Waymo One is now open to all in Los Angeles | Hacker News Reader

Waymo One is now open to all in Los Angeles

waymo.com

213 pointsra7371 comments

If you have the chance to try out a Waymo (you own a credit card and smart phone and find yourself in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix or Austin if you can get through that waitlist) I thoroughly recommend it.

Right now it's the most exciting tourist attraction in San Francisco.

The first few minutes are pretty terrifying... but the ride is so smooth that you very quickly settle into it. It's absolutely worth experiencing.

I'd like to but how do you overcome the slight powerless feeling? Like when those guys surrounded a vehicle and made it to stop with people helplessly inside. You're kind of stuck.

Same as when you're in an uber?

You have control in that instance. Apples and oranges.

What control over the human Uber/Lyft driver, whom you've never met before, do you have?

Self preservation.

You control someone else's self preservation? That doesn't make sense to me unless you're suggesting the passenger also threaten the driver. Did you answer the question they actually asked?

Ostensibly, the Uber/Lyft driver is also feeling threatened and will gun the throttle in an attempt to escape the situation, even if an attacker is directly in front.

Sure, but that wasn't the question.

Or an airplane.

On an airplane, the pilot has skin in the game. If he screws up, he will pay with his own life.

What happens to the developers/manufacturers of a driverless car that kills a passenger or a pedestrian?

I thought we were talking about the feeling of powerlessness? Still seems like an apples-to-apples comparison in that regard.

> how do you overcome the slight powerless feeling

I don't have any "feeling of powerlessness" when I am on a plane, or a taxi, or a bus or train or a boat, because I believe that whoever is conducting those vehicles have interests aligned with mine: to get safely and uneventfully to the end of the journey.

There is no such alignment on a driverless car, plane or boat. No engineer or executive will get punished in case the car gets double parked, let alone if it runs over a pedestrian crossing the street.

In the event of an emergency, the Uber driver is also a human who would take action (possibly extreme or illegal) to get out of a life-threatening situation. The self-driving car will not.

You can open the door and get out if it's stopped. You can press the "pull over" button to have it pull over as soon as it can safely do so. You can call rider support or 911 while the doors remain locked to the outside.

I agree that it's a slightly more vulnerable feeling than driving myself, but I still feel far less vulnerable than taking public transit or walking. And when you factor in risk of a crash, it's also safer than Uber or driving myself.

I don't think Waymos will often be targeted by criminals for anything besides vandalism, with 20+ cameras and potential remote monitors the risk:reward ratio is much worse than other options.

> I still feel far less vulnerable than taking public transit or walking.

This sounds incredibly dystopian. What hellhole do you live? What are the dangers you have from taking public transit?

The other people on public transport, not the least of which from them is second hand smoke from either fentanyl or meth, not sure which, nor do I care to learn.

I still ride the bus/trolley/tram/subway, especially when the streets are busy, but late at night I'll opt for a Waymo, depending on the circumstance.

Not the OP, but...

https://www.tokyoweekender.com/japan-life/news-and-opinion/w...

> What hellhole do you live?

Do a search for women and public transit. This isn't just Japan, or Europe, or the USA. It's a real problem being discussed. Honestly, I feel like this is fairly common knowledge at this point.

> What hellhole do you live?

The US I guess.

You seriously think that walking or taking public transit in the US feels dangerous in 2024? It may have felt a bit different in the 1980s but, even then, most major cities were not in general hellholes even if some locations were sketchy.

Around where I live there’s a lot of addicts and homeless who use that as primary transport. I don’t want to generalize of course, but the camps here are frequent spots in the paper for bizarre murders and violence. It doesn’t feel safe being around unknown variables like that, for me at least.

Any large city, there are (large) areas I feel pretty comfortable in, especially not in the middle of the night. And there are areas I generally avoid including in cities that I otherwise consider "safe."

I do think you need to be aware of the environment generally and, while there is always some risk (anywhere), you can alleviate a lot of it.

I'm very familiar with a large northeast metropolitan complex and there are places/times I wouldn't go but lots of places/times I would.

I don't know, I was just answering in behalf of the parent comment

hell yes it is if you're a woman and/or have anything valuable on your person

I guess I question why anyone would live somewhere, unless that really had no economic choice, where they felt so unsafe. I sure wouldn't and don't.

ADDED: Probably unfair. Some are willing to tradeoff safety for culture etc. so long as they can essentially buy their way out of some of the potentially uncomfortable urban aspects (which is presumably what's being discussed here). This is a perfectly understandable attitude--as it probably was in NYC in the 80s or so.

It's also highly variable. There are lots of nearby areas that feel unsafe, and the people in those areas that make me question safety ride the busses more. Do i feel unsafe in my home? No, but i don't have a lot of addicts mulling around my house or i'd move (like you said).

Then of course there's differences in opinion on actual risk. I don't generally feel comfortable around variables i don't understand. I grew up around addicts and found them to be very unpredictable, and so my reaction may be biased. Nonetheless it's true for me personally.

edit: Conversely though, i think humans have a tendency to get used to nearly anything. We then can downplay the risks of things we've become accustomed to. Even if the risk of violence is low, risk of general unpleasant interactions would be enough to make me avoid the bus/etc.

A lot is familiarity.

I was in Detroit for an event a couple years ago. A number of us didn't really feel safe after dark and there were a couple incidents that other attendees experienced. Part of it was the general reputation but we also just didn't really know.

Whereas I'll walk down 5th avenue in Manhattan at two in the morning with no real concerns though I'm being more alert than if it were noon.

As you say, it also wouldn't take many bus/subway incidents to make me go: "That's a nope from now on."

You would live there if you can effectively shield yourself from the safety risks, by doing things like avoiding mass transit and bad neighborhoods.

Also, because you may have family and ties to the area.

People sure are reading a lot into my comment that I feel "more vulnerable" on the sidewalk than in a Waymo. That doesn't mean I think walking is dangerous. (It can definitely be unpleasant in some locations though, for a variety of reasons.)

Uhm, I've seen videos about how NYC was in the 1970s? I'm sure SF was similar. It was pretty rough back then, the 80s were slightly better, and then things got pretty good past the 90s, and now they are getting bad again.

I lived in Manhattan a summer in the 80s. Went to school in Cambridge in the 70s. There were definitely areas one avoided and cities were losing population.

Relatively recently (maybe 5 years ago), a work colleague got an AirBnB "bargain" on a house in the Roxbury area of Boston for a group of people for a conference and told me there was a shooting down the street. I was, like, IDIOT, you might have asked a local why it might have been such a bargain. (To be clear I'm not sure how objectively dangerous it was but I wouldn't have been staying there and walking at night.)

Not sure most of Manhattan was unsafe generally but you were certainly careful. Not sure that accidentally taking the express subway up to 125th street was actually a guarantee to walking out to a hail of bullets but you were definitely careful to a degree you probably aren't today. I never a foot in Brooklyn until much later. And I remember a somewhat scary drive from LaGuardia to the Port Authority late at night along 42nd Street because of some confusion around schedules.

San Francisco. I do walk and take transit all the time, but I'm a man. My wife has been chased by mentally ill people bin broad daylight. The risk to me is low, but I still make sure I'm aware of my surroundings.

I don't think this is unique to SF. Even in very safe cities there's surely a higher chance of being mugged walking down a dark street than riding in a 5000 lbs vehicle with tinted windows.

> there's surely a higher chance of being mugged walking down a dark street than riding in a 5000 lbs vehicle with tinted windows

Please account for the danger of being struck by other people riding in 5000 lb vehicles with tinted windows!

Much better to be inside of a protective steel cage if there's a chance of getting hit by a 5000 lb vehicle.

I think in the long-run robotaxis are crime heaven. It's so easy to mug people in a robotaxi, especially when they're used like autonomous busses. Public transit is largely safe because you're in public. As soon as you put people, strangers, in a private little box with no accountability all bets are off.

I think they seem good now because you're not riding with randos. Although, randos can still trivially stop the car. But this model is unsustainable, eventually you will be riding with randos.

All of over the world there are subway cars where there are randos in the subway car with no security guard or driver. Essentially an autonomous "bus" scenario. Basically the exact same scenario you're describing. But it's not that dangerous

Those work because there's more people. It's hard to coordinate, say, 20 people to rob you (one guy).

If you ride the subway at night, with almost nobody on it, you get the same effect.

So let me get this straight. Once there are lots of people it's more dangerous, but once there are no people it's simultaneously more dangerous? I'm not following the logic here

They are saying there is safety in crowds.

>It's hard to coordinate, say, 20 people to rob you (one guy).

> But this model is unsustainable, eventually you will be riding with randos.

It's unsafe when there's lots of people, it's unsafe when there's no people. Basically they're saying it's unsafe no matter what, which just isn't true. Subway systems are an everyday part of life in many cities.

I think they are saying you are safe with a crowd, and safe with no people.

They are also claiming that Waymo will have compulsory ride sharing for some reason, and therefore wont be safe (I dont agree with this part)

The situation you want to avoid on a train or car is being trapped in a shared space with only a crazy person.

I see, but that's a very contrived situation. I think in that situation you just tell the Waymo to pull over and get out. The world is not a utopia. There will always be some sort of risk to everything we do

I agree with you that it is a contrived situation. I agree with them that the danger is highest when you are isolated with an unknown stranger.

I imagine "eventually you will be riding with randos" is more likely to work like Uber and Lyft right now, where you can get a discount if you accept a "shared" ride or pay full price for a car that's just you.

It might also be that Waymo and co have decided that the additional risk involved in putting strangers in a car together without a driver to keep an eye on them isn't worth taking on.

IMO Uber and Lyft are already unsustainable, and our current transportation infrastructure has been falling rapidly behind for a couple decades. I can't foresee a future where mass transportation is achievable with ANY single person vehicles, including robotaxis.

I hear some people say this, and my first reaction is usually yours--where do they live that could justify feeling so afraid? My 12-year-old daughter rides the subway to school in NYC every day, and she doesn't feel endangered (a bit crowded perhaps). I feel safer sending her on the train with her friends than I would putting them in a car.

