Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco
waymo.com
waymo.com
The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly longer wait and slightly more fare, I'd choose the Waymo every time.
(I have no affiliation with Waymo, Google or any related industry - it's just an amazing service!)
Since you mention Uber, I can definitely see in my city how the quality of cars decreased and they started using almost inclusively cheap immigrants who realistically couldn't pass a drivers exam in my country and have on multiple occasions driven into wrong directions/ran red lights etc.
Also, Waymo isn't even Google. You might accuse me of overstating this, but truthfully they operate as a different company.
There are schemes where undocumented immigrants ask someone to activate their account on their behalf. In practice, the person giving you a ride could be literally anyone.
Don't they? Allowing messier, older, and less pleasant cars would increase the supply of drivers, allowing Uber to place lower bids on those drivers, lower their prices, increase volume and revenue, and increase profit.
Sometimes it's worth not worrying about problems too far in advance.
Whether this translates to Waymos smelling like meth or fentanyl when you get in them thanks to the previous rider remains to be seen. Or just needles, foil, or used condoms left behind. They record video, so Google could close the person's account so they won't be able to book Waymos with that account again, so we'll end up having to see how hard it is to create new accounts to use Waymo on to ban nuisance riders.
It's not a loaded question to ask what a person means when they introduce a term.
> The types of people are those who would assault others on some fashion.
That's a tautology. Nobody knows if a person fits the type of person who would assault someone, until after they've gone and assaulted someone.
/s
I agree with your point about the approach to the argument, but I think google has enough info to make a way to vet passengers by identifying if you are likely to trash a vehicle.
Granted in my work I've never made the attempt to smell fentanyl, but it isn't one with a reputation of having an odor. I assume you mean the smell of recreational users of fentanyl.
The funniest (or not if you’re not from SF) was a guy boarding a full bus with a 7 foot long dining table with the legs attached, arguing and threatening anyone who protested. Eventually he dropped the thing on someone’s foot and starting an altercation which delayed everyone by 15 mins.
The way this will manifest is the drunk idiot who'll puke all over the car. The bored asshole who carves his initials in the seat. The edgelord who gets their jollies out of destroying other people's stuff.
Good chance you had some in the original group as well, but early adopters are usually mostly people who deeply understand tech. Once that falls away, you have a less thorough understanding of tech, and a very surprised realization that booking something under your name that has cameras all over will likely result in you being held accountable for what you did. But after you did it.
How that'll play out in the long run is anyone's guess. If Waymo maintains rigorous enforcement and the courts actually play along, it might just work out. It's still going to be capital-intensive because we seem to have created a world where being a major asshole in public without consequences is kind of an entitlement people expect to have, and Waymo will need a very strong "yeah, not here" vibe to prevent that. Which requires a number of high-profile incidents.
Yes, the subtext of the question likely was "are you discriminating against the poor!?" If it was indeed, the answer to that question is "no, the ride pricing will do that".
This isn't about "commoners". It's that any large group of people contains assholes, assholes restrain themselves depending on circumstances, and the new users might well lack that understanding.
It's fundamentally not about "commoners", but about a knowledge-based restraint falling away. (As for the "commoners", you might also want to read the last part of my comment, instead of outraging)
Hard for me to imagine this being a widespread problem. Probably about as much problem as there is with something similar happening in the elevator of a private building.
Subject has no recourse to appeal and is banned from life including his ancestors and spawns"
I’ve had to walk a few times near steep hills, I was wondering if partly it was due to the angle of approach and the sensor view being blocked so they avoid the area?
Not sure if was legal or not for the Waymo to stop there, but given that Waymo stops take quite a bit longer than stops with Uber/Lyft (as it takes a while for the car to continue driving) this was one of the worst places possible to stop. Especially as there would have been space available right after the crossing next to Walgreens.
See CVC 22400(a):
No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, becauseof a grade, or in compliance with law.
No person shall bring a vehicle to a complete stop upon a highway so as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the stop is necessary for safe operation or in compliance with law.
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
Double parking is legal (in some cases) in California, but this wouldn’t be allowed under any reasonable interpretation.
I’ve also seen Waymos double parked on both sides of the street, which blocks other cars from going around them.
But Waymo probably isn't comfortable telling its cars to park in many illegal parts of streets, even if it's going to be quick. Partially because determining which illegal parking jobs are socially acceptable vs unacceptable is a hard determination for a robot to make.
One thing I actually think is really cool about the Waymo ux (full disclosure, I work for Google but not Waymo) is how it elevates the pickup/dropoff locations to feel like more of a first class feature (compared to just typing in an address and your Uber driver dropping you off in the general area).
I don't think I've ever had to walk more than 30 feet to a pickup location, but I have had it drop me off at the nearest cross street (usually on streets where it would've had to double park in front of my exact drop-off location)
Freeways in CA aren't the worst in the country (lookin at you, TX), but they're still not easier than surface streets, especially during off-peak hours.
Can you expand a bit on why you feel freeway driving is "easier"? the only thing i can think of is you're much less likely to get into a head-on[0] collision.
[0] apply directly
As to why freeway is easier: maybe not as a very new driver, but as soon as you're comfortable handling a car you can get on the freeway and the mental processing loop is much easier. Just follow the car ahead at a safe distance for the speed. Very little else, can be done with just half a brain while you think about other things.
10 mph would be a great average speed, usually.
Of course, if you have an accident there, you piss off a whole lot more people than you would on a surface street.
never been. Is that the one from the phantom planet song?
Also, when Waymos get confused on surface streets, they can just stop. Can't really do that on a freeway.
Years ago they were very respectful and conservative of basic road markings but clearly they have now ‘expanded capabilities’
And they can't just park in bike lanes, obviously.
See CVC 21209(a):
No person shall drive a motor vehicle in a bicycle lane established on a roadway pursuant to Section 21207 except as follows:
(1) To park where parking is permitted.
(2) To enter or leave the roadway.
(3) To prepare for a turn within a distance of 200 feet from the intersection.
source: I commute by skateboard in SF daily. Just yesterday an empty Waymo cruised straight through a fresh red, narrowly missing my entry into the crosswalk.
But don't get me started on what I've seen human drivers do on the same streets. Just annoyed that Waymo's aren't better.
This was in a turn-left-only intersection with a separate pedestrian light. Maybe the Waymo got confused and thought I also had green.
Surprised traffic lights aren't updated to communicate with cars directly. Why not have traffic lights broadcast 'stop' message along with turning red?
I suspect traffic lights, roads and cities will have to be updated to work with driverless cars.
I've never heard of the lights transmitting their timing
This article from SFMTA erroneously states that the busses use "GPS to communicate with the traffic signal", lol, what is the actual band used ?
Human drivers speed up to avoid red, and yay you avoided red but the suddenly higher speed is far more dangerous for everyone around.
Plenty other jurisdictions will ticket if your car is still on the intersection when it turns red.
I appreciate the implication these cars are driven by ghosts :rofl:
So, what you are asserting and that cannot be true at the same time. So, my conclusion is that whatever you think you know here is probably wrong.
As for people that recently got their drivers license. I'm pretty sure that demographic is over-represented in the statistics of who drives the least safely, traffic fatalities, etc. Also insurers and rental car agencies have policies that reflect those cold, hard statistics. It will be interesting to see what they do when level 5 starts happening (probably sooner rather than later). My guess is that they'll charge people extra for the privilege of taking control of the car as they are far more likely to damage the vehicle and otherwise cause trouble.
