I live inside the original area in Phoenix where they did their training. I have to give kudos where it's due. I originally _hated_ their cars constantly driving around our neighborhood, but I was persuaded to try one a few weeks back. It completely changed my mind. They are now my favorite way to get around. I am a very happy, frequent customer and hope they keep adding coverage and more cars. This is absolutely the future I want to live in.
I live downtown PHX (Roosevelt Row) and beyond riding in them I MUCH prefer them driving around on the streets than actual human drivers. There isn't a day goes by that I don't see drivers make up 4-way stops, disregard the 4-way stops, flip a youey in the middle of an intersection, etc. Contrast that to the ever predictable Weymo, just quietly going about their little self-driving existence.
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
I have never tried to spell the phrase "flip a youey" before.
It might be the only word I use that I have never considered spelling, so I am grateful that you included it your comment.
That said, I think you are wrong and it should be "uey", "uie," "u-ie," or any other spelling that emphasizes the "u" after which the term is named.
Also "I do not know the answer but I am sure you are wrong" is the most internetish comment I've ever made, so that's two striking experiences for me today.
> I have never tried to spell the phrase "flip a youey" before.
As a former Scripps spelling bee contestant, I've developed a low-grade allergy to commonplace onomotopeic words with no obvious, agreed-upon spelling. Recently I struggled with zhuzh (which has the bonus terror of having an alternate spelling, 'zhoosh') - but I commend OP for having chosen a phonetically parseable spelling over one of your (arguably more appropriate) choices, as I suspect it would have taken a lot longer to divine meaning from.
I had always imagined that word to be spelled "jouerge", a variation on the French verb "jouer: to play" mixed with some element of "bourgeois: in the manner of the middle class".
My etymology makes sense. You can even extend it to the "jouergeois" if you need to describe middle-class foodies.
In this case I am definitely wrong and I blame Canada.
Hahahaha! So good of you to call that out because I had never seen the word written out before either and literally tried every form you suggested and more (you-ie, u-ee, uy, etc). To be honest I settled on 'youey' not because it was the one I thought was correct, rather it was the one I thought most people would understand.
I also toyed with just putting "flip a bitch" but figured some might find that problematic as I'm not entirely sure of it's etymology...
>they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
There's something adorable and HHGTG about that whole thing! Reminds me of the robotic Star Liner that refused to take off because of the peanuts hadn't been delivered thus its checklist was incomplete. It had waited eons as its passengers withered to corpses securely locked into the cabin only stating that it was 'statistically likely a new civilisation with peanut packages will arise on this planet'.
Lemon-scented paper napkins, IIRC (I hadn't recalled corrected, so I updated it). Also Marvin spent ~millions of years in the car park for the Restaurant at the End of the Universe: ""The first ten-million years were the worst. And the second ten-million - they were the worst too… The third ten-million, I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.
"
It's funny because for some reason they definitely do feel adorable and polite. I know we shouldn't actively anthropomorphize them, but it's just the feeling you get when you see them go about their polite little way, adorably plotting our downfall.
> If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
I've had humans do this, when I had no intention of crossing the street because I was just standing at the corner waiting to meet somebody. At least the humans give up after a few seconds, with exacerbated expressions like I'm the one who did something wrong. It would be pretty funny to see a robot car sit there for minutes.
I do this all the time as a walker too! But I try to step away from the curb and signal clear dis-intent. That's bc when I'm driving the neccesary bias is to assume that all pedestrians could be erratic and go into the street at anytime. It's neccesary because even if it's only 10% you can't accept any errors.
In other words, I'm trying to politely set the groundwork to say I think you are wrong if we assume having pedestrians signal clear dis-intent to cross is a reasonable requirement. Of course, the drivers are also wrong to be exasperated with you so I do think in a sense both parties are wrong :D.)
The times it's happened to me, I was leaning up against a lamp post or telephone pole. Most drivers don't get confused, but some of the time somebody does. If I actually intend to cross, I stand up straight and attentive on the curb.
Waymo feature request: self-driving car waiting for a pedestrian for period of time, it screams "fool, I'm about to drive, so if you step in front of me, I'm driving right through your dumbass". Needs some little robot hands for deaf people. For those who simply aren't looking, it should use a water pistol.
