The wait is over. Starting today, anyone can hail a ride with Waymo in San Francisco. Rain, shine or Karl the Fog, just download the app, and ride.
The wait is over. Starting today, anyone can hail a ride with Waymo in San Francisco. Rain, shine, or Karl the Fog, just download the app, and ride.
We’ve been operating in San Francisco for years now, deliberately scaling our service over time. With tens of thousands weekly trips, our Waymo One service provides safe, sustainable, and reliable transportation to locals and visitors to the city alike.
Now it’s available to anyone.
Waymo rides for all, 24/7, across the city
San Franciscans are using Waymo to connect to the city’s social fabric, making fully autonomous rides part of their daily lives.
About 30% of Waymo rides in San Francisco are to local businesses. We’ve provided thousands of rides to and from individual restaurants, live music venues, bars, coffee shops, ice cream parlors, parks, and museums, boosting the local economy. In a recent survey, over half of our riders said they used Waymo in the past couple of months to or from medical appointments, highlighting the value of personal space during these trips. Additionally, 36% of our SF riders used Waymo to connect to other forms of transit, like BART or Muni. Some of our San Francisco riders even use Waymo to depart in style from their weddings.
“I'm thankful to be living in a city that embraces technology when it can improve our lives with convenient and safe modes of transit,” says Michelle Cusano, Executive Director at The Richmond Neighborhood Center.
Waymo’s fleet is all-electric and sources 100% renewable energy from the City’s CleanPowerSF program. Since the beginning of our commercial operations in August 2023, Waymo’s rides have helped curb carbon emissions by an estimated 570,000 kg, contributing to California’s ride hail emissions goals. This also empowers our riders to travel more sustainably — Waymo’s recent rider survey revealed that 53% of our San Francisco users feel that Waymo has helped them be more environmentally friendly.
Plus, more than half of Waymo riders in SF say that riding with Waymo has improved their sense of personal safety when getting around, according to the survey.
“I enjoy riding in Waymo cars and appreciate the ease of transportation,” says Charles Renfroe, Development Manager at Openhouse SF. “Members of our community, especially transgender and gender non-conforming folks, don’t have to worry about being verbally assaulted or discriminated against when riding with Waymo.”
In addition to improving mobility for locals, Waymo offers a unique way for visitors to experience the city. Thousands of tourists have enjoyed the sightseeing from Waymo vehicles, exploring San Francisco’s iconic landmarks from the Presidio to the Ferry Building. By supporting Spanish and Chinese languages through our app and in-car features, we ensure a more inclusive experience for a diverse group of local riders and visitors to the City by the Bay alike.
In total, nearly 300,000 people, including those who live, work, and visit San Francisco, have signed up to ride with Waymo since we first opened a waitlist — more than a quarter of the city’s population. We’ve been welcoming new riders to the service incrementally, and we are now excited to open it up to everyone.
Scaling our operations safely and responsibly
Safety leads everything we do at Waymo, and this step in our journey builds on over 15 years of experience building safe and convenient autonomous driving, ever since we took our first rides on the streets of Palo Alto back in 2009. With more than 20 million rider-only miles and nearly 2 million paid rider-only public trips under our belt, we’re now bringing the safety benefits of the Waymo Driver to more people in San Francisco.
Road safety is urgent. Thirty nine people were killed on San Francisco’s roads in 2022 and twenty five more in 2023, with thousands reporting injuries every year. Traffic violence kills around 40,000 people in the U.S. annually. The status quo on road safety doesn't serve the people of San Francisco, and the Waymo Driver can help change that.
"Drunk driving remains the leading cause of fatalities and injuries on American roads, claiming over 13,000 lives in 2021 alone. As drivers increasingly drive while impaired, the need for technological intervention becomes evident,” — says Patricia Rillera, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) California State Executive Director. “MADD proudly collaborates with autonomous vehicle leaders like Waymo, recognizing their potential to prevent tragedies caused by impaired, distracted, and drowsy driving."
Our track record for safe operations is unparalleled. We’ve been safely transporting passengers for over six years, now providing more than 50,000 rides a week across three major urban areas. Over more than 30 scientific papers, it’s become clear that the Waymo Driver is already improving road safety in the cities where we operate. The Waymo Driver avoids high-severity collisions better than even the most attentive human drivers, and the data shows that we have fewer insurance claims and injuries or police reports than human drivers.
Our operations improve safety for other road users, too. Over the 3.8+ million rider-only miles we’ve driven in San Francisco through the end of March, the Waymo Driver was involved in 17 fewer crashes with injuries and 12 fewer police-reportable crashes compared to human drivers*.
We’re committed to growing our service gradually and responsibly. We work closely with city and state officials, first responders, and advocates for road safety to ensure our service helps local communities gain access to reliable, safe, environmentally friendly transportation and has a positive impact on mobility.
A huge thanks to our many riders, community partners, and the residents of San Francisco for their support on this journey. Together, we’re providing locals and visitors to San Francisco with a safe, clean and fun mobility experience, keeping the city on the forefront of technological innovation.
And if you’d like to experience full autonomy for yourself, download the Waymo One app on the App Store and Google Play and take a ride today.
*The comparison is informed by Waymo’s methodology introduced in December, 2023.
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Comments
I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious.
The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly longer wait and slightly more fare, I'd choose the Waymo every time.
(I have no affiliation with Waymo, Google or any related industry - it's just an amazing service!)
By itsoktocry 2024-06-2522:1114 reply I love how we've gone from "Taxis are gross and dirty, that's why I love Uber!" to"Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why I love Waymo!" in the span of 5 years.
What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.
> These cars are literally unsupervised.
Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.
I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.
I've had a dude with a Tagalog accent take over the speakers in my car and asked me and the folks I was inside with to leave because I decided to clown car it with friends visiting from out of state. With that said, there for sure is someone monitoring, but it's similar to how checkout at Amazon Go stores went.
I'd be curious to know how this monitoring scales over time.
We have computers that can drive a car in city traffic and you're worried that we can't have a computer look at the inside of a car and tell me if someone's left a mess? A non-ML model background subtraction algorithm from the 2000's could tell you that.
By TremendousJudge 2024-06-2614:391 reply computers can't smell
By traverseda 2024-06-2615:071 reply VOC sensors are pretty good
By AuryGlenz 2024-06-2615:39 “Massive fart detected. Initializing ejector seat in 3, 2…”
I’m not sure how you could make that work. People that eat Indian food step in and it might get set off, so people will cry racism. You drive next to a particular industrial plant, etc..
By eightysixfour 2024-06-262:41 I don’t work for Amazon but I have worked with the tech. The media really ran with a misunderstanding there - the error rate for JWO is dramatically lower than people seem to think.
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/no-amazon-isnt-killing-just-...
By DANmode 2024-06-266:40 Does your long term include changing from offshoring?
If not, what are you expecting to be prohibitive?
> Unsupervised in what sense?
Unsupervised in the sense that there's no driver there to clean the car when it gets dirty. At the same time, presumably part of the odor of an uber comes from the driver, so that helps. I wonder if waymos roll down the window (weather permitting) between riders, to air it out. Might be dangerous at a red light, since people could throw stuff in or even dive in through open windows.
By browningstreet 2024-06-265:101 reply Or, maybe.. when the Waymo cars return to the depot periodically during the day.
Makes sense if they're nearby frequently, but if vehicles are serving larger areas, that would happen less often.
By dgoldstein0 2024-06-267:051 reply They may have multiple depots in the larger area. Maybe spread further apart though
True! Presumably they'd refuel the vehicles in these places as well. The number of depots would depend on how much time you want to waste having vehicles driving out-of-direction and (1) the cost of additional real estate plus (2) the cost of employees at each location.
> How do you remotely detect if car stinks or not?
Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?
By potatolicious 2024-06-2613:51 Not to mention the problem is pretty eminently solvable: let users flag a car as having an unacceptable condition. If that happens dispatch a new car and send the dirty car directly back to home base for cleaning.
The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.
The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.
Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.
This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.
The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.
By BurningFrog 2024-06-2614:041 reply People take taxis because they're too drunk to drive.
This sometimes leads to in-car vomiting.
There are also still smokers among us.
By hiptobecubic 2024-06-2913:51 I'm confused, are you saying that no one can detect if you're smoking or vomiting?
By frakkingcylons 2024-06-2614:44 They have sensors to do this. They also know how to cycle the cabin air completely from the Covid days.
By BurningFrog 2024-06-2614:08 Amazon has plenty of odor detectors for ~$50: https://www.amazon.com/odor-detector/s?k=odor+detector
I assume there are sensors available suitable for Waymo taxis.
By BurningFrog 2024-06-2614:011 reply If the cameras are not AI monitored now, they will be next month.
By mensetmanusman 2024-06-2614:49 By mechanical Turks for a few years.
By Aerbil313 2024-06-2523:31 I think GP meant unsupervised during the ride by a remote human driver.
By bamboozled 2024-06-2614:07 There's internal cameras that are periodically checked.
Not appealing for me personally.
>>Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked.
What do you think is more likely to get vandalized - a room with a human sitting in it, or a room with a camera watching it?
By standardUser 2024-06-2612:152 reply They have my credit card and they could ban me from their app. It's not like people constantly trash hotel rooms or rental cars.
By JohnFen 2024-06-2619:58 > It's not like people constantly trash hotel rooms
I worked as a house attendant in an upscale hotel for years. Let me tell you from experience: a shockingly high percentage of people trash and damage their rooms. Not the majority, but enough to keep staff busy every day.
99.9% of people also don't vandalize toilets, buses, trains and other public amenities, it's the 0.1% that do that's the problem...
By _flux 2024-06-2614:19 None of those places have a good idea of your identity, though.
By iwontberude 2024-06-266:541 reply The room with the human sitting in it, because humans are known to vandalize things.
I can't believe I have to specify this, but I obviously meant "other than by the human watching the room". Equally I don't expect the Uber driver to be the one vandalizing their own taxi.
By iwontberude 2024-06-2616:25 They do occasionally, I smell smoke in the headliner because the driver is an occasional smoker.
By sulam 2024-06-2612:24 And yet you'll find that your definition of clean may far exceed the driver of an Uber's at least every other trip.
Uber started as off duty black car drivers doing gig work. Those were the default right? The random guy with a car gig was rolled out as uberx later?
But I'm completely with you on the unsupervised part. People doing all sorts of things back there that an ML might not identify. Now if they hire an army remotely to monitor, I guess that could scale because of wage disparities.
Not just wage disparities. You can probably watch the typical video of an individual sitting calmly scrolling on their phone back at 32x speed. More complex scenarios with multiple people at 16-4x. Even assuming they pay 'car monitors' as much as drivers (which you're right, they probably don't) the cost for the monitors is still probably less than 10% the cost for equivalent drivers.
By miki123211 2024-06-2611:09 Not just wage disparities, but also time / location.
Quickly going through CCTV footage from a ride to catch "unusual things" takes much less time than driving. Even if somebody had to watch the entire ride at 1x speed and just one ride at a time, there's no need to do it when the car is idle or driving to pick up the next passenger. You can also hire a lot less watchers than you have drivers, because a surge in demand in one city can be serviced by watchers in many other cities. There's no need for night shifts either, you can make everybody work 9-to-5 in whatever timezone they're at.
By sushid 2024-06-2523:12 Well it's because as Uber expanded and had to desperately fight for its margins, it started to lower its standards for UberX. Before, cars had to be fairly new and in a relatively good condition. Now it's no longer the case.
By shoubidouwah 2024-06-269:552 reply You have ID of who was in the car and when, and a 'report' button in the app for the next passenger. Easy enough, if something is reported you have the choice to wait for the next one while the trashed car goes to be cleaned or ride anyway at a discount if you solve it yourself - e.g: put the trash in a bag in the boot of the car. After N reports attributed to you, you get banned.
By mejutoco 2024-06-2610:17 Uber can have reporting as much as this, or more. I can think of some: the driver owning the car incentivizes keeping it clean; bad reviews for dirty cars.
This problem is orthogonal to selfdriving.
open car door
trash car (or don't)
report trashed car
ride for discount
By elaus 2024-06-2616:08 You forgot the last step: Get banned because the video surveillance shows the trash being thrown in after you've unlocked the car.
By DiggyJohnson 2024-06-2616:19 Yes. But this is obviously asocial enough to deter most people. Significantly better deterrent than self-checkout, at least.
By darkr 2024-06-267:14 TBF, after riding up a few SF hills in the summer I’m pretty gross
By Keyframe 2024-06-2523:06 Organic, manual, hand-driven authentic vintage driving experience (before it was cool, of course).
By hot_gril 2024-06-260:27 Regardless of whether the Waymo is supervised, they're brand-new cars, of course they'll be cleaner.
By DANmode 2024-06-266:37 Might actually cut down on the contingent who leave trash or other debris because they believe a person will be cleaning after them.
I know, I know. We can dream.
By lilbaby 2024-06-2715:48 Careening into dystopia one questionably clean Uber at a time
By olalonde 2024-06-265:03 Self-driving + self-cleaning cars obviously.
By vlan0 2024-06-2613:29 Life is just a giant story we tell ourselves. This is no different. Who knows what tomorrow's story will tell!
Waymos ads are obnoxious and it keeps selling my travel data to everyone, I'll better get a car
By miki123211 2024-06-2611:132 reply Source?
By hot_gril 2024-06-2616:11 They supposedly use trip info for their own advertising. Says also "in some cases" shared with third parties for ads.
"We collect usage data that includes trip history, buttons or links you click on our mobile app, in-vehicle interfaces, wait times for our vehicles, and other actions you take with our products and services"
"We collect information about your location in a few different ways. When you take a trip, we collect the pickup and drop-off location and details about the vehicle’s route."