And obviously one of the points Waymo is trying to make with their press release is that they are already safer. It's a press release of course and not the same as cold hard facts. And you make a fair point about self reporting. But it suggests the obvious notion that computers are getting pretty good at not crashing into stuff (or people). I find that entirely unsurprising, BTW. It does not seem like a particularly hard problem.
When that driver is sober and alert and paying attention. Which I'm sure is at least 90% of the time.
If I'm coming back from a party, or an ER visit, or being 95 years old, I may not be in that 90%.
Dark magic too, I've been on one too many rides where the driver insists on monologuing on topics that range from detestable (politics) to alarming (the driver was armed, and had picked me up from the airport)
What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.
Public transport, hopefully.
Maybe if they re-invent trains or buses again
You joke, but I've heard more than one argument about how self-driving cars will drastically improve traffic because, for inter-city travel, they will be able to drive very close together on the highway in a long convoy, leaving almost no space between cars...
Leaving proper gaps (which next to nobody reading this will be familiar with!) allows for cars to cross, or even merge.
If you're driving long distance, you get the advantages of a train, but door-to-door, with no scheduling conflicts and no egregious stop times. If your destination is 5 minutes away, it's still a car.
Every car in a train-caravan is schlepping along its own engine, crumple zones, airbags....and with rubber tires...
...its frankly idiotic.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
The future will be a combination of trains, a more extensive robotaxi network for the last mile, which can be cars or vans, and a much smaller percentage of personal vehicles compared to today. Buses as they are today will decline.
Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.
I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.
I'd be curious to know how this monitoring scales over time.
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/no-amazon-isnt-killing-just-...
I’m not sure how you could make that work. People that eat Indian food step in and it might get set off, so people will cry racism. You drive next to a particular industrial plant, etc..
If not, what are you expecting to be prohibitive?
Unsupervised in the sense that there's no driver there to clean the car when it gets dirty. At the same time, presumably part of the odor of an uber comes from the driver, so that helps. I wonder if waymos roll down the window (weather permitting) between riders, to air it out. Might be dangerous at a red light, since people could throw stuff in or even dive in through open windows.
What do you think is more likely to get vandalized - a room with a human sitting in it, or a room with a camera watching it?
I worked as a house attendant in an upscale hotel for years. Let me tell you from experience: a shockingly high percentage of people trash and damage their rooms. Not the majority, but enough to keep staff busy every day.
Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?
The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.
The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.
Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.
This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.
The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.
This sometimes leads to in-car vomiting.
There are also still smokers among us.
I assume there are sensors available suitable for Waymo taxis.
Not appealing for me personally.
But I'm completely with you on the unsupervised part. People doing all sorts of things back there that an ML might not identify. Now if they hire an army remotely to monitor, I guess that could scale because of wage disparities.
Quickly going through CCTV footage from a ride to catch "unusual things" takes much less time than driving. Even if somebody had to watch the entire ride at 1x speed and just one ride at a time, there's no need to do it when the car is idle or driving to pick up the next passenger. You can also hire a lot less watchers than you have drivers, because a surge in demand in one city can be serviced by watchers in many other cities. There's no need for night shifts either, you can make everybody work 9-to-5 in whatever timezone they're at.
For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
"We collect usage data that includes trip history, buttons or links you click on our mobile app, in-vehicle interfaces, wait times for our vehicles, and other actions you take with our products and services"
"We collect information about your location in a few different ways. When you take a trip, we collect the pickup and drop-off location and details about the vehicle’s route."
"We may also use your information to personalize services, advertisements, content, and features, communicate with you including marketing (which you can opt out of), service, and account messages, or communicate other information we think will be of interest to you "
"We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active."
"Waymo will not disclose your personal information with a third party unless one of the following applies: ...
- We're involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale or transfer of some or all of our assets
- In some cases to help us tailor ads and offers to your interests as detailed in the U.S. state law requirements section
- Comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request ... "
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840#zippy=%2Cinf...
I know, I know. We can dream.
This problem is orthogonal to selfdriving.
trash car (or don't)
report trashed car
ride for discount
I’m sure the account agreement is going to require you to to accept being charged egregious bills for damaging or dirty-ing the cabin
A friend of mine works night audit in a rough part of the valley. As soon as he says the magic words 'we require a major credit card or a $300 deposit', they immediately hang up.
Sure you can pay in cash at the end if you want.
But you can't get a room in the first place without a credit card, even if they never charge it.
(I mean I'm sure there are some exceptions somewhere, but generally speaking, no, cash isn't sufficient.)
The point is when there's damage, it can be billed to the malicious actor in question.
At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
Starting to sound a bit like a credit system or some other dystopian shit show. You do something dumb, drunk while in college and you're cut off...sounds amazing.
This would reductively mean a more effective form of punishing vandalism, which would in of itself be a slight net good overall.
In the ideal case, there would be a recompense program to pay for the damages made + extra, in return for being able to ride them again.
Meta-point: This discussion has significant overlap with busses/trains/public transportation. How we deal with bad actors in that space would translate well into this space.
But for some people, a fine is just the cost of doing the thing. And for every bad actor you ban, there's another bad actor willing to take their place.
The keyword there being "some". If an account is tied to the person, recourse for negligent/malicious behavior can be applied, but that only works if there's an account to add the penalty to.
On Waymo's part, requiring an account to use the service would be in the benefit of the service as a whole.
The future is awesome
Think of those self-cleaning toilets.
I totally agree we will start to see very specific driverless designs that are very easy to clean.
Either that, or Johnny Cabs. I'm easy.
That's a good robotics project. All the cars are the same. The cars do not have any objects inside that belong to the occupants and should stay. So robotic interior vacuuming could be quite practical, as a station in the car wash. A vision system can inspect for damage and route that car to the maintenance line.
one waymo was perfect, the other ran a red light then stopped in the intersection diagonally across two lanes of traffic until the light turned green. didn't endanger anyone but felt awkward!
on the cab ride to SFO my driver kept falling asleep and veering into the next lane, i tried talking with him to keep him awake but it was clear he'd been driving all morning and was exhausted.
the cab ride from memphis international was interesting, the cab was falling apart, driver was nice but he tried to convert me to christianity for the last ten minutes of the ride.
the waymos will end up safer but totally devoid of character.
For huge metropolitan cities for examples London, Istanbul, Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta or Sao Paulo running a red traffic with a car can most probably cause fatal accidents. I am now more than convinced that level 5 autonomous driving cannot be achieved in my lifetime, and much better efforts should be better directed toward non-invasive highly accurate early detection of high mortality diseases like CVDs and efforts for properly mitigating climate changes.
I just want to get from point A to point B without having to make small talk or delicately navigate a political discussion with a stranger. A stranger who both controls the vehicle and, in the case of Uber/Lyft, will be giving me a rating at the end of the ride.
In other words, what kind of safety metrics do you think would be necessary to change your mind?
If in N years 90% of your peers use self-driving cars, and the only accidents you hear about are in the news about people you don't know, would that change your feelings about safety?
I am blind. General statistics and adoption rate in my peer group (sighted coworkers) are not representative for me at all. None of these datapoint give a good indication how much I am (as a visually non-participating pedestrian) in danger.
