Waymo One doubles service area in Phoenix, continues growing in SF
blog.waymo.com
blog.waymo.com
I walk my dogs twice a day and the cars are constantly driving by with their array of sensors. Made me feel like I was being constantly filmed and recorded... which as I understand them to work I certainly was/am. Outside of that, I resented being involuntarily part of a science experiment that is objectively pretty dangerous all things considered. For example, I would never cross the street when one was coming down the road. I didn't trust them.
> What about the experience of using the service changed your opinion?
The UX is really incredible. The car handled driving very, very well. Much better/safer than most Uber/Lyft's I've been in. Made me realize how freeing this technology will be for those that don't have the ability to drive. If you don't have a car / don't have the ability to drive in Phoenix, you're going to have a bad time. Walkability here is typically very poor.
In an ideal world, we'd have physical separation for peds/bikes/skateboards/etc and motorized vehicles, but if we have to share, I'd much rather share with AI than humans.
(That's my pedestrian perspective. As a driver, I love driving and would hate to lose the right. But honestly I think the writing is on the wall, especially in dense urban environments.)
The reliance on a static world map is a very big safety feature in my opinion. I wouldn't be as confident stepping into the path of a Tesla.
* They are very safe and you’re not at the mercy of the Uber/Lyft driver’s driving skills.
* Their cars are pretty good (Jaguar I-Pace fleet) and generally very clean. You know what you’re getting every time.
* You don’t have to interact with a driver.
* No tipping.
- The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell
- You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.
- They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive
- You get to play your own music
So great to hear. Seeing videos of self-driving Tesla made me fear for the worst.
Right. Because Tesla FSD “beta” is not guaranteed, even if you pay for the monthly subscription.
And even if you did have Tesla FSD beta, it’s a pile of shit. It’s gets worse every quarter as they continue to remove safety sensors from vehicles due to supply chain issues.
Have they removed the "you need to be fully aware and ready to grab the wheel" requirements of FSD? If not, how is this comparable? There is no driver.
Tesla is developing a general solution which works everywhere and can take left hand turns! ;)
Ah yes, the classic comparison between a product you can literally go out and use, today, versus some hypothetical Tesla future state. No matter how good the technology is, Tesla promises something better and people act like it exists.
My partner has been propositioned and harassed over a dozen times by Uber drivers.
I think for many this is going to be a killer feature.
Edit: to be totally clear: I did not agree in either situation, but tried to gracefully divert or redirect without escalating the situation. I didn't confront as, frankly, I wasn't sure if the person would have responded violently.
Uber is valuable, but I have kind of accepted the premise that an Uber drive is just a public transit experience with a customized destination. I should expect some potentially weird and possibly unpleasant interactions as part of the process.
I would 100% convert to Waymo only away from Uber just based on those two experiences and dozens if not hundreds of generally positive Uber experiences.
I think Uber has solved this to some degree with their rating system, but it's still a big problem.
- they’re cheap. $5/ride.
- they’re fun. It’s a self-driving car! That’s cool! I genuinely had fun every time I was taken around in one.
If they scale, that will become a problem:
- people puking in car
- people having sex in car
- people eating greasy fries in car
These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely), but the big difference here is that users won't be anonymous. The next waymo rider (or waymo staff if the car stops by some inspection checkpoint between rides, or some extra in-car sensors) will be able to report the incident, which would flag repeating bad riders over time.
Overall the experience would be as good as a Uber today, as like you said, no roll of the dice on the driver.
Another new problem specific to self driving and not seen for public transportation: muggers driving a high speed bike targeting isolated rides (they'll know how easy it is to make the car stop, smash a window, and get the rider's valuables). Basically the modern version of stagecoach robberies.
One could argue these already happens in Europe on highways with traffic jams, but I can see the muggers being more active at night, since in addition to knowing the rider can't try to escape, there's also less crowds around. It'll be very dependants on regions : In Phoenix, I'd assume less often as muggers won't know if the rider is carrying.
Just warnings and sirens. Nothing drastic, such as "Your Google account has been terminated for violating Google's terms of service".
Muggers won't be an issue since it's complicated to get people's stuff out of the car through a broken window.
Eh, I've used public transport regularly for 10+ years in two countries as a resident and in many, many cities as a visitor, and I can count on one hand the number of incidents I've had where someone has thrown up/left vomit on the bus or train I was on. The greasy/smelly food thing is slightly true, but let's be real, someone eating a McDonald's on a train for 10 minutes out of a 4 hour journey is partially because there's no other choice for food on that train on a long journey. On short distance transit (within the city/region) I genuinely can't remember the last time I had an issue with someone eating on the bus.
> Another new problem specific to self driving and not seen for public transportation
This is just FUD. If someone stepped out in front of me in a car in my city, I would stop. It's just as likely that two people step in front of me, one smashes my window and grabs my valuables and the other stops me from driving off, as it is that they pinpoint driverless cars.
Given that they are a Google/Alphabet company this seems like a missed opportunity for running ads on loop.
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
It’s hard not to envision the nearest construction vehicle casually lifting the thing into the east river while a couple NYPD guys laugh and take pics for their friends.
In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to
a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too
far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to
indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey
this.
https://www.firerescue1.com/fire-truck-crash/articles/stop-f...
Cruise also operates in Phoenix; it would be interesting to contrast its performance with Waymo there.
Staying in the overtaking lane is against the rules in Britain; is that the case in California too?
In Italy this would be resolved by the passengers getting out of the bus, lifting and moving the car out of the way.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
Never seen a self-driving-car in person, but I assume it's the standard 4-seater sedan layout, right?
