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Comment by yellow_postit | Hacker News Reader

Self driving is going the way of fusion power. Always just a couple years away.

I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile handoff to humans has legs, but I wonder how much the Tesla claims have poisoned the proverbial well of a more constrained system for the foreseeable future.

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1. Waymo works great. It's safer than humans within its operating regime, and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service. As they collect more data, the regime expands.

2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.

I use Tesla FSD everyday. It is not a robotaxi yet, but it makes a big difference in day to day life. I can do most drives without disengagement. To be clear, it needs to get 100x better for robotaxi. But even with its beta flakiness, it is magical.

So do your regular drives just not include any tree lined roads, or have they done some mapping to fix phantom braking in your area?

And that’s a serious question, because the stress of trying to anticipate the next phantom brake event completely defeats the purpose in my mind. I’d much rather just drive myself.

I never experience phantom braking in FSD Beta on HW4.

Phantom braking has been almost entirely eliminated in the past year. Plenty of others have noted the same experience.

Used to happen to me once every ~100 miles. This year, it only happened once the whole year, and the drop was maybe ~10mph.

Its not self driving though. I have to pay attention when using it. Tesla doesn't have a Level 3 or higher cars on the road.

Cruise has Teleoperators. Their snafu revealed an intervention every 4-5 miles, which is worse than Tesla's FSD. (Cruise vehicles were also subjectively bad at driving)

Leveling means nothing, and are determined by the company. Actual operations and range of operational capability matter.

Tesla doesn't have self driving though. Its level 2. Mercedes has level 3 cars on the road where the driver can legally watch a movie or read a book. Level matters but it dictates what the driver can legally do. Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving, Tesla makes the driver 100% liable. There's a huge difference.

> Also Mercedes is accepting 100% liability while their cars are in self driving

That's what I thought too, but apparently it's not that clear cut. Their manual says that the driver must be ready to take over not only when prompted by the system but also "due to obvious circumstances". It's not clear what that means — cue the lawsuits. https://safeautonomy.blogspot.com/2023/09/no-mercedes-benz-w...

Cruise’s teleoperators cannot perform any safety critical interventions like preventing a crash in a fraction of a second, which Tesla drivers can and do. If you remove the driver from Tesla, their intervention rate would be even worse. No matter how you slice it, a driverless car is more capable than one that requires a driver.

Exceedingly few Tesla interventions are safety related. The majority of mine are to fix awkwardness negotiating with aggressive human drivers and legally mandated full stop (which no human driver does).

Cruise has still been in and caused accidents, at a rate likely no better than Tesla. Also, Cruise operates only on a small number of mapped roads, whereas a Tesla can operate anywhere in the U.S. in most weather conditions, and yet still does a great job.

Anecdotes are not data. “Exceedingly few safety interventions” doesn’t matter when the number is non-zero. That number is exactly zero for driverless vehicles. So their interventions are not the same as Tesla’s interventions.

If Cruise had a fallback driver all the time, it would “operate everywhere” too. That’s not really saying much. The entire problem is about how to remove the driver, which Tesla is nowhere close to in any geographic area. A dead giveaway is how they’re reluctant to even let drivers take their hands off the wheel.

Do you have a source of this data? Is Tesla releasing all their interventions. Cruise interventions are all submitted to the state of California as part of their self driving certification.

It revealed that a human operator engages with the car in some way every 4-5 miles, and the (ex) CEO explained that this metric was stupid because human operators were always fully assigned.

His suggested metric is cars/operator, which was ~20 IIRC.

For Tesla, for the near future, that number is 1.

I paid for a month of FSD over the summer to try it out, and it was an extremely stressful experience.

It was very twitchy and jarring at stop signs, there are several uncontrolled T-intersections around my house that FSD just flew through (almost striking another car one time), and I didn't like how it always tried to get into the slowest lane on the highway during rush hour.

Maybe I'll try it again this summer to see how it's improved, but some of the close calls last time soured me on the experience. It felt more like I was babysitting a new driver and less like I was being chauffeured around.

Waymo is only in cities with conditions basically perfect for self driving. Most of the world lives where weather occurs.

Most of the US population lives on the coast, which is quite temperate generally.

I suspect large portions of North America will be easily serviceable by robotaxi.

Waymo seems to work the same in pretty heavy rain as a clear day in SF. They're testing snow a lot more now, no idea how good it is yet.

San Francisco seems pretty tricky: narrow streets, heavy pedestrian traffic, fog, hills, street cars, etc

SF doesn't seem like an ideal place, it rains and is foggy which both degrade lidar performance.

Yeah have fun when it's snowing so hard that all the sensors get covered if you stand still for too long at a light or something.

And I do wonder what hail would do to it. Could cause a lot of... interesting input data. And subsequently a lot of interesting driving.

Sensors can already handle rain. Heating elements are not hard to add (if not present now).

Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.

Even if it didn't work in snow (and it's unlikely to do worse than humans), all the west coast, desert west, and south have basically zero snow all year long.

