Waymo expands its rider-only territories
blog.waymo.com
blog.waymo.com
I would love to see Waymo become another hose. I'd love to see it launch in my city (whenever the laws are amended to allow such things).
(Yes, I know arguably they've had a few other successes.)
I have a ton of criticism about Google but they've been able to diversify a lot better than I expected and I totally understand why companies with big cash "hoses" like you describe are making these sort of 'long shot but highly profitable' investments.
In YouTube's case it's more likely that they saved it, IIRC the bandwidth bills and legal threats were getting pretty existential around the time of the purchase. Inheriting those legal problems was a chance they took that could have sunk the entire company in a slightly dumber legal outcome for the status quo of the web, which was still very much in limbo at the time.
Being able to pull off being the only company to successfully do self-driving is a similarly masterful execution and I'm not sure how long it's going to take for competitors to catch up to them at this point. More likely they'll just be licensing any tech/patent use to competitors and taking a cut off of that too.
Google has screwed up plenty of projects but this isn't one of them. The upsides to human mobility are substantial and well worth the effort and I hope everyone involved is ultimately rewarded for it.
Yeah. Smartphones were barely a thing when Google bought YouTube and, more broadly, user-created video wasn't very widespread generally. YouTube's money-losing business, such as it was, mostly consisted of users violating copyright by uploading TV and movie clips.
However, it would be silly to imply that either of those products were nearly as popular and solid/full-featured as they are now, by many magnitudes. Those products today are nothing compared to what they were back then. Even for me, as someone who has been using YouTube since way back then, just randomly seeing screenshots of the old YouTube throws me off and makes me go "is that what it really was back then? it doesn't even look similar at all".
And no, I don't mean it in a bad way. Up until about Honeycomb (3.0) or Ice Cream Sandwich (4.0), Android imo felt more like "minimum viable product that technically has feature parity with Apple and some more, but you have to have some really good justification to willingly pick it for any reason other than the price", and the experience of using it felt entirely subpar. The release of 4.0 (or 3.0, i honestly forgot) was when Android started feeling like an actual solid competitor to Apple for the first time, and not just an obvious "second best option".
One of the interesting questions for me is where the profits come in. Android definitely started as a loss leader so that they didn't get shut out of the mobile advertising market. But I could believe that it's in the black now due to the Apple-like model of charging a slice of everything that goes through the phone. Google Cloud is definitely not profitable yet, but they claim they will get there: https://accelerationeconomy.com/cloud-wars/google-cloud-has-...
I’ve lived in UK where iOS is very common but also in Portugal where the average salary is 800 euros and virtually everyone uses android.
Most of the world can’t afford iPhones
I believe the core ad platform for Google is going to be YouTube, it is the only one I am not leaving now.
AirPods would be a fortune 50 business by themselves...
Android makes very little money in the grand scheme of things. It came out during the Oracle trial that Android only had made $17 billion between 2011-2017. On the other hand, they pay Apple $18B+ to be the default search engine on iOS devices. Apple makes far more from Google paying them in mobile than Google makes from Android.
GCP is still losing money.
Google has no successful profitable business besides advertising and has the focus of a crack addles flea.
We also forget DeepMind which is run as an independent company but I believe is Google owned.
But I’m sure they will get right this time.
Did I mention Google Fiber? They literally abandoned cities and left streets in ruins.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Waymo is just another way to add more water to the hose.
More leisure time not focusing on the road = more eyeballs.
What percent of our lives do we spend driving?[0]
"Our best guess? Six percent of our waking hours are spent in a car, en route. There are 4.12 million miles of road in the United States, and that’s a lot of ground for the 222 million drivers in this country to cover."
[0] - https://short-facts.com/how-many-hours-does-the-average-amer...
Moving people and things (Waymo Via[1] is their autonomous trucking and delivery subdivision) via roadways is worth (in revenue) hundreds of billions of dollars in the U.S. alone. Even capturing a fraction of that market, and carving out profit (by displacing expensive, accident-prone and sleep-needing humans), is a money hose on its own.
Lyft and Uber are not leaving 60% of the money on the table to the drivers.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lyftdrivers/ https://www.reddit.com/r/uberdrivers/
Want to respond to the 60% figure?
The rational thing would be to keep doing what they're best at.
But somehow that's not how things work.
BTW, local models underperform GPT-3 but they can still perform decently (eg. FLAN T5, GPT NeoX)
Didn't think of it. It's not much of a business though. At least not yet.
I asked a friend who works at waymo why it's taking forever to build up a critical mass of vehicles to get the wait times down to a more reasonable level.