I was in a Jaguar. The one they show on their site [1].
Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.
Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.
In fact, today the area around elevated freeways is often much cheaper than the surrounding area for several blocks.
People with lower income benefit from having a decent bus system that doesn’t require them to pay $10K a year on a car.
Could you pick a worse example?
Realistically, what breaks efficiencies in the US is city design: Places of work mostly detached from activities and housing, pretty much guaranteeing inefficiency. The robotaxis don't make a difference here: The max number of people looking to travel at once doesn't change, and neither does their destination. This makes the number of vehicles actually on the road not change very much at all: The best you can do is hope for people being comfortable (and not inconvenienced) by carpooling with strangers, not unlike what lyft and uber offer already. In the middle of the day, there's no new demand for robotaxis: They'd be parked somewhere, and every mile they move is a car/mile of congestion they create. So you either park the cars where the jobs are, getting, in practice, the same results as private vehicles, or you park them somewhere else, increasing total congestion. It's not just robotaxis that would park: See what happens in all the train commuter lines in American cities, where most trains just get parked in a yard.
The miracle of cities with top transit (See, for instance, Madrid), is that a relatively high percentage of the network is about equally busy in both directions. Trains might stop in rush hour, but route 6 will be useful in either direction most of the time, with little waste compared to US cities. This is the real weakness of the argument of just adding more transit: What we need to make it work is basically urban rebuilds. IMO still a good idea, bit it's a far slower, and more expensive problem than it might appear.
They make not taking your car with you a bit more feasible, and that’s a start at least.
Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use.
Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.
Delivering on this requires some sort of "Uber Pool" like algorithm to put a few people together in a vehicle, but doesn't require large busses.
Average occupancy of a car is 1.5 in the US, and that number shrinks as household size declines.
(It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason that automated technologies wouldn’t also spread to buses and trains. In fact, you can already automate trains. The big win there, is that buses represent massive fleet commonality.)
It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowded bike lanes than you can into crowded streets. But around here at least, bike lanes don't get a lot of people. I lived by one for years that I don't think I ever saw a bicycle on once. But even when not in use, all of that space is still being set aside for cyclists.
Where a wide high-quality network is deployed quickly, you do often see high ridership increases, but usually in the US what you see is a bunch of scattered lanes that barely reach anywhere in an unbroken link, and no one wants to ride a journey that is even 5% dangerous.
But for example, London has seen 25% growth since pre-COVID by deploying more lanes widely: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/london-cycling-covid-...
Also, there was that case with the Uber self-driving car hitting the person crossing the street with a bicycle in Phoenix, because they had turned off the bicycle detection resulting in automatic braking.
Car-like vehicles have massive inefficiencies, because the act of merging into and out of other lanes is inefficient.
A train line can carry up to 80k people per direction per hour. The FHWA’s estimate of a car lane car capacity is 2k people per direction per hour. And because cars have to eventually dump onto a surface network that requires timed cycles so that pedestrians and cyclists can cross the street, these low capacity segments are actually the bottleneck.
However, a bus can carry a hundred people comfortably. Ten buses instead of a thousand cars results in much leas congestion.
They cannot.
> I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.
They would take up more space because they're cars. Cars can't get to similar efficiencies of space compared to buses unless you compared packed private cars with sparsely ridden buses. And then of course, there's trains.
Perhaps someday we'll have all self driving cars that can safely coordinate and pack themselves into smaller spaces on the road, but that's decades away at a minimum, since you'd first need to get rid of all manually driven cars.
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
There's something adorable and HHGTG about that whole thing! Reminds me of the robotic Star Liner that refused to take off because of the peanuts hadn't been delivered thus its checklist was incomplete. It had waited eons as its passengers withered to corpses securely locked into the cabin only stating that it was 'statistically likely a new civilisation with peanut packages will arise on this planet'.
It might be the only word I use that I have never considered spelling, so I am grateful that you included it your comment.
That said, I think you are wrong and it should be "uey", "uie," "u-ie," or any other spelling that emphasizes the "u" after which the term is named.
Also "I do not know the answer but I am sure you are wrong" is the most internetish comment I've ever made, so that's two striking experiences for me today.
> U-ie n.
> also U, U-ee, U-ey, U-turn, youie
> (orig. Aus.) a U-turn; thus chuck/bang a U-ie, to make a U-turn.
But yeah, u-turn, not you-turn.
As a former Scripps spelling bee contestant, I've developed a low-grade allergy to commonplace onomotopeic words with no obvious, agreed-upon spelling. Recently I struggled with zhuzh (which has the bonus terror of having an alternate spelling, 'zhoosh') - but I commend OP for having chosen a phonetically parseable spelling over one of your (arguably more appropriate) choices, as I suspect it would have taken a lot longer to divine meaning from.
My etymology makes sense. You can even extend it to the "jouergeois" if you need to describe middle-class foodies.
In this case I am definitely wrong and I blame Canada.
I also toyed with just putting "flip a bitch" but figured some might find that problematic as I'm not entirely sure of it's etymology...
I've had humans do this, when I had no intention of crossing the street because I was just standing at the corner waiting to meet somebody. At least the humans give up after a few seconds, with exacerbated expressions like I'm the one who did something wrong. It would be pretty funny to see a robot car sit there for minutes.
In other words, I'm trying to politely set the groundwork to say I think you are wrong if we assume having pedestrians signal clear dis-intent to cross is a reasonable requirement. Of course, the drivers are also wrong to be exasperated with you so I do think in a sense both parties are wrong :D.)
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
If water sources dry up it won't be necessary to raze the city. People will leave anyway.