Are there other cities where public transit is much more dangerous? I want to give GP the benefit of the doubt, but part of me wonders if this is an irrational fear fueled by media.

I would say Oakland BART. I'm a 200 man and not particularly fearful. I couch surfed through the arab spring revolution, but I avoid that part of BART. I have like a 50% rate of hostile homeless and mentally ill people screaming and threating me. I would not send a 12 year old daughter on it.

Chicago. The risk spectrum is a lot broader than "will I be murdered on the train?". You can also have a deranged person come right up and spit in your face (happened to me). Not worth it.

Also have a 12yr old in NYC and I would never let them ride the subway alone, nor do they have any desire to.

I think perception and experience (direct or indirect) makes a bigger difference than just "where do you live". Some people might be scared by the media, sure, but we have both been personally assaulted several times on the train, and many more times simply freaked out and scared by weird people, and we know lots of others who have had similar experiences or worse, so based on that, no I don't think it's an irrational fear for everyone.

Assault an beatings. Most people I know wont take BART through Oakland. It is fairly common to have to deal with mentally ill or high people threatening to gut and kill you.

If you have ever been trapped in a box with an angry psychotic, you would want to avoid it.

Well, New York City, but that is more of an edge case. Most public transit in America is safe .... I think.

> when you factor in risk of a crash, it's also safer than Uber or driving myself

It’s also predictable. Uber and Lyft have been so desperate for drivers they’ve accepted people who drive dangerously, cancel at the last minute or plain can’t follow driving directions. You skip that with Waymo.

You get over it very quickly. The first ride or two is a bit weird and then you just settle into enjoying it.

The real difference is that those guys felt emboldened to act that way with nobody at the wheel. They might not have trusted an uber driver to not drive into them, and there is a social element where some people apparently don’t think about how they are acting on video, they think nobody is around.

I expect this to go away over time as people realize driverless =\= witnessless

You can quickly call for human assistance on one of the big support buttons.

I did my first ride when I was at a conference in SFO earlier this month. Part of it was it 'shows' you what it sees, which was a bit better on what I could track as a human with my head on a swivel. The car never went beyond residential speeds and it was very much felt like a fast car trying to be cautious. It was less terrifying then teaching my kid to drive. We very much felt like we were on a tourist ride - and the taxis that drove past us often had folks trying to get video/pictures of us passengers in a car without the driver.

Watching a couple hundred of them try to get out of a parking lot was comical.

> Like when those guys surrounded a vehicle and made it to stop with people helplessly inside.

Is that a common thing? I wouldn't be surprised honestly. I heard of the traffic cone thing but not this.

You get out and use reasonable force to break free of their false imprisonment, the same way you would if you were in your own car and you were falsely imprisoned.

I hope very strenuously that the implication is not that you would run over people who are blocking you if you were in control of the car.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Reginald_Denny

I would rather take many lives than be subjected to this sort of injury

Unfortunately the Bush Doctrine is not valid in traffic. I believe you will find significant challenges if you try to justify murder this way.

The government expecting me to resign myself and roll over in this situation is the real problem

Society expects you to roll over. The government has the power to imprison you if you refuse.

I would strongly consider it, for sure. If I was stopped by obvious muggers in a dangerous place, alone, then definitely. I wouldn't aim for them, and I would certainly hope they jump out of the way. But quite literally you can expect to get hurt if you play in traffic.

Do you ever fly?

> Right now it's the most exciting tourist attraction in San Francisco.

I'm as excited as you about self driving cars, but the vehicles are essentially driven remotely, maybe not by live video feed but nonetheless by remote operators, in the sense that matters. It is more tourist attraction than it is end-all be-all of technology, which was very deflating to find out.

All I am really saying Simon is that you are a highly educated guy: adopt a more nuanced take on this. According to the people I know who work in this space and are not trying to raise money for autonomous vehicles, and according to many journalists, there is a lot of consensus that Waymo has adopted a remote driving scheme that is working, and perhaps that is why they are operating a taxi service and others are not. It isn't clear if that growth story, as great as it is, will help them raise enough money to invent truly autonomous vehicles.

Source for this claim?

Remote operators only help out in rare cases

Vehicles per-operator is the important metric, imho. If one operator can supervise a dozen vehicles at a time with only occasional manual intervention then it's still a massive labor-saving tool.

All the evidence suggests that the number is >1 operators per vehicle.

>150,000 trips / week. 3000 employees. 1:1 supervision is only viable if every single employee was a supervisor, and that's obviously not true.

If those 3000 employees work full-time (40 hours per week), they could theoretically serve 150,000 trips of up to 48 minutes in length, which seems reasonable, no?

Another interesting statistic here is that Waymo apparently has only 700 vehicles in its fleet [1]. That would require only 700 supervisors.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/alphab...

Supervisors don't work 24/7 like the cars do. For 1:1 coverage you need ~4X as many people as cars.

As I said, theoretically viable if all employees were supervisors. But they're not.

I tend to agree with you that it's very likely that the cars are operating autonomously most of the time.

However, I don't think this kind of math helps much in actually proving (or disproving) that. We don't know how many of the employees are supervisors. For all we know, Waymo hires dozens of external mechanical turks per vehicle and uses a simple majority voting algorithm to ensure safety. Unlikely, or even ridiculous, but apart from Waymo's press releases, and the accidental legislation report [1], there is little hard evidence.

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

Ok, I'll play. Would you like to present said evidence? Remember that your claim was very explicitly about Waymo, so I'd hope the evidence is about them rather than some other company.

Even if they wanted to they couldn't drive real-time. Remote operators help when stuck.

It's like people forgot about the Amazon stores being an army of cheaply paid third world labour disguised as revolutionary technology.

They had too high a rate of needing humans, but nevertheless it was almost entirely computers. That wasn't a disguise.

Good news: this isn't true - https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

https://archive.is/20240913090221/https://www.nytimes.com/20...

> For years, companies like Waymo (owned by Alphabet, Google’s parent company) and Cruise (owned by General Motors) avoided any mention of the remote assistance they provided their self-driving cars.

> That is just how things work in Silicon Valley. By creating the illusion of complete autonomy...

https://archive.is/iPKWQ#selection-719.0-719.483

> While Zoox and other companies have started to reveal how humans intervene to help driverless cars, none of the companies have disclosed how many remote-assistance technicians they employ or how much it all costs. Zoox’s command center holds about three dozen people who oversee what appears to be a small number of driverless cars — two in Foster City and several more in Las Vegas — as well as a fleet of about 200 test cars that each still have a driver behind the steering wheel.

> ...the [Cruise] cars were supported by about 1.5 workers per vehicle

> Waymo and Cruise declined to comment for this story.

I don't know what to say. It's an "illusion of complete autonomy."

The energy of these replies is the same as, "When a parent does a kid's homework, it isn't cheating." The difference is we still have no idea if the child will grow up into an adult, and it's not guaranteed that Waymo will be the one to crack real autonomy, even if it looks that way today. Indeed the longer it takes them the more likely it's not going to be them.

[flagged]

> There's no illusion of any kind.

I don't know dude. Simple question: is it fully autonomous? No. If you step inside the vehicle, does it feel that way? Yes. That is nearly the definition of an illusion.

> is it fully autonomous?

Yes. If you understood how remote assistance works, you'd agree.

There are no autonomous systems that doesn't require some form on human help. The question is can the vehicle do all the driving tasks and when it does fail, it does so gracefully and achieves "minimal risk condition" on its own (because, of course, no one can intervene remotely in real time). Waymo certainly does this.

There's a world of difference between "driven remotely", which was your claim, and "autonomously operated, with a remote driver available to help, in case of exceptions and emergencies", which is reality.

Just like there's a world of difference between doing your kid's homework, which is viewed as unacceptable, and helping your kid with their homework, which is viewed as good parenting.

> autonomously operated, with a remote driver available to step in, in case of exceptions and emergencies

Listen to yourself...

Anyway, you're getting it. I guess we have to be there and see for ourselves how the parent was involved in the kid's homework, right? If Waymo has nothing to hide, by all means, let in the press to their remote driving center. What are they going to do, steal the source code?

What even is your allegation? That someone has a joystick in a remote center and they're directly controlling the vehicle? And they are doing it all in real-time over cellular networks?

This isn't remotely feasible unless you think Waymo has invented new concepts in physics.

Small point of clarification. It's not feasible to do it safely. It's absolutely feasible to do it well enough to provide the illusion of safety though. There's various companies (Nuro, Vay.io) teledriving vehicles on US public roads right now. Waymo and others simply don't do it because of the obvious safety issues.

Yes, that is what they are alleging with regards to Waymo.

Nothing will be completely autonomous and no reasonable person expects that. You will anyway need some degree of human intervention in order to achieve robustness. The important thing is that you don't need to take care of driving and spend the time in a more useful way. If you're insisting that everything needs to be fully machine driven and zero human intervention is required, you're effectively moving the goalpost just for your own argument.

> the vehicles are essentially driven remotely,

And then you say "an illusion complete autonomy."

Not being completely autonomous 100% of the time doesn't mean it's essentially driven remotely. Driven remotely means driven remotely. Not someone interjecting at one point on a ride, which seems to be what the articles are referring to.

So, pick a lane, you can't have both. Either someone is driving the vehicle, or there are support staff capable of intervening at points. And frankly, I would be horrified to think the second one wasn't happening. That would be moronic.

Edit: Oh, I see you doing a lot of goal post shifting in other comments replying to this. Good luck, driven remotely.

I suppose that if the vehicle will crash or hurt people without human remote operation of some kind, that's driven remotely in essence, no?

If there is more than 1.0 people running the vehicle, that's not good either.

I like Waymo! I just think that they aren't the only ones to figure out autonomous driving, and the crazy thing is that maybe they are specifically not trying to figure out autonomous driving, and that is maybe why only they have found success?

I think you're not really understanding what people are telling you: the vehicles do not depend on remote operators to avoid crashing or hurting people. The remote operators do not drive the cars in real time.