He said the issue was cost. I guess all those sensors are actually more expensive than the cost of a human driver at this point?
It has to be deeper. Google has deep pockets. Even it doesn’t want to touch them, one could sell interests in individual cars’ cash flows, a quasi-debt which neither dilutes the company’s equity nor puts its survival at risk.
It makes a lot of sense to roll something like this out slowly. Taxi service is a commodity, putting out a bunch of cars that are have negative ROI doesn't get you much over having a few cars.
I find resource planning to be difficult and frustrating here at Google, despite billions and billions in the bank.
You don't want huge numbers of cars on the road until you're sure they're incredibly safe.
Waymo inhoused their sensors and claimed a 90% cost reduction, but before that they were at $200k+.
Still, even at $200k+ that's not terribly high compared to a human driver once you amortize it over 8+ years. Higher than minimum wage, but really it's probably a matter of the upfront cost more than anything.
I'll also point out that even if they 100% solved self driving... somebody has to fill the things up with gas in most states, lol.
It really only has anything to offer to individual consumers, specifically saving the seconds it takes to just plug in your car. That seems like an insane trade to make, to me. Maybe in theory some city could invest in embedding them into street parking, but I just don't think that will happen. Even if vandals started cutting plugs or something, you can buy a LOT of replacement cables for the price of one wireless charging pad.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/china-ev-infrastructure-charging...
https://www.oregon.gov/osp/programs/sfm/Pages/Self-Service-R...
Perhaps the expense he was talking about is that it would be super expensive to create a factory to be able to increase the volume whilst the vehicles are still rather custom built.
I will say that I have very little knowledge about anything here, just that Google has already spent billions on this effort and it would seem strange that they are shying away from spending a few hundred thousand per vehicle.
An improperly-rolled-out software update could kill a lot of people, including people not riding in Waymo vehicles. That bug could be in every Waymo vehicle on the road right now, waiting for the environmental conditions that make it turn deadly.
Slow is safe, safe is smooth, smooth is fast.
Only if they don't stop off at a tourist trinket store.
It's pretty clear that with Waymo the first response is to fail safe: when in doubt, pull over and ask for help. I was expecting that the help could include a semi-assisted remote override mode. The remote support would not be turning the wheel and pressing the gas, but giving it higher-level overrides, like "do a u-turn here". So in that case if it loses touch it's reasonable to resume traveling if it now can or once again pull over and ask for help.
So either you're no worse off, or the link is fine and you don't need to send someone out at all. Sounds pretty good to me!
Like I said originally, if it was safe for the car to be driving itself it already would be.
Car encountered an unmarked dead end and got confused turning around (there was a badly-parked car on the narrow road). Car called for help and we were told a person was en route. A few minutes later, a guy arrived in a truck and manually drove us to our destination.
Or they can mark a vehicle as parked so the car won't wait for a stationary vehicle it thinks has right of way.
But they can't directly drive the vehicle. The whole software and Comms stack is far too slow to do that safely.
Pay 5G networks to have priority data feeds for video, and send all the data back to an operator with 50ms glass to glass latency. Then have the remote operator drive.
Always have the car in a position to take over and stop incase the comms link gets cut. Usually that will involve either slamming the brakes on hard or gently, depending if there is an obstacle ahead or someone following behind.
That means they no longer need to handle 99.9999999999% of cases, but instead just handle 99.9% and detect the rest for a human to do.
You are potentially overlooking application level latency, just because the packets arrive in 50ms time does not mean the video latency is upper bounded to that. I think 100-200ms is more realistic.
If your one way network latency is 50ms, it takes 150ms minimum to send a packet on 1.5x round trips which is necessary to confirm round trip connectivity and notify the other party. If you can assume clocks are synchronized you can send packets one way in 50ms to confirm connectivity and latency.
> Usually that will involve either slamming the brakes on hard or gently, depending if there is an obstacle ahead or someone following behind.
you’re specifically in a situation in which the car has failed, so im not sure how you can assume the car will make these kinds of decisions correctly.
> I personally think they should just update the stack so they can do realtime control.
Lets assume video latency of 100-200ms can be achieved, its still potentially dangerous. There are however some companies i am aware of in certain countries that are doing it anyway!
Even if glass to glass latency was 1ms, perhaps its not a technological issue but a PR issue. Maybe they don’t want news headlines about people driving cars with mario kart steering wheels or it’s easier to get regulatory approval by reassuring the public they will do the safest thing possibly.
I wonder what the air force does with remote drone pilots?
I think you may be an outlier and early adopter type person and may not represent the average customer.
