control for most new cars these days and that's a solid win.

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> Waymo seems to be way out front and everyone else seem to be fighting for second here.

I'd say Cruise is comfortably second. They've made very good progress in SF and I believe they are doing driverless rides there for employees.

That's correct, Cruise is doing driverless rides for employees in SF. I didn't know about Waymo's driverless rides, though-- can't say I follow the space that closely. Wow!

Just curious, what is your personal experience with Waymo that leads you to this conclusion? Also curious to know about Waymo’s performance in the snow because I haven’t heard much about that.

I took a couple of rides in Chandler recently. It was incredible to see a completely driverless car pull up and take me to my destination (and back). Never felt weird or unsafe in the vehicle and the driving felt very natural.

When you experience it, it's clear they have a mature system that's learned from driving millions of real world miles (and billions in simulation). And if you follow their research/tech stack closely, there's no doubt they are years ahead of everyone else. I'm not sure how successful of a business they will be, but their tech is solid.

As far as driving in inclement weather, Waymo is pretty transparent that it's very much a work in progress. They claim the 5th gen Jaguar I-Pace vehicles (the 4th gen Pacificas in AZ don't do as well) will be able to handle rain/snow/fog better due to upgraded sensors, but it's one of the big challenges remaining for them.

Do you not feel that their relative success during your ride in Chandler is at least partially due to the specific location (easy suburban streets) and the geofenced boundaries (they require high quality ground truth labels in order to be successful). If we took the car and dropped it in the middle of Manhattan would it work as well?

It’s easy to say Chandler is just “easy suburban streets”, but for a computer to drive by itself it’s completely non-trivial. In any case, they are already giving private beta rides in SF, so you will soon see how they tackle dense urban streets. They recently started mapping NYC, so I assume that’s coming in the near future too.

Waymo (and others) are very clear that geofencing and prior knowledge of roads are necessary for safe operations. Their safety standards are extremely high because there’s no driver for fallback — the vehicle is responsible end-to-end. Geofencing allows them to validate extensively and that means when they say it works, it really does.

I think the mapping argument is pretty overblown at this point. Most of them have figured out how to do it efficiently and keep it up-to-date.

It’s more a question of scale (can they afford to map the entire US, or the entire globe?), and of over-reliance on features which can become stale.

They've claimed they can map efficiently and the maps are self-updating from the fleet [1]. Waymo and other SDCs have said in the past that mapping isn't as big of an issue, but we will have to wait and see.

[1] https://blog.waymo.com/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

just took a waymo fully autonomous (no safety driver, nobody in the driver seat, no manual override) taxi in scottsdale to lunch. was surreal. supposedly over 1m miles with no faults.

Well I'll admit my waymo experience I can't talk about publicly. I get that might be a bit of a let down:) so feel free to ignore the waymo portion of my comment and just assume that everyone is around the same level of ability

> Also curious to know about Waymo’s performance in the snow because I haven’t heard much about that.

Me too, i know almost nothing about their ability in snow.

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