You do realize that your only source for this claim is an article that only mentions Waymo twice: once to say that Waymo had no comment, and once to blatantly lie about the remote operators being some kind of a shocking revelation rather than something they'd been open about for years.

I'm not stupid. I know that there isn't a steering wheel in a building somewhere with a camera feed to a Waymo. The Waymo cars are autonomously driving a lot of the time, in the sense of the car is being steered and going places using computers alone. "Drive the cars" and "real time" are words with specific meanings.

This isn't complicated though. The car phones home for many reasons to have a human being make a decision, using whatever non-steering wheel interface, but an interface nonetheless. That is not autonomous driving. The Waymo is somewhere between a human driver and a people mover at SFO.

It is certainly a scientific triumph that the car can distill the decisions or whatever. We don't know what kind of decisions humans are being asked to make or how frequently. We can make some metrics, like how many people per vehicle or whatever, but I'm not an expert. I'm not going to be able to fart out a metric. I don't really trust a company that needs a bajillion dollars in capital to achieve its goals on its metrics, but of course, I would invest in Waymo - I would invest in all the self driving car companies, because if that's my job and I like making money, that's the best strategy!

So many questions that people can pose, many metrics, they do not get to the core of the meaning of autonomous driving. One of the strongest analogies I've heard is that someone was comparing Waymo's remote driving to Google Maps. Here's the thing - would you be as excited about Google Maps as a technology if there were a human being planning the journeys and sending them to you? Very different science.

I'm not sure why this is so controversial. I am really excited about Waymo and autonomous vehicles. It's more that the reality is closer to tourist attraction than triumph of science.

> the vehicles do not depend on remote operators to avoid crashing or hurting people

Then why do they have any remote operators at all? Don't tell me, to resolve rare problems or whatever, or other speculation. I mean strategically or intellectually, surely, the simple answer is that the cars are not capable of day to day navigation using only computer-made decisions 100% of the time. That isn't controversial. We don't have visibility into specifically what kinds of decisions humans are making, so you shouldn't make such strong absolute statements, but it stands to reason that considering how essential everyone in autonomous vehicles is saying human-in-the-loop operations are, the purpose is pretty important. I would assume that an important purpose is safety! This isn't complicated!

Waymo could clear this all up in an afternoon. Let a journalist visit their remote operations center, and show them a screenshot of the interface. Zoox did! It doesn't take a genius to understand that the illusion and excitement of autonomous driving is so important to their perception of being ahead, Waymo isn't going to do that.

I think the reality is that their remote operations are better than everyone else's, not necessarily the autonomous parts of their driving, and that's why they're operating a taxi service and Cruise isn't anymore.

Maybe the secret to all of this is very effective remote operations. That would also be a really big deal.

> Then why do they have any remote operators at all? Don't tell me, to resolve rare problems or whatever, or other speculation.

I mean, I don't know for sure what exact tasks they do and what exact capabilities they have. If I did know for sure, I wouldn't tell. But given you're doing nothing but speculating, demanding me to not speculate seems unreasonable.

So, let's speculate, but still be more concrete than "resolve rare problems". Let's say that a Waymo can't plot a path it believes is safe, for whatever reason. There could be hundreds of different reasons for that. Maybe it doesn't think there's enough room to get through somewhere. Maybe it can't identify an object. Maybe a sensor stopped returning data. Maybe it's surrounded by an angry mob of luddites looking to torch the car. Maybe the passenger isn't leaving the car at the end of the trip, because they're black-out drunk.

The car can't proceed on its own in these cases. If moving, it'll stop safely, and wait for the human operator to resolve the situation. Maybe they'll annotate the map, or give the car a hint on a possible route, or tell the car to hang tight and it'll be picked up by a service crew (while they order the passenger a replacement car), or route the car with the uncooperative passenger to a {hub,hospital,police station}. In none of these cases is the alternative to a remote operator "to crash or harm people", which you claimed. It's that the car won't move.

The reason the car will stop when it needs help is that a remote human simply can't resolve a hazard in time. Communications aren't reliable enough, the latency is too high, and it's unlikely that a remote operator would have enough context to make a safety critical decision in a split second.

If you knew from the start the cars are not being driven remotely, why claim there's a "remote driver"? If you knew this wasn't realtime remote driving, why claim the remote operation is safety critical?

> I'm not sure why this is so controversial.

Well, you're making an extraordinary statement and providing no evidence for it. Like, literally your only source was about a different company. And when called out on it, you move the goal posts, or pretend that words mean what you want them to mean. That kind of thing is catnip to internet forum posters.

What's your evidence that it would crash without the remote operation, or that it's more than 1.0 people?

None of your links support your claim that "the vehicles are essentially driven remotely". They say that remote operators in rare cases need to provide guidance:

> the technician can send the car a new route to follow around the construction zone

Recommended reading for a bit of insight into the mechanics of the remote operations. E.g:

"Fleet response and the Waymo Driver primarily communicate through questions and answers. For example, suppose a Waymo AV approaches a construction site with an atypical cone configuration indicating a lane shift or close. In that case, the Waymo Driver might contact a fleet response agent to confirm which lane the cones intend to close."

Any source on the "most waymos are remotely driven by a human" claim?

Please, don't. Let's not normalize yet another corporate attempt to privatize urban mobility: https://youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

Urban mobility means very little when your streets aren't safe. I'm paraphrasing a poor translation, but as a Central American leader recently said:

>Some say that we have imprisoned thousands, but the reality is that we have freed millions.

Waymo is very much like this. It inconveniences a few people, but it also saves a lot more from accidents, or even worse.

Pushing for autonomous vehicles will lead to a local maxima which is worse, more expensive, and less universal than solutions that already exist and have been deployed in every developed country that is not increasingly car dependent.

It's a sisyphean effort to build rail in the US, and an even bigger one to drag american suburb dwellers into an urbanist future. Developing autonomous vehicles good enough for 90% of trips is probably cheaper than building rail, the total amount invested into waymo so far (11.1B) will build you about 4 miles of subway in manhattan [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

You are arguing based on sunk costs, and even if rail was not an alternative, the US could be investing in other modes of transport: light rail (trams), buses and electric bikes.

Also, you are not accounting for externalities. Get the suburbanites to pay for all the extra costs they incur on the roads, power/water/waste distribution, healthcare costs incurred by air and environmental pollution from all the cement for roads and parking lots... Quickly they will change their tune and will be willing to become "city dwellers".

Whoever makes suburbanites pay for externalities will lose an election unfortunately, stupid ass myopic voters will just see the sticker price and thumb their noses at urbanists

Light rail has all the disadvantages of a bus and all the disadvantages of a train, if you’re gonna build rail you might as well spend a bit extra to build elevated, you’re gonna have to fight knuckle draggers in court anyways

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I went on Eurostar recently, the experience was quite alarming. The food was terrible, and the tickets very overpriced. The London underground and rail system had many different kinds of weirdos, speaking in strange tongues that would make even the most liberal person in SF blush.

The only exception to this was Japan's transit system. But even then, a bunch of fellow Americans were essentially chimping out, playing music at high volume and screaming obnoxiously. I have to say that I was pretty ashamed of being American that day.

I have mixed feelings on that video. The general bit-piece feel on self driving is not really deserved, IMO, and seems to be against self driving for the sake of it.

I think self driving will be a massive, massive boost to human productivity as it gets better, but we shouldn't use it as an excuse not to continue pursuing other means of transport. It doesn't really fix any of the scaling problems with car transport regardless.

> It doesn't really fix any of the scaling problems with car transport regardless.

But the investors are not saying that, and they won't be around when everyone else gets stuck with the bill in the future.

The key point of the video is less about AV itself, but the idea of betting on car-centric infrastructure. Did you see the part where Jason talks about the municipalities justifying cuts to investments in public transit because "people can just go ahead and take a uber anyway?"

I agree with you - but slippery slope fallacy does not justify ignoring an innovative technology.

Municipalities using it as an excuse to malinvest seems like a bit of a red herring to me - how many places actually did that? And honestly in some low-population towns it might well be the most sensible solution.

Any large city though needs alternatives, and the fact that cars are kinda crap at mass transportation still isn't something that has hit most US cities even without self driving cars. They plow billions into expensive, inefficient highway infrastructure anyway.

> And honestly in some low-population towns it might well be the most sensible solution.

That is reversing the logic a bit. The reason that low-population towns don't get to develop their own robust economy is very correlated to its lack of in public transit and fast connections to larger centers.

Politicians in the US keep talking about high speed rail and crazy projects, but a (relatively) easier to way to revitalize flyover states would be if they had "regular" passenger rail to connect with each other. Each station would become an opportunity to develop a local economic center, and each center that starts to grow would mean an opportunity for thousands of people to leave the big expensive coastal cities.

I was in SF back in May, but didn't manage to get through the waitlist :(

It was so cool to see them diving around.

Interestingly, when I showed the clips to some of my senior family members, they didn't seem interested at all. I think they couldn't comprehend what was going on, even after I explained.

Their (several independent trials) reaction was similar to showing them some AI-generated image of something which clearly can't exist. It was so absurd that it was just filtered out with a comment "yeah, yeah - nice car".

Every quantum leap in technology looks that way. It's so unbelievable/magic that people can't even comprehend it.

> Right now it's the most exciting tourist attraction in San Francisco

Right now those robocars are widely and openly hated by many people who live in San Francisco

People who live in SF hate everything though.

Some of them pretty much do, and they are certainly vocal about it!

This is certainly true, but doesn't mean that they aren't hugely popular [1]. We (me with young children) used to call out "Driverless Car" whenever we'd see one, but it is less interesting when you may see 15 over the course of a 2.5 mile, 15 minute drive.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1gi8cyf/wa...

We just shout "Whammo!" but also enjoy them.

That's pretty common for popular tourist attractions generally.

They are also widely and openly loved by many people who live in San Francisco.

I bet if you did polling the vast majority of people would either like them or be ambivalent.

Source?

the comments in this thread that agree. to start.