What scenario did you have in mind where the city runs out of water? I bet the nice folks who actually do this kind of work would love to hear about it. They seem exceedingly confident in their water portfolio [4]. Or maybe you’re just speculating; a little curiosity goes a long way [5].
[1] https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservices/resourcesconservation/...
[2] https://news.wef.org/ancient-engineering-lays-groundwork-for...
[3] https://www.arizonawaterfacts.com/water-your-facts
[4] https://www.phoenix.gov/waterservices/resourcesconservation/...
[5] https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...
When we talk about razing and rebuilding, it’s notable that this has already happened in our history. That’s how we have interstate highways cutting through urban areas and the destruction of the passenger rail network which was effectively razed and replaced by highways. Many big box stores and parking lots replace buildings that were destroyed (see before and after photos of downtown Houston, for example).
Most American cities outside of the coasts wouldn’t even exist without a railroad network that largely no longer exists.
These are all conscious choices and there’s no such thing as being stuck with cars-only infrastructure forever. The defeatism of saying that we are stuck with cars-only is a lie. After all, interstates regularly need billions of dollars of periodic investment just to keep them functional. Many states continually decide to do things like add lanes and enhanced interchanges at eye-watering costs that aren’t too dissimilar from the cost of adding new rail service.
For example, what if instead of spending $20 Billion in today’s dollars on the big dig in Boston, the elevated highway was simply demolished and the rest of the insane costs that were sunk into an underground highway went into expanding the commuter rail network and making a better rail connection to Logan airport (the blue line already nearly goes there with a short airport bus transfer, which could be further improved). That would reduce traffic in downtown Boston rather than expanding traffic by adding lanes and making driving more attractive than alternatives. This is already one of America’s most walkable cities but the highway was moved underground rather than removed.
$20 billion is so much money that entire new commuter rail lines could have been built for that price.
By the criteria I would use, Phoenix is a massive success in urban planning. The criteria I would use would be the willingness of people to move there.
In 1950, Phoenix was in the top 100 biggest US cities...barely. It was 99th, with a little over 100,000 people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2000, Phoenix was the 6th largest city in the US with 1.3 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2022, Phoenix was the 5th largest city in the US with 1.6 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8.5 million. And NYC has been losing population for the last few years.
The people who moved to Phoenix didn't have guns to their heads. They moved there because out of all the cities in the US, Phoenix worked best for them. To me that points to an incredible urban planning success. They might have failed at building a city that you like. They might have failed at building a city that was hostile to people who want a single family home with a two car garage. But they didn't fail at building a city that people choose to move to.
I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/137hr3l/wa...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/05/04/waymo-...
But our goal in any new area would be to focus on the people that live there, because they would use the service regularly. Of course, the broader goal is no waitlist anywhere :).
This claim in the Forbes article doesn't make sense to me: "It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for."
Alphabet has been pressured to show more tangible financial results by activist shareholders[1]. Waymo has 2,500 employees. Waymo's annual budget for headcount alone include stock based compensation is over $1B by my estimate.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6daa5d29-8595-4630-a633-eb1f8b138...
Or The Guardian? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/nov/15/major-inv...
> “We are writing to express our view that the cost base of Alphabet is too high and management needs to take aggressive action,” TCI wrote in the letter, signed by managing director Christopher Hohn. “The company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high.”
This is a follow-up from TCI
1. TCI writes a letter to Google saying that they should layoff employees.
2. A few weeks later, Google lays off employees.
3. Literally the day the Google layoffs are announced, TCI writes a letter to Google saying "I have appreciated our recent dialogue concerning Alphabet's cost base. I am encouraged to see that you are now taking some action to right size Alphabet's cost base and understand that it is never an easy decision to let people go."
How else should these facts be interpreted.
The beta coverage is sunset to pacific heights and only 10pm to 530am - making it effectively useless.
I'm in the beta but still haven't tried it because unless you live directly in the zone it operates it's not useful. Even then rarely am I ubering in the middle of the night anyway.
As is, I'd have to take an uber to the zone it operates in after 10pm, then get a cruise point to point in an area where everything is closed, then take an uber home.
Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-driving companies slowly expanding availability areas after their test cars have been running around for many thousands of miles in the area.
Operations is all the stuff that's not the car driving itself around. The cars need a home base where they can park when not in use, recharge, get cleaned, have sensors checked and calibrated, and get maintenance when needed (scales linearly with number of vehicles). The cars are also not 100% flawlessly handling every situation and rider issue - there still needs to be human support in the loop, both in terms of a dedicated remote support team (scales linearly with number of rides) and in terms of local rescue people to get cars when they're really stuck (scales linearly with number of vehicles).
Cost is the cost of vehicles, tech (ADKs), and operations. Waymo and Cruise are currently operating at absolutely massive loss and will continue to do so for years. It's generally not a great idea to open the faucet on a money-losing business until you at least have a solid way to get to profitability. Yes, I know, Uber and other giant startups basically never made money, etc. etc. but the market has changed and owners are looking to decrease costs of tech and operations before really scaling up. It's going to take a couple years still.
I would only caution that people shouldn't overindex on mapping costs. When you're talking about entering a major metro area, you need lots of vehicles and depots and so on anyway just to provide the eventual service. So the upfront initial map build out is certainly a component of starting in a new geography, but I think people assume it is somehow dominant. It's not.
The current approach then for ride hailing, which requires depots, means that:
> just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country
is not happening anytime soon.
- Is the initial mapping effort very high and expensive? How long does it take, on an average, to fully map a city the size and complexity of San Francisco?
- How much of the mapping process is automated?
