Hacker News Reader

Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

> but automate it we did (ahead of many other sectors of the economy), and society has noticed and is responding to it

I was quite surprised by this sentence, as I thought we didn't have self driving cars. Have I been sleeping under a rock?

View on HN

We have self driving cars in an extremely limited number of cities (just one or two) and you can’t buy them, you can only use them like an Uber.

He’s overselling how mature the technology is.

How is he over selling it when he says explicitly that waymo exists in two cities? It's solved in that it works and they have to scale horizonatally.

lol why do you think they picked those cities? No snow or ice or much inclement weather other than rain. It is not just scaling horizontally.

I mean a year or two ago plenty of people said the tech was a dead end because it didn't handle rain and fog. They will add snow and ice capability as they expand.

He wrote about self driving "And yet, overall it’s almost like no one cares." As if it's puzzling a product which hardly works anywhere isn't something people care about?

We have remotely driven cars, that they market as self-driving.

Even the crowd here fall for it. Downvote and then go read their term of service and look for "safety driver" and "remote" and "fleet response specialists". Then go cry about your waymo invesment.

I think you may be underselling :)

I agree, they have remote drivers waiting to take over, but I think that the current SOA is delivering a very high % of autonomy. Is this viable? Dunno... Will it creep up? Dunno...

you have no idea how much they drive. they avoid talking about it on every interview. Ars explicitly called then out on this and they called saying this is their main profit sucking issue right now "having one overseer per car". to me that means they are, for all practical purposes, driving. no matter how much they try to spin it.

Yeah - if that's right then it's a bust.

No, they have talked about it in interviews. They've repeatedly said they don't have remote drivers. They have "remote assistance" that the car can call to ask questions if it's confused. You can tell when this is happening in the car, because it plays a message like "our team is working to get you moving". It's rare, maybe once every few rides. There is no way there's one overseer per car.

they did say it on record on the ars interview. one per car. and then they spin it with "they don't drive the car, just provide input".

the cases where the car halt, the system is probably waiting for a supervisor input, so it is technically 1.2 overseer per car.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com