I will definitely try it out. Long term however I feel uneasy about actively undermining the income opportunities for so many people.

That's an interesting tradeoff to make. So try it once and swear it off afterwards for ideological purposes? I already feel myself creating a bit of a conversational rage trap here though, so apologies in advance.

I certainly understand the sentiment, but can you think of historical examples where technology, which oftentimes in history has undermined income opportunities for people, has not been adopted for that reason? I guess I'm really asking whether there has ever been a successful effort to stop the adoption of tech that undermines human labor/income opportunity.

We're certainly in the thick of it right now. Recent high profile ones: LLMs, port automation, other types of AI for media production, I'm sure the list goes on and on.

The reason I'm asking is not to advocate for technology, but rather to understand if there have been successful efforts in the past to stifle tech. If there haven't been noteworthy ones, then my gut says we ought to be focused on how to get those people to not be left behind (so so incredibly difficult) rather than preserving something solely for the sake of people making money off of it. Like I said, so easy to say, but incredibly difficult to achieve in practice. Not sure there are great examples of people not being left behind.

undermining the income opportunities for so many people.

Don't worry. Once the novelty has worn off, the cost will probably be on par with Uber and Lyft with real human drivers --- if not higher.

The acquisition, maintenance and supervision costs for the self driving vehicles will probably consume any difference in cost.

A lot of people are assuming that replacing cars driven by minimum wage/sub-minimum wage drivers with high tech robotaxis will make this sort of transportation almost too cheap to meter. Long-term there's presumably some advantage espeically as costs drop to the level where an autonomous car is just a car.

I'm not sure there's ever this magical transition where a car you use a few times a day (and is specific to your needs) is ever replaced by an on-demand service to a significantly greater degree than today.

They are the same price in SF, but you never have to figure out how much to tip the waymo.

This is really a valid concern. We talk about stable wages for Uber and meal delivery drivers here in Seattle, and when business goes down as a result of policies that pay drivers more but cost users more, we say that's just a society cost (don't use the service if you can't pay the 20% tip!). But if Waymo ever moved in here, I'm sure there would be a bunch of people on the far left crying bloody murder since it upends their whole feedback loop.

The quality of app drivers in LA is wanting. I’ve been proselytized, informed of imminent apocalyptic civil wars, asked if I know any guys who want to buy copper in bulk. And how can I forget the driver asleep at the wheel of a Tesla with regenerative braking on max, with each doze into slumberland jolting the whole carriage into alert with a smart ping of the battery charging, all the long way from downtown to the airport? I don’t care if it’s double the price and I occasionally get stuck behind an errant traffic cone for an hour, I will gladly take Waymo.

yeah - the killer app is you can bring your own music

The Waymo integration is weird and through a different app, and not just "Bluetooth from my phone".

Your writing style is very reminiscent of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. I'm a fan.

Here's the detailed area coverage map for LA: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119#LA

Assuming increasing number of waymo cars for the next four years, I wonder how this is going to affect the so called "Car-Free LA" goal for the 2028 olympics. Maybe it'll just be a tweak in a marketing of what it means to be "car free."

> As of August 2024, Waymo's fleet is under 1,000 vehicles

> Los Angeles County there are 7.67M registered automobiles and trucks

what are you even talking about

They mean a car-free Olympic games, not an entirely car-free Los Angeles.

If there's a plan for the Olympics to be car-free then its success or failure is surely unrelated to the size of the (presumably tiny) fraction of cars which are self-driving by that time, though?

In other words, if people are reliant on cars for transport for the Olympics then whether they're Uber / taxi / Waymo doesn't really make a difference.

Its failure is virtually guaranteed because the effort is being run by the city of Los Angeles. They started working on it 7 years ago and have done almost literally nothing. They haven't even completed all of the environmental impact statements. All actual indicators are going the wrong way: bus ridership is down, service hours are down, capital and operating expenses are way, way up, much of the capital is being spent on freeway carpool lanes, widening, ramp widening, and other car junk, and consequently car vehicle miles traveled are way up.

This hasn't been my experience at all. LA Metro has opened a ton of new rail stations and turned on a ton of new bus routes. The Aviation/Century station just opened and the LAX Transit Center is slated to open some time between now and Jan 2025 which will cleanly connect the C and K lines and offer a quick connection from LAX to the Metro. The Metro ambassadors and increased police presence has definitely made the Metro feel a lot safer. Metro hit record ridership numbers with the Dodgers game/parade the previous week.

Ridership decreased across pretty much every transit system post COVID. Metro is bouncing back to pre-COVID levels. I strongly prefer using Metro when I'm downtown because it's just so much convenient than dealing with the hellish congestion. Waymos might make the drive more comfortable but it won't stop you from sitting in the car at 10 mph because of traffic. I agree that Metro has a long way to go the further you get from DTLA or Santa Monica, but I think the trajectory it's on is great.

I doubt there's ever going to be a big bang moment where self driving just works everywhere. Instead it's going to be a slow rollout of self driving taxi's in increasingly different environments.

Depends on if Tesla succeeds or not. I'm betting they will.

It still won't be a big bang moment. There might be a moment you can go hands off on highways, and a moment you can go hands off in urban environments. But it's still going to be gradual overall.

I've been a bit surprised that no one (well GM was mildly pushing in this direction at one point) has really gone after autonomous driving on selected highways within some weather parameters. I know urbanites get all worked up about robotaxis but a system that lets me chill for the next 100 miles of highway driving seems far more interesting if it's reliable/safe.

Highways is this weird thing where building the L2/L3 capability is comparatively easy (Which is why Tesla autopilot has been halfway decent for a long time now, and BMW have a true L3 system in restricted areas where you can take eyes off the road), but L4 is really hard because a true L4 system has to always be safe even if the driver doesn't take over. You could be tens of miles between highway exits, and just stopping on a highway isn't exactly safe by default. An L4 system therefore needs to handle anything between its current position and the next exit which massively ramps up the number of possible situations it needs to be able to handle compared to the L2/L3 equivalent.

L4 in an urban environment is weirdly feasible by comparison, even though we still don't have examples of extremely good L2/L3 systems yet (there's far more complexity by default compared to highways: lights, pedestrians, complex lane decisions, more visual noise, higher average relative speeds) we already have these L4 Taxis being rolled out. The reason is that if a driver doesn't take over it's much easier to find a "safe" place to stop. Apart from getting stuck in the middle of a junction, you can feasibly park up anywhere that has speeds <=40mph.

My understanding is that Tesla's approach is to not require hyper-detailed maps. So far it doesn't work well enough, but if they do manage to get it working, then I think it will actually be a "boom, suddenly it works everywhere" moment. Waymo One, by contrast, requires extremely detailed maps of the service area, which is why they can only slowly roll it out place by place.

It's not about maps, it's about operational design domain.

The requirements for a self-driving vehicle on highways is very different from urban and and very different from sub-urban. Multiply that with how different countries and cities have very different looking roads, e.g. narrow windy roads in London vs wide straight roads in Phoenix.

I agree it's not going to be an location-by-location rollout (other than for regulatory reasons). But I do think Tesla will find that their product "just works" in some places, and doesn't work at all in others - at least for a time. I don't think Tesla would sit on their hands and say "it's not ready yet" until they'd cracked everything. If it's safe to take a nap on Highways and not safe in an urban area then I think they'll just start selling that.

Is Tesla a serious competitor in this space? I know they've made a lot of noise about self-driving cars, but that all seems to be hype generated to sell more human-driven cars. Maybe I'm off base here. I don't really follow Tesla closely.

Tesla's announced Cybercab literally can't be driven by humans, it has no steering wheel/yoke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Cybercab

From your link, the Cybercab is a concept with an unknown release date using technology wasn't even demo-able during the reveal. This seems more in line with my comment about generating hype rather than a convincing show of capability. Even if they do release it, which would be cool, wouldn't it be like a decade behind Waymo at that point?

No, Tesla has let select users run full self-driving betas for years, it's a very capable system now.

Here's a good and relatively recent (3 months old) video about how its current capacities:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qY51q2Zifc

If you want to see how the latest beta drives, it's version 12.5.6: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tesla+12.5.6 .

It's still far from ready to release, but it is also improving very quickly - far from solely hype. They have the most impressive non-geolocked self-driving system as far as I'm aware.

It depends on what you mean by competitor. afaik Mercedez sells a self-driven level 3 autonomous car where they even insure the driver/car, but it's pretty expensive. Tesla has the numbers, but not a single car that can do as much as the Mercedez. Tesla promises they can just push an update an everybody gets a self-driving car, but they've been saying that for... 7 years maybe?

I can't suppress the strong feeling that they will, not by being technologically mature, but by easing a lot of regulations that are restraining them now.

Especially with Tesla's Ceo soon to be a member of the government.

Just like cars companies made jaywalking illegal or bought public transport companies to close them.

Yes. I expect that self-driving Tesla accidents will be rapidly suppressed.

Absolutely. Every country, state, city, county can enact their own regulations as they see fit. This is Uber rollout on steroids, imo. There are some many hurdles to making this happen even if the tech exists.

The Waymo-Tesla duality is so fun.

Tesla FSD already works everywhere, even on unpaved roads. It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo.

Waymo works very well, just not in as many places as Tesla.

You might bet on Waymo because they have a fully working product already, but I’m betting on Tesla because of the vast amount of training data they are collecting. There’s a bitter lesson here.

I’m betting on waymo because they use lidar

Well and because they actually have real self driving cars without a safety driver. Tesla doesn't have that and only has demoed it in very specific scenarios.

It's not that black-and-white.

And those demos are VERY old at this point.

I own a Tesla, though I don't own FSD, but this year, Tesla has given all cars a trial of FSD on two occasions. It works remarkably well. I backed out of my driveway, then enabled FSD and it drove all the way across Portland to a friend's place with zero intervention. It was about a 15 mile, 30 minute drive.

It navigated neighborhood roads without markings and tons of cars parked on the curb. It got onto the freeway and navigated, including changing lanes to overtake slow traffic. Once I got to their place, I was able to tell it to automatically parallel park on the curb.