- How are the maps kept up-to-date? We know from Waymo's blog post a while ago [1] that the cars map continuously. But is human intervention required to verify an update (like a new construction zone that was encountered)?
- How much of the country have you already mapped? Waymo says they are testing in 25 cities, so I'm assuming the number is at least 25 cities.
- What does a vehicle do if it detects a mismatch of road conditions vs the onboard map? (I already know the answer, but this is one of the most frequent points of misinformation where people say it stops working)
Anything you can share without revealing your secret sauce is appreciated!
[1] https://blog.waymo.com/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...
When you take a hard look at exactly how to get the costs down to the point where that price is profitable, that must be a monumental challenge. The cars must cost maybe $100-150k more? Maintenance on the sensitive custom-fit equipment, software and operations costs, yikes.
Kudos to the hardworking waymonauts!
CEOs (plural)
The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.
Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.
That's certainly the intent with Waymo Via for trucking, and we drive multiple routes today including say Dallas <=> Houston for beer [1]. The video at [2] includes some footage of the trucks on a highway.
[1] https://www.ttnews.com/articles/waymo-ch-robinson-driverless...
2,800 employees on Linkedin
> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises
Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]
Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-p...
Tesla has 130k.
Tesla’s autopilot team has ~300 people.
Both teams have done incredible work.
It’s funny watching HN comments trying to tear down Musk and Tesla while their software—which has driven billions of miles—continues to just get better and better.
I love that we have these companies all investing billions of dollars on trying to solve this problem in very different ways. Truly a beautiful example of capitalism at work pushing technology forward in a way that (sooner than you think) will be saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
A lot of people bought cars based on bad, lying, PR. Appreciating assets, $30K/year robotaxi service next year, we'll rent out your car for you. Coast to coast in 9 months, again, again, again, and again.
It's sort of the opposite of what OP praised: loud, not quiet, scrambling in public, not head's down.
In their defense, the whole AI industry was convinced of this. It’s known as the long tail. An absurdly huge number of small edge cases to fix before it’s a solved problem.
Tesla pioneered the model of a unified fleet software with constant updates and new features. And with that architecture they consistently deliver incremental value to every Tesla owner on a regular basis.
I’ve been an M3 owner since 2018 running software that had barebones visualization, basic lane keeping, TACC, and not even a dash cam or sentry mode, or the ability to automatically change lanes on the highway.
Today I drive FSD beta 11.3.6 on the same car which regularly brings me door to door, drives impeccably on and off the highway, handles lane changes, off-ramps, unprotected left turns, etc.
Truly hands off, unsupervised, self-driving is the target. Owners see Tesla’s relentless drive towards this goal, and FSD Beta gets better with each release.
Elon did think he would get there sooner. He did say at the 2019 Autonomy Day he thought it would be feature complete by 2020. But Tesla never promised it would be done then, and Elon even said his biggest criticism - and he said it’s a fair one - is he gets the time wrong. “Sometimes I’m not on time. But I get it done.”
Honestly it remains to be seen if they will pull it off. The level of improvement in the last year has me more optimistic than I have been previously. In the meantime a Tesla is still the best car and by far the best value on the market.
I appreciate the scale of the challenge; what Tesla is trying to do with FSD, and what it will mean for the world if they succeed. Turing awards and Nobel prizes alike.
I personally don’t begrudge that it’s taken longer than Elon hoped to achieve one of humanity’s most ambitious and meaningful technological breakthroughs. I love being part of the process and contributing to its success.
Frankly it’s the people who would never by a Tesla who complain about the timeline. The fact is that the vast majority of actual owners are extremely satisfied with their purchase. Consumer Reports surveys found Tesla was the #1 brand for customer satisfaction several years now.
It’s gross how many people ride the bandwagon of anti-Tesla or anti-self driving because it’s not coming out as fast as the next iPhone revision. It’s a damn hard problem that’s going to take a bit of time and deliver serious rewards to our society.
This must be what it felt like in the early days of automobiles or other highly disruptive, society changing innovations.
In the end… if the day comes that I install a new update on my Model 3 and it boots up with full-release FSD with an Enable Robotaxi button, fact is people will still hate on them.
I recognize it as hugely advanced, world changing technology. If they truly nail it, every other passenger car is obsolete.
The idea that such powerful technology would be locked up and controlled by Google of all companies… on highly customized vehicles that only they own… you would think HN in particular would realize how badly that future turns out.
What Tesla is doing in entirely laudable, and they’re doing it in a way that democratizes rather than monopolizes the technology. And this fits with Elon’s entire ethos of tackling challenges he sees as necessary as a way to protect humanity.
Definitely. The big picture is that they are very careful and conservative with their statements about the future, but if you look hard enough you can always find something. With Tesla it's the polar opposite.
Advantages over Uber/Lyft:
- Privacy - having the car to yourself is nice!
- Safety - My friends who are women have almost universally said they feel uncomfortable taking Ubers/Lyfts at night and would prefer the Waymo
- Ride matching happens almost instantly
- Estimated pickup times are consistently accurate
- Trunk is open for use and the car will prompt you to grab your items and open the trunk at the end of a ride
- Extra legroom in backseat because there's no driver
- No driver/car confusion - you can set your initials to be displayed on top of the car at pickup
- Drives surprisingly confidently/well - can handle complex urban traffic, pedestrians, cyclists without doing anything obviously "dumb"
- First-class native app experience
- Rides are priced upfront
- Rides can be multi-stop
- Driving is conservative - nothing above the speed limit
- Driving is sometimes a little bit jerky (e.g. at stop signs, while inching on a right turn at a red light)
- Routes can sometimes be odd / longer (usually within 25% of the most direct route)
- Rarely (<5% rides), car will stop for pickup somewhere odd (middle of lane when there's an available curb, right turn lane)
- No driver if you leave something behind (there's a support form online, but I left my phone once and a good samaritan happened to call using the emergency number)
- Pickup times can be longer today than Uber/Lyft as they roll out more cars
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/news-and-updates/all-news/cpuc-appro...
https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/regulatory-services/licensing/transp...