"We may also use your information to personalize services, advertisements, content, and features, communicate with you including marketing (which you can opt out of), service, and account messages, or communicate other information we think will be of interest to you "
"We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active."
"Waymo will not disclose your personal information with a third party unless one of the following applies: ...
- We're involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale or transfer of some or all of our assets
- In some cases to help us tailor ads and offers to your interests as detailed in the U.S. state law requirements section
- Comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request ... "
https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840#zippy=%2Cinf...
Windows 11, Google, et al.
For more see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
By signatoremo 2024-06-2613:02 Public transportation is not a true panacea even where it’s seen most favorable. Car ownership increased 14% in Europe from 2012 to 2022, across the board:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/d...
The future will be a combination of trains, a more extensive robotaxi network for the last mile, which can be cars or vans, and a much smaller percentage of personal vehicles compared to today. Buses as they are today will decline.
And mingle with the masses? in SF?
Maybe if they re-invent trains or buses again
> Maybe if they re-invent trains or buses again
You joke, but I've heard more than one argument about how self-driving cars will drastically improve traffic because, for inter-city travel, they will be able to drive very close together on the highway in a long convoy, leaving almost no space between cars...
By miki123211 2024-06-2611:171 reply I don't think it's such a bad idea, actually. There's value in having something that can drive in a "train", but that can also disconnect when needed and drive on its own.
If you're driving long distance, you get the advantages of a train, but door-to-door, with no scheduling conflicts and no egregious stop times. If your destination is 5 minutes away, it's still a car.
By elbasti 2024-06-2718:06 Or, you know, you could drive (or bike! or waymo!) to the local train station, which should have <30 min, well-scheduled, predictable headways to major cities, then take a train that goes 150+mph, and then drive (or bike! or waymo!) to your final destination, for _far_ less total energy expenditure.
Every car in a train-caravan is schlepping along its own engine, crumple zones, airbags....and with rubber tires...
...its frankly idiotic.
By DANmode 2024-06-266:44 It'll end up being the opposite that causes a positive effect, if there's one to be had.
Leaving proper gaps (which next to nobody reading this will be familiar with!) allows for cars to cross, or even merge.
By thechao 2024-06-264:30 150 cars long! 90000 horsepower! May Immortan Joe live forever!!! To the Vineyards!
Right, because public transit cleanliness beats Taxis, Ubers, and Waymos.
By wetpaws 2024-06-285:17 [dead]
By red75prime 2024-06-268:161 reply You need to get rid of excessive solar energy when prices turn negative anyway. So why not charge a fleet of electric taxicabs.
By red75prime 2024-06-2616:19 Why not both? We aren't trying to be efficient here, we are dumping excess energy from intermittent sources.
I got access to Waymo in LA a few weeks ago and have taken it 4 times. It's capabilities are impressive for sure, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as "smooth and sure ride". The car's skills seems to vary between impressive and "nervous new driver". It drives like someone that got randomly stuck into a much bigger car than they are used to.
When I rode in one, admittedly a long time ago when cruise was still operating in sf too, the waymo car pulled over for a firetruck. However, the firetruck was merely crossing the road we were on and it was 3 streets away. And the waymo pulled into a bus stop to do this. The safety driver had to nudge it back into traffic.
By Schiendelman 2024-06-2523:301 reply The rate at which these systems are improving makes it almost useless to compare even six months ago.
By forgetfreeman 2024-06-265:084 reply Prove that. Because last time I checked in there wasn't a self-driving system in play that wouldn't faceplant into wet cement, blow through crosswalks, or find itself trapped in a cleverly deployed ring of salt. Additionally, by their own admission Waymo is nowhere near level 5 autonomy, which means they still haven't reached parity with what a mediocre human driver is capable of.
By jillesvangurp 2024-06-2614:341 reply Well they just announced that they are doing tens of thousands of rides per week. That either works or it doesn't. And they seem pretty comfortable doing that. Also there's a distinct lack of horror stories involving Waymo cars. And I assume that they don't have thousands of mechanical turks wielding a joystick somewhere, which means these things are mostly working as advertised (i.e. autonomously) with the very occasional manual intervention.
So, what you are asserting and that cannot be true at the same time. So, my conclusion is that whatever you think you know here is probably wrong.
By forgetfreeman 2024-06-2615:531 reply Idgaf if they're round-tripping the equivalent to mars and back weekly, the fact of the matter is their tech cannot perform at the level of a human driver who's had their license for a week, by their own admission. No amount of argle-bargle changes that as the autonomy levels are very well-defined and Waymo self-reports as L4 under optimal conditions and no clear path to L5 in sight in the next decade. Let's not confuse a legislative fuckup on the part of cdot with actual technical prowess yeah?
By jillesvangurp 2024-06-2617:231 reply You are splitting hairs. Tens of thousands of rides per week. Autonomously. Those are the keywords. Other things they are bragging about involve such things as 24/7, night and day, and foggy conditions. I would suggest actually reading the short press release. They make quite a few interesting claims in it. Anyway, anyone in the SFO area will probably be reporting all the wonderful and uneventful rides they are enjoying with Waymo soon.
As for people that recently got their drivers license. I'm pretty sure that demographic is over-represented in the statistics of who drives the least safely, traffic fatalities, etc. Also insurers and rental car agencies have policies that reflect those cold, hard statistics. It will be interesting to see what they do when level 5 starts happening (probably sooner rather than later). My guess is that they'll charge people extra for the privilege of taking control of the car as they are far more likely to damage the vehicle and otherwise cause trouble.
And obviously one of the points Waymo is trying to make with their press release is that they are already safer. It's a press release of course and not the same as cold hard facts. And you make a fair point about self reporting. But it suggests the obvious notion that computers are getting pretty good at not crashing into stuff (or people). I find that entirely unsurprising, BTW. It does not seem like a particularly hard problem.
By forgetfreeman 2024-06-280:13 I'm not splitting hairs. The difference between L4 and L5 autonomy is enormous. I submit that you cannot get enhanced safety outcomes out of a system that cannot perform the task at hand at least as well as a mediocre human, and realistically not until you're routinely out-performing the bulk of human operators. And if you think not crashing into random shit in a perfectly chaotic environment is an easily solved problem please explain to me why store PoS tech (orders of magnitude smaller problem space) has been a roiling dumpster fire for decades now. Software doesn't have an amazing track record at solving problems. It has proven to be absolutely phenomenal at shifting problem spaces in weird ways and introducing spectacularly stupid unplanned side effects however.
By D-Coder 2024-06-270:57 > they still haven't reached parity with what a mediocre human driver is capable of
When that driver is sober and alert and paying attention. Which I'm sure is at least 90% of the time.
If I'm coming back from a party, or an ER visit, or being 95 years old, I may not be in that 90%.
Not only will safety take a long time for technical reasons, but its extremely predictable under what financial conditions corporate execs sweep safety issues under the carpet. If Alphabet has a few tricky quarters good luck to everyone.
By forgetfreeman 2024-06-2616:031 reply Oh sure yeah. It'd take exactly one legislative push to place full liability in the case of accidents onto the vehicle manufacturer (where it clearly belongs) to fold up every autonomy division in the industry like a wet towel. What galls the shit out of me is there's apparently enough dumb money afoot to float R&D spend equivalent to the GDP of a middle of the road 3rd world country just to make cabbies lives even more miserable.
By hdbv6 2024-06-272:57 That dumb money mountain will go to fighting legislation as we have seen with big oil, telco, pharma, wall st etc. The money always flows and aggregates around anything that promises to become a monopoly tomorrow. And monopolies can then collect rent at whatever rate they want. This end state is what attracts money more and more. The money is not just to replace the existing solution, its reqd to capture and lock in talent, attention, suppliers, lobbyists, politicians etc. The more the spend the more competitors exit too, the closer to market capture. But they have been spending for a long time to end up in just 2 cities so the pressure to scale, monetize, compromise will keep growing.
By dgoldstein0 2024-06-267:15 > cleverly deployed ring of salt
I appreciate the implication these cars are driven by ghosts :rofl:
By beaugunderson 2024-06-264:194 reply took two waymo rides in SF and two nightmare cab rides in SF and memphis in the last couple of days.
one waymo was perfect, the other ran a red light then stopped in the intersection diagonally across two lanes of traffic until the light turned green. didn't endanger anyone but felt awkward!
on the cab ride to SFO my driver kept falling asleep and veering into the next lane, i tried talking with him to keep him awake but it was clear he'd been driving all morning and was exhausted.
the cab ride from memphis international was interesting, the cab was falling apart, driver was nice but he tried to convert me to christianity for the last ten minutes of the ride.
the waymos will end up safer but totally devoid of character.
By a_c_s 2024-06-2613:12 The possibility of "character" is always my biggest dread when getting into a taxi or an Uber.
I just want to get from point A to point B without having to make small talk or delicately navigate a political discussion with a stranger. A stranger who both controls the vehicle and, in the case of Uber/Lyft, will be giving me a rating at the end of the ride.
My AIs have no character, I demand my Roomba show a little passion when cleaning.
By datadrivenangel 2024-06-2618:15 Ghosts in the machine aren't real, which is a shame, so we should fix that!
By d3nj4l 2024-06-2610:59 You joke but that would go so hard. Like DJ Roomba from Parks and Rec.
By teleforce 2024-06-268:10 From my (hopefully) neutral point of view I think Waymo running a red traffic light is the worst of all and most likely will end up in a disaster.
For huge metropolitan cities for examples London, Istanbul, Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta or Sao Paulo running a red traffic with a car can most probably cause fatal accidents. I am now more than convinced that level 5 autonomous driving cannot be achieved in my lifetime, and much better efforts should be better directed toward non-invasive highly accurate early detection of high mortality diseases like CVDs and efforts for properly mitigating climate changes.
By darepublic 2024-06-2612:53 [flagged]
By Dr_Birdbrain 2024-06-2523:447 reply I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.
By majormajor 2024-06-260:346 reply The biggest problem with cleaning is that compared to Uber where there's a human driver, the autonomy factor will almost certainly lead to more people fucking shit up simply because they can. Look at anything else that goes unattended in the public way: ebikes, delivery bot things, scooters... nasty combo of "I want to fuck with The Man" and "haha nobody is here watching I don't need to be as careful with my messy sandwich"
Thats silly. The cars are private property and full of cameras being monitored by a tech giant.
I’m sure the account agreement is going to require you to to accept being charged egregious bills for damaging or dirty-ing the cabin
It is indeed silly. And yet every taxi driver has plenty of horror stories, and that's with a human sitting there.
By hilbertseries 2024-06-262:243 reply Taxis have basically no recourse if you just ditch. Waymo has a video of you, your full name, your billing address and your credit card on file.
By bamboozled 2024-06-2614:09 Waymo has a video of you, your full name, your billing address and your credit card on file.
The future is awesome
By ModernMech 2024-06-262:432 reply So do hotels, I guess that’s why no hotel room has ever been trashed.
By x-complexity 2024-06-267:032 reply > So do hotels, I guess that’s why no hotel room has ever been trashed.
The point is when there's damage, it can be billed to the malicious actor in question.
By miki123211 2024-06-2611:222 reply Unlike Waymo, hotels can't really bar the bad actors from staying in any hotel ever again.
At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
By x-complexity 2024-06-281:50 > At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
This would reductively mean a more effective form of punishing vandalism, which would in of itself be a slight net good overall.
In the ideal case, there would be a recompense program to pay for the damages made + extra, in return for being able to ride them again.
Meta-point: This discussion has significant overlap with busses/trains/public transportation. How we deal with bad actors in that space would translate well into this space.
By bamboozled 2024-06-2614:10 At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
Starting to sound a bit like a credit system or some other dystopian shit show. You do something dumb, drunk while in college and you're cut off...sounds amazing.
By ModernMech 2024-06-2613:38 No, the point was that billing the damage to the malicious actor in question will prevent damage.
But for some people, a fine is just the cost of doing the thing. And for every bad actor you ban, there's another bad actor willing to take their place.
By Anotheroneagain 2024-06-266:222 reply I guess that's why no hotel lets you pay cash.
By crazygringo 2024-06-2615:38 I've never been to a hotel that didn't require a valid credit card as a hold for security when checking in.
Sure you can pay in cash at the end if you want.
But you can't get a room in the first place without a credit card, even if they never charge it.
(I mean I'm sure there are some exceptions somewhere, but generally speaking, no, cash isn't sufficient.)
By vkou 2024-06-267:03 They'll accept cash if you fork out a $300 deposit, and the people who are likely to both pay cash and trash a room rarely have that much extra money on hand.
A friend of mine works night audit in a rough part of the valley. As soon as he says the magic words 'we require a major credit card or a $300 deposit', they immediately hang up.
By miki123211 2024-06-2611:24 This heavily depends on the country, plenty of places in the US and other credit-card-loving countries are credit (and specifically credit, NOT debit) card only for this reason. Plenty of tourists from countries where such cards aren't as popular get bitten by this.
By x-complexity 2024-06-267:02 > Some taxis have that too. Where does it get them?
The keyword there being "some". If an account is tied to the person, recourse for negligent/malicious behavior can be applied, but that only works if there's an account to add the penalty to.
On Waymo's part, requiring an account to use the service would be in the benefit of the service as a whole.
By dilyevsky 2024-06-262:39 1. The cars are not unattended 2. Public transit and the like get rekt because they are cheap and there is no consequences whatsoever. When you get $400 full detail bill like they do for rentals and/or get banned for life (even as a +1 because they have your face) that tends to have a chilling effect
By Rebelgecko 2024-06-260:37 Waymos do have interior cameras, so if you puke in the backseat you can't blame it on the previous rider
That's my biggest concern too. My fear is in 20 years nobody will be excited to go in these because the interiors will be whittled down to dilapidated NY subway seats.