As far as I'm concerned, Tesla has fulfilled their promise of full self driving. The "supervised" requirement is basically just being used as a legal loophole to avoid liability if it fails.

> The "supervised" requirement is basically just being used as a legal loophole to avoid liability if it fails.

"If it fails" - so it is supervised for a reason then. It makes sense because FSD has an intervention rate in the low double digits according to community trackers like https://teslafsdtracker.com.

I think I'd only consider the promise met if they take the liability

Waymo vs Tesla definitely smells like bitter lesson to me yes, 100%. With Waymo being on the bitter side, to be clear. Future will tell if the intuition is right on this one

Well, one thing is that many of us rarely take taxis. (Aside from reserved private cars to the airport now and then.) I'm unconvinced that self-driving changes the equation enough for most of us. I do have a trip coming up that 50% cheaper Uber might lead me to not rent a car but that's rare.

Outside the US the situation is quite different. But I don't see Waymo testing outside the US, not even trying, so there.

Car ownership is pretty high in a lot of places. It's still pretty much central urban--lower ownership, harder to re-find a parking spot--vs. everywhere else. Taxis may be more common in some places but there are still a lot of privately owned cars and taking taxis or having drivers is really not the norm in most places.

Nevertheless the comment I was answering to was about renting a car instead of taking a cab or the public transport.

FWIW, Waymo has more cameras than a Tesla. Both companies are removing sensors over time. In some ways removing sensors is easier to prove out with real-life data than adding them. I think it is going to be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Tesla added back the radar and improved the cameras in HW4. My guess is that ultimately they'll converge to a similarly capable sensor/compute suite with Tesla improving theirs and Waymo paring down.

But doesn't Waymo have the better hardware/sensors?

I’m not sure about computing hardware, but Waymo absolutely has better sensors, yes.

But it isn’t obvious to me that better sensors outperform better data.

Isn't Waymo operating an autonomous taxi service for 100k trips per week an object example of outperformance?

Shipping working product should count!

It definitely counts! I also didn’t realize the trip count was so high, that is very impressive.

The diversity of geography may be critical, though. You can only drive the Embarcadero so many times before your loss bottoms out.

It looks similar to a cable/fiber rollout where they have to onboard each region individually. I know they are currently doing this in the Atlanta metro.

Like cable/fiber, once they have good models of the business and what it costs to roll out, they have the freedom to accelerate and do regions in parallel. If the business works, I would expect them to scale the pace of rollout.

> 100k trips per week

Now 150k trips per week (things are moving fast)

https://x.com/Waymo/status/1851365483972538407

Waymo has much better data than Tesla. It is just the coverage of that data that is different.

This is the root of the misunderstanding, I think. You’re begging the question.

More data does not necessarily mean better data. You can collect many more individual driver experiences, but if they do not have sufficient resolution in the necessary dimensions, they may never provide “better data.” Similarly, even if the magic data is hidden somewhere in there, if the model cannot practically extract the insight because of their sizes/disorganization vs the computational/storage capacity, this too would mean they are not better data.

Of course you can make the argument that some of the sensors are unnecessary, but when one fleet has had millions of vehicles for years and isn’t working, and one started with dozens, has recently grown to one thousand vehicles, and is working, the evidence is not in support of the argument.

Waymo was able to do this with less miles. How much data does Tesla really need at this point? Assume you have all the data in the world that you could ever possibly want. How much of that can you really compress into a car for real FSD?

Tesla was supposed to have what they needed when they released the Model 3. Then they had to upgrade the cameras and CPU which meant they had to re train. Then they re-wrote, so again retrain. Now it's new cameras and compute again. Cycle repeats.

How over-fitted are their models to the cameras? I'd expect a layered architecture where a sensor layer does object-recognition and classification and then hands over this representation of the world to a higher-level planning model. You should have to retrain the whole stack for camera revisions - hell that's how it would work across car models with their different camera angles.

> Tesla FSD already works everywhere, even on unpaved roads. It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo.

I would not bet on Tesla's FSD other than on highways. Same as many of the Tesla FSD owners I know.

I think I dislike it more on the highway than in the city, and I really dislike it around traffic lights. The highway lane change decisions are awful.

Maybe the end-to-end NN version is better, though. I haven't been able to try it (hw3).

Indeed, it was not very long ago that FSD would happily take a straight line through a roundabout, lanes or "skirts" be damned, essentially treating it as a standard intersection.

so tesla works everywhere except where it doesn't work?

No, the duality is:

Waymo works any time, except where it doesn’t.

Tesla works any where, except when it doesn’t.

There are some "where" issues with Tesla too. I have an intersection where it consistently can't tell that its view is obstructed. It'll just yolo into the intersection then pause (after pulling out into the lane) when it realizes that it wasn't actually able to see. Its consistent behavior, and seems to be a flaw with obstruction detection.

I might argue that every traffic light is sort of a where too. Mystery meat yellow light handling is scarily bad.

I don't understand the "bitter lesson" reference here. The bitter lesson is that general methods of computation are more effective. How is one of the two not using general methods?

My understanding is that Waymo is applying specialized centimeter-scale mapping and lidar to achieve superior results.

In contrast, Tesla is using dumb cameras and just dumping boatloads of data into their model. It’s a more general solution. Maybe the reference doesn’t fit perfectly - the model architecture is likely similar under the hood - but there’s some analogy there.

I think you need to update your understanding.

Just saying they have better results because of mapping and lidar is incredibly reductive. They have an extremely sophisticated AI/ML stack and simulators.

Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wGhKBjH_U&t=2135s

My definition of "works" includes the fact that a self-driving car will never drive into a parked fire truck, or many other things i've seen tesla FSD do.

One challenge for Tesla and Waymo has been the piecemeal permitting process. Even though California gave Waymo a statewide permit they have still needed to work through various cities/counties for permits. I imagine one goal of Musk's is to make that all go away sometime next year. I'm not making a comment on whether I agree that is a good idea. Just speculating.

Do you think it’s time for a specific federal regulation?

FSD and Waymo are completely different products. FSD isn't even autonomous, as the user manual reminds you:

    Always remember that Full Self-Driving (Supervised) (also known as Autosteer on City Streets) does not make Model Y autonomous and requires a fully attentive driver who is ready to take immediate action at all times.

> the vast amount of training data they are collecting

They keep pushing this point. And they do appear to be collecting an absolute firehose of data from the millions of vehicles they have on the road. By comparison, Waymo collects a lot less data from many fewer vehicles.

Which leads to some tough questions about Tesla's tech. If they have (conservatively) 10x the training data that Waymo has, why can't their product perform as well as Waymo? Do they need 100x? 1,000x? 10,000x?

Assuming they were at parity with Waymo today, this would suggest that their AI is only at best 10% as effective as Waymo's, and possibly more like 1% or 0.1% or whatever. But since they can't achieve parity, it's not even possible to bound it.

It's entirely possible that their current stack cannot solve the problem of autonomous driving any more than the expert systems of the 60s could do speech translation.

I haven't heard a compelling argument as to why a system that is at best 10% as effective would ever be expected to be the leader.

Data isn’t as useful here as in other domains, since when you change the car’s behavior even a tiny bit, a lot of the timeseries is invalidated. It’s not evergreen, and it can be quite subjective what it means to “pass” a scenario that one previously failed.

Also, Tesla collects data from its fleet, but that data’s fidelity is likely quite limited compared to other companies, because of bandwidth if nothing else. Waymo can easily store every lidar point cloud of every frame of driving.

Data quality is important, too.

> It just doesn’t work as well as Waymo.

I hope for the best for Tesla, but they are many years behind Waymo. The world definitely needs a second working self-driving system! Right now comparing Tesla and Waymo is nonsensical. Once you can sit in the backseat of a Tesla while it drives there might be some worthy comparisons to be made.

> I’m betting on Tesla

I'll take that bet...

I predict the Chinese, in a decade, will have the first FSD

Tesla is miles behind

>I predict the Chinese, in a decade, will have the first FSD

I'll take that bet any day. China and innovation don't go hand in hand.

Didi's testing self driving taxis but before I take the bet and tell you that we should decide on the goal posts.

Uhm, we already have FSDs, both the USA and China, just not the Tesla FSD. China is running auto taxis in a few limited areas with full setups that rely on LIDAR, and I hear they are pretty good.

Waymo works in 4 cities as a fully autonomous vehicle.

Tesla works nowhere as a fully autonomous vehicle.

If training data is such an edge for Tesla, how is it that Waymo works so much better than FSD with only 1/1000th the data?

I also don't see any evidence that Waymo can't work anywhere. They recently expanded to Austin, and it seems that it immediately drives better than FSD.

Tesla FSD will never catch up to Waymo until they switch to LIDAR and have human assistance when the vehicle gets into complicated scenarios such as emergency vehicles blocking the road and redirecting traffic.

I'm betting on Tesla not for the technology, but because President Quid Pro Bro is probably going to issue an Executive Order that turns every Tesla company into a federally blessed monopoly.

Training data is trivial to collect. Betting on Tesla because they have more training data than Waymo is like betting on Roscosmos because they have more employees than SpaceX.

I'm not going to get excited until this can drive in Boston/Cambridge. If it can navigate that nightmare (and not kill any cyclists) I'll be impressed with what self-driving cars can do. Bonus points if they can work in snow when sightlines are obscured.

is boston that much crazier then san francisco? ignoring snow for now. I hate driving in SF

Depends on the location. I don't like driving in SF especially but there are some areas of Boston that are pretty crazy if you're not used to them and don't intuitively know when to get over into some lane and aren't used to driving pretty aggressively at times.

It's worth keeping in mind that autonomous vehicles find different things challenging than humans do. Weird road shapes and knowing how to route into some lane is pretty straightforward with map data. It's the "normal" parts of driving like predicting other road users that are more difficult.