Same here (downtown Phoenix area) -- the driverless Waymos have been awesome. Occasionally they get confused but it seems pretty rare. They're better than a lot of the other drivers on the road out here.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
I haven't taken one since they announced the change (I'm in a part of Phoenix that's pretty walkable), but I think it will be 3 in the rear bench and one in the passenger seat. They've been pretty clear that they don't want people sitting in the driver's seat, and I'm guessing that will continue to be the case with this change.
I wonder if there's some regulation behind why they haven't got rid of the traditional front-facing layout entirely and replaced it with train carriage style seats around a table?
These cars still have to meet all federal crash safety standards. Modifying the seating position would also require modifying the airbags, seat belts, seat belt pre-tensioners, etc. Then the vehicle would have to be crash tested again to ensure it is safe for the passengers.
Part of this announcement is the completion of retiring our Pacifica fleet. So while we used to have the vans on the road in Chandler, you'll now see the same vehicles that were in Downtown Phoenix and San Francisco.
It blows my mind that someone living downtown in a city the size of Phoenix (relatively large) needs to use a car at all. It’s really a shameful failure of urban planning.
Is a 20th-century mass transit system actually preferable to robocars once the technology is mature? My guess is it's the cities like Austin, planning new transit systems without designing for synergies with robocars, who are failing at urban planning.
Good public mass transit is absolutely superior. Waymo cars don't solve traffic, it only partly solves parking and paying a human.
Having (on average) a single person take up 40 square feet of space on the road for travel is horribly inefficient. You do a few orders of magnitude better with a full train car or bus.
Not only don’t autonomous cars solve traffic, they will actively make it worse. The marginal cost of operating a car drops dramatically when you remove the human drivers from them (who also suffer from pesky conditions like boredom and drowsiness), and so we can expect these vehicles to drive signficantly more frequently than their human-operated cousins.
Think about uses like DoorDash. Instead of (in a city) walking to nearby restaurants, we now replace a larger share of those dinners with ones where cars are driving back and forth across the city to pick up the food and deliver it. This will only become more common when the cost drops by not having to pay a human being, and so we can expect a much greater volume of traffic from this one example use.
Other currently-marginal use cases will see equivalent growth due to the similar economics.
Re traffic: with robot-driven cars, congestion pricing would be technically easy. This is an example of not considering possibilities created by the new tech.
You are comparing with the least efficient form of transit, and looking at cities that are not really designed for transit anyway. So yes, bad transit in cities not designed for it isn't that efficient. Note, on top of this, that you are purely looking at energy efficiency, when the key problem of individual robotaxis is space efficiency.
Realistically, what breaks efficiencies in the US is city design: Places of work mostly detached from activities and housing, pretty much guaranteeing inefficiency. The robotaxis don't make a difference here: The max number of people looking to travel at once doesn't change, and neither does their destination. This makes the number of vehicles actually on the road not change very much at all: The best you can do is hope for people being comfortable (and not inconvenienced) by carpooling with strangers, not unlike what lyft and uber offer already. In the middle of the day, there's no new demand for robotaxis: They'd be parked somewhere, and every mile they move is a car/mile of congestion they create. So you either park the cars where the jobs are, getting, in practice, the same results as private vehicles, or you park them somewhere else, increasing total congestion. It's not just robotaxis that would park: See what happens in all the train commuter lines in American cities, where most trains just get parked in a yard.
The miracle of cities with top transit (See, for instance, Madrid), is that a relatively high percentage of the network is about equally busy in both directions. Trains might stop in rush hour, but route 6 will be useful in either direction most of the time, with little waste compared to US cities. This is the real weakness of the argument of just adding more transit: What we need to make it work is basically urban rebuilds. IMO still a good idea, bit it's a far slower, and more expensive problem than it might appear.
Autonomous vehicles will not make cycling or walking next to much faster multi-ton vehicles more pleasant, even if those vehicles are less likely to kill you. I mean, have you walked along even a 35mph road with significant traffic? It's extremely unpleasant due to the noise and air pollution.