I don’t know where this idea that driving in SF is easy mode comes from. No one who has actually driven in SF would say that. Yes it doesn’t have snow, but it has rain, zero-visibility fog, lots of pedestrians and cyclists, heavy traffic, narrow roads, steep grades, bus-only lanes, lots of cars parked on the street and double parked. Self-driving companies don’t pick SF because it’s easy, they pick it because it’s the most challenging city that’s close to their engineers.

How else would you do it? First, get the technology to work at all before doing the harder things it can't handle yet. Crawl, walk, then run. Or in this case, drive in snow. Even if it never gets there in my lifetime (which I doubt), it's already working.

> and that regime is more than enough to make a profitable taxi service

Waymo isn’t profitable and has been a massive money loser over the past several years. See “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s earnings. Where does this claim come from?

It's based on public comments about the per-mile cost of Cruise and Waymo, and the fact that Waymo is currently operating in only a tiny number of areas. Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs, and iterating on the hardware will drive down the marginal/capital costs.

Amazon made no profit for many, many years, but that's because they were re-investing all their revenue. No one doubted that they could have turned a profit if they wanted. (Tbc, there is not yet a component of Waymo that is profitable because, as mentioned, they are just operating in a handful of cities.)

>Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs

Where is the actual evidence of this, though? I'm not trying to be snide -- genuinely curious.

Waymo is expanding -- their service areas (and operating times) have expanded in SF and Phoenix. There's a waitlist in LA and Austin. Yet Waymo's financials are still buried in Alphabet's "Other Bets" line, which lost $1.2 billion in Q3 2023.

You think Google, which has been catching heat endlessly for falling behind in AI, has not only won the self-driving race from a technical standpoint (the claim by many in this thread), but has also found a way to make it both profitable and scalable to arbitrary locations, and they're hiding this reality in their earnings statements? Seems unlikely to me. Why bother with waitlists and slow rollouts in favorable climates? Why not blitzscale this thing to all markets and disclose the numbers to investors and send the stock to the moon?

Waymo generally seem to be extremely cautious: they have invested the most effort into the safety design of their systems and they don't shout very loudly for being the leader of the pack. I think this extends to their expansion as well: autonomous car companies are only one or two serious incidents away from severe backlash (see Cruise), and the more you operate the more likely it is that one occurs. Expanding slowly and dealing with each expansion of near-miss edge cases as you do so is a rational strategy in that case, even if you have already beaten human drivers.

(Also Google is bad at full commitment, and I don't know how much that extends to Alphabet, but they as a company seem pathologically incapable of putting even a majority of their weight behind anything, which is a significant source of failures for them)

>> Expansion greatly dilutes the fixed costs

> Where is the actual evidence of this, though? I'm not trying to be snide -- genuinely curious.

That claim was just based off how all businesses work. All the infrastructure, management, training, etc., that scale sublinearly with volume are diluted at large volume.

> Yet Waymo's financials are still buried in Alphabet's "Other Bets" line, which lost $1.2 billion in Q3 2023...

As I said, I definitely think Waymo is losing money overall right now, even in a particular regime.

> Why not blitzscale this thing to all markets and disclose the numbers to investors and send the stock to the moon?

They are in fact expanding rapidly. But this can't be scaled as fast as a software/internet company. They literally have to manufacture custom cars and, crucially, map the region in detail. Remember that Tesla's meteoric rise was ~70% growth per year. For years Waymo was only offering service to the general public in Phoenix. They opened in San Francisco in late 2022, and then in LA in mid 2023.

Also, Waymo (~$30B in 2020) is still an tiny part of Alphabet stock (>$1T), who owns a controlling interest. They have no reason to pump the stock because they have no shortage of capital.

Is that "same direction travel divided between autonomous trucks and all other traffic"? Or "only on highways where traffic directions are separated by a median"?

The former sounds like a massive (understating it probably) infrastructure investment. Trains sound better (as other comment while I was typing notes).

The latter doesn't solve the issues noted in the recent article here: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...

Am curious to hear more thoughts/insights.

Interesting article, thanks.

Waymo appears to be the real deal. Last night I saw one navigate a situation with a hesitant pedestrian better than most human drivers. And before people chime in with "ideal conditions," it was at night in the rain.

I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.

How is waymo doing with snow covered roads?

They are testing, but don’t offer a service in snowy areas yet.

Waymo and Tesla are the only real competition left in the U.S. The deciding factor is how fast Waymo can roll out to more locales before Tesla gets closer to level 5 over the next 3-5 years.

After that, vehicle production and operations cost will be the main factor in the race to $0

I rode in a Waymo and it feels safer, easier, and was more enjoyable than Uber.

That just seems like a train to be honest, and runs into the same problems of who is going to pay for the infrastructure and handle priority.

Trains are nowhere near as flexible. There simply aren't tracks going to and from every truck's origin and destination. It's not a replacement.

I don't think divided lanes are required either. The problems with self-driving trucking aren't about following the lane.

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