Imagine if all (or even most!) SF drivers decided they would come to a complete stop at each stop sign and at each red light!
Now what I wonder is whether Waymo has a durable lead over Cruise, or if Cruise succeeds alongside them.
It's actually
Profit -> Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ???
I understand that Tesla also learns in simulation.
But if you look at videos of recorded Tesla autopilot drives on Youtube you will see a huge amount of success in terms of getting people to their destination without crashing or killing anyone. And there is constant gradual improvement.
If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service. The trick will probably be that you need to have a driver's license and sit in the front seat at first. But after X months they will probably allow sitting in the back, especially for certain vetted trip regions.
Rental cars? Lame.
2-3% improvement in what metric exactly? Disengagement rate? Tesla has a long way to go there in anything but highway driving.[1]
YouTube videos are not proof of the safety of an autonomous vehicle. Tesla autopilot is currently very optimistically at level 2.5. 2-3%, even across all metrics won't get them to level 3, much less level 5.
I don't blame the people working in their self-driving program. The expectations that have been placed upon them are unreasonable given the constraints on equipment cost and aesthetic design.
1. https://twitter.com/TaylorOgan/status/1458169941128097800
Even massaging the data in the light most favorable for Tesla, a Tesla is still 3x more likely to be in an accident resulting in injuries than the next worst advanced-driving system, and is more than 50x more likely to be in an accident causing injuries than Toyota's or GM's advanced driving systems.
A 2-3% improvement still means that Tesla is the most dangerous advanced driving system on the roads.
> Toyota's or GM's advanced driving systems
What advanced driving system? Do you mean lane assist with adaptive cruise control? That’s not even remotely comparable.
For comparison, the entire rest of the world's automotive industry has 1 fatality and fewer than 100 accidents, despite having advanced driving systems on more than 3 million vehicles.
But nice try, I'm sure Elon would love to hire you hire Tesla's damage control department.
It doesn’t matter? Sorry, but this is absurd. There are no other advanced driving systems on any production vehicles that is comparable to what Tesla is doing.
This kind of unbacked, vague, hand-wavey, arm-chair cynicism holds society back from making real progress. No thanks.
Silly pro-Tesla FUD is setting back actual progress in ADAS systems by years.
It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case.
Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attaching some general intelligence to vision can probably do it. Likely will be bigger issues then though.
A car equipped with more sensors, will always be better at handling more situations, than the one without them, no matter how "smart" their drivers become.
Specifically this is the relevant part: https://youtu.be/g6bOwQdCJrc?t=1370
They removed radar because it was making things worse.
Case in point: the whole radar removal and reintroduction flip flop. It seems like they don’t believe themselves that cameras are sufficient.
Object detection is inextricably linked with prediction which are both inextricably linked with planning.
As you point out, the companies that have "solved" it don't have scale.
They don’t have scale yet for different reasons (adverse weather driving, long testing cycles, costly operations setup). “If they don’t have scale, that must mean sensor fusion doesn’t work” is quite a ridiculous argument.
If you think sensor fusion is not possible, then you must also believe Tesla’s attempts at re-integrating radar will not work and that they won’t achieve their stated goal of FSD.
But maybe it's not. Maybe the additional flops required for sensor fusion would be more useful if given over to the planning part of the problem. After all, you don't have infinite cycles. This is what I mean when I say it has not been proven at scale. The edge cases matter (arguably they are all that really matter), and "solutions with more sensors work better at object detection in artificial benchmarks" is not nearly as convincing to me as it seems to be to you. Again, object detection does not exist in a vacuum, and a solution that generally behaves better in a very constrained environment might actually behave worse when you throw all the edge cases at it and add on prediction and planning.
How actionable you make it depends on how good your engineers are. Diverse input data is definitely more actionable than just RGB pixels from images.
> But maybe it's not. Maybe the additional flops required for sensor fusion would be more useful if given over to the planning part of the problem. After all, you don't have infinite cycles.
On the contrary, it reduces your compute requirements. For example, adding lidar means you are getting direct distance measurements instead of wasting compute cycles predicting distance using voxels. It's a much more effective use of compute.
LIDAR doesn't work great in the rain/snow, so you still need a system that is predicting distance using voxels.
Doesn't really sound like less compute to me. I feel like I'm repeating myself but again this is what I mean by scale matters. A self-driving system that performs better in perfect conditions is not even a good system if it doesn't work in the rain.
Which is the point the detractors of "fuse all the things" have been making. Don't get me wrong, I think probably those same detractors (e.g. Elon Musk) have also not been entirely intellectually honest with their arguments and have ulterior motives like cost savings and saving face, but that doesn't make the arguments wrong.
Yes, integrating seamlessly is the hard part.
For Tesla, they found the increased sensor fusion complexity made the overall system less reliable, which was what informed their attempt at vision only. Karpathy went into this on Lex Fridman's podcast.
Only with better sensor fusion algorithms that worst case the overall system performance doesn't degrade with additional sensors. Tesla could have hit compute bounds in order to meet latency requirements for example (or they couldn't find the right technique/algorithms).
Sounds like a hard problem but I imagine this would eventually be overcome in the future. More sensors is definitely the future.