Given my life experience, it is safe to assume nobody really thought about blind people. I am regularily tripping over (and hurting myself with) badly placed bicycles. I am assuming a high percentage of these bicycle owners are well-meaning, green-voting people. However, their political and/or personal attitude doesn't help people like me at all, we still get hurt on a regular basis, and nobody talks about it. I would be surprised if this changed with AVs.
We are way too aggressive with allowing self-driving cars on our roads. Companies are incapable of building a toaster without bugs, our banking apps are a burning garbage dumpster fire, and yet we somehow think it will be different this time?
The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking them every time.
That's still far away, these are not driverless cars, there is always a driver monitoring, but they monitor not one but many cars, ready to take over.
It's driverless by definition because... there's no driver in the seat. The car is in control and is responsible for its safety at all times.
I'm sure at least some of the hype is in regards to people owning such "driverless" cars.
It's driverless by definition because it does not have a driver, but it's not autonomous by definition, because it requires outside help to function. Cool hair splitting. It's an impressive technical feat for sure. In regards to perceived benefits for society, it's part of the way there, as it reduces the number of humans required to driver from 1 per car to 0.something per car.
They are driverless and specifically L4 autonomous, which is the best autonomy you can get right now. The vehicles that can operate without any help doesn't exist. You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your expectation.
Eh, I'd say we're a decade out from an L5 vehicle. It'll officially be L4, on road only. But that matches a good fraction of American drivers' capabilities.
If you fall asleep or don't respond it's fine, you're just stuck.
I don't think Google plans to do this for a variety of reasons, but I don't think there's fundamentally any reason they couldn't.
"Just" being stuck on a highway doesn't sound too safe. If you have multiple supervisors watching the fleet it's less of a problem than when it's one fallible supervisor.
And they're not drivers, they're supervisors. They don't take over driving, AFAICT they issue high-level commands like "safe to proceed", "take the right lane", et cetera.
I mean, this is true for Uber as well.
If I own the car, and I'm sending it to do errands for me while I work or sleep, seems like the cost of someone being available to "assist" it at short notice would be prohibitive. Unless it requires assistance once a month or so.
Point being, I suspect many people don't want to own any vehicle, whatever level of automation it has (which could be none). The reason we do is that taking taxis everywhere is too expensive. If that cost can be brought down, however it's done (computer brain, cab driver, capuchin monkey, whatever), many people will be happy to forgo owning a vehicle.
It’s clear that they’re not the cars for me to worry about out there on a bike / on foot / etc.
Turns out, the right breakthroughs in writing laws are good, too. While the bad ones wreck you.
Why? Why Not?
- Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years
- Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business.
Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's?
Disclaimer - I am an Alphabet & Tesla shareholder
2) Tesla has zero even remotely monitored, let alone autonomous, miles driven. So no, there is no reason to believe Tesla is close to true robotaxis.
The rate of innovation at Tesla > Waymo
The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo FSD
The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD
Tesla has economies of scale. Waymo has all the details figured out. Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years)
Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that.
Larry, Sergei are extremely poor capital allocators. Musk is brilliant (despite him being a narcisstic a*hole).
Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness.
Waymo is successful enough to not kill it, but also not a cash-flow positive to scale it up
Edit : Tch, Tch expected HN anti-Musk hate showing up in downvotes.
Larry/Sergei didn't create the Cybertruck
The kind of founders who knows shipping > waiting-for-perfection?
move fast and break things may be ok for social networks, but never ok for endangering the safety of others
to launch a 6th model of a marque, so well established, theoretically knowing a lot about cars, a model that dies when it gets wet, it's just embarrassing
They have driving assist that people still measure in 'number of times I had to grab the wheel'.
If Tesla does manag to jump straight from level 3 to level 5, they have a chance to compete, but that seems unlikely. They also might move to level 4 and be able to expand level 4 coverage faster, but that still remains to be seen.
Waymo has years of experience with the other hard part of self driving taxis: actually picking up and dropping off people without a human driver.
Anti-musk partisanship frustrates me, but I suspect it is your fan-boy talking points that drive the downvotes of your comment
Technology progress is non-linear. Yes, Tesla is at L3 and Waymo at L4.
But, you completely missed the point of rate-of-innovation, which was why I made that as first point.
My GOOG holdings are 4x than TSLA. But in terms of who will deliver FSD at better margins, it's hands down TSLA. It's simple Math and Elon's obsession about cutting material costs & process to it's barest minimum. Waymo has no such discipline or culture.
FWIW - You definitely come off as as irrationally in favor of tesla, regardless of reason.
Nobody missed any of your points, they just don't agree with most them or believe the rest follow from your points.
Any driver that makes this kind of move is typically in the top 5%ile of driving skills. Yes, it's an asshole and slightly illegal move, but the level of intelligence that needs to be applied for this move is all you need to know about Tesla's advantages.
I have been extremely critical of Musk's reliance on only cameras, but I'm impressed with the progress they have made because of the new architecture in 12.x series. Considering it'll be trained with 100x more compute, I'm willing to bet that Tesla will overtake Waymo's capabilities.
Yes, it's a speculation and you can disagree, but unless proven you can't tell it's wrong
It was luck that the left lane was moving and that there was space. I don't want to see this kind of move from a driverless car.
A skilled driver always makes the smooth transition into those gaps. I know most HNers are goody-rule-followers and can never appreciate the skill required to make that maneuver consistently. But, this is a clear example of separation of intelligence / skill and I'm happy with the bet that these are signals of intelligence
What you call first-principle-thinkers, the rest of the world calls dicks. Everybody sees that manoeuvre, it doesn't require a genius. Most of the people don't do it because they are afraid of repercussions (if they get caught) or are civilised enough to realise that their time is not more important then the time of others. Yes, that manoeuvre doesn't "save you 5 minutes", it steals 1-2 seconds of everybody else's time.
Just read this https://fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf
From fig (1)
Waymo/ HNers : Knowledge Edge
Musk : Convexity Bias
That's why Musk's approach will win. Waymo will no doubt provide a safe, rule-following driving experience, but Tesla will have frontier breakthroughs and provide more human-like, adapting and sufficiently aggressive driving experience
So Tesla will necessarily converge to the performance of your average driver, because that's where the data leads it.
Waymo's is developing a new type of understanding and modelling of the world. It perceives and tracks items above the capability of humans to track and understand. Therefore its limits are outside of the bounds of the most capable human drivers.
Your own argument highlights exactly why Tesla's approach is a dead end (exactly in the same manners that LLMs will lead to the dead internet), while Waymo's approach will likely generate super-intelligence.
Hard disagree.
It's pretty clear the car just didn't understand what the line of cars was doing.
> level of intelligence that needs to be applied for this move
If you were a human making this move, I would judge your intelligence as below average.
Every idiot can drive like an impatient asshole. Choosing not to do is is the true sign of intelligence. The car is literally driving itself at this point. What does getting there three minutes faster so you can doom scroll Instagram from the lobby instead of doing that while your car is driving itself do for you? Are you more important than everyone else and thus deserve not to wait your turn?
If it helps, Waymo's will run red lights, so it's not like Tesla's got a monopoly on being a bad driver.