In fact, today the area around elevated freeways is often much cheaper than the surrounding area for several blocks.
They were wrong and their argument was bad, but it remains a fact that America has dismal public transit compared to other developed nations (which is why their argument was bad).
Robo cars are more expensive during peak usage, so they can form habits where public transit is both encouraged because I took a robocalled to work and the bus home because then it was rush hour, or Vice versa. Or I took the bus to work and left late at night after the buses stopped running via a robo taxi…etc. All this occurs with Uber already, I don’t bother renting a car because even though it sucks to take the bus from the airport, I can Uber that and use more efficient transit when available, since I have something that fills in the gaps. Robo cars just make that link more efficient (lower cost eventually as humans become more and more expensive).
They make not taking your car with you a bit more feasible, and that’s a start at least.
Traffic isn't a function of road space. The true throughput of roads is immense when utilized by better drivers (one extreme example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pbAI40dK0A). A lot of traffic is caused by bad human drivers: accidents (and associated rubbernecking), shockwaves, running red lights, double parking, circling around looking for parking. Additionally entire additional lanes of traffic (for cars or personal mobility vehicles) will be available when streetside parking isn't necessary. Personally I look forward to the possibilities of turning all that unecessary parking space into something useful ("we’re the Saudi Arabia of developable land in cities").
Good public mass transit presumably involves cops kicking out the smelly homeless people, right? I don't think that would fly in most places these days though, it isn't humane. Yet it's the only way to make public transit tolerable.
Some of them aren’t merely lacking access to resources. Mental illness is part of the picture too. Trains and busses are warm comfortable places for such, as well as the criminal element. People think of bus and subway stations as dirty and often dangerous places, not just in the USA.
I don't know if they're un-homed or not, but I've encountered a lot of people smoking, shouting, or making a mess with food in rail cars, making them unusable for everyone else.
Cars take up too much space. Relying on cars instead of mass transit means everything has to be more spread out, which makes walking and biking a lot worse.
If everyone can share a small fleet of self driving vehicles, they don’t need to take up a lot of space at all. I’m assuming you were talking about parking space; I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.
> If everyone can share a small fleet of self driving vehicles
They cannot.
> I don’t see how self driving cars would take up significantly more space than mass transit while on the road.
They would take up more space because they're cars. Cars can't get to similar efficiencies of space compared to buses unless you compared packed private cars with sparsely ridden buses. And then of course, there's trains.
Perhaps someday we'll have all self driving cars that can safely coordinate and pack themselves into smaller spaces on the road, but that's decades away at a minimum, since you'd first need to get rid of all manually driven cars.
Trains are a very inefficient use of space. Trains often run nearly empty, and the tracks can only be used by trains. A road (utilized by autonomous vehicles) can be used at any time and any schedule by any vehicle, including the possibility of giving automatic intersection right of way to pedestrians, or safely sharing road space with personal transport (bikes, scooters, etc.)
If a thousand people try to go to work at the same time, the car being driverless or not will not result in less than a thousand cars being driven, and the number of cars in the road is the biggest cause of congestion.
However, a bus can carry a hundred people comfortably. Ten buses instead of a thousand cars results in much leas congestion.
Well, not exactly. The good thing is that automated, centrally booked autonomous systems can run pretty good car pools. Sure human drivers can do this but it's just not as practical. Not at all. So it's possible that those 1000 people might be served by 500, 300 or maybe even 250 autonomous cars.
From an energetics perspective it's incredibly hard to beat walking, biking or rails. If your occupancy on the car is reliably greater than 1, that is an improvement over single occupancy cars, but those boxes are just huge compared to a bicycle.
I spouted this line for a long time, but was recently corrected by commenters pointing out that 2-3 occupancy electric cars actually beat the vast majority of subways and trains in practice, because you don't need to accelerate and decelerate every passenger at every possible stop. Cars are designed to be remarkably aerodynamically efficient, especially compared to motorcycles or bicycles, and an electric battery+motor is much more efficient at producing power than your muscles.
Delivering on this requires some sort of "Uber Pool" like algorithm to put a few people together in a vehicle, but doesn't require large busses.
In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk.