By aeyes 2024-06-265:46 Once these become more common I am sure they'll adapt the interior to be more similar to the subway (plastic seats, no carpet, hard plastic everywhere) instead of having luxury car seats.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:16 You need an account, probably with a credit card, if you're gonna ride. If you intentionally mess up the car, you'll probably just get banned from the service.
By foota 2024-06-260:51 It's probably a little bit better since a car is a closed environment. That won't save it entirely, but it'll at least mitigate the issue I expect as compared to e.g., a public bus.
By CobrastanJorji 2024-06-260:021 reply I imagine the cars all head to some centralized location for cleaning and whatever other maintenance. That probably makes cleaning a very economic, factory-like procedure. Beats something like Uber where drivers have to bring their cars to a car wash or whatever (although presumably the Uber drivers aren't being paid to wash the cars because they aren't employees, so the unpaid labor there gives Uber an advantage).
By gnicholas 2024-06-261:54 I wonder if they'd ever offer riders a discount for taking trash out that was left behind by other riders. They could even include a vacuum and give people a couple bucks off for cleaning it out during/after their ride.
I think eventually they’ll just make a car (like Zooks is) without all the messy crud (steering wheel etc) and with fixed, waterproof seats and such. It will be designed for automatic cleaned by driving into a depot and being hosed down.
Think of those self-cleaning toilets.
By qingcharles 2024-06-266:15 Right. This is a prototype. You've got a whole empty seat not being used, and a steering wheel sat there baiting someone to play with it. The vehicle was never designed for the purpose for which it is being used.
I totally agree we will start to see very specific driverless designs that are very easy to clean.
Either that, or Johnny Cabs. I'm easy.
By dgoldstein0 2024-06-267:14 The nhtsa used to require all vehicles have steering wheels. Looks like that rule changed in March 2022 for autonomous vehicles so we should so start seeing those. I guess it just takes a while for new autonomous vehicles to be designed and built to take advantage of the change in rules.
By dyauspitr 2024-06-260:55 Every rider’s identity is known. That’s going to play a huge role in how people treat them.
By Animats 2024-06-264:21 > Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically.
That's a good robotics project. All the cars are the same. The cars do not have any objects inside that belong to the occupants and should stay. So robotic interior vacuuming could be quite practical, as a station in the car wash. A vision system can inspect for damage and route that car to the maintenance line.
By hi_hi 2024-06-263:43 Let me introduce you to WayGlo. They pivot to automated car cleaners...
So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of stopping abruptly.
source: I commute by skateboard in SF daily. Just yesterday an empty Waymo cruised straight through a fresh red, narrowly missing my entry into the crosswalk.
But don't get me started on what I've seen human drivers do on the same streets. Just annoyed that Waymo's aren't better.
Competing anecdata: Yesterday I was running downtown and a Waymo stopped for me at a green light because it wasn't sure if I was gonna jaywalk (jayrun?). Only once I stood still for a few seconds did it continue to make its turn.
This was in a turn-left-only intersection with a separate pedestrian light. Maybe the Waymo got confused and thought I also had green.
By entropicdrifter 2024-06-2520:401 reply Could also be that they're taught to be overly cautious to avoid suicidally stupid humans
It's pretty normal for people running in densely populated cities with 15mph average traffic speeds to ignore red lights. Nothing suicidal about it :)
By microtherion 2024-06-2523:22 Yes, but SF seems to have some truly reckless pedestrians, often presumably under the influence of substances. There are graduations between "cross at a red light when you think it's safe to do so" and "barge into a 4 lane street in the middle of a block because the voices in your head tell you to".
By darepublic 2024-06-2612:52 I sometimes wait on pedestrians when turning right on a green and pedestrians do a little dance on the corner that makes it hard to tell if/when they're gonna cross.
By iknowstuff 2024-06-262:501 reply I think it’s legal to enter an intersection on yellow and exit on red in CA. Thats why.
Human drivers speed up to avoid red, and yay you avoided red but the suddenly higher speed is far more dangerous for everyone around.
By Ferret7446 2024-06-265:552 reply Why would it be illegal to enter on yellow? I thought that's the entire point of yellow. Otherwise we'd just have red and green, and hopefully you can imagine how that would work out.
By kortilla 2024-06-266:22 In some states you are supposed to attempt to stop on yellow unless it’s unsafe to do so: https://axleaddict.com/safety/The-Meaning-of-the-Yellow-Traf...
By iknowstuff 2024-06-273:47 Its the leaving on red being legal thats the interesting part.
Plenty other jurisdictions will ticket if your car is still on the intersection when it turns red.
By fragmede 2024-06-264:04 Anecdata to say I've been in a Waymo and had it run a red.
By throwaway2037 2024-06-260:52 I would like to see video of an equivalent incident.
By linearrust 2024-06-260:232 reply > So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of stopping abruptly.
Surprised traffic lights aren't updated to communicate with cars directly. Why not have traffic lights broadcast 'stop' message along with turning red?
I suspect traffic lights, roads and cities will have to be updated to work with driverless cars.
By barbariangrunge 2024-06-261:052 reply It does. It uses a specific band on the electro magnetic spectrum commonly supported by most receivers
By jazzyjackson 2024-06-263:341 reply hm? Are you mixed up with Transit Signal Priority where Muni can request the light stay green a little longer?
I've never heard of the lights transmitting their timing
This article from SFMTA erroneously states that the busses use "GPS to communicate with the traffic signal", lol, what is the actual band used ?
By nmeofthestate 2024-06-264:41 I think the commenter was alluding to the 430 terahertz band.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-264:221 reply SF traffic lights do not.
Of course they do. A specially trained human can even visualize those signals.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2616:03 Lol I missed the joke.
By a_c_s 2024-06-2613:18 Why? That would be expensive and the cars are designed to understand the lights as they are.
By choppaface 2024-06-2518:312 reply Have also nearly been hit as a pedestrian by a Waymo. I also last week saw a Waymo blow through a yellow-red very aggressively, so I think the downvotes on above comment are intensely biased.
The way you can tell that a mode of transport is very safe is there are tons of people online whining that they almost got killed by it.
No. It means it’s only a matter of time before this technology breaks the law and kills someone.
By Schiendelman 2024-06-2523:34 Or people are sensitive to it and the rate at which it kills people will be lower than humans, or probably already is!
By mgh2 2024-06-261:10 How is pricing? https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/18abac9/pr...
By ModernMech 2024-06-2521:213 reply I’d say the same, maybe. But yesterday I had an Uber with a guy that had a degree in history and a love for SF lore, and told me about the tomb of Starr King, and then I went on a quest to find it with my friend. Just saying that there’s magic out there that’s not technological.
Not so difficult to add this feature with the help of human like voice and LLM backend.
By darkteflon 2024-06-2521:43 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Hacker News.
By rd 2024-06-2523:04 Put a tone monitoring system to tell if the person is getting annoyed, and have a fallback that reroutes you to a warehouse of offshore comedians.
By im3w1l 2024-06-2523:09 You're not wrong, but I think part of point of storytelling is about connecting people with each other and creating a sense of community.
By lawlessone 2024-06-2614:36 You'd replace your parent's with an LLM.
By ModernMech 2024-06-261:141 reply That kind of misses the point; it was the human that was interesting to me and the interaction we had, not that he gave information.
> Just saying that there’s magic out there that’s not technological.
Dark magic too, I've been on one too many rides where the driver insists on monologuing on topics that range from detestable (politics) to alarming (the driver was armed, and had picked me up from the airport)
By fragmede 2024-06-2522:26 I have women friends who have been physically assaulted by human drivers.
Was there a law against being armed in the airport dropoff/pickup area there?
No, I added the pick-up locationbut to make it clear the driver knew I was unarmed as I was coming off a flight, since one can't legally fly with a gun.
By IndrekR 2024-06-261:06 In most countries, including US and all EU member states, one can legally fly with firearms and ammunition. There are some rules that must be followed. Sure, you can not take them to the cabin.
By hot_gril 2024-06-261:02 It's legal to fly with guns in checked bags, but I don't know the specifics of the interaction with the driver.
By hot_gril 2024-06-260:00 Yeah, I've ridden with two cool drivers with history degrees, one jazz musician from Ethiopia, and one who I'd already met elsewhere. Zero interest in riding in a Waymo. (Disclaimer: Alphabet shareholder)
Personally I dont understand why they went with Jaguars. I wish they had gone with Hondas and struck a deal with them to integrate their level 3 Autonomous tech as it is the most advanced in the industry.
By brian-armstrong 2024-06-263:16 They're worth trying once, but they're not ready to replace Lyft/Uber. The cost is similar or sometimes even more for Waymo, and the trip often takes longer thanks to the car's skittishness. The ride length estimates are also quite optimistic which can lead to arriving later than one intends. I don't see a real compelling reason to keep using them.
Is there any kind of limit to them besides the geofence? Can you get a Waymo at night? In the rain? I suppose it never snows there. How about roadworks? How do they react to vehicles with emergency signals? Can they follow directions of a cop in the street?
By ramonverse 2024-06-2517:21 While they pick up in almost every location the drop off is sometimes "close by" like 3min walk to final destination (the app tells you in advance tho so you can decide to order or not). This is quite annoying sometimes and I picked uber instead.
By __loam 2024-06-2519:19 By choppaface 2024-06-2520:581 reply They are starting to obstruct bike lanes just like Ubers, I’ve seen this happen 3-4 times and it’s documented here: https://sfba.social/@SafeStreetRebel/112634004752866771
Years ago they were very respectful and conservative of basic road markings but clearly they have now ‘expanded capabilities’
By FireBeyond 2024-06-2523:482 reply California law says vehicles can enter the bike lane whenever they feel it is safe to do so.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:20 They definitely cannot enter a protected bike lane as shown in the tweet.
And they can't just park in bike lanes, obviously.
By scottbez1 2024-06-263:06 This is false. Please don't spread dangerous legal misinformation.
See CVC 21209(a):
No person shall drive a motor vehicle in a bicycle lane established on a roadway pursuant to Section 21207 except as follows:
(1) To park where parking is permitted.
(2) To enter or leave the roadway.
(3) To prepare for a turn within a distance of 200 feet from the intersection.
No. Yes. Yes. Waymo's have been taught to handle construction and emergency signals. Waymo's can follow hand directions from a cop in the street.
Are there no freeways inside the geofence? Someone in the thread mentions that they will be adding freeways soon, so I understand it can't do those now.
There are freeways within the geofence in SF. My understanding is that Waymos will not drive on those freeways without a safety driver for now.
Freeway driving is easier than surface streets. Maybe merging in is the hard part.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:20 It's "easier", but if you screw up, the consequences are MUCH worse.
Also, when Waymos get confused on surface streets, they can just stop. Can't really do that on a freeway.
By fragmede 2024-06-2523:55 that's the key point. a crash at 5 mph is inconsequential next to a crash at 50 mph.
By AlbertCory 2024-06-260:022 reply You haven't driven on 101 in SF, I take it.
10 mph would be a great average speed, usually.
Based on my limited experience with Telsa model 3 FSD and my Toyota lane assist/radar cruise control, congested highways are the absolute sweet spot for self driving. Not much happening on the sides, and stop and go traffic being quite tedious for the human. It's happy to speed up and slow down over and over again.
By AlbertCory 2024-06-263:571 reply well, in that case they should drive on 101 in the City. No pedestrians (normally) as you said.
Of course, if you have an accident there, you piss off a whole lot more people than you would on a surface street.
By lawlessone 2024-06-2614:331 reply >101
never been. Is that the one from the phantom planet song?
By Fatnino 2024-06-2716:13 101 connects San Diego to Seattle
By sulam 2024-06-2612:46 YMMV greatly depending on time of day.
uh, in southern california there used to be an unspoken rule: if you can't pass the driver's test with freeway included, you go to NorCo and take the test there. No freeway - the hardest thing is the "parallel park and reverse" which is just being told prior "when you pull over, take as long as you need to get as parallel as you can to the curb, then just go in reverse, look over your shoulder, and don't touch the wheel." Well, that and you automatically fail if you hit a cow.
Freeways in CA aren't the worst in the country (lookin at you, TX), but they're still not easier than surface streets, especially during off-peak hours.
Can you expand a bit on why you feel freeway driving is "easier"? the only thing i can think of is you're much less likely to get into a head-on[0] collision.
[0] apply directly
By lanstin 2024-06-263:36 There's fewer pedestrians that might or might not be about to step in front of the car. Less need to predict human actions. There's mostly no perpendicular intersections. Generally visibility is good, don't have to remember that there was a car getting ready to enter traffic behind the peach tree. No skate boarders.
By Fatnino 2024-06-2716:19 In Redwood City (easiest dmv test route I know of), they ask you if you want freeway on the test, you say no and they cross off that whole section. The parallel parking section is done on a completely empty block and the only way to screw that up is to park blocking someone's driveway.
As to why freeway is easier: maybe not as a very new driver, but as soon as you're comfortable handling a car you can get on the freeway and the mental processing loop is much easier. Just follow the car ahead at a safe distance for the speed. Very little else, can be done with just half a brain while you think about other things.
By xnx 2024-06-2518:25 Good point. Not sure what the status is in SF. They're working on it in Phoenix: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...
Wouldn't the Ubers potentially be cleaner? Who's cleaning the Waymo between rides?
I've taken 38 Waymo rides so far. Every one of them has been very clean, cleaner than the average Uber ride.
By dventimi 2024-06-2519:20 No idea. I'm just reporting on what's already actually happened in the past (my ride experiences) instead of speculating on what might happen in the future.
It's a function of the filtered population. The cars are at full capacity day and night so the increased number of users won't affect a single car's cleanliness nearly as much as the type of people that will be riding in them.
What do you mean by the type of people who will be riding in them?
That new group is people who aren't at the frontier of trying out new tech.