How is the "rate of innovation" higher but yet they've innovated less and have a less functional product? It's made up metric and was ignored because it adds no value to the conversation unless you have some actual data.
from Fig 1: https://fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf
Waymo (and most HNers) : Knowledge Edge
Musk / (Billionaires hated by HNers) : Convexity Bias
Tesla isn't even comparable to Waymo at this point because Tesla has zero level 4 capability. Teslas don't even have the redundant sensors needed for level 4+. All Tesla has is empty promises and an u unclear path for ever getting past level 3.
The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD"
This seems like one of the key assumptions, but is not proven out at all because Tesla does not even have a level 4 vehicle. So the cost of delivering one comparable to waymo is infinite right now!
Your other key assumption is "Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years)".
Both the assertion in the first part and the second part seem like super-strange assumptions, and not obviously true at all, yet are also critical to your analysis.
Waymo could get to the scale of tesla. It may or may not be too expensive to do. It could in fact, buy 5 million FSD cars. It may or may not be too expensive to do.
"Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that."
Or you know, if needed, Waymo could change?
It's funny to watch someone say "this one company will be able to adapt in every possible way to it's advantage, and nobody else can or will"
That almost never happens.
Your retort is then that you are getting downvoted because of anti-musk hate.
Have you considered that maybe you just don't have that good of an argument instead, and that your comment comes off as more of a tesla fanboy (regardless if you are) than a useful contribution?
I could write the literal opposite comment of what you did, in favor of Waymo. That would not be a useful contribution either for the same reasons.
Why not? They only do the integration, and traditional car and electronics manufacturers have solved the scaling problems long ago.
cost of Tesla FSD hardware add-ons : $5,000
Tesla benefits from vertical integration, which is super important in the innovation phase.
I'm still coming to this from an unbiased perspective. Personally, I'd be a lot richer if Waymo wins the FSD race.
Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it seems like it must be fairly infrequent.
So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without injuries.
Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different numbers, but from those initial numbers it seems your perception of reality of Waymo "screwing up" less is not accurate.
[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...)
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data....
Tesla cars with FSD have a driver behind the wheel who can instantly take over if the car is about to crash into a stationary object. Any time a Tesla would've crashed into something an object but its human driver saved it, that doesn't count in stats like these. Many Tesla owners have reported that they have to regularly disengage FSD because it's trying to do something dangerous or looks like it's headed for a crash.
In contrast, Waymo cars do not have a human who can take the wheel if they try to run into a wall. The closest equivalent is that if Waymo cars get confused and don't know how to proceed, they can stop, then phone home and ask a human navigator to give them 'advice' or a general path; these people don't directly control the car, they're more comparable to a human navigator in the front passenger seat. It's still human assistance obviously, but it's not gonna save the car from running into an object that it didn't think was there.
With Tesla the responsibility is on the person in the driver's seat, so there is a (rightfully!) a bias for overreaction on the part of the driver. We will never know many of these disengagements were necessary.
The only way to get a true comparison of data is to compare robotaxis with robotaxis.
> The only way to get a true comparison of data is to compare robotaxis with robotaxis.
100% agreed. And so far, Tesla hasn't taken the step of actually letting the cars be driverless.
People saw the steering wheel turn and perceived it to be the system going haywire, or thought that "the car was about to crash" as you put it, and intervened.
The newer NN based FSD acts more like what a human would do.
And there's definitely cases where the Tesla in question just tries to run into parked cars or similar for no apparent reason, but Tesla fans always have some excuse about why that's irrelevant, especially if it's not on whatever the absolute latest version is.
Then they accuse the people horrified at Teslas making basic errors and trying to crash of being "anti-Musk".
The reality is that their progress has been slowly incremental and often mixed: https://insideevs.com/news/724479/tesla-fsd-12-4-1-real-worl...
There were some private driveway situations where the uploader intervened to back out to go to a new destination (but Waymo drops you off half a block away and makes you walk instead of entering your driveway, so it's not possible to compare). And there were some situations where a human driver honked - this has happened to me in Waymo as well. There was one situation where the Tesla didn't seem sure if it could proceed, but Waymo in that scenario would ask a remote operator (this has happened to me in both Waymo and Cruise) and presumably Tesla robotaxi can also have remote operators.
The only case where he actually disengaged was at a stop sign with a slip lane, and the car turned right at the stop sign instead of turning right using the slip lane. He went there again at the end of the video and the car used the slip lane. I don't see this as an unfixable problem, because clearly the car can use slip lanes to turn, it just needs to be taught to always prefer slip lanes when turning.
So, your own video disproves what you're saying. It isn't failing at basic driving tasks.
I think the mistake you're making is assuming that they will never be good enough. A lot of people said the same thing about Google/Waymo until they actually rode in one.
It's worth remembering that Waymo required their users to sign NDA's during beta, while the Tesla FSD beta was open to everyone with no NDA. So there was a lot more Tesla content being posted and going viral.
Meanwhile Tesla hasn't required NDA's except for employees running internal builds.
So essentially we're comparing footage from Waymo when it was at the end stages of its development to footage from Tesla at the early stages of its development.
I don't think we'll actually know until Tesla has an actual robotaxi product. When Cruise had one, most people who had tried both Cruise and Waymo said Waymo was better. That was my opinion as well.
Well, except for the fact that one is doing it completely driverless. And it has to do that every single time without having the luxury of a driver to prevent accidents.
Big difference in reliability, which makes them wildly different.
We can't make an apples to apples comparison until Tesla also has a robotaxi product, but even then there will be questions around the role of remote operators.
Well, no. A Tesla doesn't operate without a driver's supervision, so it can't be driverless. It did that particular drive without intervention, that's it. The stats [1] clearly show it's nowhere near capable of doing it without a driver in the seat. Community tracker puts them at 30 miles per disengagement.
It's not even at the point where the challenge is handling weird edge cases with construction or strange intersections, it's still struggling with not running into parked cars and walls. How many years do you think it should take a self-driving system to be able to handle those basic tasks in the general case? Because Tesla has been working on self-driving for almost a decade at this point, and they still seem to be barely past the starting line.
> it's still struggling with not running into parked cars and walls
Based on the phrasing of your sentences, I must ask which FSD version you are running, and if you can share footage.
> Because Tesla has been working on self-driving for almost a decade at this point, and they still seem to be barely past the starting line.
Waymo/Google has been working on this since 2009, which was itself based on a Stanford project (whose team was hired from Stanford to Google) that started in 2004. So that's either 15 or 20 years depending on how you count, and it doesn't include the much harder tasks of mass producing vehicles and making electric vehicles commercially viable.
I would imagine that while Waymo's mapping efforts have been very human effort-intensive so far, they will be looking at developing this automatic map-making capability as a high priority for rolling out new cities. Scaling the rate of expansion is then mostly a matter of throwing hardware and compute at the problem.
The very low take-up rate of FSD during the trial period indicates that most people are buying Tesla's because they are arguably the best EV with the best charging network.
Not because of FSD.
Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic signs, and much more.
HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities.
Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale.
It remains to be seen if Tesla can generalize FSD enough to reach the same level as HD Mapping everywhere. Still, they have shown that the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost.
I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads. They will be built in lucrative places. Cruise and Waymo won't make money from putting taxis in nowhere Arkansas, so they don't need to map it.
> the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. Cruise and Waymo have amazing sensors and even they struggle with sensor range, sensor reliability, model performance on tail cases, etc. For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing. They are relying on the limited dynamic range of their cameras + active illumination + hoping laser gets enough points / your object is reflective enough. Laser perception also hits limits when lasers shine on small objects (think: skinny railroad arm). Cars also have limits with regard to interpreting written signs, which is a big part of driving.