It's possible the lidar approach only really works with up to date high resolution maps and without that you end up in a local max you can't really escape with that approach.
That's been Tesla's argument up to this point anyway and I don't think the success in cities really proves things either way.
It may not matter since robotaxis in cities is still worth a lot and highway driving is mostly a solved problem.
True full self driving though will probably require solving vision - in that case I think the argument that lidar is a local max could very well be true.
Sorry, but you’re just repeating Elon Musk’s buzzwords like “local maximum”. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no such thing as “lidar approach”. All sensor inputs are fused (early/late fusion) and run through perception algorithms. Lidar is used for localization with maps, but that’s not even its primary use (that’s object detection). And it does not require maps to be up to date either.
Tesla’s problem is that they’ve promised their existing cars on the road are capable of full self driving. They can’t add hardware to them, so they will maintain the “camera is sufficient” stance for a long time.
High resolution mapping works for localized solutions, but not in the general case.
I'm glad both groups are working on different approaches, it'll be better for us in the long run imo.
It's no surprise that it's easier to get to Level 4 if you have a 50-100k sensor suite, HD maps and a geofence.
However, I wouldn't be shocked if, even if Tesla robotaxis arrive many years later, Tesla achieves profitability before Waymo does.
Why do you think Tesla’s approach “didn’t work and they are now dead last in the game?”
Maybe that’s just an opinion because you provided nothing to back it up - but I can tell you not only does AutoPilot/FSD Beta work, the latest FSD Beta stack (I’m driving 11.3.6) works extremely well.
Tesla has orders of magnitude more passenger-miles driven than any other solution, which is one quantitative way to gauge success.
Tesla’s latest FSD Beta safety record on city streets is also excellent - 10x fewer accidents per mile than Cruise for example.
This is another huge win for Tesla but it’s important to note that this is accomplished in part by requiring strict driver oversight (enforced through gaze & attention tracking in the cabin camera). So the significantly lower accident rate is not an apple-to-apples comparison of two L4 solutions, but it convincingly shows that their L2 solution is actively making the city and highway roads safer for the driver and the cars & pedestrians that they are sharing the road with.
they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate and the air quality.
I can also attest to it. I've interacted as a pedestrian and cyclist to many cruise and waymo cars and they've been very, very cautious and careful.
The reason so many people die in US cities is because of policy, not because people can't drive inherently.
Self-driving car fleets probably increase suburbization in the same way that trains created suburbs long ago.
Depending on how it breaks out, "more space per person at similar total environmental impact" is a quality of life win but not a climate-change-fighting one.
Pedestrian safety and other externalities are probably a big win, still.
The parking lot point is interesting, I hadn't thought about that.
But it's not obviously better to me: commuting behavior is very time-of-day determined, and the cars are gonna have to be somewhere in between rush hours. You don't want them on the road, and you can probably shift around to catch other sorts of predictable demand, but environmentally you're gonna want to minimize the total nubmer of miles driven without passengers.
EDIT: so in areas with less development and commmuters are parking their cars in surface lots all day, yeah, you don't need those surface lots for commuters + all the other lots at retail, residential, etc all at once if the cars are moving around to other uses during the day. But in denser recent-development areas where office parks predominantly have underground or garage parking it may be harder to realize infill there.
Basically, if the cost can be comparable to car ownership, reducing resource use by making car buying of any kind far more difficult. Which is admittedly entirely a thought experiment. Though it is a thought experiment many authors seem to arrive at.
Edit: I wish I could say I was surprised at the downvotes for a comment that is pro-worker.
I can’t help thinking that the potential upside will far out-way the cost.
London streets are littered with dormant vehicles. Most just sit there taking up room and dominating the city. It would be a whole other city if we could change that dynamic.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-...
Many of the jobs you are referring to are socially fulfilling to some people. It's an escape from a poor home situation or from an addiction.
It was what he used to survive though, and surely not all cab drivers would be the same.
My brother in law drove Uber when he was illegally canned from his factory work and is the reason he got to eat.
There are options to solve problems that don't require a change in the outcome you desire. Mainly something along the lines of forcing the companies profiting from this to pay a person a reasonable wage to act as the social aspect that will be missing. So the job market can be unaffected.
It's not just a cab job problem either. It's also not about who I like or dislike or whether or not it impacts me or not. I have never used a cab in my life and I cannot drive and thus have no car taking up your street.
I do however see a worsening homeless crisis in my small-ish Canadian city. I would rather see empty cars than tortured souls.
Force them to hire someone to sit in a car all day and do absolutely nothing?
To act as a local for a traveler.
To recommend locations
To do nothing but sit there and look at their device or read
Or perhaps the answer is a tax on automation and everyone can sit at home perpetually online.
Im not claiming to have answers to this rapidly approaching problem. It's definitely a problem though. Even if it doesn't impact myself whatsoever at this time.
What is your job? If it is gone tomorrow and your education is useless, what will you do?
What about your family and friends?
Nobody I know wants this. I’ve had great Uber, Lyft and taxi drivers. But they’re far from the norm. I’d much prefer to be able to play my own music, or take back-to-back phone calls, or snore loudly.
If this is genuinely the service, there is booming business in tour guiding.
I drove cabs for nine years (right up until Covid).
Some people want to talk, some people don’t want to talk, some people just won’t stop talking and you have to tune them out.
What everyone had in common was the desire to get from point A to point B as cheaply as possible. They didn’t care about any social aspect, given the choice I suspect the majority of them would rather not have been paying for my livelihood if it meant the ride was cheaper.
How many people do you think fell for the Lyft “fist bump” BS over taking a VC subsidized ride for a discount over a taxi?