The way this will manifest is the drunk idiot who'll puke all over the car. The bored asshole who carves his initials in the seat. The edgelord who gets their jollies out of destroying other people's stuff.
Good chance you had some in the original group as well, but early adopters are usually mostly people who deeply understand tech. Once that falls away, you have a less thorough understanding of tech, and a very surprised realization that booking something under your name that has cameras all over will likely result in you being held accountable for what you did. But after you did it.
How that'll play out in the long run is anyone's guess. If Waymo maintains rigorous enforcement and the courts actually play along, it might just work out. It's still going to be capital-intensive because we seem to have created a world where being a major asshole in public without consequences is kind of an entitlement people expect to have, and Waymo will need a very strong "yeah, not here" vibe to prevent that. Which requires a number of high-profile incidents.
Yes, the subtext of the question likely was "are you discriminating against the poor!?" If it was indeed, the answer to that question is "no, the ride pricing will do that".
By Eisenstein 2024-06-263:002 reply I don't know what 'deeply understanding tech' has to do with any of that. Plenty of people who 'deeply understand tech' get drunk and puke in places. Honestly, you sound like a Victorian-era petty lord looking down his nose at 'commoners'.
You read the part where I said the understanding constrains the existing user base from antisocial behavior, right?
This isn't about "commoners". It's that any large group of people contains assholes, assholes restrain themselves depending on circumstances, and the new users might well lack that understanding.
It's fundamentally not about "commoners", but about a knowledge-based restraint falling away. (As for the "commoners", you might also want to read the last part of my comment, instead of outraging)
By Eisenstein 2024-06-2620:391 reply The fact that a critique by someone else of what they think you sound like makes you accuse them of 'outrage' is exactly why you sound like a snob.
If that person had done me the courtesy of actually reading, I wouldn't object.
By Eisenstein 2024-06-272:00 That person did read it, and the fact that you believe anything you wrote in the entire comment would not contribute to the notion that your are a classist snob is hilarious.
and you said it wasn't a loaded question. That was intellectually dishonest of you.
A loaded question is a trick question, which presupposes at least one unverified assumption that the person being questioned is likely to disagree with.
Can you quote my question back to me and point out the presumption that the person is likely to disagree with?
That's a loaded question, but sure, let's go there. The problem with public transportation is that the public is allowed to use them, and the rules, legal and social, are not well defined or enforced. Assaulting other passengers is generally tolerated by the system, depending on the type of assault. Physical assault is considered too far and doesn't go unnoticed, but chemical and audio assault on fellow passengers usually goes unreported. The types of people are those who would assault others on some fashion.
Whether this translates to Waymos smelling like meth or fentanyl when you get in them thanks to the previous rider remains to be seen. Or just needles, foil, or used condoms left behind. They record video, so Google could close the person's account so they won't be able to book Waymos with that account again, so we'll end up having to see how hard it is to create new accounts to use Waymo on to ban nuisance riders.
> That's a loaded question
It's not a loaded question to ask what a person means when they introduce a term.
> The types of people are those who would assault others on some fashion.
That's a tautology. Nobody knows if a person fits the type of person who would assault someone, until after they've gone and assaulted someone.
By wdh505 2024-06-266:50 Breaking news, google introduces social credit system that "only applies to waymo and think of the childen". More at 9
/s
I agree with your point about the approach to the argument, but I think google has enough info to make a way to vet passengers by identifying if you are likely to trash a vehicle.
By Zenzero 2024-06-261:06 > Waymos smelling like meth or fentanyl
Granted in my work I've never made the attempt to smell fentanyl, but it isn't one with a reputation of having an odor. I assume you mean the smell of recreational users of fentanyl.
By darth_avocado 2024-06-2523:161 reply Drunk party goers on a Friday night, people smoking in the car on their way to Dolores, petulant teenagers…
I've been riding MUNI for 25 years. The only assault I saw was a drunk office worker on his way home on the 31AX.
By hot_gril 2024-06-2523:56 I rode BART for a year, every day something bad happened
By darth_avocado 2024-06-261:591 reply I Guess you must not be riding it as much as you think you do. I’m an infrequent rider and I’ve seen 2 altercations and multiple (10+) disturbances since January.
The funniest (or not if you’re not from SF) was a guy boarding a full bus with a 7 foot long dining table with the legs attached, arguing and threatening anyone who protested. Eventually he dropped the thing on someone’s foot and starting an altercation which delayed everyone by 15 mins.
I've ridden the 22 through the Mission at midnight every Tuesday for much of the last seven years. I assure you that's exactly as much as I thought I do.
You might be magic. Crazy, crazy shit goes down on Muni. I used it to commute from outer Richmond to downtown for years and the bystander effect was fully powered up on many of those rides. And it wasn't always the homeless people, little old Asian ladies could be hella scary.
I might be. I also commuted downtown from the outer Richmond for years, on the 31, the 38, the 1, and the 5. Oh, I've seen plenty of crazy stuff, but only one assault.
By sulam 2024-06-2613:06 Okay, the point I think the poster up there was trying to make is that there are degrees of assault. I never saw anyone murdered, and only twice some sort of physical struggle. The number of times crazy yelling broke out is uncountable by me, though.
By scarby2 2024-06-2519:15 i wonder if it's a function of a consistent cleaning schedule. Many uber drivers seem to wait far to long between interior cleans.
By sbuttgereit 2024-06-2515:352 reply Potentially. But, with each driver exercising quality control over their own vehicles, the actual result will likely vary from hitting as good or better a standard to being worse. The Waymo standards, thus far, are pretty high, so I would expect on average Uber/Lyft/Etc. would fair worse on average.
I have no doubt that Google is waiting for more adoption before starting to cut costs everywhere and before you know it your puked out ride will direct you to www.waymo.hr/help to find an article which resolves your issue
Why would that be any different from Uber? Doesn't Uber also want to cut costs?
Uber has partner drivers which have their own companies, their own rating, and can be punished for their behaviour. Once a company completely vertically integrates (like Google would like), meaning they have their own cars, they no longer want to punish themselves for bad behaviour/cars. Since they have to choose between short term cost of higher maintenance fee or long term cost of loss of quality of service their managers will start to optimize for quarterly results: cutting short term costs. What they want is to first entrench the market, push out competitors, introduce complex regulation and fees which prevents new competitors into the market and then start cutting costs everywhere they can and increase prices.
Since you mention Uber, I can definitely see in my city how the quality of cars decreased and they started using almost inclusively cheap immigrants who realistically couldn't pass a drivers exam in my country and have on multiple occasions driven into wrong directions/ran red lights etc.
By JumpCrisscross 2024-06-2519:112 reply Waymo is posiionting itself as a premium product. Defending that brand precludes letting the cars go to shit.
They may be trying to, but when has Google ever successfully positioned something as a premium product and defended that?
Pixel phones? Nest? The Bayview hotel rooms are pretty nice. Hell even Gmail feels pretty premium to me, but I guess this word might be considered subjective.
Also, Waymo isn't even Google. You might accuse me of overstating this, but truthfully they operate as a different company.
By lmm 2024-06-2622:25 Pixel phones have less of a brand than Samsung, much less Apple (not talking about actual product quality, just brand positioning). Nest doesn't stand out, although I don't think any of the smart home things are really established enough to know which are good or bad. I've never heard of the Bayview hotel rooms. Gmail is good but it's not a "premium" feel.
By dventimi 2024-06-265:31 There's always a first time.
By dventimi 2024-06-2519:18 Yup. Plus, if Waymo can clean its cars with greater efficiency at lower cost than Uber can, then all other things being equal, Waymo will have cleaner cars.
By 29athrowaway 2024-06-262:47 The drivers are not the same people who activate their account.
There are schemes where undocumented immigrants ask someone to activate their account on their behalf. In practice, the person giving you a ride could be literally anyone.
By dventimi 2024-06-2518:48 I didn't understand any of that.
Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through messier cars. But they can do things like increase prices after taking over a market, which they have not been at all shy about doing.
By dventimi 2024-06-2520:28 > Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through messier cars
Don't they? Allowing messier, older, and less pleasant cars would increase the supply of drivers, allowing Uber to place lower bids on those drivers, lower their prices, increase volume and revenue, and increase profit.
By kungito 2024-06-279:27 They can definitely have more beat up cars which over time I can observe in my city. As for prices, luckily they have a lot stronger competition with bolt and local taxi apps as creating a local taxi app is really not that hard
By jfoster 2024-06-267:08 The standards might one day be a problem. As in, maybe, and one day. Not definitely, and not currently.
Sometimes it's worth not worrying about problems too far in advance.
By rurp 2024-06-2519:59 I would be surprised if the Waymp cars weren't exceptionally nice in this phase, while they're trying hard to gain market share and trust. Google Search was a clean and delightful experience once upon a time. The aspect I'm more interested in is what the experience will be like if they ever become a dominant transport option.
Waymo's have cameras inside the car to make sure the vehicles are clean: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819
Yeah they probably pipe that video to an algorithm that does background subtraction so they're able to assert that the vehicle is clear of foreign objects, but those cameras don't detect smell. If someone defecates and wipes it somewhere the camera doesn't see, then what?
The rider reports an issue and Waymo sends a new car while they send the dirty one back to the depot back to be cleaned? Offending previous rider is charged a fee and then banned for life.
Hard for me to imagine this being a widespread problem. Probably about as much problem as there is with something similar happening in the elevator of a private building.
By ganeshkrishnan 2024-06-2523:50 "the algorithm has decided that the subject has likely defecated with 63% probability and will be ejected in t-5 minutes.
Subject has no recourse to appeal and is banned from life including his ancestors and spawns"
By bloodyplonker22 2024-06-261:361 reply One of the worst parts of the Uber experience is the smell of the driver. Especially those that put on heavy cologne or perfumes.
By loopdoend 2024-06-267:09 Those who choose to drive around with air recirculation on all day...
By dotBen 2024-06-262:04 No one but they have to return to base to recharge pretty quickly, whereupon someone can clean and tidy them.
By ken47 2024-06-269:16 Why deal with real people when we can plug ourselves into the matrix? Until we get so bored that we ask the matrix to create fake people for us to interact with.
I will prefer a human driver (for several reasons) for a long time to come. I would even pay more for a a human driver.
Because of safety concerns or because you like the idea that in principle humans should be driving?
In other words, what kind of safety metrics do you think would be necessary to change your mind?
If in N years 90% of your peers use self-driving cars, and the only accidents you hear about are in the news about people you don't know, would that change your feelings about safety?
By lynx23 2024-06-267:08 Primarily because I Lack trust (safety concerns) and prefer the flexibility of human drivers. Besiides, I think eliminating "simple" jobs like being a driver will result in more social problems.
I am blind. General statistics and adoption rate in my peer group (sighted coworkers) are not representative for me at all. None of these datapoint give a good indication how much I am (as a visually non-participating pedestrian) in danger.
Given my life experience, it is safe to assume nobody really thought about blind people. I am regularily tripping over (and hurting myself with) badly placed bicycles. I am assuming a high percentage of these bicycle owners are well-meaning, green-voting people. However, their political and/or personal attitude doesn't help people like me at all, we still get hurt on a regular basis, and nobody talks about it. I would be surprised if this changed with AVs.
By orbisvicis 2024-06-2515:223 reply Another comment, another thread mentioned that Waymo requires more walking than an equivalent Uber ride - to the pickup location, from the drop-off location. Anyone know why this might be true?
By ducttapecrown 2024-06-2515:313 reply I'll hazard a guess: because Uber drivers are sometimes willing to stop for a minute in an illegal spot to park to do a quick pick up or drop off, and Waymos are never willing to do that (presumably).
During one of my last Waymo rides the car stopped on Powell between Bush and Sutter (facing South stopping on the regular lane a bit before the Powell/Sutter crossing). This caused other drivers to drive on the cable car tracks to go around the Waymo (which are separated from the driving lane with a double yellow line) and it caused a truck to do a right turn directly from the cable car tracks (as there wasn't enough space to merge back into the lane).
Not sure if was legal or not for the Waymo to stop there, but given that Waymo stops take quite a bit longer than stops with Uber/Lyft (as it takes a while for the car to continue driving) this was one of the worst places possible to stop. Especially as there would have been space available right after the crossing next to Walgreens.
By Schiendelman 2024-06-2523:321 reply Honestly, it’s almost always legal to stop in a lane. Regardless of the fact that other drivers had bad behavior, that was the right thing to do. Some of the future of all this is that we will need to install curbs in places we don’t have them now to prevent bad human behavior.
This is absolutely false in California, please don't spread dangerous misinformation.
See CVC 22400(a):
No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, becauseof a grade, or in compliance with law.
No person shall bring a vehicle to a complete stop upon a highway so as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the stop is necessary for safe operation or in compliance with law.
The above was referencing stopping on a city street ("Powell between Bush and Sutter"). You're talking about stopping on a highway. These things are not particularly comparable.
In the California Vehicle Code section 360, a "highway" is defined for the purposes of the vehicle code as "a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street." [0]
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio....
By mikeodds 2024-06-2515:45 Last night a waymo dropped me off near the giants game. Presumably somewhere you aren’t meant to stop as I heard a security guard on loudspeaker asking “the car with the display on top” to move along as I was walking away, but the car wouldn’t move as there was still relatively fast traffic moving past it.
I’ve had to walk a few times near steep hills, I was wondering if partly it was due to the angle of approach and the sensor view being blocked so they avoid the area?
By smugma 2024-06-2522:01 I’ve seen a Waymo stop and pick up a rider at Octavia and Linden. If you look at a map, you can see that it’s totally blocking all traffic.
Double parking is legal (in some cases) in California, but this wouldn’t be allowed under any reasonable interpretation.
I’ve also seen Waymos double parked on both sides of the street, which blocks other cars from going around them.