Occlusions are still public enemy #1. Waymo killed a dog. Cruise crashed into a fire truck coming out of a blind intersection even though their sensors saw the truck within 100ms.
LiDAR and HD mapping together are supremely useful, even if you don't drive with it, for enabling you to simulate accurately. You cannot simulate reliably while guessing at distances and locations. HD maps let you use visual odometry to localize, and distance measurements grounded in physics backstop the realism of your simulation at least in terms of the world's shape.
Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with confidence since they don't have HD ground truth. There are believers at the company that maybe you could make "good enough" ground truth from imagery alone but that in and of itself is a huge risk, and it's what skipping steps looks like. Most in the industry agree that barring a major change in strategy they just have no way to regression test their software to the level of reliability required for L4 / no human supervision.
HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated frequently and immediately when any construction occurs.
It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't think that is possible.
I dunno if said data would be as high quality as dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every Waymo car has.
What does this mean? Electric cars are already required to emit a sound as they drive.
I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if there's no imminent crash.
> I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.
I'm not sure what you mean. Presumably Waymo's software is the same across its fleet. They're not training one car's model at a time.
Well, if your car brakes hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me. I’m not sure how to make this concept simpler so I can only repeat it.
> Electric cars are already required to emit a sound as they drive.
I know.
> I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if there's no imminent crash.
If you think in a discussion about robot cars that drive themselves being conducted on a hacker website, I’m suggesting that cars communicate their sensor data to each other by honking their horns, in really not sure what to tell you other than yes, this would be profoundly dim witted.
> I'm not sure what you mean.
I believe it.
> Presumably Waymo's software is the same across its fleet. They're not training one car's model at a time.
I believe it. I also believe you’re deeply missing the point, perhaps intentionally.
1. Robotaxi companies might simply stand to make enough money to cover the cost of routine HD mapping. Anywhere the revenue of putting taxi services in a new city outweighs the cost of implementing the necessary updates sufficiently, won't companies do it? We could think of these companies as having similar economics to Uber, but replacing the cost of paying drivers with the cost of routine HD mapping updates.
2. Smaller towns have less frequent construction, so the update costs might be lower as you target less dense areas.
3. I could see a single company that specializes in providing routinely updated maps to a variety of fleet-operating companies. This could potentially be a utility or somehow subsidized by the government. It would also be possible for government to coordinate construction with HD mapping updates. After all, by lowering the rate of accidents and decreasing square footage devoted to cars, governments have a vested interest in seeing robotaxis replace human-owned and driven cars.
IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5.
Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time and get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.
For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes is way higher than cameras. Dynamic range is another. Also, Cruise and Waymo are some of the only companies that have hard internal data / ability to simulate how well their safety drivers do, and in the very same scenario what their software driver will do. Without LiDAR you can't build that simulation, and once you have that data if you continue to use HD Maps and LiDAR there's probably a good reason.
> Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time and get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.
Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would be able to avoid.
> IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level
See, you could say this if you had some data that showed that incidents per X miles (when the vehicle is driving at night) is sufficiently low, + if the software passes some contrived scenarios to gut-check its ability to see in the dark with the necessary reliability. But you don't have that data, do you? Someone has it though :) and I'd argue regulators should have it too.
I don't think it's exciting to say that you must have theoretical parity with something to use it for this use case. Tesla's solution monitors ~6? cameras at once with accurate depth in each. That's 6x more views than a human can see. I wish people would stop comparing apples to oranges.
> Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would be able to avoid.
I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying attention.
No, the depth is estimated. It's not accurate, at least not in the way you need for L4.
> I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying attention.
I was just clarifying what the bar is. The bar is that avoidable accidents need to be avoided. Nobody will get mad if a plane crashes due to unavoidable circumstances (freak accident where two engines go out due to bird strikes or something). People will stop flying in the plane when it becomes clear that the airline is not doing everything it can to avoid fatalities.
IMO the bar is well above human-level if you actually want to attain the level of trust necessary to remove the steering wheel from a car.
Eyes which are orders of magnitude capable than the best cameras, and Teslas come with mediocre cameras, not the best. Eyes which are connected to a brain, and ML is a looooong ways from rivaling that.
> That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.
Robotaxis do not need to account for things jumping out unexpectedly in front of them?
My brain tries to hides all this from me, and makes me think that I see the world in glorious 3D technicolor all the time, but that's a lie as revealed by the many amusing optical illusions that have been discovered over the years.
Meanwhile, today I used ML that knows more than me, can think and type faster than me, which is a much better artist than me and which can read and react far faster than me to visual stimuli. Oh, it can also easily look in every direction simultaneously without pausing or ever getting distracted or bored.
Somehow it doesn't feel like I have a big advantage over computers when it comes to driving.
The maximum dynamic range of the eye is ~130dB. It's very difficult to push an imaging system to work well at the dark end of what the eye will do with any decent frame rate.
It's not as different as it used to be, but even so: the Mk. I eyeball does pretty damn well compared to quite fancy cameras.
Depth sensing is again, estimated or using time of flight sensors which is pretty much short-range lidar. HDR is used already in AV perception, but still loses to your eyeballs in dynamic range and processing time.
Eyeballs have high dynamic range but with high mode switching times. Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust. Cameras are so cheap you can just have a regular day camera and a dedicated night vision camera together, switching between feeds can be done in milliseconds.
Robots aren't humans. You need accurate depth perception to maneuver a robot precisely, and you need ground truth depth measurements to train learned depth perceivers as well as to understand their overall performance. Humans learn it by combining their other senses and integrating over very long time using very powerful compute hardware (brain). To date, robots learn it best when you just get the raw supervision signal directly using LiDAR.
> Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust
You do realize cameras have the same issue, and that HDR isn't free / is very computationally intensive?
Your brain is _really really_ good at surmounting challenges including many that you did not mention. We don't know how to get close to this in terms of reliability when using cameras and ML alone. Cameras and ML alone can go very far, but every roboticist understands the problem of compounding errors and catastrophic failure. Every ML person understands how slow our learning loops are.
Consider that ML models used in the field have to get by with a fixed amount of power and ram. If you want to process time context of say 5 seconds, and with temporal context 10Hz and with resolution 1080p, how much data bandwidth are you looking at? Comparing what you see with your eyes with a series of 1080p photos, which is better? Up it to 4k: how long does it take to even run object detection and tracking with a limited temporal context?
Your brain is working with more temporal context, more world context, and has a much more robust active learning loop than the artificial systems we're composing today. It's really impressive what we can achieve, but to those who've worked on the problem it feels laughable to say you can solve it with just cameras and compute.
There are plenty of well respected researchers who think only data and active learning loops are the bottlenecks. In my experience they're focused on treating the self driving task as a canned research problem and not a robotics problem. There are as many if not more respected researchers who've worked on the self-driving problem and see deeper seated issues -- ones that cannot be surmounted without technologies like high fidelity sensors grounded in physics and HD maps.
Even if breadth of data is the problem and Tesla's approach is supposedly yielding more data -- there is also the question of the fidelity of said data (e.g. the distances and velocities from camera-only systems are estimated and have noiser gaussians than ones generated with LiDAR). If you make what you measure, and your measurements are noisy, how can you convince yourself or your loss function for that matter that it's doing a good job of learning?
