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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

First, where is the data?

Second, yeah, it's bananas to test large, fast, heavy robots on public streets. The only reason we let it happen is because the robots look like cars.

Third, it's bananas to have large, fast, heavy vehicles everywhere mixed in with all the other traffic. The only reason we let it happen is a mass-marketing campaign (see "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM )

Here is a film "a Trip down Market Street" recorded in San Francisco on April 14, 1906, just before the Great Earthquake. The source of the problem is clear: cars accelerate much faster than horses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_1AdYRGW8

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They're not very fast at all, unfortunately, at least for the riders. And they seem to try to pick the longest, least congested paths to get to destination to avoid bumping into too many tough turns that might get them in trouble. Takes easily 2x as long as with an Uber.

they are only allowed to run from 9pm to 5/6am though. Rode a few and they seemed perfectly safe.

I regularly (like daily) see empty cars (Waymo & Cruise) driving around residential areas by Lake Merced while I'm driving to pick up/drop off my kid from summer school... that's between the hours 8am and noon. Also see them in the Ingleside neighborhoods during the day: they have been completely empty when I've seen them. So maybe they can't carry passengers other than those other times, but they are definitely driving around outside of the hours you cite.

Having said that, I've not seen any bad driving from them. There are certainly far worse human drivers, motorcyclists, bicyclists, and pedestrians out there on a regular basis, so I'm not against the self-driving cars being on the street.

Yeah, I think they don’t carry passengers outside of those nighttime hours, but they are still testing them in some areas during the day (which makes sense, need to test them then if they eventually want to operate then)

You are absolutely correct.

Waymo carries passengers 24/7, Cruise is night time only except employees.

Can anyone get a Waymo? I signed up a long time (years?) ago and think I still don’t have access.

oh true. I didnt think about the non-occupied times when they run

I think they are training and not testing. I might be wrong, but if I am right, the use of public roads is a necessity. This is how AI works, I guess.

Anyone care to explain why they downvoted this?

Probably because "training" implies direct and constant supervision, which would almost completely avoid any chance of incidents because the human is in charge at all times.

Deploying an unsupervised robot on the general public for training purposes is even worse than for testing purposes.

Why? If it is already safer than human drivers (as they claim), training and testing are both okay. Not even just okay, but a good thing!

> If it is already safer than human drivers (as they claim)

They are not safer. They are constantly behaving like this:

- https://twitter.com/desertflyer/status/1677464706251128832

- https://twitter.com/flrent/status/1677483882109882368

What I think they should do (what I would do if I were in charge at a AI-car co.): There's a whole ersatz city out in the desert somewhere the whole purpose of which is to allow in situ modelling of new "smart" hardware. (This is a real thing, but I forgot what it's called and I'm too lazy to look it up, I apologize for my barbarism.) The people that "live" there are actually paid employees. That's where you test your self-driving cars.

Further, I would have started by making self-driving golf carts made out of nerf that can't go faster than, say, two miles per hour, and then iterated. It's reckless to immediately attempt to make Knight Industries Two Thousand, in my opinion. The potential for mayhem and death goes up with the kinetic energy, eh? Both speed and mass contribute to the "killer robot" aspect of these machines. Start small and light.

Also, let's call them "auto-autos", eh?

As far as I'm aware, all L4 AV companies have done years of closed course testing. You can (not) see these vehicles being tested in places like GoMentum station in Concord, Altamont Raceway in Livermore, and TRC in Merced, not to mention other courses in Vegas, Seattle, Tahoe, AZ, Florida, Michigan, and China.

Of course, companies also started with small, slow vehicles like the Waymo firefly and the Nuro R vehicles. Voyage (acquired by Cruise) was doing their testing in a low speed access controlled retirement community, with essentially golf carts.

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