Hacker News Reader

Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Waymo has been doing a lot of driving, without any blood. They seems to be using a combination of (a) learning a lot from close calls like this one where no one was hurt even through it still behaved incorrectly and (b) being cautious so that even when it does something it shouldn't the risk is very low because it's moving slowly.

View on HN

Waymo operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta so I am sure they encountered school buses by now and learned from those encounters.

Waymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance.

Very limited scope and area is now the whole of a few major cities.

https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?authuser=1

This is actually the one technology I am excited about. Especially with the Zoox/mini bus /carpool model, I can see these things replacing personal cars entirely which is going to be a godsend for cost, saftey and traffic

I absolutely would, since operating in a slowly growing limited scope and area is a part of the safety strategy.

> Waymo operates in a very limited scope and area. I would not attempt to extrapolate anything from their current performance.

This is less and less true every year. Yes, it doesn't drive in the snow yet, no, I don't drive in the snow either, I'm ok with that.

If you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good.

Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t. An A320 piloted within a regulated commercial aviation regime is very safe.

What matters is the safety of the entire system including the non-technological parts.

I'm just curious to see how they handle highways more broadly which is where the real danger is and where Tesla got in trouble in the early days. Waymo avoided doing that until late last year, and even then it's on a very controlled freeway test in Phoenix, not random highways

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...

Highways are pretty safe. The road is designed from start to finish to minimise the harm from collisions. That’s not true of urban streets

They drive on highways here, in Austin, all the time. They do just fine. My kids love to wave to Waymo.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com