Essentially removing most economic incentive to deploy self-driving cars at all?
Is money to goal or is it a better society? Less pollution, less waste, more social interaction, and increased safety. Less colored paper.
Surely the government has an interest in financially incentivising this development. Especially given a decrease in road wear and tear, lower climate impact and surely any number of other benefits.
More people taking cheaper trips in cleaner vehicles is a better society in my book.
What about when it's Waymo One or Uber Zero. Support is GPT7 Two.
No call center jobs, no driving jobs, less supporting jobs, less money flow, more homelessness, more violence. Decreasing compensation for the jobs remaining due to increased competition.
Short term profits go brrr?
Have you tried to get support on Uber, Lyft or a taxi?
> No call center jobs, no driving jobs, less supporting jobs, less money flow, more homelessness, more violence. Decreasing compensation for the jobs remaining due to increased competition
It's difficult to distinguish this from neo-Luddism. Maybe there is nothing productive for those people to do. If so, we can address it then. But the history of technological revolutions–from the agrarian to the internet–suggests the opposite. (We are, after all, discussing jobs which first arose around a century ago.)
"Let's make artificial fake work to make sure that people have something to do and money."
Hopefully we can do better than that.
It’s like saying “self-driving cars and solving the nitrogen fixation problem would be a big win for preventing famine.”
> As a result, total PM10 emissions from EVs were found to be equal to those of modern ICEVs. PM2.5 emissions were only 1–3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
As the quote mentioned, this can be improved. Lighter batteries, better regenerative breaking, and improvements in tire material would all help.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...
Anyone who has been to Oslo understands EVs are a huge benefit for urban air quality.
And obviously the technology making these cars possible also make self driving busses possible, which would allow new ways for urban mobility.
This is total bullshit. EVs barely use frictional brakes at all. My Tesla Model S from 2014 is still on the original set of brakepads after nearly 200000 miles. Several EV car models even have a problem with disks _rusting_ because the frictional brakes are not used except when the car is parked.
If anything, EVs will absolutely cut down on brake dust.
With tires, it's a bit more nuanced. Regular tires can indeed wear a bit faster on an EV, especially if you are addicted to high acceleration. But tire vendors are now producing EV-optimized tires that are a bit more durable, and it seems like the difference is pretty negligible.
Also, keep in mind that your bullshit study only looked at weight. So it follows that buses and trucks (that have MUCH more weight) will leave genocide and devastation in their wake.
Obv. I haven't read anything but the summary but the core assumption means it's an extrapolation and not measuring actuals.
For example, while EVs accelerate faster, regen braking massively reduces brake wear - the lack of mention of regen in this extrapolative study seems a huge miss. Also EVs typically don't have the same tire material - they use low rolling resistance tires which do better on particulates.
And it's no longer true that EVs are heavier than comparable combustion vehicles. The Tesla Model 3 weighs 3,550-4,070lbs. The BMW 3 Series weighs 3,200–4,330lbs, though the lightest model is a two door convertible. While combustion vehicles don't carry heavy batteries, they do need exhaust systems, more complicated drivetrains, and bigger cooling systems. Also, more and more combustion vehicles are becoming hybrids to meet stricter emissions standards. That means adding weight for batteries, an electric motor, and a transmission that can handle both propulsion sources.
1. See figure 6 in this paper: https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/12/2/190
If it's utility electric, from what fuel source is it generated?
[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/print.php
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Ar...
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate
and the air quality.
This does jack squat for getting across San Francisco or from corner to corner of Phoenix.
Getting from outer sunset to market by bike daily isn't really practical, especially during Weather.,
I though this too until I looked at the true dollar costs or carbon impact per passenger mile. That doesn't even account for the externalities of particulate pollution and road wear. The buses in my city are also filthy diesel, belching thick, noxious, clouds of soot as they accelerate away from the stop, right at crowds of people who just got off the bus. Heavy buses also require special concrete pads at every stop and still do heavy damage to the road surface: rutting and exacerbating potholes.
still do heavy damage to the road surface: rutting and exacerbating potholes.
Look at lord Elno's autonomous vehicle tunnel – individual vehicles simply don't scale.
Unleaded gasoline will leave a nasty residue on your exhaust but that's about as bad as it (should) get. Alcohol and gas will burn cleaner but come with their own drawbacks. Trolley buses, of course, don't have tailpipe emissions but not everyone is willing to put up with the overhead infrastructure.
And hey, battery EV buses are starting to become a thing too (e.g. SF is trialing ones from a few different manufacturers).
Bike lanes don't appreciable increase the percentage of trips by bike, they dis-proportionally slow down car traffic, and the bike commutes themselves are probably the worst transit mode in the US.
Heck, bike lanes almost never even _replace_ the amount of traffic that they displace.
All bike lanes do, is cater to a bike lobby that tries to force their hobby on everybody else, at the expense of practicality.
https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-departmen...
Uber does 7.64 billion rides per year. And they are not profitable. The waymo cars sure ain’t cheap, and scale of operations will take a ton of cash. I wonder if waymo would ever be profitable.
I also wonder how Waymo plans to handle 'surges' - they either have enough cars to handle peak demand, in which case many are idle much of the time (and thus not making money), or they build a fleet for the minimum/average, and let more elastic competitors cover surges (or it's just impossible to get one at rush hour anywhere). It really seems like Uber/Lyft/etc ought to have a better business model than this very centralized, capital-intensive approach, and they're seemingly incapable of earning a profit.
Probably large regional hubs that cars will drive themselves to for periodic maintenance (or get towed to if the vehicle becomes disabled). Much more potential to bring down total cost than the 'each driver does it themselves' model.