By Rebelgecko 2024-06-260:42 Fwiw there is a checkbox if you want to absolutely minimize walking. It'll often do things like drive around the block so you don't have to cross the street yourself.
One thing I actually think is really cool about the Waymo ux (full disclosure, I work for Google but not Waymo) is how it elevates the pickup/dropoff locations to feel like more of a first class feature (compared to just typing in an address and your Uber driver dropping you off in the general area).
I don't think I've ever had to walk more than 30 feet to a pickup location, but I have had it drop me off at the nearest cross street (usually on streets where it would've had to double park in front of my exact drop-off location)
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2519:33 Human taxi drivers are okay parking illegally to do pick-ups/drop-offs, and we as a society usually tolerate that, as long as they're quick about it.
But Waymo probably isn't comfortable telling its cars to park in many illegal parts of streets, even if it's going to be quick. Partially because determining which illegal parking jobs are socially acceptable vs unacceptable is a hard determination for a robot to make.
By jwr 2024-06-266:36 I definitely would not want to be a beta tester of this software. I know too well how the sausage is made, I guess.
We are way too aggressive with allowing self-driving cars on our roads. Companies are incapable of building a toaster without bugs, our banking apps are a burning garbage dumpster fire, and yet we somehow think it will be different this time?
By taylorlapeyre 2024-06-2515:066 reply Living here for the last 10 years, it's been jarring how just in the last few years, driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this the default now?"
The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking them every time.
I was riding a bike yesterday with a Waymo behind me and was impressed with how much confidence it gave me that it knew I was there.
By Rebelgecko 2024-06-260:45 One thing that really impressed me about riding Waymo is that when you start to open the door, it'll give really good warnings if you're potentially opening the door into traffic. Even specifying if there's a passing car/bike/scooter
By amelius 2024-06-2523:06 Good LiDAR makes the problem considerably easier.
By tomoyoirl 2024-06-2515:32 I don’t look forward to taking them and choose other drivers, mostly because the price and wait time dynamics are a little funny, but I am glad I did take a ride or two. They’re much better drivers in the sense of “not interested in pushing any limits.” They navigated around a parked truck effectively, queueing and waiting their turn to go into the opposing lane behind some other cars. The perception display of surrounding people and cars was very comforting. My only moment of fear was a sudden stop because a wrong-way bicyclist had lurched out into traffic — that’d happen with any driver, unless we hit the guy. Yeah, I guess you can cone them, they’re that conservative of drivers.
It’s clear that they’re not the cars for me to worry about out there on a bike / on foot / etc.
By toss1 2024-06-2615:10 This makes me wonder why this shouldn't become the default mode of public transport — i.e., subsidized by the local govt in the same way as busses/trolleys. It seems they could actually replace the busses and provide better service with a sufficient inventory of cars. Could even provide Waymo-style vans on regular++ routes, with the "++" being ability to divert to nearby residences, especially for the mobility-impaired.
Why? Why Not?
By GardenLetter27 2024-06-2614:171 reply It's us in the EU who are having the sacrifice though. As we're left behind economically and technologically as a load of octogenarian bureaucrats decide to ban genetic engineering, AI, etc.
calling protecting people's data, 'banning AI' is an interesting take
By GardenLetter27 2024-06-2617:34 I was referring to the AI Act, not the GDPR.
By frakkingcylons 2024-06-2614:471 reply Congrats on your breakthroughs in writing laws.
By oblio 2024-06-275:08 Do you still elect presidents with a minority of the popular vote? Are corporations still people?
Turns out, the right breakthroughs in writing laws are good, too. While the bad ones wreck you.
By sschueller 2024-06-2616:40 Sitting in traffic in a taxi or your own car sucks either way. Public transportation is the only sustainable solution.
> driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this the default now?"
That's still far away, these are not driverless cars, there is always a driver monitoring, but they monitor not one but many cars, ready to take over.
Highly recommend people read how Waymo's fleet response works before throwing out phrases like "remote drivers take over cars": https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
There is someone to take over as soon as the car encounters something it cannot handle. It's not self driving. By definition it's not driverless, there is always a driver assigned who will take care of it if needed. One of the reason they cannot scale beyond small areas.
By alphabetting 2024-06-2515:49 Do you think the remote operators are driving the vehicles? They can only give the car instructions (pull over, go back to depot etc). In no sense are they driving.
Assistance != taking over.
It's driverless by definition because... there's no driver in the seat. The car is in control and is responsible for its safety at all times.
Regardless of the definition, I can't buy and own such a "driverless car" because I don't operate a supervision center with people available to "assist" the car. Whatever "assist" means. Nor can any company that's not large enough to operate the infrastructure.
I'm sure at least some of the hype is in regards to people owning such "driverless" cars.
It's driverless by definition because it does not have a driver, but it's not autonomous by definition, because it requires outside help to function. Cool hair splitting. It's an impressive technical feat for sure. In regards to perceived benefits for society, it's part of the way there, as it reduces the number of humans required to driver from 1 per car to 0.something per car.
These cars are not meant to be owned. They're part of a fleet.
They are driverless and specifically L4 autonomous, which is the best autonomy you can get right now. The vehicles that can operate without any help doesn't exist. You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your expectation.
No, what you explained is 100% what I expected. Driverless cars for Google. For me, I'll be waiting a loong time.
By dilyevsky 2024-06-263:43 Doesn’t seem impossible to offer remote assistance as a paid subscription. The real showstoppers are cost and maintenance of the self-driving hardware which is astronomical
By JumpCrisscross 2024-06-2519:14 > vehicles that can operate without any help doesn't exist. You'll be waiting for a long time if that's your expectation
Eh, I'd say we're a decade out from an L5 vehicle. It'll officially be L4, on road only. But that matches a good fraction of American drivers' capabilities.
Since the assist doesn't require real time response (e.g., the failure mode is the car not moving, not you dying unlike a tesla) it seems like a non taxi version could simply set you up as the assist monitor.
If you fall asleep or don't respond it's fine, you're just stuck.
I don't think Google plans to do this for a variety of reasons, but I don't think there's fundamentally any reason they couldn't.
By red75prime 2024-06-268:30 > If you fall asleep or don't respond it's fine, you're just stuck.
"Just" being stuck on a highway doesn't sound too safe. If you have multiple supervisors watching the fleet it's less of a problem than when it's one fallible supervisor.
By longdustytrail 2024-06-2518:55 Presumably if you own the car you can act as your own “assistant”
By voxic11 2024-06-2613:13 It would go against their operating license for a remote driver to completely take over control of the car. The car is always in ultimate control even when it's getting "assistance" from a remote operator.
By dventimi 2024-06-2516:26 How many someones are there per active vehicle?
If you could rent/purchase a vehicle without a steering wheel, would you not want there to be someone available who can help out when the system runs into trouble? As long as there is no driver in the car, does it matter how it drives? Is that not just an irrelevant implementation detail that has no bearing on your passenger experience?
As long as it requires some humans to be available to "assist", I'm not sure anyone would sell or buy such a vehicle. Or rent in the "car rental" sense. Taxi service is what makes sense.
If I own the car, and I'm sending it to do errands for me while I work or sleep, seems like the cost of someone being available to "assist" it at short notice would be prohibitive. Unless it requires assistance once a month or so.
If you're sending it to do errands, you might consider also sending it out to take riders, as a side hustle. Do that, and you're now a taxicab service.
Point being, I suspect many people don't want to own any vehicle, whatever level of automation it has (which could be none). The reason we do is that taking taxis everywhere is too expensive. If that cost can be brought down, however it's done (computer brain, cab driver, capuchin monkey, whatever), many people will be happy to forgo owning a vehicle.
Where did you get this information? There are definitely people ready to respond to any requests from the car or passenger when they come up, but I've never read anything to indicate that each ride is actively monitored by a person.
Search for "driver monitoring system". As soon as there is something unexpected there is an actual driver taking care of it. Also the reason why it's not level 5, but stuck at level 4 self driving.
By bryanlarsen 2024-06-2515:461 reply That's not "always a driver monitoring". They're not actively monitoring all of them all of the time, they're responding to requests from the car.
And they're not drivers, they're supervisors. They don't take over driving, AFAICT they issue high-level commands like "safe to proceed", "take the right lane", et cetera.
There is always somebody ready to respond. Of course they can't take full control, that would be stupid dangerous, but they can still control the car. They even have people who go to your car to get it unstuck manually when needed.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:04 They can tell the car what to do like a human navigator in the front seat, but they don't directly operate the car. Those are very different things.
By JumpCrisscross 2024-06-2519:16 > There is always somebody ready to respond
I mean, this is true for Uber as well.
By __loam 2024-06-2519:30 Nobody is driving the car remotely, that would be an enormous liability. The car calls in and either asks the operator to make a decision for them or tell it where to go. Once they do that, the car handles the how. You're making a lot of proclamations about this stuff without a strong understanding about how it works.
By dventimi 2024-06-2516:28 How many cars does each person monitor?
By __loam 2024-06-2519:21 The waymo I took on Sunday didn't have a driver.
Genuine question ->
- Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years
- Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business.
Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's?
Disclaimer - I am an Alphabet & Tesla shareholder
By bangaladore 2024-06-2519:146 reply The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation information and what the car can see.
Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic signs, and much more.
HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities.
Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale.
It remains to be seen if Tesla can generalize FSD enough to reach the same level as HD Mapping everywhere. Still, they have shown that the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
> HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities.
Waymo have said time and again they don’t rely on maps being 100% accurate to be able to drive. It's one of the key assumptions of the system. They use it as prior knowledge to aid in decision making. If they got "lost" whenever there was a road change, they wouldn't be successfully navigating construction zones in San Francisco as we've seen in many videos.
They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout changes to the entire fleet. See https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...
At this point, the whole “HD maps are not practical” is just a trope perpetuated by the Tesla community for years.
> They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout changes to the entire fleet.
Which leads to mapping failures being unchecked, as the system that generated the data is the one checking the data by driving it. See bullet point 1 in their recent recall for an example.
> Prior to the Waymo ADS receiving the remedy described in this report, a collision could occur if the Waymo ADS encountered a pole or pole-like permanent object and all of the following were true:
> 1) the object was within the the boundaries of the road and the map did not include a hard road edge between the object and the driveable surface;
> 2) the Waymo ADS’s perception system assigned a low damage score to the object;
> 3) the object was located within the Waymo ADS’s intended path (e.g. when executing a pullover near the object); and
> 4) there were no other objects near the pole that the ADS would react to and avoid.
By cstejerean 2024-06-260:031 reply > the Waymo ADS’s perception system assigned a low damage score to the object;
and Tesla would do better how in this case? It also routinely crashes into stationary objects, presumably because the system assumes it wouldn't cause damage.
By flutas 2024-06-2720:04 > and Tesla would do better how in this case? It also routinely crashes into stationary objects, presumably because the system assumes it wouldn't cause damage.
Are the Teslas in the room with you right now?
Please point out in my comment where I mentioned Tesla. I can wait.
By ra7 2024-06-260:23 The changes can be checked additionally by humans, although not always.
> We’ve automated most of that process to ensure it’s efficient and scalable. Every time our cars detect changes on the road, they automatically upload the data, which gets shared with the rest of the fleet after, in some cases, being additionally checked by our mapping team.
Doesn’t mean it’s foolproof. But the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks.
Wasn’t it Waymo that had troubles navigating in winter and not seeing bike racks and other obstacles due to poor HD mapping?
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-277:09 Waymo doesn't serve any snowy locales yet. But sure, years and years ago mapping was worse than it is today? The mapping used today is working quite well in warm weather locales.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2519:164 reply > Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale.
If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost.
I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads. They will be built in lucrative places. Cruise and Waymo won't make money from putting taxis in nowhere Arkansas, so they don't need to map it.
> the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.
That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. Cruise and Waymo have amazing sensors and even they struggle with sensor range, sensor reliability, model performance on tail cases, etc. For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing. They are relying on the limited dynamic range of their cameras + active illumination + hoping laser gets enough points / your object is reflective enough. Laser perception also hits limits when lasers shine on small objects (think: skinny railroad arm). Cars also have limits with regard to interpreting written signs, which is a big part of driving.
Occlusions are still public enemy #1. Waymo killed a dog. Cruise crashed into a fire truck coming out of a blind intersection even though their sensors saw the truck within 100ms.
LiDAR and HD mapping together are supremely useful, even if you don't drive with it, for enabling you to simulate accurately. You cannot simulate reliably while guessing at distances and locations. HD maps let you use visual odometry to localize, and distance measurements grounded in physics backstop the realism of your simulation at least in terms of the world's shape.
Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with confidence since they don't have HD ground truth. There are believers at the company that maybe you could make "good enough" ground truth from imagery alone but that in and of itself is a huge risk, and it's what skipping steps looks like. Most in the industry agree that barring a major change in strategy they just have no way to regression test their software to the level of reliability required for L4 / no human supervision.
By FireBeyond 2024-06-260:161 reply > For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing.
This one in itself continues to kinda surprise me. High end Audis have full-blown thermal cameras, and will literally flag heat producing objects on the console: https://www.audi-technology-portal.de/en/electrics-electroni...
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-268:16 It's likely because thermal is expensive for the BOM and also wrt energy usage. Also low res.
By Workaccount2 2024-06-2519:211 reply Google already has a fleet of vehicles driving around continuously taking new street view photos.
By bangaladore 2024-06-2519:252 reply Google Maps seems to update at a frequency of 2-8 years. Maybe longer in some areas and we don't know what they do other than stitch it together.
HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated frequently and immediately when any construction occurs.
It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't think that is possible.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2519:302 reply The obvious thing to do is to just have every Waymo robotaxi or car with licensed Waymo tech report in its daily mapping/obstacle data to the mothership, so you can get new changes almost immediately.