Totally fair. Things I might find challenging as a human unfamiliar with a given location (though GPS tends to help a lot) are probably different from an autonomous vehicle dealing with a lot of borderline crazy behavior by other cars, cyclists, and pedestrians darting out into traffic. A person also can just process so many inputs at once so you get into situations that are challenging in part because so much is going on.

Boston doesn't have a grid system, lanes aren't marked, really weird and complex intersections, etc.

This intersection is a local favorite, a backed-up lane off the highway onto a half-rotary that splits off into multiple directions: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3560154,-71.1859078,17.52z?e...

That's relatively easy for a robot, though. It only has to learn the rules once.

What's hard for a robot is dealing with crazy unpredictable people, and while Boston has its share of those, I think SF is worse.

I don't know. Boston and New York may have a culture of taking whatever right of way you think you can get away with. The West Coast historically at least was more known for enforcing jaywalking though given the current state of SF I'm not sure that's still true. Boston/Cambridge also has a huge influx of students every year, many of which are pretty clueless about navigating an urban environment safely.

If you think careless/bold Harvard students are road hazards, wait until you meet the psychotic addicts of the Tenderloin.

I admit I probably know to not drive through SF on certain routes.

They have been navigating the SF Tenderloin for over a year. Entire streets are a crosswalk. Most biologic drivers would barely function there. But I do wonder how lidar/visual integration works in snow.

Barely function? C’mon. Just let the pedestrian pass and keep driving. Not that hard.

Boston? Pfft. I'm not going to get excited until this can drive in rural Turkmenistan. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35834271).

In places that have real winters, there are going to be significant blocks of time where self-driving will never work unless real synthetic intelligence is reached.

Way too much of this is developed in places that... don't have weather.

Waymo is doing winter testing in Buffalo, NY.

When you stomp on the brakes in a reasonably new car that's skidding on ice and it makes a loud thunking noise, what is that, and what's controlling that system?

ABS, "anti-lock brake system"

It's been standard in cars for a long time. It's a really pretty simple system that ensures that your wheels aren't just completely stopped while you're braking hard on slick services. When the wheel's are completely stopped there's less friction than when they're still rolling near the speed of the road. Also when your wheels are locked steering is nearly impossible, but you do have directional control while they're still rolling.

Some of the systems are more advanced than others, but the basic version just compares the speed of the wheels to each other.

And this ay-bee-ess system is able to control the car and bring a car to a stop on snow and ice in way shorter a distance a human is able to, to the point that new drivers are taught to stomp on the brakes and let the computer control the brakes because it's able to do it better than an ordinary human; this system is controlled by computers? But then somehow driving on snow is going to be this total show stopper that is just utterly insurmountable gotcha for computers driving cars? Nevermind that crawl, walk, and then run/go out in the snow is a totally reasonable way to deliver a product, and that even if it never works in the snow, there's enough of the global that doesn't get snow (no thanks to global warming) that it's still a worthwhile investment, even if only to prevent drunk drivers from choosing to driving drunk during the summer months.

Driving on snow is just an exercise in modeling friction in a computer and which way the car will go given available sensor input. Self driving cars don't innately have a concept of friction the same way a human with feet does, and they're able to drive on static asphalt, and also snow, with some training. Human drivers should practice driving in the snow in a parking lot to understand how the car slips and slides and grips operates under those conditions before taking to the road. (It's also fun!)

I'm sure it'll take a lo of doing to winterize the sensor packages and for the software to work well enough to be reliable when there's just snow on the ground that hasn't been plowed recently, nevermind when it's actively snowing. But personally I think it's a when and not if as to whether or not self driving taxis will ever hit New England. (No guess as to a specific timeframe though, lol.)

AV companies test in winter conditions. Waymo had NYC and Buffalo deployments years ago, and they do winter testing in Tahoe and Michigan. This winter they'll do the upper peninsula, Detroit and Tahoe again.

I'm not sure what you consider "real" weather, but those are all places I think qualify by any reasonable definition.

Of course. We're still there with the horses -> cars transition. There are still plenty of places that horses can get to but cars can't.

And similarly: the transition will also go in the other direction. We'll start making roads and navigation easier for self-driving cars and prioritize the destinations we care about the most. At the tail end of the transition, there will still be areas with ridiculous intersections and confusing rules that only humans can do. We just won't care about them as much by then because everything we do care about is reachable by self-driving cars.

Roads are already easy to drive. We already have signs on roads directing people to the most prioritized destinations. And now we have navigation apps that can even provide turn-by-turn and lane-by-lane directions. The issue is that most people simply ignore traffic rules when it is convenient to do so.

We didn't redesign roads and navigation for taxis or rideshares, and we're not going to do that for self-driving cars either.

We absolutely do redesign roads when the existing design becomes suboptimal as indicated by an increased number of accidents or driver complaints. And we do sometimes have lanes specifically for buses / taxis, too.

We already do this stuff, and we won't need to rebuild 99% of roads. It's the "less than 1%" that are already tricky for normal humans that might need a rework. Or self-driving cars will just take suboptimal routes, if those roads / intersections aren't the only ways to important destinations.

This depends on where you are.

Where I live in Seattle, they have rolled out significantly more 5-30 minute loading only zones on former street parking to deal with the uptick in rideshares and food/parcel deliveries, because the alternative is a bunch of illegal double parking.

> ridiculous intersections and confusing rules that only humans can do

LLMs are already better at this than humans:

https://x.com/petergyang/status/1707169696049668472

I think it's actually going to be the other way around. We'll build infrastructure exclusive to AVs where the rules are too complicated for humans, but allow AV traffic to move more efficiently. For example, an AV shouldn't need to stop and wait at a red light if there's no traffic to wait for.

In most cities there is simply no physical space to build separate infrastructure for AVs.

The logical conclusion being that we should look elsewhere for AVs to take off?

To be fair, you also don't have to stop at a traffic light if there's no traffic to wait for if you don't want to. Just drive across the bridge to Oakland to see it in action.

Slow rollout? Waymo's growth has been insane the past year. Log graph: https://x.com/brianwilt/status/1851366713507344742/photo/1

Good point.

At 2 trips per day for 300M Americans over 7 days, that would put the rideshare takeover at ~4.2Bn. If we extrapolated based on the referenced graph and exponential growth, that would put the takeover at 2029 :)

Its safe to assume that the limiting factors will soon become sourcing of components of the perception and control stacks.

Yeah, I wonder how much money they're pouring into lidar production. Particularly considering that they've partnered with Hyundai, Stellantis, Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Jaguar Land Rover, and Volvo.

And Uber.

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partner...

In terms of geographic area. It's still only open to the public in three places, with Austin on wait-list status.

Looks like Waymo will be the first Alphabet moonshot that will reach 100B valuation in the not too distant future. Just need to hit the most profitable cities and Uber will have to compete at lower prices, while they're a public company. The nest egg will will be kept full as it's the only working autonomous ride solution out there making any money.

I think it's great we finally have self-driving cars, but why the huge valuation? Waymo has the enormous capital cost of owning the cars. Unlike taxi companies they don't push that capital cost to their drivers.

Ginormous market, 10x better product, no competition is currently close.

Plus although they have the capital cost of owning the cars they don't have the COGS of paying the drivers so presumably much higher margin per ride.

You’re right that Tesla’s product is so far ahead that it can’t really be called competition.

I love Tesla, I own the stock, but I don't think they can be considered comparable until they have a live autonomous taxi service that regular people can call from their phones and regularly rave about.

On one hand, Tesla could roll out a Waymo competitor in all the necessary cities in a matter of months if they wanted to. On the other hand, Waymo will cease to exist as soon as Tesla cracks their robotaxi problem.

  I think it's great we finally have self-driving cars, but why the huge valuation? Waymo has the enormous capital cost of owning the cars. Unlike taxi companies they don't push that capital cost to their drivers.

Ultimately, it's still the riders who pay for the drivers and their cars in a traditional taxi company and Uber. The cost of the car doesn't just disappear.

Unfortunately that's not always true. Taxi drivers often work for below minimum wage, or even occasionally below cost.

>but why the huge valuation?

Uber without the expense or problem of a driver.

Well currently Waymo is about double the price of Uber. But yes hopefully one day it will be cheaper.

> But yes hopefully one day it will be cheaper.

I also hope it will be cheaper, but it's definitely worth paying more for Waymo because of the better experience: safer, smoother, quieter, no weird smells, or conversation, etc.

If anything Waymos are much more likely to have weird smells than Ubers since the robot can't smell. Nothing is stopping someone from scrapping some dog doo off their shoe onto the carpet to the pleasure of the next rider.

Unless the weird smells come from the driver. If a customer causes a smell the car will be cleaned and the customer fined. If the driver is smelly - like from sitting in a car all day - there's nothing to be done.

Who can tell who caused the bad smell? If you have a driver they'd know but how will Waymo know which of the 20 or so riders dragged in dog doo, maybe the doggy doo accumulated through the first 10 rides. Who foots the bill then?

The same way as with car shares. You blame the person before the person to report it and have cameras.

but anyone who gets into a Waymo that smells like dogshit can get out, report it, and wait for the next one. Are you describing a real problem or just one you imagine?

In these scenarios you do understand that there will be a non zero number of smelly Waymos, that was my entire point, also until someone reports it you really won't have that smelly Waymo fixed.

They are definitely cleaner right now, but that's probably mostly because only rich people and tourists currently use them. If they ever become cheaper than an Uber I would expect them to become smellier too.

> Well currently Waymo is about double the price of Uber.

This is not accurate in my experience in SF. Most of the time, the price is comparable to UberX and during peak-times, the price is upto 20% higher than UberX.

I spent a week there very recently (like 3 weeks ago) and checked the prices a lot. It was always around 50%-100% higher than Uber. It was never even close to 20% higher.

I took a couple of trips for the novelty value (as someone else mentioned, it's by far the best tourist attraction in SF at the moment!). The experience was really great - very relaxing - but there's no way I'd use it if I just wanted transport. I can see women paying a premium for it out of fear of taxi drivers, but that's not really an issue for me. I would maybe pay a small premium to avoid awkward lack of conversation, and the bad driving of typical taxi drivers, but not 50%!

