I took a Waymo in Phoenix the other night. Works like magic. I’m honestly fine waiting four times as long for one because it’s fun, and it’s cheaper. Even when they had to send out a manual driver, the experience was smooth and fast.
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?
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.
https://www.oregon.gov/osp/programs/sfm/Pages/Self-Service-R...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Only if they don't stop off at a tourist trinket store.