Average occupancy of a car is 1.5 in the US, and that number shrinks as household size declines.
(It’s also worth noting that there’s no reason that automated technologies wouldn’t also spread to buses and trains. In fact, you can already automate trains. The big win there, is that buses represent massive fleet commonality.)
> In cities where space is at a premium, a bunch of people standing, or on a bicycle, will always beat out people sitting down with room for an engine and a trunk.
It depends. For example, you can theoretically fit more people into crowded bike lanes than you can into crowded streets. But around here at least, bike lanes don't get a lot of people. I lived by one for years that I don't think I ever saw a bicycle on once. But even when not in use, all of that space is still being set aside for cyclists.
Most of the time the issue with bike lanes is really an issue of a bike lane network.
Where a wide high-quality network is deployed quickly, you do often see high ridership increases, but usually in the US what you see is a bunch of scattered lanes that barely reach anywhere in an unbroken link, and no one wants to ride a journey that is even 5% dangerous.
As a regular, enthusiastic, urban cyclist, there is nothing I want more than widespread use of autonomous vehicles. With well-behaved (i.e. not human) drivers, every street becomes safer and less stressful than a dedicated bike lane.
Also, there was that case with the Uber self-driving car hitting the person crossing the street with a bicycle in Phoenix, because they had turned off the bicycle detection resulting in automatic braking.
Keep going with that thinking. What if trains were autonomous, electric, exactly/efficiently sized to what they were transporting, didn't require expensive/dedicated tracks, and could go directly between any 2 points? You end up with autonomous vehicles.
Trains are nice because they don’t require massive reconfigurations to hold varying crowds of people and the things they carry. People move furniture on subways all the time. There isn’t really a ‘perfectly sized’ personal vehicle; even now, just the simple bifurcation between a normal and XL taxi leads to longer waits for the latter, and god forbid you need special accommodations like for a wheelchair.
Car-like vehicles have massive inefficiencies, because the act of merging into and out of other lanes is inefficient.
A train line can carry up to 80k people per direction per hour. The FHWA’s estimate of a car lane car capacity is 2k people per direction per hour. And because cars have to eventually dump onto a surface network that requires timed cycles so that pedestrians and cyclists can cross the street, these low capacity segments are actually the bottleneck.
Once it makes economic sense to design car models specifically for robotaxi use, small light one-passenger electric models may well become the most common type. In the graph I linked from my other reply, a one-person E.V. like this beat all of the transit systems and came in second only to an electric scooter/trike.
Still more cost efficient to run a single bus than separate vehicles, just in maintenance alone. Also we already have buses, these single occupation EVs that still have enough space for a decent battery size don't exist.
These seems reasonable, but I don't think the math holds up. A 2016 study (http://www.columbia.edu/~ja3041/Electric%20Bus%20Analysis%20...) showed the lifetime cost (including maintenance) of a bus for its 12 year useful lifespan to be $1.4 million. Without even doing the inflation adjustment, that could buy at least 12 electric vehicles. Those 12 vehicles could be much more efficient even running on a single fixed bus route (i.e. more frequent schedule), or (more likely) operating like taxis by taking people to and from exactly where they want to go.
That's a bit extreme. I lived in a city with a similar climate for over a decade and had no problem walking, running, biking, and playing basketball in 110+ degree dry heat. I now live in a relatively humid area and I wouldn't go hiking when it gets over 85 degrees.
Like LA: Large, sprawling, full of concrete, car-dependent
Without the good parts: No media industry, very little tech industry, much less diverse, far fewer good restaurants, no ocean
For those of us not located in areas where Waymo is available, do you mind elaborating on why this is your favorite way to get around? As compared to Uber, Lyft, etc.
- The cars are very safe, very conservative drivers
- The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell
- You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.
- They are currently at par or cheaper with Uber/Lyft prices and typically it's faster for the car to arrive
I had an Uber driver in upstate New York who was trying to get me to agree or at least not disagree with the superiority of the white "race". I had another driver in Oakland California who would not relent until I acknowledged God is real and I should be thankful for his love. I felt massive cognitive dissonance afterwards feeling both the requirement to report these drivers but also massive guilt at the non-zero chance I was depriving them of one if not the last potential for work available to them. I decided not to report either but still reflect on whether that was a good choice or not.