That wasn't my experience in August, the prices were pretty much at parity whenever I looked.

This post compares prices in LA: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/sU6l51A0XD. It's inline with what I mentioned above.

They could be scaling price with demand similar to Uber. Could be demand for Waymo was higher than demand for Uber at the time you checked.

Right this second, 11 am Tuesday after Veterans day, 2024, a trip to the Palace of Fine Arts would cost me $15 on Waymo, $24 for a wait and save on Lyft, and $17 for an UberX.

Also no pressure to tip with Waymo.

Right this second, 6pm on a Friday night, the Marina, Waymo was $30, Lyft was $25, and Uber was $20.

9pm, Saturday night, Uber and Lyft to Hibernia bank is $12, Waymo is $17.

The losses are currently in the neighborhood of $1B per year. That may or may not reduce... scaling is hard. For every car they add right now, the worse the loss becomes. So I'm a little skeptical on your valuation estimate.

Are they losing money when they add cars in regions they already support? That's more important than the cost of expanding into new areas.

WARNING: never try to take Waymo to the Hollywood Bowl.

Their app lets you book a ride to the entrance... then stops and makes you exiut, in front of a motel, blocking its driveway, a mile from the venue.

There is an invisible "exclusion zone" there that is not marked on maps, and not communicated to you in any way. You just get dumped somewhere other than the displayed destination and there is no ability to "add a stop" or otherwise modify the ride.

Ask me how I know when trying to make a show... or ask the people in the other Waymos we watched pull up as were frantically trying to get a Lyft.

Not sure how long ago you did this, but just opened the app and tried to book one there and it says I can't because it's outside the service area (it shows Hollywood Bowl but in the greyed out "Results outside of service area."

I've taken a Waymo to several large events recently and usually for those it tells you when booking how far from your destination you're actually going to be dropped off or picked up. Maybe a bunch of those folks, including yourself, complained and they fixed this issue for the Bowl.

Well worth to watch 'Not Just Bikes' new video 'How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

It's long, but well worth an hour of your time. He even states in the comments that he set out two years ago to make a positive video about AVs:

    What was most surprising to me was that when I began researching this video (two years ago!) it was going to be about some of the technical challenges that would need to be overcome in order to make self-driving cars a reality, but the conclusion was going to be that ultimately, AVs would be a good thing.

    By the time I was done researching this topic I was absolutely horrified of our future self-driving dystopia.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0&lc=UgzN9fnItjm2b...

The future he illustrates seems mostly plausible, except that it depends on all of the technology functioning flawlessly. I have a hard time believing that streets full of high-speed AVs functioning in perfect synchrony is likely.

However, that doesn't change my general agreement with the conclusions he draws in that video and the rest of his channel.

If this thing can reliably drive in SF and LA it pretty much means they nailed self driving.

We'll see if they ever start operating in Mexico or India.

It's not only because of the chaos but also that maps aren't accurate enough.

Google and Waymo have been working on that problem for a while. And starting a Waymo service area involves letting loose a fleet of them there. You should expect the map quality to improve fast in serviced areas.

Most western drivers would not be able to drive on bzy street in India so that might be a very high bar :)

The Chinese techs have already launched self driving taxis in China. And China traffic can be really chaotic, although I'm not sure if they aren't launched in any old urban areas yet (e.g. not new towns with better roads and less chaotic traffic).

LA and SF in no way encapsulate the whole of global cities. No snow, easily navigable grid systems, wide American lanes, English road signs, best google maps coverage, etc. Once they are operating in Rome, Lahore, Seoul, etc. then I’d be more convinced.

Can't wait for them to move up to Seattle. We're basically San Francisco with slightly easier hills and more rain/occasional ice, so seems like a good candidate.

Yes on Seattle. We also have much more expensive Ubers/Lyfts than SF.

On a recent SF trip except for the airport I used waymo the entire time. About the same price as uber/lyft, cheaper if you tip human drivers.

Very cool to see how fast we went from taxis, to the app based rides to app based self driving cars like this.

After working in silicon valley tech companies for almost 10 years, ive been become really cynical about it all. This is one of the few things that actually seems really cool. I actually looked up to see if their hiring but they don't hire remote.

Waymo followed the rest of the alphabet companies in the back to office drama post-covid. You can still get remote positions if they want you badly enough to grant an exception. Cruise did remote, but they're not the best choice lately. Zoox thinks remote work is a sin of the highest order because they're owned by Amazon.

Since you mentioned them, Zoom started driverless rides (not open to the public) today.

*Zoox

It makes me sad that people get more excited about Waymo than public transit. Our Muni trains are clean, modern, and efficient, and the BART is an infrastructural marvel of sorts. I’d much rather criss-cross the city with light rail than add more expensive Waymos.

There is a /s missing in there. Muni is painfully slow, the entire system including BART dangerous, and the timetable a joke.

It’s just a straight up lie to call the Muni “painfully slow” and “dangerous.” I ride the trains every day to and from the Mission and rarely encounter any issues. Trains come every 5-15m, depending on time of day; not sure where the “joke” is here. To me, the experience is quite comparable to light rail in places like Amsterdam, Brussels, and Melbourne, except that we have a lot less of it.

BART is a bit more grimy but hardly less safe than e.g. the NY Subway.

You are welcome to your preference, paaaaaatttiiiiiieeeeennnnnccccce and experience. I'm truly glad it works for you. I use the system when I have to - it's dangerous often enough and slow enough and unpredictable enough that it's only "when I have to" - usually for self inflicted issues of parking and cost and unpredictability of Uber/Lyft itself. That's the problem with "dangerous often enough" for example: you can't tell before getting on a vehicle whether that will be an exception or the rule and you plan based on the general experience. Which is not good for me.

The timetable joke is because of its uselessness for planning switches or choices from one line to another, all the way to entirely missing vehicles. If you need transfers, you try and use a real-time app and you better be extremely agile with it. Good luck to the rest of us.

What do you mean by “dangerous”? I can’t even recall the last time I encountered some sort of major disturbance on a Muni train. Transfer-wise, the worst case scenario is that you’ll end up waiting 15 minutes for the next train, but it’s pretty unlikely. (And this is something easily solvable with more trains.)

Perhaps most importantly, though, Muni is 10x cheaper than ridesharing as well as far more egalitarian. Paying $10-20 to get anywhere in the city is just setting a pile of money on fire.

> far more egalitarian

I would rather that some don't suffer than everyone suffer equally

Well, I’d rather we invest in infrastructure that can benefit all of us rather than just ferrying the bourgeoisie around. If they see this as “suffering,” then maybe they can just move to Texas?

It is painfully slow. If you have to ride Muni on at grade sections it is a complete joke. I lived for more than 10 years with my front door opening to the T and a job at Embarcadero. Straight shot on the T (this was prior to central subway opening, an event I was waiting for the entire time I lived there). It was so bananas slow and unreliable that I exclusively biked, even when raining, since it was so much faster and I actually could rely on even getting there. I gave up on it entirely pretty quickly. I felt terrible for anyone who couldn't bike who actually had to rely on that garbage system.

God forbid you have to switch lines on your surface street burdened route, good luck.

The last time I risked it and tried to T home from an event (very against my better judgement), some sort of "security incident" happened, causing them to stop and unload the entire train and keep it stopped it there blocking the tracks entirely in that direction for investigation. I walked 30 minutes home. Very fitting final ride capping my decade+ of disappointment with that pathetic excuse for a train.

Muni access was one of the selling points to move where I did, I still get depressed/pissed thinking about how terrible it actually was! There is a tiny corridor served by underground Muni which is functional, but it's such a small fraction of the whole system.

I can run faster than muni metro's at grade sections

I just think the tech is cool, it's not a comment on what is good for the world or public policy.

I can drive to the Exploratorium in 20 mins. The BART ride is 22 mins, but it includes over 15 mins' walk at each end, meaning the total journey time is 2.5x.

This 2.5x to 3x is typical, in my experience.

If I'm on my own, it's faster to cycle than to take public transport.

This is the most appealing feature to me - no tipping.

The end result of self-driving? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

What happens when the car starts making the decisions about where you're headed, or not headed? Oddly, "autonomous" now refers to he machine, not to the human. Palantir just started training Anthropic against secret government data. Isn't it easier to have your cybertaxi drive you to the authorities than for them to have to track you down?

Does google report the quarterly numbers for Waymo separately? It will be interesting to see how these taxi services are producing. Feels like they have finally found a path to monetizing their investments in this space but cannot help but also think it’s a net negative because of the cost of each car

The title is a little bit wrong, they only serve 80 square miles of LA county not all in Los Angeles.

I believe they are saying open to all, as in the general public.

Neither LAX nor the valley (san fernando valley) are covered. Still excited

This is going to be another one of those things where most people underestimate it for a while.

Growth in 2025-2027 will be absolutely incredible! The sharpest part of the exponential growth curve is just ahead.

Can’t wait for them to expand into the Peninsula and South Bay.

Anyone have any insight on how Waymo handles the tight roads? Wonder when it will be coming to the hilly areas of Los Angeles.

I think the problem now is that individual waymos are ok on relatively narrow streets, streets with hills, being cautious about pedestrians and cyclists, etc. The most frequent issues I notice in SF now are around waymos interacting with other waymos. This particularly involves deadlocking when trying to navigate around each other in tight areas. I've seen this with multiple waymos trying to get around a double-parked delivery van, where a waymo trying to go around blocked a waymo in the oncoming lane and they both stopped. I think this is also related to the issue of waymos honking at each other in their own private parking lot because they were getting in each other's way.

That sounds promising! What about when needing to do a dance when there's an oncoming car on a tight street in the hills? Does it find a gap or even backup to let the car by?

Waymos honking at each other is hilarious.

Yes I've been in a Waymo that backed up to let someone pass.

That's epic!