I dunno if said data would be as high quality as dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every Waymo car has.
By singleshot_ 2024-06-2519:502 reply Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me as I’m approaching. I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2521:052 reply > Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me as I’m approaching.
What does this mean? Electric cars are already required to emit a sound as they drive.
I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if there's no imminent crash.
> I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.
I'm not sure what you mean. Presumably Waymo's software is the same across its fleet. They're not training one car's model at a time.
By singleshot_ 2024-06-2618:13 > What does this mean?
Well, if your car brakes hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me. I’m not sure how to make this concept simpler so I can only repeat it.
> Electric cars are already required to emit a sound as they drive.
I know.
> I guess if it has to brake hard for something, honking might be a good idea, but I wouldn't want cars to constantly be beeping at everything in their vicinity if there's no imminent crash.
If you think in a discussion about robot cars that drive themselves being conducted on a hacker website, I’m suggesting that cars communicate their sensor data to each other by honking their horns, in really not sure what to tell you other than yes, this would be profoundly dim witted.
> I'm not sure what you mean.
I believe it.
> Presumably Waymo's software is the same across its fleet. They're not training one car's model at a time.
I believe it. I also believe you’re deeply missing the point, perhaps intentionally.
By nolist_policy 2024-06-268:14 They do: https://youtu.be/YxVihk4c-h8?t=3m5s
By bangaladore 2024-06-2520:531 reply I suspect its the processing and validation, not the raw data that is difficult. At least for cities.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2521:11 Agreed, but having the raw data is still useful, especially for less-used routes where it's not economically feasible to send out dedicated mapping cars all the time.
By directevolve 2024-06-2520:51 I'm just speculating here, but I can envision a few ways of dealing with the cost problem in scaling an HD mapping-based robotaxi fleet:
1. Robotaxi companies might simply stand to make enough money to cover the cost of routine HD mapping. Anywhere the revenue of putting taxi services in a new city outweighs the cost of implementing the necessary updates sufficiently, won't companies do it? We could think of these companies as having similar economics to Uber, but replacing the cost of paying drivers with the cost of routine HD mapping updates.
2. Smaller towns have less frequent construction, so the update costs might be lower as you target less dense areas.
3. I could see a single company that specializes in providing routinely updated maps to a variety of fleet-operating companies. This could potentially be a utility or somehow subsidized by the government. It would also be possible for government to coordinate construction with HD mapping updates. After all, by lowering the rate of accidents and decreasing square footage devoted to cars, governments have a vested interest in seeing robotaxis replace human-owned and driven cars.
By Dunedan 2024-06-265:13 > Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with confidence since they don't have HD ground truth.
Tesla does have HD ground truth data for verification generated by their own LIDAR-equipped vehicles. However, according to a recent tweet by Elon Musk [1], they don't need LIDAR for that anymore.
[1]: https://nitter.poast.org/elonmusk/status/1788064109633875999
By bangaladore 2024-06-2519:314 reply > That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated.
IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5.
Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time and get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.
That vision-only argument is marketing spin from Tesla. The biggest thing it leaves out is that humans process their vision input with a human brain, which Tesla vehicles very much do not have. If and when we create true AGI they will have a good argument, but a world where that exists will be wildly different from our current one and who knows if Tesla's tech will even be relevent anymore.
By bangaladore 2024-06-2520:511 reply Why are you so confident that AGI, or a human brain, is necessary to be able to drive a car with only cameras?
I get annoyed with statements like this because technology changes and advances so quickly, and Tesla has made substantial technical leaps in this field of machine learning. They have the state-of-the-art vision -> voxels/depth models and are only improving.
Tesla, who use cameras only, have not demonstrated full self driving, despite trying for a decade. Elon Musk has stated "It is increasingly clear that all roads lead to AGI. Tesla is building an extremely compute-efficient mini AGI for FSD" [1]
Waymo, who use additional sensors like lidar, have a driverless taxi service which needs no safety drivers.
The evidence kinda speaks for itself, IMHO.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1740641473849352450?s=20
By diebeforei485 2024-06-2523:162 reply Waymo does have safety drivers, they're just driving the vehicle remotely when it's in certain areas instead of being in the vehicle. So it isn't "full" self driving either.
> Tesla, who use cameras only, have not demonstrated full self driving
There are entire youtube channels with hours of continuous video showing Teslas driving around SF, but also other parts of California, with no human intervention.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2523:531 reply No, Waymo is not driving remotely. Remote operators can only answer simple questions. They're at the point of commercialization so it's all about unit economics. There's no point in driving remotely especially since it does not scale cost-wise.
Waymo is geofenced, but within its geofence it requires zero human intervention. Tesla on the other hand is famous for mistaking the moon for a traffic light. Saying "Tesla has so many miles on YouTube" is hilarious because first of all there are channels with lots of Cruise & Waymo footage too, and more importantly it's not the # of miles that matters, but the # of non-trivial scenarios you can handle.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-260:511 reply I don't see why Tesla can't handle those scenarios if they also use remote operators. I wouldn't be surprised if they do.
Btw Waymo is nowhere near achieving unit economics. Their cars cost like 5 times what Teslas cost, and the sensors require a lot of upkeep and maintenance.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-264:16 Who’s to say what unit economics they’ve achieved but I’d hazard to guess that their investors wouldn’t support expanding their fleet and service unless the unit economics are at least close to break even. Cost for sensors and overall BOM keeps going down as more suppliers enter the market.
Are you saying that there are times when a Waymo car's ability to respond to events is at the mercy of a random Internet connection? What happens if the safety driver is steering remotely, from another town, and there's packet loss for a couple of seconds in the middle of a curve?
Again, they don’t drive or steer remotely. What sometimes happens is a multiple choice question is presented to the operator in an ambiguous situation:
<photo of construction zone> Can I drive through here? [Yes] [No]
When this is happening, the car is stopped and lets the passenger know that it’s reaching out for remote help to figure out what to do. For me this has happened two times across my 125 Waymo rides (571 miles) so far, and was resolved in under 20 seconds. Though I must say, 20 seconds feels like ages when you’re in the car and blocking traffic!
By the-rc 2024-06-262:23 I agree with you, I was just highlighting for the other poster how difficult/crazy/riskier remote driving would be.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-260:47 In that case if the car isn't able to decide what to do, it stalls in the middle of the street. Happens all the time in SF.
It's probably not accurate to say that the remote operator is "steering" though. It's more like pathfinding.
By rootusrootus 2024-06-2519:452 reply > humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat
Eyes which are orders of magnitude capable than the best cameras, and Teslas come with mediocre cameras, not the best. Eyes which are connected to a brain, and ML is a looooong ways from rivaling that.
> That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.
Robotaxis do not need to account for things jumping out unexpectedly in front of them?
By bangaladore 2024-06-2520:521 reply Again, another claim that a brain or AGI is required to drive a car. Does anyone have any research to cite that establishes this seemingly known fact?
I am not sure that the vision in Teslas is adequate with -any- amount of processing to drive a car. Spatial resolution is limited, as is seeing distant vehicles during merges, etc.
Secondarily, there is no guarantee that the amount of processing is enough, because the extant human systems use much more.
“Cheating” by using more sensors to simplify out complexities and to cover for the shortcomings of other sensors in the suite seems wise.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2521:50 > “Cheating” by using more sensors to simplify out complexities and to cover for the shortcomings of other sensors in the suite seems wise.
Also, "cheating" is just a necessary step to build baseline metrics. You need ground truth.
It may very well be the case that cheating is needed to generate the training data necessary to stop cheating...someday.
By mike_hearn 2024-06-2520:442 reply Orders of magnitude more capable than the best cameras? I wish. I need corrective lenses for my eyes to even work at all. With that fixed they feed my brain an image that's upside down, black and white except in the centre, which is covered in blood vessels and which has a blind spot. They also take a long time to adjust to sudden changes in lighting conditions, don't do any true depth sensing, suffer frequent frame drops and can't run for more than about 20 hours at a time before they basically stop working.
My brain tries to hides all this from me, and makes me think that I see the world in glorious 3D technicolor all the time, but that's a lie as revealed by the many amusing optical illusions that have been discovered over the years.
Meanwhile, today I used ML that knows more than me, can think and type faster than me, which is a much better artist than me and which can read and react far faster than me to visual stimuli. Oh, it can also easily look in every direction simultaneously without pausing or ever getting distracted or bored.
Somehow it doesn't feel like I have a big advantage over computers when it comes to driving.
The cameras we are talking about have poor angular resolution, worse dynamic range than the human eye, and don’t do any direct depth sensing either.
By mike_hearn 2024-06-2521:302 reply Are we talking about Tesla's cameras or the "best" cameras? There are smartphone cameras that do depth sensing and HDR, and cameras are cheaper than eyeballs so composing them to get more angular resolution seems OK.
By mlyle 2024-06-2522:35 ToF/structured illumination cameras are honestly not that capable.
The maximum dynamic range of the eye is ~130dB. It's very difficult to push an imaging system to work well at the dark end of what the eye will do with any decent frame rate.
It's not as different as it used to be, but even so: the Mk. I eyeball does pretty damn well compared to quite fancy cameras.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2523:111 reply > There are smartphone cameras that do depth sensing and HDR
Depth sensing is again, estimated or using time of flight sensors which is pretty much short-range lidar. HDR is used already in AV perception, but still loses to your eyeballs in dynamic range and processing time.
By mike_hearn 2024-06-268:001 reply Yes, but human depth sensing is also estimated.
Eyeballs have high dynamic range but with high mode switching times. Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust. Cameras are so cheap you can just have a regular day camera and a dedicated night vision camera together, switching between feeds can be done in milliseconds.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-268:20 > Yes, but human depth sensing is also estimated.
Robots aren't humans. You need accurate depth perception to maneuver a robot precisely, and you need ground truth depth measurements to train learned depth perceivers as well as to understand their overall performance. Humans learn it by combining their other senses and integrating over very long time using very powerful compute hardware (brain). To date, robots learn it best when you just get the raw supervision signal directly using LiDAR.
> Walk from a bright area to a dark area and it'll take seconds for your eyes to adjust
You do realize cameras have the same issue, and that HDR isn't free / is very computationally intensive?
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2521:24 > My brain tries to hides all this from me
Your brain is _really really_ good at surmounting challenges including many that you did not mention. We don't know how to get close to this in terms of reliability when using cameras and ML alone. Cameras and ML alone can go very far, but every roboticist understands the problem of compounding errors and catastrophic failure. Every ML person understands how slow our learning loops are.
Consider that ML models used in the field have to get by with a fixed amount of power and ram. If you want to process time context of say 5 seconds, and with temporal context 10Hz and with resolution 1080p, how much data bandwidth are you looking at? Comparing what you see with your eyes with a series of 1080p photos, which is better? Up it to 4k: how long does it take to even run object detection and tracking with a limited temporal context?
Your brain is working with more temporal context, more world context, and has a much more robust active learning loop than the artificial systems we're composing today. It's really impressive what we can achieve, but to those who've worked on the problem it feels laughable to say you can solve it with just cameras and compute.
There are plenty of well respected researchers who think only data and active learning loops are the bottlenecks. In my experience they're focused on treating the self driving task as a canned research problem and not a robotics problem. There are as many if not more respected researchers who've worked on the self-driving problem and see deeper seated issues -- ones that cannot be surmounted without technologies like high fidelity sensors grounded in physics and HD maps.
Even if breadth of data is the problem and Tesla's approach is supposedly yielding more data -- there is also the question of the fidelity of said data (e.g. the distances and velocities from camera-only systems are estimated and have noiser gaussians than ones generated with LiDAR). If you make what you measure, and your measurements are noisy, how can you convince yourself or your loss function for that matter that it's doing a good job of learning?
It's relatively straightforward to build toy systems where subsystems have something on the order of 95% reliability. But robotics requires you to cut the tail much further. https://wheretheroadmapends.com/game-of-9s.html
By RankingMember 2024-06-2519:452 reply > if the bar is human level
IMO the bar is well above human-level if you actually want to attain the level of trust necessary to remove the steering wheel from a car.
By rootusrootus 2024-06-2519:51 Agree 100%. And IMO it is worth remembering that a really significant share of collisions are caused by well known risk factors. For those of us who avoid being in those situations to begin with, the robotaxi would need to be a good bit safer than our average.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2519:411 reply > I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5
For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes is way higher than cameras. Dynamic range is another. Also, Cruise and Waymo are some of the only companies that have hard internal data / ability to simulate how well their safety drivers do, and in the very same scenario what their software driver will do. Without LiDAR you can't build that simulation, and once you have that data if you continue to use HD Maps and LiDAR there's probably a good reason.
> Dogs jump into the road in front of cars all the time and get killed, and kids get endangered at school bus crossings. That's a reality of life that robotaxis do not need to solve.
Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would be able to avoid.
> IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level
See, you could say this if you had some data that showed that incidents per X miles (when the vehicle is driving at night) is sufficiently low, + if the software passes some contrived scenarios to gut-check its ability to see in the dark with the necessary reliability. But you don't have that data, do you? Someone has it though :) and I'd argue regulators should have it too.
By bangaladore 2024-06-2520:481 reply > For one, frame rate and processing rate on human eyes is way higher than cameras.
I don't think it's exciting to say that you must have theoretical parity with something to use it for this use case. Tesla's solution monitors ~6? cameras at once with accurate depth in each. That's 6x more views than a human can see. I wish people would stop comparing apples to oranges.
> Robotaxis need to avoid any accident that a human would be able to avoid.
I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying attention.
By kajecounterhack 2024-06-2521:33 > Tesla's solution monitors ~6? cameras at once with accurate depth in each
No, the depth is estimated. It's not accurate, at least not in the way you need for L4.
> I never said anything to the contrary. Animals get hit all the time, not just because a human wasn't paying attention.