Props to Waymo for what they've accomplished; they've been very clever in working around the limitations of the tech. But it sounds like it has a long way to go before they're ready for general-audience usage.
[1] E.g., the Crossing the Chasm model, although this is more the behavior of the "visionary" segment than what he calls "early adopter"; scroll down to the first big graph here: https://thinkinsights.net/strategy/crossing-the-chasm/
Yup! It as far more forgivable than an Uber driver taking the wrong turn half a dozen times in a row. It was half the cost, before tip. And it was up to four times as long a wait, not always four times as long. All of that more than makes up for the fun.
It’s not ready for mass roll-out. But there is a massive beachhead to grab.
Toyota lost a lot of money the first few years they sold the Prius, but they were happy to do it because they believed they'd work out the production cost issues over time. And they were right. Clearly Waymo's going for a similar strategy here. But one difference is that Toyota at that point had decades of experience wrangling the cost curve for cars. It'll be interesting to see if they can get capital cost plus mapping cost plus operational cost down low enough so that they can at least break even on a ride.
https://www.synopsys.com/automotive/autonomous-driving-level...
I don't think that's true. In my view, by scaling these AI models we will arrive there. But even if I am wrong, we don't need level 5 for this technology to be revolutionary. I am mostly interested in using Waymo as my new Uber, so if it can decently navigate cities costing half the price, then sign me in.
That is, "everywhere in all conditions" exceeds what any human will do. If I won't drive in a blizzard or specific cities, does it make a car level 4 if it punts under these conditions?
I think we need a better definition that encompasses the different capabilities of things calling themselves level 4, and avoids an impossible standard for level 5.
If it's actually blocked then decision becomes stop and prevent harm or go forward and hurt someone.
I don't think it's a very good counter argument.
Edit: without meaningful data as to which is more meaningful I'd lean towards LIDAR being safer because there's less info (depth) to infer, and to me color seems less important than depth, barring stuff like signs and lights. Which shouldn't be hard to correlate between the two.
But without more meaningful data this comes off as a "you should x people people did x anciently and it seems like that worked"
Aw. Not quite yet. But getting steadily closer. What's pricing?
When the service turns on as a commercial service in San Francisco, autonomous vehicles will really be here. Phoenix is the easy case. SF is moderately hard. NYC will be tough.
Instead, current trends seem to be for an additional form of transportation within limited geographic areas. One can imagine a scenario where, for instance, we have a number of cities where self-driving cars are the dominant form of transportation in the center, but traditional cars are still owned and operated by the people who live on the periphery, and most cities don't have self-driving networks at all. Something similar to how the subway functions in Manhattan New York, perhaps.
Or maybe not. But I think this all shows that it's not just difficult to predict which pieces of future technology we will have, but also how a particular piece of technology will actually be implemented and impact society.
I think in the past, technology mostly threatened to replace and eliminate jobs nobody really wanted, or merely assist people in their jobs to make them more effective. AI is really doing a number on us, though. I really like programming, and I have plenty of friends who really like drawing. It would be a shame if the main incentive to be good at those things in society were to disappear due to the job market being partially eaten, but it does seem like that's what is going to happen eventually. Sometimes I wonder if it's even worth fighting it, as it seems like it's just another inevitable mess that winds up the same either way because people with more money than I can fathom have a pretty good incentive to make it so.
Either way, driving seems somewhere down the middle. I think automating driving would be great, but I also assume plenty of truckers do enjoy the job, and would be lost without it.
It's good that this transition is taking a while. I don't think we're equipped to handle it.
[1] https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-cadillac/innovation/super-...
I think it’s always been apparent that self driving is one of those problems where the first 90% is hard but solvable, but where the difficulty just keeps increasing in the last 10%.
When I was growing up in the 80s and 90s I was constantly seeing coverage of cars driving themselves around circuits and even handling skids in a skid pan better than any human. I fully expected to never have to drive. Sadly I was very wrong.
I’ve never wanted more to be wrong about my cynicism about a technology than with self driving.
There may have been a lot of people like that, but there were very few knowledgeable people who were making such predictions in public. The only one I know of is Rodney Brooks, and even he went public for the first time only in 2017 [0].
[0] https://rodneybrooks.com/edge-cases-for-self-driving-cars/
"Taking me from Cambridge to Logan Airport with no driver in any Boston weather or traffic condition — that might not be in my lifetime," Leonard told Bloomberg. (2018) (I think he actually said the "not in my lifetime" thing originally a few years earlier.)
