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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

> Somebody is going to get there eventually. But not without a lot of investments.

There's still a bunch of major technological problems to be solved.

Taking Waymo as the best right now: 1. Their solution requires detailed mapping for all areas before it works 2. It doesn't appear to work with rain 3. Or snow

Like, none of these challenges are insurmountable, but as they say the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the next 90% of the time.

And more generally, even if the technological problems were solved, there's the regulatory concerns, in that who takes liability when (not if) there are accidents.

Given all that, I wouldn't expect to see full autonomy for about 10-15 years.

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Mapping isn’t a major issue because there’s surprisingly few roads across a country. The interstate highway system is 47,432 miles in the US, you could send a car down every lane every day without major issue.

The US has 4.09 million miles of road for 333 million people. If you assume it costs 10$ / mile / year which seems excessive that’s still a trivial expense.

Why did Waymo survive and Cruise fail then?

From the outside, with no insider information, my impression is waymo was under a lot LESS pressure compared to others to exaggerate their successes. This is just my impression but to me it feels like waymo was able to do a lot better self-policing or was much better at marketing to appear keeping safety at a top priority. For example, I remember reading articles that said the equipment on early prototypes were multiple times the cost of the Toyota Prius cars they were mounted on. Things like this make me feel safer with a waymo.

The real answer though is money. Since none of these investments are close to breaking even, the only obvious answer as to why one succeeds vs fails is the continued additional investment of money.

Execution, having a good idea and lots of money doesn’t guarantee success.

Waymo is 4 years older than Cruise

Cruise severely botched an accident investigation which they might have been cleared of if they didn't try to hide evidence from CA regulators [0].

Follow the laws and it's fairly easy to operate.

I was a happy customer of Cruise's btw and they largely solved the self driving taxi problem at the city level at least, but Waymo does have access to better mapping because of Google.

[0] - https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-05/gms-cruise...

Theres a world outside US

The important bit is the ratio of customers to miles of road. The US has 80+ people per mile of road, that radio may be slightly higher or lower in each country but it’s never going to be prohibitive.

I think 10-15 years is extremely pessimistic given we have cars on the road now delivering passengers. Scaling that is the game.

I’d say 10-15 years is an optimistic outlook for ”full autonomy”. Maybe in some regions of the world in certain weather conditions. Full autonomy in northern snowy countries isn’t going to happen in 10-15 years, imo.

I think 10-15 years is a good guess because the issue is about regulation and infra and these move much slower.

> given we have cars on the road now delivering passengers

No we don't, only local roads, not fare-paying passengers on freeways, not in NorCal. In Phoenix AZ they are still testing self-driving on the freeway on employees, not fare-paying passengers on freeway.

Wait until you see self-driving taxis on freeway and to/from airports, with fee-paying passengers, in traffic, in bad weather, at night. See how many accidents there are per million miles. Then the discussion moves to "How many accidents/fatalities are acceptable per million passenger-miles?"

> See how many accidents there are per million miles.

It's hard to do worse than human drivers on that front. Especially under the circumstances you mention.

Don’t we need data before we can say that? Human drivers are pretty bad but self-driving software is hard to compare appropriately since you can’t just use national averages which include conditions the self-driving systems don’t support.

> 2. It doesn't appear to work with rain

Waymos do drive in the rain. See [1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/126kznl/wa...

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