I was just clarifying what the bar is. The bar is that avoidable accidents need to be avoided. Nobody will get mad if a plane crashes due to unavoidable circumstances (freak accident where two engines go out due to bird strikes or something). People will stop flying in the plane when it becomes clear that the airline is not doing everything it can to avoid fatalities.
By consumer451 2024-06-2520:251 reply > The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere."
I seem to recall Musk saying in the last couple years that "full self driving will basically require AGI." This appeared to me to be extremely honest and accurate, though I believe that in the moment he was trying to promote the idea that Tesla was an AGI company.
Does anyone happen to remember when he said that?
By Mockapapella 2024-06-265:07 Would have been at one of their AI days in the last few years
By ddalex 2024-06-269:05 > requires a ton of data
Not a problem for Google, right?
> constant updating
I guess the cars can and will update the mapping in real time ?
> at best in certain cities
If mapping a city is possible, so it's mapping a highway, even easier.
If cars do update the maps themselves, they require might just a couple of human-driven passes of the standard WWaymo cars on a highway to generate the maps.
By solardev 2024-06-266:22 The obvious question here is "why not both". Use mapping data where you can, LIDAR and other sensors where you can, and visual cameras when you must. There's no reason to limit yourself to just one input type. Elon claims that, sure, but it doesn't seem like a given at all.
By hindsightbias 2024-06-2523:56 I’ve watched Waymos navigate the Tenderloin. It doesn’t get any more random than that.
By whiplash451 2024-06-2519:422 reply Waymo is in a better position because:
1. Robotaxi is a better target than general self-driving because the human baseline is much lower for robotaxis (most people dislike their experience with uber, while most people think that they are a better-than-average driver)
2. Google took the high road on safety. The move-slow-and-dont-break-things DNA of Google (that hurts them in so many domains) is a golden asset in self-driving.
By robertlagrant 2024-06-2520:11 Tbh I love my experience with Uber. I know people who don't own a car because they think it's cheaper to use Uber. But you're right - I am an above-average driver.
By choppaface 2024-06-2521:031 reply The main factor though is that California appears poised to hand them a monopoly.
By whiplash451 2024-06-260:031 reply Cruise did not help themselves. The market is open.
By choppaface 2024-06-273:58 Waymo/Google benefitted massively from regulation (and lack of regulation) early on when they hacked up the car’s code for a demo and caused an accident with injuries
https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...
Waymo would not exist as it is today if that crash had any fair scrutiny.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2519:153 reply I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment:
Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
This means that hitting even all the major metro areas in just the US is going to take them a long time, let alone the rest of the world (or at least developed world). That does give Tesla some time to potentially catch up, since they don't seem to be bounded by geography in the same way.
Now, that said, I personally don't think Tesla's strategy is workable except maybe the very long term. Doing this with only vision seems like taking something that was already enormously challenging and making it nearly impossible instead. Their slow progress and inability to get their cars to avoid even basic errors frequently, despite near a decade of development now, I think points to this strategy just being bad.
By jessriedel 2024-06-2519:222 reply > They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.
It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2519:242 reply It will get faster definitely, but how much faster is the question. We've only seen full rollout to two cities so far, so hard to extrapolate.
By llamaimperative 2024-06-2519:522 reply Well you can definitely bet it will be faster not slower than the first two, especially given the basic (i.e. shared/city-agnostic) engineering required and the policy component, which will get easier and easier with each city as risk aversion turns to FOMO.
By jessriedel 2024-06-265:09 My argument is based on theory. We know that a lot of the learning is facing unusual situations (trucks delivering traffic lights, etc) that can happen in many places. And we have some idea of how long the mapping takes.
As a potential customer, Waymo's careful approach seems much more appealing to me. I don't want to ride in a move fast and break things robotaxi when it's snowing in Chicago.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2521:15 Same, though playing Devil's Advocate some more, I can certainly see why "everywhere all at once" sounds more appealing to many people than "incremental rollout to major metros". While I'm guessing that eventually Waymo will cover pretty much any paved public road, that's not actually certain, let alone when it would happen.
I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2519:27 Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're aiming for, and I hope it works out.
By itsoktocry 2024-06-2522:161 reply There was an episode of The All In podcast a month or two ago. Friedberg brought up driverless Waymo being available in San Fran. Chamath hadn't even heard of it. He looked it up live and it blew his mind.
These guys are all about tech and couldn't believe there were companies ahead of Tesla, what do you think the normies know?
By yangikan 2024-06-2616:37 Could you point me to this episode, please?
By jrflowers 2024-06-2519:53 This is a good question. Will the robot taxi company beat the company that hasn’t made a single autonomous vehicle in the robot taxi business? It is hard to say
By diebeforei485 2024-06-2523:273 reply > is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's?
Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win.
Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:221 reply Tesla definitely has lower costs, but what they don't have is a car that can drive itself.
They only have a car that can drive with a human partner behind the wheel who's ready at any second to take over and prevent it from crashing.
> They only have a car that can drive with a human partner behind the wheel who's ready at any second to take over and prevent it from crashing.
Even that is a faulty system.
I really don't understand how people can think Tesla and Waymo are anywhere close to each other. Making a car drive itself is a much harder problem to solve than scaling production. If you look at what Tesla has, today, it is a vehicle that can sometimes drive on its own with the need for a human behind the wheel. The ability to remove the human from the front seat is the other 95% of the work. In systems like this where human lives are at stake, getting "mostly there" with FSD is essentially worthless.
The problems of logistics and scaling are well-known and well traveled. The invention of a self-driving car is not. Once Waymo has solved the issue of entering new cities and quickly gathering data to feed into their model, they've won.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2621:081 reply Scaling production isn't the issue for Waymo, it's scaling and maintaining operational capabilities within cities at a cost that still lets them be profitable.
I think it's possible, but it's definitely less trivial than scaling production of more self driving cars.
Those go hand in hand. In theory the successful mass production of their vehicles should drop the cost so that they can turn a profit. The increased number of vehicles and ridership cover the staff to maintain them. As I mentioned elsewhere I would not be surprised if the plush leather seats give way to easily cleaned hard plastic chairs.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-271:24 No, I'm saying the problem is scaling that's not just building and maintaining the cars themselves, but rather building and maintaining capability around the cars.
By Zenzero 2024-06-261:17 You are assuming Tesla is anywhere close to the capabilities of Waymo. Ignoring Elon and his history of hyping things far beyond reality, Tesla does not appear to have the equipment, data, or organizational culture to achieve what Waymo has done.
By FireBeyond 2024-06-260:141 reply Waymo doesn't have to convince its vehicle owners to let strangers ride in their car unsupervised.
Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-260:341 reply Tesla is rather good at mass producing their own vehicles so they are not reliant on existing Tesla owners providing their vehicles for the fleet. If the rumor mill is to be believed, they will also be making a dedicated robotaxi vehicle with no steering wheel so there isn't a wasted empty driver seat.
> Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.
Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.
By FireBeyond 2024-06-2615:161 reply > Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.
The entry bar for renting a vehicle on Turo is quite a bit more substantial than hailing an Uber. I looked at making my cars available.
You can restrict the age of the driver (anything vaguely high end I see required you to be 30+), require substantial deposits ($750), proof of your own insurance, mileage and location limitations, and more. Versus "Downloaded the Robotaxi app and put in a credit card number".
By diebeforei485 2024-06-2718:17 People aren't even entering a credit card number, they're just using Apple Pay!
The Tesla-owned fleet will likely have the same requirements as riding an Uber. If the rumors are to be believed, those will be dedicated robotaxi vehicles with no steering wheel.
Of course for peer-to-peer you will be able to set your own requirements based on what you're comfortable with, or even just not join the network at all so your car stays exclusively yours.
By LZ_Khan 2024-06-2520:07 I really don't think robotaxi's are viable with just consumer grade cameras. Lidar's are what make them truly safe. Aka: tesla's training data is garbage.
By notyourwork 2024-06-2519:123 reply Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2519:402 reply Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort.
Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it seems like it must be fairly infrequent.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-2523:322 reply I'm not sure how true this is anymore. FSD has improved significantly this year that they're on their new NN architecture.
It's worth remembering that Waymo required their users to sign NDA's during beta, while the Tesla FSD beta was open to everyone with no NDA. So there was a lot more Tesla content being posted and going viral.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:011 reply I've heard "Autopilot/FSD has improved a lot recently" or "the next release is going to be a huge improvement" many times from Tesla superfans. And certainly there has been improvement, but it's still at a stage where it's making very basic mistakes in operating the car.
It's not even at the point where the challenge is handling weird edge cases with construction or strange intersections, it's still struggling with not running into parked cars and walls. How many years do you think it should take a self-driving system to be able to handle those basic tasks in the general case? Because Tesla has been working on self-driving for almost a decade at this point, and they still seem to be barely past the starting line.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-261:18 > it's still at a stage where it's making very basic mistakes in operating the car.
> it's still struggling with not running into parked cars and walls
Based on the phrasing of your sentences, I must ask which FSD version you are running, and if you can share footage.
> Because Tesla has been working on self-driving for almost a decade at this point, and they still seem to be barely past the starting line.
Waymo/Google has been working on this since 2009, which was itself based on a Stanford project (whose team was hired from Stanford to Google) that started in 2004. So that's either 15 or 20 years depending on how you count, and it doesn't include the much harder tasks of mass producing vehicles and making electric vehicles commercially viable.
Waymo hasn’t required an NDA for at least a couple of years now. They only had a waitlist for access, you could share anything you want publicly.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-260:271 reply There were various stages of rollout. The earlier stages required an NDA, the later ones did not.
Meanwhile Tesla hasn't required NDA's except for employees running internal builds.
Those NDAs ended a long time ago. Waymo has given close to 2 million rides since then. Everything’s out in the open.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-260:391 reply The NDA's ended when they were confident enough in their system that the good press would outweigh the bad.
So essentially we're comparing footage from Waymo when it was at the end stages of its development to footage from Tesla at the early stages of its development.
We agree that Waymo's and Tesla's development stages are wildly different at this point.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-261:001 reply I don't know if they're wildly different at this point. Sitting in the shotgun seat, comparing the latest FSD vs the latest Waymo, on the same pickup and dropoff in San Francisco, I couldn't tell much difference. On the one hand, Waymo definitely chooses slower, quieter roads, and weird pickup/dropoff points - which means it's a slower ride. On the other hand, most people don't have access to actually try FSD so they rely on videos which are typically older FSD versions and spliced to only show "highlights" instead of being a raw 20 minute ride footage video.
I don't think we'll actually know until Tesla has an actual robotaxi product. When Cruise had one, most people who had tried both Cruise and Waymo said Waymo was better. That was my opinion as well.
> Sitting in the shotgun seat, comparing the latest FSD vs the latest Waymo, on the same pickup and dropoff in San Francisco, I couldn't tell much difference.
Well, except for the fact that one is doing it completely driverless. And it has to do that every single time without having the luxury of a driver to prevent accidents.
Big difference in reliability, which makes them wildly different.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-261:231 reply There were no interventions, so both of them were doing it completely driverless.
We can't make an apples to apples comparison until Tesla also has a robotaxi product, but even then there will be questions around the role of remote operators.
By ra7 2024-06-261:30 > There were no interventions, so both of them were doing it completely driverless.
Well, no. A Tesla doesn't operate without a driver's supervision, so it can't be driverless. It did that particular drive without intervention, that's it. The stats [1] clearly show it's nowhere near capable of doing it without a driver in the seat. Community tracker puts them at 30 miles per disengagement.
FWIW a quick google search turns up Waymo reporting they have 0.41 incidents with injuries per million miles driven [0], whereas Tesla vehicles using autopilot had 0.152 incidents with or without injuries, per million miles driven [1].
So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without injuries.
Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different numbers, but from those initial numbers it seems your perception of reality of Waymo "screwing up" less is not accurate.
[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2023/12/waymo-significantly-outperfor...)
[1] https://insideevs.com/news/720730/tesla-autopilot-crash-data....
By ra7 2024-06-2520:44 This is a ridiculous, apples-to-oranges comparison. You’re comparing fully driverless miles to driver assist miles with humans actively preventing accidents without controlling for any variables.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-2521:081 reply This is an extraordinarily disingenuous comparison. A big reason why Tesla superfans have such a poor reputation is because of bad faith arguments like this that frequently pop up in these discussions.
Tesla cars with FSD have a driver behind the wheel who can instantly take over if the car is about to crash into a stationary object. Any time a Tesla would've crashed into something an object but its human driver saved it, that doesn't count in stats like these. Many Tesla owners have reported that they have to regularly disengage FSD because it's trying to do something dangerous or looks like it's headed for a crash.
In contrast, Waymo cars do not have a human who can take the wheel if they try to run into a wall. The closest equivalent is that if Waymo cars get confused and don't know how to proceed, they can stop, then phone home and ask a human navigator to give them 'advice' or a general path; these people don't directly control the car, they're more comparable to a human navigator in the front passenger seat. It's still human assistance obviously, but it's not gonna save the car from running into an object that it didn't think was there.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-2523:361 reply > Many Tesla owners have reported that they have to regularly disengage FSD because it's trying to do something dangerous or looks like it's headed for a crash.
With Tesla the responsibility is on the person in the driver's seat, so there is a (rightfully!) a bias for overreaction on the part of the driver. We will never know many of these disengagements were necessary.
The only way to get a true comparison of data is to compare robotaxis with robotaxis.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-260:571 reply It's true that not all of them would be crashes, but many would be, because, well, the car was about to crash. The car isn't just joking around when it swerves towards some parked cars.
> The only way to get a true comparison of data is to compare robotaxis with robotaxis.
100% agreed. And so far, Tesla hasn't taken the step of actually letting the cars be driverless.