Edit: to be totally clear: I did not agree in either situation, but tried to gracefully divert or redirect without escalating the situation. I didn't confront as, frankly, I wasn't sure if the person would have responded violently.
Uber is valuable, but I have kind of accepted the premise that an Uber drive is just a public transit experience with a customized destination. I should expect some potentially weird and possibly unpleasant interactions as part of the process.
I would 100% convert to Waymo only away from Uber just based on those two experiences and dozens if not hundreds of generally positive Uber experiences.
I honestly don't recall ever having a driver lower than 4.2 or so ever when taking an Uber. My guess is both of those drivers were low to mid 4 stars as I didn't pay any attention to it.
I think a lot of Lyft's early "we're like Uber, but better for women!" marketing hints that this is a killer feature that will absolutely drive growth. Especially now that Lyft, too, is saturated to the point of equally-risky drivers as Uber was/is.
Yeah, as a guy I personally quite enjoy interacting with my driver (if I feel like it anyway). But basically every young female I know has been spoken to or treated inappropriately by taxi drivers here in the UK.
I think Uber has solved this to some degree with their rating system, but it's still a big problem.
I feel like once they start rolling out to more and more locales, we will be hit with a spate of news stories like "creepy guy wouldn't let my car drive away by standing in front of it and leering at me"
> The interiors are nice, well air conditioned and don't smell
If they scale, that will become a problem:
- people puking in car
- people having sex in car
- people eating greasy fries in car
These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely), but the big difference here is that users won't be anonymous. The next waymo rider (or waymo staff if the car stops by some inspection checkpoint between rides, or some extra in-car sensors) will be able to report the incident, which would flag repeating bad riders over time.
Overall the experience would be as good as a Uber today, as like you said, no roll of the dice on the driver.
Another new problem specific to self driving and not seen for public transportation: muggers driving a high speed bike targeting isolated rides (they'll know how easy it is to make the car stop, smash a window, and get the rider's valuables). Basically the modern version of stagecoach robberies.
One could argue these already happens in Europe on highways with traffic jams, but I can see the muggers being more active at night, since in addition to knowing the rider can't try to escape, there's also less crowds around. It'll be very dependants on regions : In Phoenix, I'd assume less often as muggers won't know if the rider is carrying.
> These happen in public transportation too (the sex one not as often, but puking, eating smelly/gross food definitely),
Eh, I've used public transport regularly for 10+ years in two countries as a resident and in many, many cities as a visitor, and I can count on one hand the number of incidents I've had where someone has thrown up/left vomit on the bus or train I was on. The greasy/smelly food thing is slightly true, but let's be real, someone eating a McDonald's on a train for 10 minutes out of a 4 hour journey is partially because there's no other choice for food on that train on a long journey. On short distance transit (within the city/region) I genuinely can't remember the last time I had an issue with someone eating on the bus.
> Another new problem specific to self driving and not seen for public transportation
This is just FUD. If someone stepped out in front of me in a car in my city, I would stop. It's just as likely that two people step in front of me, one smashes my window and grabs my valuables and the other stops me from driving off, as it is that they pinpoint driverless cars.
Constant HD video logging of everything going on inside and outside the car doesn't eliminate these issues, but it should do a lot to minimize them. If you're looking to do stagecoach robbery, I'm not sure why you'd pick the one car that will clearly record your face and license plate, and which is networked with hundreds of other cars to watch every second of your getaway.
If an occurence is newsworthy, then it's so uncommon that it's worth talking about. How many news stories do you hear about gangs on bikes or scooters snatching mobile phones from people?
Possible, but this behavior would get you immediately perma-banned by the vehicle operators because they 1) know who you are before you enter the vehicle 2) Have video recording of the vehicle, before, during, and after your ride. If the cameras didn't record some damage (smell?) to the vehicle, it's likely the next passenger would report it.
Here's one concrete example -- these cars almost never take left hand turns. They'll route multiple right hand turns to get somewhere, which makes it feel much less risky when pulling onto a busy street from a neighborhood, for example.
