> Waymo currently operates commercial robotaxi services in Phoenix, Arizona and San Francisco,
Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to Europe small towns/mountain roads/&c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo
Basically straight lines and 365 days of sun, now send them to Europe small towns/mountain roads/&c.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIyEg35Stbo
https://youtu.be/5wXO05s-pLc?si=5W-SW5zGXIwgnQpG
It makes a mistake in that one, around 5 minutes in, due to not understanding a construction worker's gesture, but I presume it phones home for advice and someone gets it moving again. Everything else seemed to be handled rather impressively.
Disclaimer: Google employee. My job has nothing to do with cars. But I do love technology and hate driving, so I'd love to see this problem solved. I'm actually quite skeptical that I'll ever have a truly self-driving car, as I also live in a place with weather.
Understanding someone directing traffic is probably one of the harder problems.
To another point, to the degree that it's predictable ahead of time, I'd be perfectly happy with a car that only could self-drive in some conditions. Only highway for some subset of weather conditions? That would still be super-useful for some of us.
First, as all the other respondents have pointed out, your characterization of San Francisco as "straight lines and 365 days of sun" is way, way off. But more importantly, as a consumer, I'd be thrilled to own an autonomous vehicle even if it didn't work in bad weather. There's easily enough data to have a car say "there is a storm coming in your area, can't drive autonomously" long before it would become a safety issue.
And, of course, wouldn't one expect an autonomous vehicle to start in places with better conditions vs yolo'ing it in a blizzard whiteout?
My 2023 car with cameras and radar usually cannot activate lane centering - even in good weather - because it cannot tell where the lanes are.
Having driven in both San Francisco and throughout the midwest, I agree with the parent commenter that San Francisco is a much easier environment for self-driving cars.
More and more I believe in Louis CK's bit about "everything is amazing and nobody's happy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U
Then there's the sheisters trying to sell that technology and convince governments that "for safety" people should be required to buy their product. Poking holes in the technology is people's natural response to the very real fear that their ability to operate a vehicle that isn't literally controlled by a huge corporation will be taken away.
The technology is amazing, humans suck.
You see the same thing with EVs, rather than it being a purely positive thing that the market has more options for people with different driving patterns you have governments committing to banning the sale of new ICE cars when the deployment is literally in its infancy
That feels like a massive straw man. I'm not aware of anyone at this point, or with any plans, to require the use of autonomous vehicles.
> You see the same thing with EVs, rather than it being a purely positive thing that the market has more options for people with different driving patterns you have governments committing to banning the sale of new ICE cars when the deployment is literally in its infancy
That also doesn't make sense to me. Governments don't want to push to EVs because the tech is some nirvana or something, but continued use of ICE vehicles is a large contributor to climate change and we have very limited time to address that.
Wait.. what? That’s definitely a new one to me…
Tech is already inundated with corporations using technology to maintain an iron grip on their products against their users interest and I'm just sad to see that autonomous driving seems to be the excuse to extend this grip further with always-on connectivity that you can't turn off "for safety" that will also conveniently used for even more tracking. I don't think it will be used for population control or anything like that but I expect it will be expand the already existing police remote shutdown.
Autonomous cars that are truly autonomous would be amazing. But what I fear we'll get is DrivingAsAService and regulatory capture.
I am pleased to introduce you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
I was just like the last thing in the universe I want is for a company to exercise Apple like control over my car. And despite making no logical sense companies seem to be using EVs and self-driving as an excuse to create artificial lock-in and add even more data collection. New and "different" seems to mean you're allowed to break consumer expectations for the worse.
If we do reach a point where self driving systems consistently outperfom humans in term or safety, I would absolutely expect a push to atleast require it in new vehicles if not some form of new law to push people towards using that technology. Personally, I find that idea attractive but I understand why people would fear it.
My bet is you'll be amazed by how little changes. Sure you won't spend any time at gas stations/car dealerships and you'll be able to watch YouTube on your commute, but that's how millions of New Yorkers live and, well, it's fine. That is to say, we could have just built subways/mass transit and gotten all of the benefits.
There is a major downside though, and it's that we'll be doubling down on cars. That means all the mining we have to do for all the components, all the road/vehicle maintenance we have to do, all the waste we have to manage, all the pollution from tires, all the space taken up by roads, garages, parking spaces, all the batteries we have to build/maintain/recycle, all the sprawl and isolation we suffer will increase.
I'm a big fan of public transportation, and I think it's sad that so many cities have underinvested. But it doesn't help your point to pretend that commuting on a bus or subway is the same thing as commuting in an autonomous personal vehicle, and these kinds of false equivalencies only serve to discredit mass transit advocates.
I mean the point is pretty straight forward. A study like this is tautological. "self driving cars are safe on exactly the fraction of hand selected roads where self driving companies are willing to put them" doesn't tell us anything. It's a fluff piece.
If you want to make an actual assessment about the safety you need data from randomized, representative roads, not 0.x% of the streets in America. Which itself is a very generous country to pick. Put these things into peak traffic in Rome for an hour
Tautological puff pieces are what Tesla does with many of its cherry-picked stats, but this data is much more definitive.
No, you can't. You can say the drivers are worse only on the segments where Waymo was willing to test it, and that is worthless. It literally is cherry picking. What does it matter to people driving in Boston, Chicago, New York, Paris or Berlin if cars can drive safely on a suburban grid in Arizona?
If you get to pick the sample you get to pick the outcome. We could literally put these cars on the worst 1% of roads and get the opposite result. In fact we could put them on the worst 90% of roads and get the opposite result. Even the average American consumer gets no meaningful info out of this.
