For people who don't live in a Waymo market, it's easy to think that self-driving cars are vaporware, and perpetually 5 years off. For those that live in a Waymo market, self-driving cars are at once amazingly futuristic and mundane.
I also thought the driverless car companies had stalled (bad pun); but that is obviously not the case. I reflected on why I thought that and I realized I had allowed news about the Tesla self driving technology to negatively affect my understanding of this whole market.
I have since watched a bunch of Waymo videos online, they are so cool! The possibilities seem huge.
And if your answer is "I don't own a Tesla" why should anyone take you seriously?
I could be wrong about their progress though, always happy to be corrected.
FSD looks very different and you can see everything in the road and what the car is planning to do. There's some good YouTube channels where they test different versions of FSD in different situations, AIDRIVR does a good job, eg https://youtu.be/rMDNFLsXFEU?si=SHWAm24ZY3psnO4Z&t=136. Nice thing about those channels is you can also look at old videos and see the rate of improvement.
I had FSD for one month on my car and it was really impressive. There were plenty of disengagements, but they were all what I'd call "quality of life" issues. Car was too hesitant during blind lefts, or advanced lefts, car slowed down too much for speed bumps, it got into turn-only lanes later than I'd like, etc, etc. The hardest part of driving in my town is a 3 lane roundabout where upon exiting the roundabout you have to very quickly and confidently change 2 lanes in order to get on the highway, it handled it with ease. Overall, I would not buy it today, but didn't see any reason why they can't solve the issues I saw.
I took a few rides with Cruise and it was clear it was not ready for prime time, the potential was evident but it seemed like they were a couple years behind.
Separately, any level-headed quantitative assessment of the cost-and-benefits of the roll-out to society will find that we are going way, way too slowly. It is madness to slow down a research program -- whose every day of delay costs the US over a billion dollars -- because, out of hundreds of test vehicles driving over many months, a handful blocked traffic for a few minutes. If you wait to start building out the fleet until autonomous vehicles are 2x-10x safer than human drivers (the conventional wisdom among regulators), it will delay things by years and so literally cost tens of thousands of lives.
(I've taken dozens of rides in a Cruise and had zero safety issues, am very happy to have them driving around in my neighborhood, etc.)
They’re not perfect, but it’s not some horrible battleground of robotic bumper cars and dead bicyclists.
InB4 “akshully you have no right to privacy in public” — you should, and those laws predate ubiquitous cameras in every pocket, on every doorbell, and rolling down every street.
Do you also think it’s a privacy nightmare when you step into an elevator with cameras? Walk into a building with cameras?
> InB4 “akshully you have no right to privacy in public” — you should, and those laws predate ubiquitous cameras in every pocket, on every doorbell, and rolling down every street.
Surveillance cameras have been ubiquitous for a decade and the laws have been updated in many countries around that fact. Cameras in public spaces are not a new invention.
If you’re trying to suggest that we should ban cameras in public spaces then you’re never going to be happy with reality.
Also, respectfully, most people who live in CA have very little idea about the mechanics of how to drive a car - they never had to learn because of the lack of the aforementioned precipitation - so it's actually a lot easier for Waymo to get to the same level as you because you are all bad drivers (mechanically, not in terms of politeness or rule-following). In CA I frequently got asked whether I ever did amateur racing or go-karting as a child, and when I learned that this was about how I handled a car (at first I thought it was just an odd inquiry about a specific hobby), I politely informed them that I did not, but I learned to drive in an icy version of hell.
I am hopeful, but it's going to be a long slog, and at the pace it took Waymos to become average-to-below-average drivers in SF, I assume it will be 10+ years before self-driving cars come to my area in a serious way.
A quick Google search shows 50 inches of precipitation over 125 days in NYC, and 23 in SF in 71 days. That's less than half. The source (US NCEI) doesn't say how they measured, but I believe that's only rainfall.
It also does appear that as of 6 months ago, Waymos can now operate in rain and fog, but still stay off the streets when it gets heavy.
And SF absolutely does have lots of narrow streets. There are a lot of neighborhoods where the roads are only wide enough for one direction of traffic at a time due to parked cars. Either you or the oncoming car needs to pull to the side in front of a driveway to pass. Waymo handles these situations expertly.
Based on your other posts in here you seem to have some kind of axe to grind and are making stuff up. Go watch some Youtube videos.
That is not a narrow urban road, unless you have about 3 inches on either side of your car. Drive in Europe or NYC sometime.
I have no axes to grind, but I find the optimism of "[X technology] works in [Y very easy condition], so it's going to explode any time now" somewhat tiresome and naive. I have been hearing it about self-driving cars for >10 years now (since the DARPA challenges). Plenty of technologies never leave the garden of that easy condition.
People said for a long time that self driving cars would never handle the complexity of SF, the fog, the rain, the hills, the bikes, the narrow streets, the crowds of pedestrians. Now that they do, I take the opposite view of you. I think the only hurdles left are snow, economics, and regulation. They are high hurdles, but seem solvable.
Where exactly are we now? The greater-Phoenix metro?
Interesting.
More generally, I think this is the kind of rollout you'd expect from a technology like self-driving cars: slow to start, and likely exponential beyond a certain point.
The time from 1 to 10 cities may very well be longer than from 10 to 100 cities.
As for the shape, they're all going to converge to rounded bricks eventually.