> Tbh, you shouldn't compare Tesla "AutoPilot" with these full self driving options.
Right. Because Tesla FSD “beta” is not guaranteed, even if you pay for the monthly subscription.
And even if you did have Tesla FSD beta, it’s a pile of shit. It’s gets worse every quarter as they continue to remove safety sensors from vehicles due to supply chain issues.
>The Tesla full self driving private beta is more comparable
Have they removed the "you need to be fully aware and ready to grab the wheel" requirements of FSD? If not, how is this comparable? There is no driver.
I mention that in the second part of the sentence you quote. It's comparable in some ways because the car drives itself most of the time. And apparently is not restricted to some well mapped areas.
It’s really really not, Waymo only works in a tiny section of the country which has almost perfect conditions for self driving. Let me know when it works in upstate New York during winter.
Tesla is developing a general solution which works everywhere and can take left hand turns! ;)
>Tesla is developing a general solution which works everywhere and can take left hand turns!
Ah yes, the classic comparison between a product you can literally go out and use, today, versus some hypothetical Tesla future state. No matter how good the technology is, Tesla promises something better and people act like it exists.
Depends on your definition of advanced. A coffee maker is more advanced than Waymo because it can do something Waymo can't. Waymo could easily modify their cars so that they can make coffee and can drive everywhere with a lower failure rate than Tesla, but they don't want to. On the other hand, Tesla can't do what Waymo does.
> You don't have to talk to a person, which I don't always hate but have had some bad experiences. This just removes the roll of the dice from the equation entirely.
Given that they are a Google/Alphabet company this seems like a missed opportunity for running ads on loop.
The attention of a captive audience will absolutely be monetized. This could happen any number of ways, but likely that there will be an option (like YouTube) to pay extra for an ad-free experience.
For me in SF using cruise, I find them to be much safer and smoother drivers than Uber/Lyfts. I don't get car sick and I don't have to worry for my safety.
A hopefully not-too-annoying reminder that this isn’t a future that is sustainable or desirable to live in compared with alternatives. It’s really just better than the automotive hellscape you are used to.
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
What you’re saying is probably true, but are you proposing razing Phoenix and rebuilding it as a less car-focused place? My sense is that that proposal wouldn’t be too popular with the people whose homes you’re tearing down, nor would necessarily the change in lifestyle they would be forced to undergo (after I’m sure what would be decades of rebuilding…).
Considering the fact that the Phoenix area is rapidly growing, I would propose that new development focuses on transit oriented design, smarter zoning, and improved land use. It would even benefit municipalities financially to discourage unproductive land use that don’t drive tax revenue, like parking lots.
When we talk about razing and rebuilding, it’s notable that this has already happened in our history. That’s how we have interstate highways cutting through urban areas and the destruction of the passenger rail network which was effectively razed and replaced by highways. Many big box stores and parking lots replace buildings that were destroyed (see before and after photos of downtown Houston, for example).
Most American cities outside of the coasts wouldn’t even exist without a railroad network that largely no longer exists.
These are all conscious choices and there’s no such thing as being stuck with cars-only infrastructure forever. The defeatism of saying that we are stuck with cars-only is a lie. After all, interstates regularly need billions of dollars of periodic investment just to keep them functional. Many states continually decide to do things like add lanes and enhanced interchanges at eye-watering costs that aren’t too dissimilar from the cost of adding new rail service.
For example, what if instead of spending $20 Billion in today’s dollars on the big dig in Boston, the elevated highway was simply demolished and the rest of the insane costs that were sunk into an underground highway went into expanding the commuter rail network and making a better rail connection to Logan airport (the blue line already nearly goes there with a short airport bus transfer, which could be further improved). That would reduce traffic in downtown Boston rather than expanding traffic by adding lanes and making driving more attractive than alternatives. This is already one of America’s most walkable cities but the highway was moved underground rather than removed.
$20 billion is so much money that entire new commuter rail lines could have been built for that price.
