Waymo to begin testing on San Francisco freeways this week
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Waymo doesn’t exist here.
Invite-only is quite literally the opposite of public. It's private.
FSD has been set to come out in a year or so since 2014. At this point nobody should be foolish enough to give Tesla the benefit of the doubt; if they have a self-driving car, then they'll take legal liability for its actions, and if they won't take legal liability for its actions, they don't have a self-driving car. This is as true for any company as it is for Tesla, although Tesla is the only one who's seen fit to lie about it for a decade.
I encourage you to watch some of the videos on Twitter.
It's here. It's now.
I, for one, will be surprised ... in fact put me down for "very surprised".
12.5.1.3 is incredible. But it's still Level 3, attempting to do something stupid at least on every trip I've been in one.
I think Tesla will figure out Level 4 in the near future. What makes the "year or so" unrealistic is it will have to convince regulators that it's safe. For a variety of reasons, partly legitimate and partly due to Musk's antics, that might be difficult in a lot of the most lucrative markets (and markets where Teslas are).
Top comment's estimate for 2030 parity with Waymo et al is more realistic.
It did a few things better than my Ford and Hyundai vehicles, but it was wildly unpredictable when it’d just decide to stop working. That’s a big problem for me.
In a Waymo, you sit in the back seat and scroll your phone and it gets you safely to your destination every time. These are not even remotely comparable products.
Tesla's generalized driving algorithm vs Waymo's cherry-picked routes and ideal weather.
Tesla is winning. And the gap is getting wider.
This necessarily involves some kind of generalized driving algorithm but more usefully, it gives you a clear goal and distribution to measure against.
They should keep on doing what they're doing. Make ~$1000 gadget that makes driving less of a chore. Doubtful they'll get to driverless in next 10 years.
There can be many players in the market at different offerings and price points. Comma is a sweet spot where they are handsomely profitable, don't need to raise another round and get incrementally better.
Waymo has unlimited money from Google. Cruise, Zoox, e.t.c will have to face reckoning at some point.
It was smart of Uber to get out of self-driving car billion dollar money burning pit. They can always enter the race again. They have market size advantage.
Frankly, I didn’t see any benefit of Tesla over most of the lane centering and adaptive cruise solutions in the market. It felt so unpredictable that I preferred to simply drive by hand.
For me, that's the end-all-be-all of self driving promises. It doesn't matter whether they call it level 3, 4, 5, or 420, what the branding and promo copy says, it matters how it gets handled from a legal standpoint.
Unless you can get the vendor to accept liability, you're either hands-on-the-wheel driving, or sitting there tensing and waiting for the "you must jump back to hands-on-the-wheel driving in the next 3 seconds or we plow into the side of a lorry" alarm.
In a way, this is the same heuristic as "the company that offers a long warranty can't make crap." No company will willingly put themselves on the hook from the estate of pedestrians and other drivers until they know they've solved it to a statistically high level.
I routinely have as little interaction with the driver as I want
2.) The vehicles are standardized, comfortable and clean
3.) You can play your own music or none at all, roll down the windows or leave them up, while an Uber driver's preferences might not match your own
When considering all locations together, compared to the human benchmarks, the Waymo Driver demonstrated: An 85% reduction or 6.8 times lower crash rate involving any injury, from minor to severe and fatal cases (0.41 incidence per million miles for the Waymo Driver vs 2.78 for the human benchmark) A 57% reduction or 2.3 times lower police-reported crash rate (2.1 incidence per million miles for the Waymo Driver vs. 4.85 for the human benchmark) This means that over the 7.1 million miles Waymo drove, there were an estimated 17 fewer injuries and 20 fewer police-reported crashes compared to if human drivers with the benchmark crash rate would have driven the same distance in the areas we operate.
These numbers are not as high as I thought they would be.
Not trying to play devil’s advocate, just my experience
He got a huge shit storm for not wanting to talk to poor people.
Definitely don't advertise that you don't want to talk to drivers. Progressive politics is weird.
And while I agree that drivers here seem to be less inclined to talk than on west coast, I still occasionally get drivers who facetime the entire ride on the loudspeaker or watch videos on their phone mounted on the dashboard (while barely paying attention to the road).
Not even mentioning some of the stories my friends who are women told me about their uber/lyft experiences.