Waymo is doing a level 4 rollout to specific areas where they are confident they can operate them safely. This study shows they are doing a good job with that. People in these markets get access to safer transportation once they can scale. Indeed, the majority of the US population lives in areas that are roughly comparable in driving complexity to either SF for Pheonix.
The real question is if these safety rates can be maintained while reducing the operational costs to the point where this can be scaled.
> You can say the drivers are worse only on the segments where Waymo was willing to test it, and that is worthless.
That's not worthless at all. There are tons of places in the US, maybe even a majority, that are quite similar to something between SF and Phoenix. Yes, absolutely, there are tons of places it's not. Again, so what? I just don't understand why anyone would expect that Waymo would not start with a progressive rollout.
Nevertheless I do believe it might be easier to deploy self driving cars in more “feral” places where anything goes as traffic rules go. In those places, what I’ve observed, is that you can at any point actually come to a complete standstill and everyone will just navigate around you (within cities that is). This actually can work in the favor of these cars to be honest.
(BTW, Boston's reputation as a place for aggressive driving is undeserved. Insurance companies pay a lot for fender repair for the reason above, making the city look bad, but for injuries against a person, insurers just pay the limit, which an injured pedestrian can run up in the first 24 hours in a hospital. Anything beyond that doesn't show up in car insurance statistics. Houston and Austin have far more aggressive drivers, for instance.)
The bigger problem I would imagine is finding the car not responding to inputs in a predictable way. I would image at a certain point they are going to give up. Even a human driver might need a push in some conditions.
It never snows, but between the fog and strong winter storms directly off the Pacific, visibility can often be near zero in SF. I've lost sight of lanes and surroundings many times.
tbh waymo's ceo said what I said here: https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo...
Even the straight, flat, streets can be nuts - like Polk St: pedestrians can jump out anywhere, slalom of delivery trucks, delivery scooters, ride-hail cars, double parallel-parked, with bike lanes - its a major cyclist route also busses and those little tourist scooters - oh and the electric unicycles that are always blowing stop-signs! the type, shape, size, and behavior is all over the map. go two blocks over and you have to deal with cable-pulled trolleys having the right of way across the 12% grade intersection. last week there were hundreds of drunken santa-clauses jay-walking between bars. oh and the line of tourist cars (who knows what traffic behavior they might follow!) heading up to see the crooked street - as the high school is getting out.
LOL get your memory checked, memory checked, if you recall driving in SF as unproblematic.
All the CEO said was that he thinks autonomous driving won't work in every condition or ever be perfect, and that they're always finding and working through unique challenges. That's quite a bit different from "our cars only work on straight lines and with 365 days of sun".
What do you want me to do? Pretend?
Perhaps MDS is real ...
You don't get brownie points if you deliberately hamstring yourselves (no sensors, no maps) and make the problem harder than it already is. It's like trying to jump higher and higher to fly to moon instead of using rockets. It doesn't mean you're tackling a fundamentally harder problem.
He repeatedly claimed that having contradictory radar and camera data means the system won't know what data to trust. Anybody who has worked with data in any capacity can tell you that is complete nonsense. In the past, people would call combining this data "sensor fusion." These days, even high school kids know you just throw all your features into a model. You don't discard red channel data from your cameras because it might conflict with green channel data. Tesla Insurance doesn't throw away all features except driver age when calculating premiums.
For what it's worth, as a pedestrian walking around SF late at night I absolutely do trust Waymo more than human driven cars.
Also, frankly, humans drive in situations where they just shouldn't. There are times where the conditions are so bad that the only correct decision is to just say it is not possible to safely drive today. Personally, I don't drive in dense fog because your options are basically drive too fast and risk hitting something you can't see, or drive at a sensible slow speed and risk being hit from behind - which isn't your fault but might still kill you. Even the most advanced aeroplanes with all the latest and greatest sensors still have defined limits where they won't fly.
Also, that Arc de Triomphe example should just be replaced with a safe priority system. Priorité à droite is a silly rule, and it's especially silly on a roundabout. In my opinion, crashes there are the fault of the road, not the driver.
It's just like how iPhones are wildly popular in the US. I'm sure there's someone who's like "Yeah, try to sell a $1k device to a Romanian and see how it goes" and Apple only gets 25% market share there but they're one of the most successful companies in the world, without Romania.
Some markets can be irrelevant.
how about no, let's not send waymo cars into vastly more challenging conditions. i want them to keep being cautious and responsible.
The traffic fatalities are higher (18 > 15), the lack of lanes is more egregious (and people will dive across three lanes more aggressively), the amount of driving the wrong way down busy multi lane roads is more (which still happens in Beijing, but like not as often).
Beirut (or at least the outskirts) also has things Beijing doesn't: civilian enforcement of traffic etiquette via brandishing automatic rifles, traffic intersections primarily controlled by tanks instead of signals, and the annoying practice carried over from Saudis of doing that stupid angled drive-with-the-car-tilted-on-two-wheels thing in thd middle of traffic.
It's similar to Beijing in it always being slow though, so that's probably why the fatality rate isn't 30+ lol.
But ya, none of the drivers were armed, so we had that at least :)
It also gets quantitative measures of how confident it should be in what it just classified. And if your confidence measures decline, for any reason, it can just slow down. Small European towns should be doable.
Not straight lines, lots of traffic, cars parked on both sides of roads, plenty of human drivers seemingly unable to cope.
(Admittedly, mostly sunny weather.)