Hacker News Reader

Comment by Rebuff5007 | Hacker News Reader

I'm so curious about how the internal dev teams feeling about all this scaling. Four cities across 3 states -- surely there are differences in road signs, lane markings, emergency procedures, etc. Let alone the sheer volume of data of doing hundreds of thousands of miles ever week!

Massive kudos to them if they are able to do all this without things being aflame on the inside...

View on HN

> Four cities across 3 states

This is actually a scale up to five cities across four states:

> ...which already provides over 150,000 trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin

Which of course only adds to your point!

Actually they Miami would be #6. They are also starting to operate in Atlanta early next year along with Austin. So 6 cities across 5 states.

Sundar Pichai recently claimed Waymo plans to be in 10 cities by the end of 2025.

Only they know for sure where the bottleneck is. How much mapping do they really need before their software can drive it. How cautious are they being? How slowed down by the capital cost of cars and needing to set up maintenance depot's are they? How much is held up by legal approval in each jurisdiction? Knowing Google, the software is rock solid, it's the rest of everything that's taking forever.

My understanding is they have to make extremely detailed maps of where they operate and at great expense, and everything sort of breaks when anything changes. So lots of work indeed!

>everything sort of breaks when anything changes

What is “your understanding” based on?

Waymo doesn't rely on the maps to operate. It just helps with redundancy in case it's unable to see.

And it's just a matter of the cars driving through each of the streets and working with local authorities.

Your understanding is wrong. They work perfectly well when road features change and the cars are able to update maps in real time. See https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

Why does it only operate in such tiny areas?

They don’t have enough cars.

Because the last time a self driving car company "moved fast and broke things", they killed a woman. That's unacceptable. So it's slow and steady to make sure that never happens.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com