But the city I actually live in (the one whose residents recognise its name) is only a couple hundred thousand people, and it has good enough public transport that I lived here for almost thirty years now with no desire to own a car. Have I gone in somebody else's car to an event? Yeah, maybe a few times per year. But day-to-day and week-to-week I don't need a car. I have a license, I own a car parking space, I could easily afford a car, but it makes no sense to buy one, so I don't.
Despite all the complaining, Western society seems to generally be accepting of the space inefficiency of cars as it currently stands. And computer modelling has shown that, all other things being equal, autonomous vehicles are expected to increase the capacity of existing roadways.
Also, don't forget that a lot of people want to get around in a car, regardless of bus/train availability, despite what your personal feelings on the subject might be. However, don't get me wrong here, a lot of people also want to get around on foot, by bike, and by bus. Admittedly these options are lacking in most Western urban environments. We should also be building up these options for the people who want to use them. Transportation doesn't have to be a winner-take-all, one-solution-for-everyone fight. Different people want different things, and there's no reason that transportation options shouldn't reflect this.
- less space efficient means less fuel efficient which means heavier carbon footprint
- less space efficient means more vehicles which means heavier carbon footprint
- less space efficient encourages suburban sprawl which means lower city service efficiency which means heavier carbon footprint
- less space efficient encourages suburban sprawl which means more efficient alternatives like public transit are more costly and less convenient which means heavier carbon footprint
You say transportation doesn't have to be a winner-take-all fight but that completely ignores market/political forces shaped by city planning. You handwave it away by saying "admittedly these options are lacking in most Western urban environments" but why do you think that is? It's a consequence of American city space-inefficiency which makes efficient public transit worse and favors inefficient cars. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, winner-take-most is enough to change climate change outcomes significantly.
Carbon footprints can be offset. It just needs to be done honestly. Specifically, an "honest offset" is an offset that has already occurred prior to purchase of the offset, and prior to the production of the carbon being offset. If vehicular use was required to be honestly offset, your global warming concerns completely evaporate. It really is that simple. The one downside is that you don't get the emotional satisfaction of "sticking it" to car users.
If your sincere and sole goal is to fight global warming, you have to remember that most people simply do not care. If your proposed solution is to take comfortable things away from people that want those comfortable things, you are simply going to lose.
If vehicular use was required to be honestly offset, the comfortable thing that is the modern car and suburban sprawl would no longer be affordable.
I don't doubt that most people don't care, it's why we're in this mess in the first place. It's also why humanity is on track to lose a lot to the damage from climate change. I find myself wondering whether I care either, I appreciate the reminder that I'm simply going to lose even if I do.
This was never claimed, and is irrelevant anyway. Fundamental or not, a large segment of Western society wants to use cars. Quibbling over whether or not this behavior is learned, intrinsic, or a mix does not help anyone on timescales that matter. Accept this reality and move on.
> Public transit can be comfortable.
For you maybe. Not everyone is you. I've experienced public transit in a variety of European cities known for their excellent transit systems. I simply am not comfortable on public transit, as I hate not having personal space.
> If vehicular use was required to be honestly offset, the comfortable thing that is the modern car and suburban sprawl would no longer be affordable.
This isn't true, but let's pretend it is. Towards your goal of mitigating global warming through reducing car usage, wouldn't this be a better approach than directly prohibiting car usage? People are easily misled by layers of indirection. Market forces pushing people away from "unaffordable" car usage is more palatable than "fuck your way of life, you now have to ride a bus or three".
> I find myself wondering whether I care either, I appreciate the reminder that I'm simply going to lose even if I do.
It's a tough pill to swallow, but you can choose to work with the people you don't like and advocate for solutions that are amenable to them as well. Hostility to their way of life will not get you very far. There is enough solar energy reaching our planet to power our entire civilization at the energy usage of a typical American, and to start unwinding our past century of carbon emission. Most people would simply be apathetic about working towards such a goal. Try to take away their comforts, and most will actively work against you.
The US and Canada have built cities in a way where only driving is fast, therefore people want to drive.
Conversely, buses usually go mostly empty except during rush hour.
Finally, small on-demand robocars should be a great way to conveniently connect to a local train station and then to your ultimate destination, raising demand for complementary mass transit.
When most people think of "public transit", they only picture busses, trains and multi-billion dollar corruption-laden mass transit projects. However, in many cases, it is far far cheaper to (as a municipal government) purchase and operate fleets of self-driving electric vehicles. Don't get me wrong, there are still cases where dedicated rights-of-way for trains make more sense, but we should be using the optimal solution for each given situation, and the optimal solution is not always "trains and busses".
"Public transit" can also be "publicly owned electric self-driving vehicles, making use of the roads that already exist". However, a lot of people have an entrenched opinion of "CAR BAD NO MATTER WHAT", with no objective basis of what "bad" is.