It's relatively straightforward to build toy systems where subsystems have something on the order of 95% reliability. But robotics requires you to cut the tail much further. https://wheretheroadmapends.com/game-of-9s.html
Secondarily, there is no guarantee that the amount of processing is enough, because the extant human systems use much more.
“Cheating” by using more sensors to simplify out complexities and to cover for the shortcomings of other sensors in the suite seems wise.
Also, "cheating" is just a necessary step to build baseline metrics. You need ground truth.
It may very well be the case that cheating is needed to generate the training data necessary to stop cheating...someday.
I get annoyed with statements like this because technology changes and advances so quickly, and Tesla has made substantial technical leaps in this field of machine learning. They have the state-of-the-art vision -> voxels/depth models and are only improving.
Waymo, who use additional sensors like lidar, have a driverless taxi service which needs no safety drivers.
The evidence kinda speaks for itself, IMHO.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1740641473849352450?s=20
> Tesla, who use cameras only, have not demonstrated full self driving
There are entire youtube channels with hours of continuous video showing Teslas driving around SF, but also other parts of California, with no human intervention.
Waymo is geofenced, but within its geofence it requires zero human intervention. Tesla on the other hand is famous for mistaking the moon for a traffic light. Saying "Tesla has so many miles on YouTube" is hilarious because first of all there are channels with lots of Cruise & Waymo footage too, and more importantly it's not the # of miles that matters, but the # of non-trivial scenarios you can handle.
Btw Waymo is nowhere near achieving unit economics. Their cars cost like 5 times what Teslas cost, and the sensors require a lot of upkeep and maintenance.
It's probably not accurate to say that the remote operator is "steering" though. It's more like pathfinding.
<photo of construction zone> Can I drive through here? [Yes] [No]
When this is happening, the car is stopped and lets the passenger know that it’s reaching out for remote help to figure out what to do. For me this has happened two times across my 125 Waymo rides (571 miles) so far, and was resolved in under 20 seconds. Though I must say, 20 seconds feels like ages when you’re in the car and blocking traffic!
This one in itself continues to kinda surprise me. High end Audis have full-blown thermal cameras, and will literally flag heat producing objects on the console: https://www.audi-technology-portal.de/en/electrics-electroni...
Tesla does have HD ground truth data for verification generated by their own LIDAR-equipped vehicles. However, according to a recent tweet by Elon Musk [1], they don't need LIDAR for that anymore.
[1]: https://nitter.poast.org/elonmusk/status/1788064109633875999
I seem to recall Musk saying in the last couple years that "full self driving will basically require AGI." This appeared to me to be extremely honest and accurate, though I believe that in the moment he was trying to promote the idea that Tesla was an AGI company.
Does anyone happen to remember when he said that?
Waymo have said time and again they don’t rely on maps being 100% accurate to be able to drive. It's one of the key assumptions of the system. They use it as prior knowledge to aid in decision making. If they got "lost" whenever there was a road change, they wouldn't be successfully navigating construction zones in San Francisco as we've seen in many videos.
They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout changes to the entire fleet. See https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...
At this point, the whole “HD maps are not practical” is just a trope perpetuated by the Tesla community for years.
Which leads to mapping failures being unchecked, as the system that generated the data is the one checking the data by driving it. See bullet point 1 in their recent recall for an example.
> Prior to the Waymo ADS receiving the remedy described in this report, a collision could occur if the Waymo ADS encountered a pole or pole-like permanent object and all of the following were true:
> 1) the object was within the the boundaries of the road and the map did not include a hard road edge between the object and the driveable surface;
> 2) the Waymo ADS’s perception system assigned a low damage score to the object;
> 3) the object was located within the Waymo ADS’s intended path (e.g. when executing a pullover near the object); and
> 4) there were no other objects near the pole that the ADS would react to and avoid.
and Tesla would do better how in this case? It also routinely crashes into stationary objects, presumably because the system assumes it wouldn't cause damage.
Are the Teslas in the room with you right now?
Please point out in my comment where I mentioned Tesla. I can wait.
> We’ve automated most of that process to ensure it’s efficient and scalable. Every time our cars detect changes on the road, they automatically upload the data, which gets shared with the rest of the fleet after, in some cases, being additionally checked by our mapping team.
Doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
Not a problem for Google, right?
> constant updating
I guess the cars can and will update the mapping in real time ?
> at best in certain cities
If mapping a city is possible, so it's mapping a highway, even easier.
If cars do update the maps themselves, they require might just a couple of human-driven passes of the standard WWaymo cars on a highway to generate the maps.
Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be bounded by geography in the same way.
Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only vision seems like taking something that was already enormously challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I think points to this strategy just being bad.
It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.
Whether that happens remains to be seen.
1. Robotaxi is a better target than general self-driving because the human baseline is much lower for robotaxis (most people dislike their experience with uber, while most people think that they are a better-than-average driver)
2. Google took the high road on safety. The move-slow-and-dont-break-things DNA of Google (that hurts them in so many domains) is a golden asset in self-driving.
https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...
Waymo would not exist as it is today if that crash had any fair scrutiny.
These guys are all about tech and couldn't believe there were companies ahead of Tesla, what do you think the normies know?
Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win.
Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.
Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
> Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.
The entry bar for renting a vehicle on Turo is quite a bit more substantial than hailing an Uber. I looked at making my cars available.
You can restrict the age of the driver (anything vaguely high end I see required you to be 30+), require substantial deposits ($750), proof of your own insurance, mileage and location limitations, and more. Versus "Downloaded the Robotaxi app and put in a credit card number".
The Tesla-owned fleet will likely have the same requirements as riding an Uber. If the rumors are to be believed, those will be dedicated robotaxi vehicles with no steering wheel.
Of course for peer-to-peer you will be able to set your own requirements based on what you're comfortable with, or even just not join the network at all so your car stays exclusively yours.
They only have a car that can drive with a human partner behind the wheel who's ready at any second to take over and prevent it from crashing.
Even that is a faulty system.
I really don't understand how people can think Tesla and Waymo are anywhere close to each other. Making a car drive itself is a much harder problem to solve than scaling production. If you look at what Tesla has, today, it is a vehicle that can sometimes drive on its own with the need for a human behind the wheel. The ability to remove the human from the front seat is the other 95% of the work. In systems like this where human lives are at stake, getting "mostly there" with FSD is essentially worthless.
The problems of logistics and scaling are well-known and well traveled. The invention of a self-driving car is not. Once Waymo has solved the issue of entering new cities and quickly gathering data to feed into their model, they've won.
I think it's possible, but it's definitely less trivial than scaling production of more self driving cars.
In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US government.
If I had to guess, I'd say Atlanta, San Diego, Houston and Miami.
2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed of travel required. That is: the sensors cannot see far enough ahead to react comfortably when going above N miles-per-hour. That might be a dated understanding of the issue though...
Source: I've been riding Weymo since 2019 when it first went public beta (NDA-restricted use). Rode one last night coming home from the airport!
Waymo is already giving driverless freeway rides to employees in Phoenix, so I don’t agree that it’s far away. It’s definitely a different challenge though.
If you screw up at typical speeds in SF, probably nobody will die. On a freeway, odds are a lot higher.
If a car is confused in an urban area, stopping in the middle of the street isn't 100% safe, but it's not super dangerous, whereas stopping in the middle of freeway suddenly is obviously extremely dangerous.