So you're left with occasional minor maintenance for mechanical issues like broken door handles or jammed windows, and also with interior cleaning.
Even this can in future be minimized by building a taxi-only car model. You can get rid of the steering wheel, instrument cluster, central console, and all the complicated plastic parts that go with all of this. You can just replace everything with durable and easily washable hard plastic, like seats on public transit.
Then make seats easily removable, and the interior becomes straightforward to clean (heck, you can even automate it).
2. It's possible but it's going to take forever
3. It's real and happening now but it's dangerous
4. It's not dangerous but it's annoying and blocking an intersection sometimes
5. It's not annoying but maybe they won't make money
we are here.
6. It makes money but what about drivers
7. It works in cities but what about suburbs
8. It works in suburbs but what about rural areas
9. This city in Turkmenistan is the last place on earth without any autonomous vehicles and visiting is like getting into a time machine
Almost anyone who needs transportation would use such taxis if they become affordable.
But that's a very large set of very large assumptions, stacked on top of each other! I can immediately think of lots of ways it can go wrong:
1. The economics may never work.
2. The "can't speed won't speed" problem may prove politically unsolvable, meaning people end up preferring taxis who avoid liability by being decentralized.
3. Google's core business may falter before Waymo manages to become financially independent, and in the absence of Waymo other competitors may decide it's no longer worth the investment vs Tesla-style incrementalism.
4. Public transport isn't going anywhere in high density cities simply due to limited road capacity.
5. Many people may simply prefer having their own cars even if Waymo taxis are everywhere, simply because you can't beat the latency of walking to your own driveway.
But the core problem is going to be price. Taxi drivers are cheap. For years people said Uber/Lyft would build up brand loyalty, raise prices and start making money any day now. After all it's ultimately just a ridehailing app, it's not that hard to make, so how can they not make a decent business out of it? Yet they never did get to that point even though it's a million times easier. Waymo not only has to find a way to turn a regular weekly profit taking into account their ultra-expensive staff, hardware, energy costs, support costs, etc but then maybe even one day yield enough profit to pay off the initial investment! All of that whilst competing in a super low margin market? Maybe it can be done but when I see the reasons people are giving here for why they like Waymo cars (clean, safe, etc) I'm not seeing the basis of a great company. It sounds a lot like the reasons I heard when Uber first appeared, even. And it's certainly WAY easier to compete on those aspects whilst still using human drivers.
Perhaps one day yes, presumably someone will get self-driving taxis to the point of being a sustainable business, but it might well be writeoff for Google just like it was for Uber.
Also I don't think they've reached "not annoying" yet.
If they're reliably doing 10,000 trips a week, I promise you they don't need to worry about finding additional investors.
"It's not really impressive to be doing 10,000 self-driving taxi trips every week, because it's currently costing them money" is a really, really wild take.
Uber is profitable in many cities before Uber Eats. An urban-only strategy should be profitable for Waymo.
None of these problems exist for waymo, so they can be profitable a lot quicker
It's super unclear.
I think I signed up twice, a few months apart, because the message in the app didn't give me confidence that I'd signed up the first time.
Separately, the other day I turned right and there was a Waymo car blocking the lane, about to pick up some passengers. My car and the car behind me couldn't continue along the road until the passengers had reached the car had gotten in. They didn't seem like they were in a hurry.
Stopping a couple of extra car lengths away from the junction (or, better still, not blocking in the lane at all) wouldn't have paused other people's journeys.
If you're interested in Transformers and attention in particular, the excellently named Wayformer [1] paper is pretty easy to follow and SWFormer is impressive on a lot of levels [2].
The main challenge for autonomous vehicles has been (large) multi-modal inputs, while delivering real-time inference performance on the road. Many of the large-language model things you see produce cool results, but would be much too slow or expensive for a real-time, safety-critical application.
What does this mean? It can recognize pedestrians making hand gestures?
Waymo cars are safer, cleaner and cheaper than Uber, which has never made an operating profit and has abandoned its self-driving development.
Uber is stalled on the railway tracks while the freight train of self-driving tech hurtles towards it. How is it still worth $76 billion?
Bay Area yes. San Francisco less so. Sure it doesn’t get snow but it is often rainy and foggy.
Beyond that, the drivers are very aggressive along with pedestrians and cyclists. It is not a very easy place to drive.
Are you suggesting that they should start development in a more extreme climate right off the bat?
What you’re suggesting is akin to trying to develop a jetliner before building propeller aircraft. Too hard too soon and you don’t really know what the target even is. Much learning happens before you can successfully execute a complex plan like that.
Plus it’s better from a business standpoint because you can achieve probability profitability sooner with your MVP.
> Los Angeles will be Waymo’s next ride-hailing city, joining Phoenix and San Francisco as we expand to more locations.
Beyond the official service, we also do testing in multiple locations. For example, we announced that returning to Austin for testing [2]. In that post, we mention other weather testing we've done in Miami, NYC, and Bellevue, WA.
Beyond ride hailing, we have separate testing for Waymo Via with our Class 8 trucks, that you might see in Arizona or Texas.
[1] https://blog.waymo.com/2022/10/next-stop-for-waymo-one-los-a...
[2] https://blog.waymo.com/2023/03/expanding-waymos-testing-to-A...
There’s surely someone driving it remotely or hidden under the hood.
Self-driving is a hoax meant to distract us.
AI is snake oil, Dreyfus, hype train. Stochastic parrot. Confabulations. Unredeemable and based on intellectual mistakes.
Stochastic.
Stochastic.. parr..
…
fizzles out
But Waymo has real tech, and real AI.