They don't operate yet in the hills around LA, but I trot this example out when talking about Waymo. In LA a lot of the streets in central LA are not marked, have cars parked on both sides and are not wide enough for two cars to drive in opposite directions at the same time (ie they're extremely tight where you have to wait for a car to pass before you can proceed). Waymo has no problem waiting its turn and then going when it's clear. One thing I've noticed, though, is that Waymos have gotten more aggressive in these situations than they used to be (note that they seem to have gotten more bold/aggressive in other circumstances as well). In fact they were so aggressive pulling away from a curb on one of my last rides that I wrote to Waymo support telling them I thought it was too aggressive. Still a very big Waymo fan.

Btw, that sense that they're being more aggressive may be entirely in my head, but I'd bet money that it's true, which begs some questions about our robot overlords adapting their behavior to the behavior of the humans around them. Interesting if true.

Honestly glad to hear they're getting more aggressive. It feels like Waymo's biggest issue currently is the low average speed because of extreme levels of caution.

Ultimately no car will get you to your destination through LA traffic unless it is driven somewhat assertively.

I appreciate the sentiment, but one of the things I originally liked best about Waymo was how serene they would drive. I think you're right, though, it's likely not possible in some cases for it to remain so serene especially because drivers now know they can be a bit more assertive with Waymos and the Waymo will (or use to at least!) back down. Ask me how I know!

edit: spelling

Why do we have self driving cars but someone can't make a completely automated McDonald's?

I think this is against the site guidelines but will try and phrase it so that it's compliant because I'm curious if others have noticed this. Waymo threads seem to always end up on the HN front page, but then the last few ones quickly end up off of it (I assume because of downvotes?). There's so much investment in a company like Tesla where they've hitched their wagon to self-driving cars that my knee-jerk reaction is that folks are downvoting because "good press" for Waymo is not great news for Tesla (at least until Tesla releases a comparably or better-performing robotaxi).

I might also be that I'm in some odd Waymo bubble because I'm impressed with their performance and also incredibly hopeful it will greatly help usher in the era of self-driving vehicles more broadly, which I think is a net positive for humanity (I get it if folks find that thought ridiculous, but just the amount of brain damage (literal and figurative I guess!) we spend driving when we could be doing other things, how cars have been such a driving force for our built environment, etc., etc., etc.).

Posts with more comments than upvotes trigger the HN flamewar detector, and are penalized. This thread is at 300 comments for 200 upvotes.

There's no downvotes for submissions. There's flags, but it'd be quite hard to coordinate a submission to be flagged just enough to get it off the front page but not enough to actually mark it as flagged.

Ah, appreciate the info. I didn't know about the flamewar detector, nor that you couldn't downvote submissions.

Not all. Not us Europeans who come to visit sometimes. :(

What makes you think it doesn't work for Europeans?

"This app isn't available on Google Play in your region"

What if you downloaded from a US wifi network?

It doesn't work. You need to set your App Store or Play Store region to US. The Waymo app itself requires a US credit card for payment, but apparently works if you have a non-US credit card setup in your Apple/Google Pay.

In Phoenix, you can use the Uber or Uber Lite apps per https://www.uber.com/newsroom/waymo-on-uber/

Uber Lite: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ubercab.ub...

Next year you will be able to use this in Austin and Atlanta: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partner...

Uber Lite is also not available, but I'll have to try a Uber next time!

How does waymo prevent homeless sleeping in the cars?

Probably similar to Uber

I appreciate thinking about abuse vectors ahead of time, but that particular one doesn't seem like a super hard thing to deal with? You can't just step into one at will, you need to actually order the car with the phone app and a valid credit card. Most homeless people don't, I would think, have credit cards.

And after doing it once, they'd be banned from ordering another car ever again. If the Waymo detects that the passenger has not left the car, I'd imagine it would first issue annoying notifications about how the trip is over, and eventually call the ops center who would order it to drive back to home base.

You just open the door a bit, park a cone, sleep all day, free cabin. Ops center gives up on the car

The doors are locked and you have to unlock them with the app before you can get in.

They are monitored

If someone manages to break into a vehicle without an active account with payment details on record, it can drive them right to the police (or shelter).

Is it really breaking in, if one person steps out and another just "slides" in.. the door was open.

I suppose that's one argument a public defender may make to a judge when it goes to trial. I don't think the argument would fly though.

Automatically drive to a hub specialized for this or a police station?

But you can easily block the driving? Two cones and in parks in the tenderloin forever?

They would send a human out to deal with it

Waymo cannot recognize threats and drive away from them. Instead it stops indefinitely to let people harass you all they want.

Thieves recognize an easy mark in Waymo cars, paralyzing them. Police dispatch autonomous drones to address the situation. The drones, unable to identify which is the threat, decide to destroy both the people surrounding the car and the car.

Is this not the future you want?

If we are fair, this isn't a problem with Waymo ...

A human driver, especially one that owned the car, can gauge the threat and drive off if they're being carjacked, even if it physically endangers someone outside the car. The autonomous vehicle is timidly not going to run someone over, even if they're threatening the vehicle.

The other thing is the Waymo will just let you off where it thinks is good and not right in front of the address you selected, even if it's a sketchy neighborhood. Still, especially if it's late night, I'd rather send a woman home in a Waymo than a Uber/Lyft, after one of my friends was assaulted by one of their drivers. That's not possible in a Waymo.

I really cannot parse if you're for/against Waymo, lol.

Haha why do I have to be for/against Waymo like it's a sports team and blindly cheer for the local one? It's a technology with good and bad things about it

So that's why a Waymo car cut me off yesterday at an intersection in West Los Angeles. The two streets intersect at a 60 degree angle. Waymo had a Stop sign. I didn't. It just rushed out of the intersection going fast, as if it hadn't seen me.

I refuse to trust my personal safety with an anonymous driver located in a datacenter on the other side of the world

Lucky for you, waymo does not use remote drivers.

Very nice, really hope to see them on mi city eventually and give them a try.

Anyone here has used Waymo already?

My only real concern before boarding one would be not being able to stop and exit vehicle at any time I wanted to, for whatever reason.

Is this something they already address? Like a big red "STOP" button somewhere in the dashboard?

I am pretty sure that this emergency stop button is a regulatory requirement.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/one-star/

Yes, there's a "pullover now" button on the dashboard at all times.

Apparently you can always open the door from inside even if the vehicle is in motion, but I've not tried that myself!

And Muldon from The Jurassic Park softly whispering "I told you! How many times? We needed locking mechanisms on the vehicle doors!"

It freaks out at you if you open the door while it's moving, but it only drives on city streets (for now), so it's not like you have to try it at speed.

The "pullover now" button takes a while to kick in, it doesn't just stop in the middle of traffic so opening the door is sometimes more effective.

This wonderful short story from Terraform is about a self-driving taxi service. It is well worth the read before getting into any self driving taxi service. Basically, it can turn against you, and you're locked inside with no recourse.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/one-star/

(2015); Terraform in this case is vice.com’s “home for future fiction”, in case anyone was wondering.

Very good! Yes indeed, future fiction, which we are sort of living in. Thanks for contributing.

Terraform in this case has nothing to do with the product from Hashicorp, but just saying that would have been less informative.

Thank you for the link to the made up story!

Waymo has had the move crashes of any autonomous driving system so obviously the thing to do is expand their reign of terror. https://www.govtech.com/transportation/how-many-waymo-cruise...

Don't they have a lot more miles than anyone else?

Yeah, number of crashes is absolutely useless as a data point without something like miles driven as a denominator.

Not to mention, even without that, this data is apparently suspect:

> The agency notes that the listed crashes may be higher than the actual number of incidents due to several factors, including multiple sources for the same crash, multiple entities reporting the same crash, and multiple entities reporting the same crash but with varying information.

Miles driven is also a quite useless denominator. Nobody benefits, nobody learns anything when a mid-level ADAS system drives 300 miles down I-5.

I can just imagine the waste involved in trying to game that statistic. Fleets of driverless cars caravaning back and forth across Nevada just to increase the denominator.

I will grant there are better denominators, but I wouldn’t say it’s useless, especially if we could assume we’re comparing similar services to each other (e.g. city rideshares), and particularly when there’s no denominator at all currently provided.

But sure, if we could get data broken out by road type, location, weather conditions, time of day, who’s at fault, etc. then we can obviously build a much more robust comparison.

If that's because they've driven more miles than any other driving system then it's not a very meaningful statistic. Number of crashes per miles driven feels more important as a comparison.

(Also that story uses numbers from August 2023)

How many accidents do they have per mile driven? How many accidents do ride-share drivers have per mile driven?

You must be confusing Waymo with Tesla: https://www.bbntimes.com/technology/tesla-s-autopilot-leads-...

Ah, but that's not actually an autonomous driving system. It might be marketed as one, but from a regulatory perspective it is a driver assistance system.

Tesla has the most fatalities resulting from the use of its advanced driving/self-driving systems. Literally, Tesla has more such fatalities than every other automaker in the world, combined. Based on data through 2023, Tesla's advanced driving/self-driving systems were involved in 40x more crashes resulting in death or serious injury than the next most dangerous advanced driving system (at the time, GM) and more than 100x than the least dangerous advanced driving system (at the time, Toyota).

And the numbers have just gotten worse for Tesla: FSD has been involved in at least 6 fatalities this year, and Autopilot in at least another dozen. Their competitors? Just 1, and that was several years ago.

6 million cars equipped with the ADAS (FAR more than anyone else), so your statement is misleading.

No, the statement is accurate.

To put things in perspective, Toyota and Ford each sold 1.5 million cars with ADAS in the U.S. last year alone (they both sold more than 1.5 million cars in the U.S., but the remainder were the low-end models without ADAS). GM sold 2 million cars in the U.S with ADAS last year, out of more than 2.5+ million cars sold). These numbers don't include vehicles with ADAS sold in other markets.

IOW, three companies alone sold more cars in the U.S. with ADAS in a single year than Tesla has sold globally in its entire lifespan. And yet...Tesla's ADAS is responsible for fatalities than every other automaker in the world combined.

And that's because no other automaker gives its customers unrealistic expectations of what the ADAS will do, so all of their customers use the ADAS systems responsibly.

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