It's more of a challenge when your stopping distance is low (more problematic for trucking than it is for TaaS vehicles since trucks are so damn heavy).
I suspect some challenges are risks like tailgater collisions and high-stakes lane changes at speed, and even more problematic is just profitability (what if your cars are tied up in traffic jams, what if they don't have enough charge left to make a long round trip, etc).
NYC is another obvious challenge but Boston seems like a challenging middle ground.
I am not artificially intelligent and Boston’s streets are a fuckshow.
That I think is where they'll find problems when expanding to locales with less than conscientious drivers.
However I predict within a decade or so we're going to get to a point where gig work is no longer feasible. It'll take a bit of trickery, but I'm sure you could have restaurants opt in to putting their own food in the backseat of these. And then as a consumer you would just get your own food from the car .
So think about every delivery driver, and every Uber driver, and many other gig workers. All of these people are going to be out of work very soon. Plus tons of creatives will be replaced by AI. AI will reduce the need for junior software engineers .
I don't think the modern economy is ready for this. If I had one wish, it would be to at least decouple employment from health care. As is, let's say you have a serious illness that requires you to resign or otherwise not have employment for an extended period of time. You're now stuck with a serious illness and no health care. Depending on the state unless you're a child or parent you're not qualifying for Medicare period.
Has anyone figured out, who exactly gets sued when one of these Waymo's hits someone.
I've worked horrible jobs before, and I needed the money to survive. Not everyone can write Ruby code and make 300k a year.
Now, we're talking. Often, there will be handwringing about low-wage jobs from people who wouldn't dream of working low-wage jobs and who benefit from the existence of low-wage jobs. Often, that will be invoked as a rebuke to automation. But, automation in general isn't a threat to workers or well-being. In fact it's productivity gain which benefits well-being by lowering costs and raising living standards. If a portion of those productivity gains aren't used to help the people they displace, that's a matter of policy not of technology.
In my grandfather's time you could work a normal job and buy yourself a three-bedroom house in what's now one of the most expensive cities in America.
If I wanted to buy the same house at the same city, me and a partner would both have to make 150k to 200k each. And even then we'd barely be middle class, we wouldn't really be doing exceptionally well.
Homeownership shouldn't be regulated to the top 5% of income earners.
However I don't realistically imagine a tech utopia. I think we're headed towards unholy levels of income inequality. And income inequality isn't a problem by itself. Hypothetically if Billy Bob makes 60k a year, but he owns a house worth 400k and he's able to leave it to his kids, that's just fine .
The problem emerges when he's renting his home from a mega corporation that raises rent by 15% per year, until he ends up either homeless ( unhoused, shelter challenged, pick your semantic softening) or sharing a room with 2 other people.
It's a complicated problem with no clear solution.
Patents, copyrights, subsidies, ZIRP, foreign policy, etc., even without reporting to value judgments of "good" and "bad" and sticking safely with neutral terms, all these things involve trade-offs. They have consequences. They do tend to pick winners and losers.
The point is that the shape of society is a matter of choice not chance, technology, or divine providence.
That said I completely agree with you about everything else. I think the US needs to firm up its social safety net (hopefully through UBI, though I'm not hopeful) ASAP. I don't think AI will take over the world or even remove all jobs, but it will remove enough in our lifetime that we'll have a crisis of low-skilled employees out of work who just won't be able to transition into a job that pays well enough to pay four healthcare, housing, and transportation. Housing itself is a really hard problem too for various other complicated reasons.
Back in the 1950s, it was much easier to build. Now it takes much longer and it's more expensive to just get permits. It's kinda wacky to think we're still using housing stock from 100 years ago. New construction is rare.
A middle class person, say a Firefighter needs to be able to buy a home where he works. Many city workers in California have to ride long Metrolink rides just to get to work. This is also a safety concern.
Do you really want a subway conductor to have to get up at 5am to get to their 9am to 6pm shift?
This has been an issue for decades, but it's coming to a head now.
[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/apNmS7JNbQ4Cau8dA
With that much data the safety case should become very clear.
The safety story is an interesting one. Companies like Cruise and Waymo are not forthcoming with their incident data. They share infrequently and through spreadsheets that do not capture every incident. It's pretty ass, and I'd be wary of trusting their self-reported data. I imagine their insurance companies have slightly better data than the gov't, but even then maybe not.
I'm really not sure what you mean by "infrequently". They release new raw data every 3 or 6 months or something, and every single accident is trumpeted in the news. What other industry has more publicly accessible safety data?
Sadly, our regulatory agencies are currently set up for very delayed decisionmaking. Since every company can release software at any time, you could imagine a regulatory platform that tracks software releases and their corresponding safety statistics in real time.
I have a vested interest in the success of AVs (worked in the industry for the better part of a decade) but the companies building them are far from perfect in terms of how they conduct themselves wrt safety. There needs to be some development in terms of the supporting tech.
The way I think about this is: planes came before the FAA and key technologies that we use to manage flights, such as radar and radio being used in conjunction. AVs are in their "just learned to fly" era.
The number of miles a release ends up driving is mostly in simulation + some human-supervised on-road testing, and may be low / influenced by the availability of resources ($$$). There are little to no regulations or 3rd party checks on the process used to clear releases.
They do not simulate every release on all X miles driven. They can't, it's super expensive, and that's to speak nothing of challenges like simulation realism or compatibility of the simulator with multiple generations of hardware that isn't backwards compatible.
They could have no deaths for years, then suddenly a whole lot after a bad software push. Recently they issued a recall because of a bug where the car could hit a telephone pole. Imagine if the software had a bug when their cars were ubiquitous on highways, slamming cars into concrete medians? Imagine if a fault could bork critical technologies like the lidar at a high rate across the fleet?
What happens to Waymo if they kill even 1 child due to a bug or lapse in model quality? I imagine many would wake up to the reality of their safety story and demand a way to audit software releases. Or would you continue to let your kid ride Waymo? This is also to say nothing of sensor failures and other ways the car can mess up.
The probability of your dying in a Waymo is not # incidents / # miles, because past performance does not guarantee future performance when it comes to new releases. It's unknown quantity L (likelihood of encountering a dangerous bug per unit time) * T (time spent in car). Without more data about L (which changes based on many factors, like the company's process for certifying releases), L*T could go from 0 to something unacceptably high really fast.
You trust the car you drive today because the parts are quality controlled and regulated. Software drivers are a very new part added to this chain of things to trust. Their quality control process is not yet publicly regulated. The reality is there needs to be an advancement in technology to ensure software quality / safety, ideally from the role of an unbiased auditor that can catch faults and ground the fleet asap, then restore public faith by ensuring gaps in the qualification processes are fixed. No such mechanism exists today.
They are very different. Unit tests and stress tests can be conducted on pure software. You can monitor them and if there are failures you can retry.
Robot software needs all the stuff you use for regular software, but then you have this huge space of counterfactuals that can only be verified using large scale simulation. How do you know the simulator is realistic? That it has a sufficient level of scenario coverage? That the simulation was even run? That the car didn't catastrophically regress in a way that will lead to a crash after 1M miles of driving (which in a scaled service will happen quite frequently)?
Oh and a fault can result in a death for Waymo, but not for Google Search. So that's kind of a major difference.
