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Comment by jfoster | Hacker News Reader

You might not have heard of the biggest one. Apollo Go in China is actually slightly ahead of Waymo in terms of vehicles and miles.

Assuming the Austin robotaxi service continues to go smoothly, I expect Tesla will leapfrog both of them in the next 12 months. Tesla's cost-effective approach (cameras) combined with the fact that they have already scaled vehicle production positions them really well.

Media (and therefore people who trust it too much) will point out places where each of the services goes wrong, but the reality is that likely all of them are already much safer than human drivers if you define "safety" in terms of severe accidents per million miles.

More than a million people die each year from automobile accidents with humans behind the wheel.

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> the reality is that likely all of them are already much safer than human drivers if you define "safety" in terms of severe accidents per million miles.

There's no chance this includes Tesla with their disengagements (equivalent to the driver passing out) and even then it's only true under the restricted set of conditions these systems actually operate at compared to human drivers.

It wouldn't make sense for the robotaxis to ever disengage in the same way that you might've seen in FSD videos.

I'm guessing that they just stop if they ever encounter a situation where they don't know what to do.

Yes but what I was getting at is if the autonomous system is allowed to disengage every time it encounters a "difficult" situation (as Tesla "FSD" does) then its safety record can't be compared to human drivers even in otherwise comparable road conditions.

Human drivers don't get the luxury of disengaging and having a more skilled driver take over when they're struggling. If Tesla FSD drives for 100km before overwhelming glare causes the system to disengage, that'll go on record as "100km driven without accident", but when the human driver is blinded by the same glare and ends up in an accident 5km later, that'll go on record as 1 accident per 5km driven for the human driver.

OK, but if the system avoids an accident by not driving in glare whereas the human doesn't, that is still one accident avoided, isn't it?

> they just stop if they ever encounter a situation where they don’t know what to do.

Oh my god that’s terrifying if true. I can think of many situations when driving when slamming on the breaks is the absolute wrong choice. Tesla is pushing this out way before it’s safe enough to operate in public.

What would be a better option if the system doesn't understand the environment? Can happen in any system, right? There's really only two options:

1. Keep driving in some way

2. Stop

Which one do you think Waymo (or any other system) does when it doesn't understand a situation?

Not justifying it, but there is a reason the person behind is almost always responsible in accidents. You are responsible for maintaining a safe distance in case the person in front of you (for whatever reason) stops or acts erratically.

Apollo Go doesn’t seem to be very safe yet, see https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1hy72y9/ch..., it seems like they still need safety drivers? Watching the video, I don’t know how much if the ride is just being China (chinese taxi drivers on Chinese roads can make you car sick also), but the tech is obviously not where Waymo is regardless.

The video seems biased. What's with calling the car to a location where they weren't happy to access it from, and then acting as though it was a fault of the service? Pretty sure I also spotted a gap in the hedges where a fire hydrant was, so it really felt like an act.

Besides whether the video is biased or not, are we conflating comfort & safety? When a robotaxi jiggles the wheel and makes the car shake, that's clearly terrible for comfort and perhaps brings to mind an inexperienced driver, but that is a personification. Programmers who have ever dealt with debouncing might recognize that it's likely something that could use smoothing to aid with comfort, but not necessarily unsafe.

In any case, Apollo Go is ahead in number of vehicles, cities, rides, and probably also miles. Not that it really matters. Demand is going to lead supply in autonomy for many years to come. These services are not actually going to be in real competition with each other for quite some time.

The video seems pretty honest about their attempts to even get a car in the deep suburbs of Shenzhen, let alone Shenzhen central. And the ride making them sick seems legit, but it does contrast with the many Chinese social media posts saying the service didn't need safety drivers and was comfortable (although, if you watch those videos, they are obviously in the deep suburbs also, so I guess they agree on service area limitations at least).

I was in China (Beijing) a couple of months ago yet didn't have a chance to ride a driverless car there because they were only running them in the deep suburbs (Changping near Lenovo I think?). This is quite different from my experience taking Waymo, where it served the central city just fine (although I'm not sure how Waymo would handle a narrow Hutong alley way like one of the taxi's I took did).

The video seems honest in what way? What part of it makes you think that? The only evidence of ride discomfort that I saw was some steering wheel shuddering.

Once I saw the part where the car was being blamed for the pickup location chosen by the user, I really struggle to believe anything that's being said. Felt like they wanted to say it's not good right from the start.

They constantly mentioned that their phone camera stabilization was pretty good, and that they really wanted to like this from the start (otherwise they could have just taken a normal taxi without waiting around in an outer suburb for a few hours to finally get one). I don't know what to tell you, you seem to believe that self driving cars are running around the core of these cities without safety drivers, while all I've seen so far, even from the most enthusiastic Chinese v-bloggers, are cars running in the deep suburbs and aren't really very deployed yet like Waymo is in downtown SF.

You're conflating things a lot.

This started with me pointing out that the scale of Apollo Go is greater than Waymo, but then you made it about safety, which is quite a different (but still interesting) topic. Then there's this video that has been brought up in the context of safety, but seems more related to ride comfort. Ride comfort is also interesting, but different than safety.

I'm not sure we can actually have a reasonable conversation without objectively separating such topics.

I haven't looked at what the service area is, but I wouldn't assume that a downtown service area is somehow better or worse than a suburban service area, especially not without defining "better". A suburban-focused service seems like it might actually be a lot more useful than a downtown-focused service.

Back to the original point, you easily see the data yourself. The scale of Apollo Go is slightly larger than Waymo on most metrics that would seem to matter; vehicles, rides, miles, etc.

Yeah, but Tesla is headed by a ketamine-addicted imbecile.

Will sound engineering prevail over brain rot in the C-suite? I am skeptical.

I hope he gets shut down so hard he winds up living in a box in an alley. He's a billionaire Neo-Nazi.

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