Buses, on the other hand, maybe.
The main people who want fully driverless systems are politicians who hope that no drivers == no strikes and lower salaries. Though honestly that would just move the labour power to the control room operators, even if there were a good financial case for the upgrade (which there isn't).
I think part of what's going on here is that the actual pattern of technology use is heavily dependent on technical and economic details that can't be known up front. It turns out that SAE level 5 autonomy is much harder than a lot of people expected, so the thing that disrupted the cab industry is not the long-anticipated robo-cab but a mechanical-turk version of that. Or consider mass adoption of flying cars and/or personal helicopters. It has been technically possible for a while, but the economics and practicalities don't work out.
I hope they will open service here soon.
Remote humans can correct the machine's model of the world, to a limited extent. A human looking at the data might conclude that's a life-size cardboard cut out of Luke Skywalker, not Mark Hamill stood motionless in the road in costume for no reason, and so it's OK for the Waymo to squeeze past it, whereas driving very close to humans is unacceptable.
They don't have any means to remotely drive the car, if for any reason that's the solution to a problem, the Waymo will stop somewhere, a vehicle with Waymo employees in will turn up in a few minutes, then a human driver gets into your car and takes over.
This does not seem to happen very often.
Waymo’s approach is so different from Teslas in both tech and safety I’m not even sure you could compare or generalize.
Additionally, there’s a cultural difference where Tesla doesn’t care about quality/safety as much as Waymo does.
It's a complete joke that should really tarnish the brand value of a company.
Doesn't mean other companies with better sensors and better data don't have a FAR, FAR, FAR better experience.
It's clear that Waymo has run into some costs/limits in physically scaling their operations, as the software side of things appears to already be "good enough" and is not the limiting factor.
We can install like IR reflectors in the road so that they know where the lines are under the snow, but people don't know where the lines are, and so during a heavy snow day the lanes change and take on people's best guess and it becomes the new default choice as more people take the new paths.
As is often repeated the most dangerous thing to be on the road is unpredictable, and I don't know if the self driving cars would have the ability to see the changes in lane positions and adjust, or if they'd be trying to follow the old lanes in a crowd of cars making their best guesses to make it home. Seems one of those "it won't work well until the vast majority of the cars are automated" type deals.
Google already has the biggest hive mind for predicting what's ahead. One reason I turn on Waze even when driving a familiar route is that I can see traffic and conditions ahead of me. Totally saved my butt when I noticed dozens of accidents ahead in what seemed like a light rain. The road had iced over. I got off at the next exit and waited it out, using Waze to know when traffic was moving again. Passed some horrifying big truck accident scenes yet to be cleared by tow trucks.
When it's -30 for a week you end up in a situation where road salt doesn't work and the exhaust from cars polishes intersections to an icy sheen. It's hard to protect against that.
Road lines are important but physical obstacles like other vehicles are more important.
Sounds like the solution here is just to not run the cars when people are going to be most likely to want to use it.
Seems like they need to license this tech to have it payoff.
I just think that's the only real way to make this thing pay off. Also potentially it might work for long haul trucking.
But it's enough to prefer Waymo over Uber and that's all it takes.
Seems like that's the plan. Volvo and some other car OEMs are using Android on the dashboard. A total package of infotainment, autonation, and the cloud services behind the in-vehicle systems is a likely destination for this and other products than can be sold into cars at the OEM or end-user level.
TCI also pointed out that Alphabet's Other Bets division – which houses operations including Waymo, Nest, Access, Calico and more – generated $3 billion in revenues in the past five years but incurred operating losses of $20 billion. "Other Bets have been unsuccessful" and operating losses estimated at $6 billion in 2022 should be reduced by 50 percent.
"The biggest component of Other Bets is Waymo," TCI added. "Unfortunately, enthusiasm for self-driving cars has collapsed and competitors have exited the market. Ford and Volkswagen recently decided to shut down their self-driving venture" saying that achieving profit in the short term was not likely.
[0] https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/16/tci_fund_google_cut_c...
I don't think that's true. While unexpected situations do arise, I don't think people use much "intelligence" to handle them. When an elephant falls out of the semi truck in front of you, your response is to hit the breaks. You don't spend a minute thinking about the likelihood of the event, or question whether allowing the elephant to hit your car might improve the likelihood of it surviving (and whether that justifies sacrificing yourself.)
The fact is that most accidents aren't very atypical. They're everyday things that happen, and people aren't paying attention, or they make a mistake. Handling just these scenarios will result in net saved lives. In other words, autonomous driving doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.