The software release process itself becomes the thing that is tested statistically. If they release 100 versions, and each is safer than the last, it’s silly to think that one can’t be confident in the safety of the 101st without some gov’t software approval/validation process.
> What happens to Waymo if they kill even 1 child due to a bug or lapse in model quality? …would you continue to let your kid ride Waymo?
If they had driven billions of death-less miles and then a software update killed a child, I would obviously let my kid ride Waymo. It wouldn’t be close.
That's just the thing. Each release is not always safer than the last. Even ascertaining that with any reasonable level of certainty requires a lot of technology. In a company's hands alone, this "trust me bro" amounts to a ticking time bomb since companies have a tendency to trade safety for profit.
> If they had driven billions of death-less miles and then a software update killed a child, I would obviously let my kid ride Waymo. It wouldn’t be close.
You don't think the outcry at Boeing applies to Waymo?
I think this argues the opposite of what you think it does.
Monitoring != driving and if you had humans pesudo driving, the experience would be insanely bad cuz the human would be interjecting way too much.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
"the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver."
But let's assume they're lying and you're right: what kind of throughput and latency do you expect to be required between the car and the remote driver for this to work safely? How does the car know if the remote driver is actually looking at the data and acting on that? What happens if the connection stutters? Does the car take control again? How would it decide when to alternate between remote and local control? What if the two sides disagree on what to do?
Yes, the 100M miles scale is very important, because that's about how many miles humans drive until they cause a death.
I got the feeling that man had been accosted many times by angry locals and I may have been the first to give a word of encouragement, he was very polite after the initial tension wore away and he felt my shared enthusiasm. He must have been one of the early engineers, I had never seen or heard the name waymo but I was aware google had been competing in the level 1/2 dessert tests.
The man was very friendly and i was surprised how his behavior must be a reflection of society's view towards technical automation. Seeing the videos of people kicking food delivery robots and now my own tendency to flip off elon musks tesla cameras all these years later I am starting to get why he was nervous.
Cheers to the future I suppose, but hopefully the future has less cars and more walkable cities.
I mean, it's easy to say "just walk (or ride a bike)" when you're 22 years old and in prime health, but the population in most First World countries is rapidly aging.
Actual car-free areas, like the access-controlled dense old towns in Europe, are possible (if built-out where they don't exist), but not necessarily to be walkable.
I think you have the wrong impression about what "walkable cities" mean.
It's the reason New Yorkers live longer [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/29/health/life-e...
Better driving can only get you from 1 curb to another. You still have to walk to your actual destination whether it’s to the other end of the mall, or to your home’s door. In no way is this any worse in a walkable city which will not only allow you to walk everywhere when you’re able, therefore delaying any loss in walking capabilities, but will also include better and more accessible public and private curb to curb transportation.
A walkable city will also make the curb to actual destination far more walkable.
A walkable city will also mean a lot more options are accessible to the disabled through their wheelchairs, etc.
Manhattan is incredibly senior friendly.
I am disabled, and like many other disabled people, I can't drive a car. Often times as people age they also lose the ability to drive a car safely.
That is precisely why walkable neighborhoods are so important to old and disabled people.
I'm not sure if these park and someone plugs them in or what, who maintains the actual Jaguars, etc.
Can't wait to never have to drive a car again.
Like grandma driving. In a good way.
Less jerky motion, cars don’t smell bad, less motion sickness while looking at your phone.
I can't imagine these will be any different...
It's a really uncanny feeling when it pulls out into traffic for the first time and the car is driving itself. I have a Tesla, so I've played around with autopilot, but being in the back seat and not being responsible for the car at all is a crazy feeling. Legitimately one of the most "oh my god I'm living in the future moments" I've experienced in recent memory.
Pick up and drop offs get snapped to specific areas so I had to walk ~1.5 blocks on either end which wasn't a big deal for me, but could see how that might be annoying/difficult for others.
Not that there's any competitor that seems even close to Waymo.
* Uber CEO dumps $70 million of shares this week
* Google tries to steal the Tesla's media thunder by opening Waymo to everyone
* GM brings in new leadership to revitalize Cruise
* Rivian gets a huge cash injection
Waymo has been building up to this for years in San Francisco. Cruise has been looking for a new CEO for many months. Rivian has been in well known financial trouble.
I don’t think anyone’s worried about a Tesla robotaxi. It’s another vaporware in their long list of vaporwares. Going by their FSD track record, that thing won’t exist for a number of years.
Where next?
That's around $150,000.
driving an uber costs about 20 cents per mile accounting for everything including gas, maintenance, replacement, insurance. including tips you are often paid around a dollar per mile. its just dead simple math. the idea that ubers lose money is a mass delusion fueled by outrage culture, echo chambers and the media. i made tons of money doing it. im screaming into the void and it wont change anyones mind
"Guys it's the future! Self-driving cars actually exist!"
"Fuck you, here's why this is awful"
nice, i love the creation of robotics jobs
Silly and sad, but real :(
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1196487085/anonymous-protesto....
The reason Waymo should be worried is because once FSD hits that "crossing", a flick of a switch at Tesla and 3-8 million robo taxis could hit the market all at once. For comparison, Waymo has around 1,000 cars.
It's cool what Waymo's doing, but as an actual FSD user it's plainly obvious "vision only" will work, which does not bode well for all the other car companies + waymo.
There's a reason Tesla hasn't been able to remove the driver (or even let them take their eyes off). It's because the car has "just" a few cameras.
Assuming this is a feature that car owners (and presumably, states/provinces/countries) have to opt into, what does the insurance and liabilities look like for this?
I can't believe that Tesla wouldn't shove all of it onto the end car owner, even if (or rather, when) they take a sizeable cut.
I haven't ridden in a Tesla FSD. Have you ridden in a Waymo? It seems tough to compare where they're "at" without having experienced both.
I also wonder how much Waymo will have improved in the next 1-3 years. This whole field seems like the sort of thing where improvements come more rapidly as more data is acquired and data is acquired more rapidly the more vehicles come online. I could easily see a situation where Waymo masters their process and expands to hundreds of thousands of vehicles in a short period of time.
Also, while I think I do believe in the ability to do FSD well with just cameras, I wonder if there will be fringe safety benefits to using accompanying lidar that will end up winning over public perception. People seem very interested in the ability for cars to do driving more safely than humans. I feel like this conflicts, mildly, with the desire to do FSD with pure vision on the premise that humans do it with pure vision. It's a true premise, but I'm not sure it's especially marketable.
Many Chinese EVs with self-driving features include Lidar and manage to undercut Tesla on price.
Solid-state Lidar has become so affordable that most cars include multiple ones, with the spinny ones seemingly on the way out.
Also assuming that Tesla will hold on to the mass-market self-driving monopoly for long is a bit of a stretch.
Look at Cruise. They had actual robotaxis on the streets of SF and were firmly in second place. Then they had a bad accident and covered it up. Now they're set back by years and billions of dollars. Now imagine Tesla's behavior ...
https://teamster.org/2023/05/teamsters-halt-waymo-in-san-fra...
As far as I know, nobody is currently attempting to do that. Even Tesla has way more cameras on their cars than you have eyeballs, covering far more angles than your head can. There is that one org that does L2 automation with just a phone IIRC, but I don't think they're trying for full autonomy.
Realistically, it's hard for the car to be as smart as the human mental model while driving, and so having vastly superior sensors helps compensate for that.