Living here for the last 10 years, it's been jarring how just in the last few years, driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this the default now?"
The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking them every time.
The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking them every time.
It’s clear that they’re not the cars for me to worry about out there on a bike / on foot / etc.
Why? Why Not?
Turns out, the right breakthroughs in writing laws are good, too. While the bad ones wreck you.
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.