By diebeforei485 2024-06-261:111 reply Older versions of Tesla FSD tended to make steering adjustments that were short in duration, but at a higher turn angle. Human drivers in a similar situation would turn the wheel slightly but keep it turned for longer before returning to centerline.
People saw the steering wheel turn and perceived it to be the system going haywire, or thought that "the car was about to crash" as you put it, and intervened.
The newer NN based FSD acts more like what a human would do.
By TulliusCicero 2024-06-261:241 reply Yes, every year Tesla fans talk about how much it's improved, and every year it's still failing on basic driving tasks.
And there's definitely cases where the Tesla in question just tries to run into parked cars or similar for no apparent reason, but Tesla fans always have some excuse about why that's irrelevant, especially if it's not on whatever the absolute latest version is.
Then they accuse the people horrified at Teslas making basic errors and trying to crash of being "anti-Musk".
The reality is that their progress has been slowly incremental and often mixed: https://insideevs.com/news/724479/tesla-fsd-12-4-1-real-worl...
By diebeforei485 2024-06-262:03 I actually watched the entire video in the article.
There were some private driveway situations where the uploader intervened to back out to go to a new destination (but Waymo drops you off half a block away and makes you walk instead of entering your driveway, so it's not possible to compare). And there were some situations where a human driver honked - this has happened to me in Waymo as well. There was one situation where the Tesla didn't seem sure if it could proceed, but Waymo in that scenario would ask a remote operator (this has happened to me in both Waymo and Cruise) and presumably Tesla robotaxi can also have remote operators.
The only case where he actually disengaged was at a stop sign with a slip lane, and the car turned right at the stop sign instead of turning right using the slip lane. He went there again at the end of the video and the car used the slip lane. I don't see this as an unfixable problem, because clearly the car can use slip lanes to turn, it just needs to be taught to always prefer slip lanes when turning.
So, your own video disproves what you're saying. It isn't failing at basic driving tasks.
I think the mistake you're making is assuming that they will never be good enough. A lot of people said the same thing about Google/Waymo until they actually rode in one.
By mike_hearn 2024-06-2521:031 reply Tesla is willing to sell to people who will pay $$$ for a self driving car. Waymo isn't. That's probably more important for now. Taxi drivers don't earn that much, and have some advantages AI can't easily replace (able to help with luggage, use petrol stations etc). Replacing them requires undercutting them which in turn means you can't generate a ton of revenue from that. Yet Waymo's business model, such that it is, has put them many billions into the red already. I wonder if anyone has done some ROI calculations and if so how long it'd take. The LIDARs alone would require a huge number of trips just to pay them off, then you have the cars, the decade+ of enormously high software development salaries... if Waymo were another YouTube where it could hide amongst Google's other profitable businesses that'd be one thing. As a separate business with its own accountings, how long will it take until it's turned a profit?
> Tesla is willing to sell to people who will pay $$$ for a self driving car
The very low take-up rate of FSD during the trial period indicates that most people are buying Tesla's because they are arguably the best EV with the best charging network.
Not because of FSD.
By lanstin 2024-06-2623:50 Because the trial period showed that FSD will routinely try to kill you, on the routes I take around San Jose (interstate and normal roads). But having solar power and electric cars is awesome, and the car is a lot faster and more fun than my Prius was.
By lambdaone 2024-06-2521:00 Remember that the passenger cars are not the only thing that can scale; if you can automate the mapping and data preparation part of the process sufficiently, you may even be able to reduce it to mostly a matter of driving a few sensor cars around for a few weeks; maybe even cars that are adapted versions of your normal taxi vehicles, but with a human driver behind the wheel while you are mapping.
I would imagine that while Waymo's mapping efforts have been very human effort-intensive so far, they will be looking at developing this automatic map-making capability as a high priority for rolling out new cities. Scaling the rate of expansion is then mostly a matter of throwing hardware and compute at the problem.
By greenthrow 2024-06-2519:092 reply 1) Waymo has not "solved" robotaxis as a business. They are not profitable and the vehicles are not truly autonomous (the humans monitoring the vehicles are merely remote. We don't know how many humans are needed per vehicle.)
2) Tesla has zero even remotely monitored, let alone autonomous, miles driven. So no, there is no reason to believe Tesla is close to true robotaxis.
By jeffbee 2024-06-2519:38 Really, you can't repeat this point enough. Tesla has zero experience in autonomous operation. Their vehicle has not ever driven itself any distance, under any circumstances. There is no reason to believe their software is on the cusp of a sudden improvement. They simply release new major version numbers that have different sets of flaws.
By shkkmo 2024-06-2523:01 You are correct, Waymo has not solved the economics of robotaxis yet. However Waymo does have a huge head start on the solution. Waymo has been able to manage their scale growth to manage the cost of finding these solutions. It seems like a competitor that hasn't had that will have to pay a lot more to catch up.
as a Alphabet and Tesla shareholder, this is what is important.
The rate of innovation at Tesla > Waymo
The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo FSD
The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD
Tesla has economies of scale. Waymo has all the details figured out. Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years)
Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that.
Larry, Sergei are extremely poor capital allocators. Musk is brilliant (despite him being a narcisstic a*hole).
Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness.
Waymo is successful enough to not kill it, but also not a cash-flow positive to scale it up
Edit : Tch, Tch expected HN anti-Musk hate showing up in downvotes.
By Workaccount2 2024-06-2519:15 Tesla doesn't even have a single autonomous vehicle yet...
They have driving assist that people still measure in 'number of times I had to grab the wheel'.
> Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness.
Larry/Sergei didn't create the Cybertruck
The kind of founders who knows the risk of launching products?
The kind of founders who knows shipping > waiting-for-perfection?
lmao auto founders that never heard of recalls :)
move fast and break things may be ok for social networks, but never ok for endangering the safety of others
to launch a 6th model of a marque, so well established, theoretically knowing a lot about cars, a model that dies when it gets wet, it's just embarrassing
By zooq_ai 2024-06-2621:58
> it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars
Why not? They only do the integration, and traditional car and electronics manufacturers have solved the scaling problems long ago.
By zooq_ai 2024-06-2620:55 cost of Waymo FSD hardware add-ons : $50,000
cost of Tesla FSD hardware add-ons : $5,000
Tesla benefits from vertical integration, which is super important in the innovation phase.
I'm still coming to this from an unbiased perspective. Personally, I'd be a lot richer if Waymo wins the FSD race.
By DannyBee 2024-06-263:12 "The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo FSD
The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD"
This seems like one of the key assumptions, but is not proven out at all because Tesla does not even have a level 4 vehicle. So the cost of delivering one comparable to waymo is infinite right now!
Your other key assumption is "Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years)".
Both the assertion in the first part and the second part seem like super-strange assumptions, and not obviously true at all, yet are also critical to your analysis.
Waymo could get to the scale of tesla. It may or may not be too expensive to do. It could in fact, buy 5 million FSD cars. It may or may not be too expensive to do.
"Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that."
Or you know, if needed, Waymo could change?
It's funny to watch someone say "this one company will be able to adapt in every possible way to it's advantage, and nobody else can or will"
That almost never happens.
Your retort is then that you are getting downvoted because of anti-musk hate.
Have you considered that maybe you just don't have that good of an argument instead, and that your comment comes off as more of a tesla fanboy (regardless if you are) than a useful contribution?
I could write the literal opposite comment of what you did, in favor of Waymo. That would not be a useful contribution either for the same reasons.
Tesla is still stuck at Level 3 while Waymo has been operating at level 4 for years.
If Tesla does manag to jump straight from level 3 to level 5, they have a chance to compete, but that seems unlikely. They also might move to level 4 and be able to expand level 4 coverage faster, but that still remains to be seen.
Waymo has years of experience with the other hard part of self driving taxis: actually picking up and dropping off people without a human driver.
Anti-musk partisanship frustrates me, but I suspect it is your fan-boy talking points that drive the downvotes of your comment
A fan-boy would never call Musk a narcisstic a*hole.
Technology progress is non-linear. Yes, Tesla is at L3 and Waymo at L4.
But, you completely missed the point of rate-of-innovation, which was why I made that as first point.
My GOOG holdings are 4x than TSLA. But in terms of who will deliver FSD at better margins, it's hands down TSLA. It's simple Math and Elon's obsession about cutting material costs & process to it's barest minimum. Waymo has no such discipline or culture.
By solardev 2024-06-266:25 What good is being able to produce cheaper vehicles at scale if they're not capable of providing the same service? Tesla has had years to catch up but still hasn't, and there is no proof that they can.
By teractiveodular 2024-06-265:27 The main concern many observers (and I) have that is that Elon's insistence on not using LIDAR may mean that it's not possible to reach L4 with the current Tesla hardware stack, in which case TSLA can't even compete.
"A fan-boy would never call Musk a narcisstic a*hole."
FWIW - You definitely come off as as irrationally in favor of tesla, regardless of reason.
Nobody missed any of your points, they just don't agree with most them or believe the rest follow from your points.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ffhD_dNzoM0
Any driver that makes this kind of move is typically in the top 5%ile of driving skills. Yes, it's an asshole and slightly illegal move, but the level of intelligence that needs to be applied for this move is all you need to know about Tesla's advantages.
I have been extremely critical of Musk's reliance on only cameras, but I'm impressed with the progress they have made because of the new architecture in 12.x series. Considering it'll be trained with 100x more compute, I'm willing to bet that Tesla will overtake Waymo's capabilities.
Yes, it's a speculation and you can disagree, but unless proven you can't tell it's wrong
By fragmede 2024-06-2617:45 > Yes, it's an asshole and slightly illegal move, but the level of intelligence that needs to be applied for this move is all you need to know about Tesla's advantages.
Every idiot can drive like an impatient asshole. Choosing not to do is is the true sign of intelligence. The car is literally driving itself at this point. What does getting there three minutes faster so you can doom scroll Instagram from the lobby instead of doing that while your car is driving itself do for you? Are you more important than everyone else and thus deserve not to wait your turn?
If it helps, Waymo's will run red lights, so it's not like Tesla's got a monopoly on being a bad driver.
> Any driver that makes this kind of move is typically in the top 5%ile of driving skills.
Hard disagree.
It's pretty clear the car just didn't understand what the line of cars was doing.
> level of intelligence that needs to be applied for this move
If you were a human making this move, I would judge your intelligence as below average.
By zooq_ai 2024-06-2617:42 The level of skills / intelligence required to make a smooth merge in these situations without impeding anyone requires superior skills and intelligence. Something people who don't make this move won't understand
I'd say these drivers are in the lower 5%ile because what usually happens is that they now block two lanes or almost crash trying to go into the corner together.
It was luck that the left lane was moving and that there was space. I don't want to see this kind of move from a driverless car.
By zooq_ai 2024-06-2617:38 It wasn't luck. There is always space between cars during stop-and-go traffic as cars take time to accelerate.
A skilled driver always makes the smooth transition into those gaps. I know most HNers are goody-rule-followers and can never appreciate the skill required to make that maneuver consistently. But, this is a clear example of separation of intelligence / skill and I'm happy with the bet that these are signals of intelligence
As long as it doesn't impede traffic, and make these kind of smooth merge, it isn't. This is the difference between normies and first-principle-thinkers. They are being brainwashed into thinking all rules / laws are there to maximize total good for society
I don't know where you live, but here in Europe, the driver would lose the driving licence for 1 month for this little stunt. Specifically, changing lanes near the intersection over the solid line, and cutting those waiting in line.
What you call first-principle-thinkers, the rest of the world calls dicks. Everybody sees that manoeuvre, it doesn't require a genius. Most of the people don't do it because they are afraid of repercussions (if they get caught) or are civilised enough to realise that their time is not more important then the time of others. Yes, that manoeuvre doesn't "save you 5 minutes", it steals 1-2 seconds of everybody else's time.
By giving an European example, you are actually proving my point.
Just read this https://fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf
From fig (1)
Waymo/ HNers : Knowledge Edge
Musk : Convexity Bias
That's why Musk's approach will win. Waymo will no doubt provide a safe, rule-following driving experience, but Tesla will have frontier breakthroughs and provide more human-like, adapting and sufficiently aggressive driving experience
By ddalex 2024-06-2621:31 The problem with Tesla's approach is that it learns from humans. Specifically, it learns the mediocrity of humans. That's why it made that idiotic manoeuvre, it learned it from the typical people that drive other Teslas.
So Tesla will necessarily converge to the performance of your average driver, because that's where the data leads it.
Waymo's is developing a new type of understanding and modelling of the world. It perceives and tracks items above the capability of humans to track and understand. Therefore its limits are outside of the bounds of the most capable human drivers.
Your own argument highlights exactly why Tesla's approach is a dead end (exactly in the same manners that LLMs will lead to the dead internet), while Waymo's approach will likely generate super-intelligence.
> you completely missed the point of rate-of-innovation
How is the "rate of innovation" higher but yet they've innovated less and have a less functional product? It's made up metric and was ignored because it adds no value to the conversation unless you have some actual data.
Waymo has spent more money, resources and started earlier than Tesla and yet it is only marginally better than Tesla at this point.
from Fig 1: https://fooledbyrandomness.com/ConvexityScience.pdf
Waymo (and most HNers) : Knowledge Edge
Musk / (Billionaires hated by HNers) : Convexity Bias
By shkkmo 2024-06-273:32 > Waymo has spent more money, resources and started earlier than Tesla and yet it is only marginally better than Tesla at this point.
Tesla isn't even comparable to Waymo at this point because Tesla has zero level 4 capability. Teslas don't even have the redundant sensors needed for level 4+. All Tesla has is empty promises and an u unclear path for ever getting past level 3.
Many people predict that AI is going to explode, and afterward nothing will be the same. If that happens, Telsa is in a better position than anyone else to simply update their software and deliver self driving cars.
Whether that happens remains to be seen.