That was hilarious. Instead of Rothschilds, or Blackrock, its a French fraternal order in Paris.
those kind of people never notice the flaws in their theory, such as there being so many shadow groups that they would have to compete for power, the same as if no shadow group existed
There is a simple explanation for this within their canon, similar to how it works with religions - my conspiracy theory is the real one, the others are all wrong and/or planted by the baddies of my conspiracy theory.
There are sometimes fun crossover episodes between different conspiracy theories. But as soon as some incongruency between them forms a flaw in logic that you pointed out, it instantly goes to “yup, they are wrong, and my conspiracy is the right one.”
I rotated identities, just email, phone number, assumed a different last name in casual arenas, and everything went back to normal as a nobody.
Subsequently, the most amusing thing became reading about women googling all their potential dates. I never do that, but its funny that I’m a ghost and makes me wonder how many other ghosts they're giving the green check mark on. Seems like a waste of energy.
I like 2.) and 3.) and this was a promise of uber and lyft originally, but instead its always been a cumbersome experience that might as well not exist
The driver is often on a call for the entire journey, which is annoying.
It’s often much colder or warmer than I’d ideally like.
An extreme case, but I once had a driver stop a ride, jump out of the car and pull the driver out of the car in front. They proceeded to have a fist fight. The other guy had honked at him for blocking the road or something.
I’d much prefer a computer to drive me around.
That's the Accordion Effect.
With enough cars on the road, one little tap of someone's brakes flashes their brake lights and it ripples upstream until the 80mph column of cars is forced to go to down to zero ASAP.
https://cphpost.dk/2016-08-26/news/more-rocks-being-thrown-f...
At 35mph you can have something (radar/cameras) look a few meters ahead, then if there is a stationary obstacle you slam on the brakes.
At 60 that doesn’t work because braking distances are much longer. There might be an obstacle directly ahead of you on the pavement, but you won’t hit it because the car will turn with the road. This means that your emergency braking system needs to be aware of the steering, the road layout, and the expected route.
Waymos are one of the first things that my visitors to SF want to try. It feels like living in a science-fiction future.
The ride and navigation feels very smooth - after the novelty of having no driver in the front seat wears off, you become accustomed to the experience surprisingly quickly. In comparison, I found the Cruise driving experience pretty uncomfortable and stress-inducing.
The app and software inside the vehicle is really well-designed. Which is unusual for a google consumer product!
And my female friends, in particular, far prefer Waymo to Uber or Lyft because they don’t have to engage with a creepy driver trying to hit on them.
I, for one, welcome our new self-driving overlords.
AFAIK, they strictly follow the speed limit, which feels too slow when everyone else is speeding.
The funny thing about self-driving cars is that they're designed to obey laws to the letter, which real drivers never do. I think we're going to see a lot of laws necessarily getting updated to allow real-life driving behavior, such as double-parking during pickup and dropoff.
Did the SFPUC make a change to disallow that then, because point-to-point is how Waymo worked in SF as recently as a month or so ago? Perhaps they did, as a condition of allowing expansion.
I'm betting on Waymo, too, but Tesla has chutzpah in a way Google and GM do not. That might permit them to take more risks (and incur more costs on the public) earlier.
In the end, avoiding a monopoly is always good.
That's a prediction, one that I hope comes true. However, I have to be realistic and given the track record I am not too hopeful.
Here is a litmus test: would you allow Waymo to drive schoolbuses with your children? I know I certainly will never allow my family or myself to get into a metal box going 80 mph without a driver.
Does that bother you?
On top of this, the software quality is certified, built over decades, and continuously tested on each plane regularly - and of course the pilots are still there ; )
School buses are an interesting case because they drive fixed routes, so you can imagine some intense mapping and route planning process which makes them even safer than a normal autonomous vehicle. They could also afford to have a larger number of higher quality sensors.
This was my experience too.
Way more smooth and smart about its SF driving than for instance, my elderly parents. It manages to be assertive without being aggressive.
I won't be the first in line to take Waymo on a freeway but at some point the results will speak for themselves.
> I won't be the first in line to take Waymo on a freeway but at some point the results will speak for themselves.
Indeed - lets hope we do get to actually see the numbers in due time.
Waymo's obey all traffic laws and never drive tired, drunk, or distracted.
I messaged Lyft and they really didn't seem to take it seriously or care. They of course worded it in a way to avoid any potential legal problems, and I doubt anything came of it. That driver should not be on the road.
There have been several other less notable incidents where I was worried for my safety.
I'm here for the robotaxis
Yes, obviously. Humans are provably more dangerous.