Phoenix is located at the confluence of the Gila and Salt rivers. Municipal water use is flat since the 1990s while the population has increased from 1 to 1.5 million [1]. Its modern canal system is built on the ruins of irrigation works built by the Hohoklams over 1000 years ago [2]. Locations around the metro area have been inhabited for even longer. And finally, agriculture is 70% of water use state-wide [3]. Some embarrassingly large portion of that is used to grow alfalfa which is exported to the middle east where they have actual deserts.
What scenario did you have in mind where the city runs out of water? I bet the nice
folks who actually do this kind of work would love to hear about it. They seem exceedingly confident in their water portfolio [4]. Or maybe you’re just speculating; a little curiosity goes a long way [5].
>> The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning
By the criteria I would use, Phoenix is a massive success in urban planning. The criteria I would use would be the willingness of people to move there.
In 1950, Phoenix was in the top 100 biggest US cities...barely. It was 99th, with a little over 100,000 people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2000, Phoenix was the 6th largest city in the US with 1.3 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8 million.
In 2022, Phoenix was the 5th largest city in the US with 1.6 million people. NYC was the largest, with around 8.5 million. And NYC has been losing population for the last few years.
The people who moved to Phoenix didn't have guns to their heads. They moved there because out of all the cities in the US, Phoenix worked best for them. To me that points to an incredible urban planning success. They might have failed at building a city that you like. They might have failed at building a city that was hostile to people who want a single family home with a two car garage. But they didn't fail at building a city that people choose to move to.
A future with all autonomous vehicles is about the best transportation future I can imagine! Go directly point-to-point in private transportation quickly, quietly, safely and efficiently. In a fully-autonomous future, infrastructure needs are dramatically reduced: no parking, fewer lanes of traffic, minimal road surface (could even just be 2 "rails" of pavement for the tires). Fully-autonomous vehicles could also reduce domestic flights dramatically (and all the associated fuel consumption and noise).
I've gone over to Chandler to check them out - was also really impressed, very smooth ride! I'm on the wrong side of I-10 unfortunately for getting regular rides from my house :/
I'll contrast this with Cruise, which are driving autonomously in San Francisco.
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
Visualizing this situation happening in New York City, where I live, is causing me to chuckle out loud.
It’s hard not to envision the nearest construction vehicle casually lifting the thing into the east river while a couple NYPD guys laugh and take pics for their friends.
In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to
a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too
far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to
indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey
this.
Yeah that tracks. My last run in with Cruise was towards the end of April when their vehicle (Gnome) decided to just wait for the light to turn green… in the fucking crosswalk. This was on Market, so it's not like it's a small, easy to miss crosswalk.
Sure, to that end my favorite Cruise anecdote stems from one of the Cruise humans forcing the car to make an illegal left turn off of Mission a few years ago. Granted Cruise's software still struggles with legal left turns, but still.
A formative experience when I was learning to drive was being pulled over to the right and watching a firetruck pull behind a car stopped at a red light, siren blaring and lights flashing, and eventually having to get on the PA and tell the person to run the red light so they could get through.
That's a mistake by the fire truck. You aren't supposed to preemptively run a red light to help them, they're supposed to order you to do it right away if that's what they want.
This surprised me, and I haven’t found any information one way or the other about the universality of the rule, but I did find this guide that strongly implies you’re correct.
In Germany you have to make way/not obstruct, though you don't have to endanger yourself excessively.
So if the traffic behaves, you absolutely have to move out of the emergency vehicle's way traffic light be damned. Usually you'd pull over to not put yourself into a prime t-boning spot, but with good visibility you actually drive across the intersection to where you where going anyways, and ensure you let them pass.
Yes, there were some news stories about the challenges that public safety and law enforcement had when dealing with Cruise vehicles. The company sent training materials, but that’s as much as I can remember at the moment, I’m sure some searching would pull up hits.
In these cases, bus vs cruise vehicles, the bus is often helpless to fix the problem, and a stalemate ensues. As I understand it, bus drivers in SF are not allowed to backup without the presence of a supervisor (it makes sense that you'd want someone watching the back of the bus) so it is up to the cruise vehicle to backtrack if they somehow meet up head-to-head. Of course the cruise vehicle is like an Uber driven by Spock--perfectly logical and without emotion--and will just is sit waiting until the path ahead is clear.
It seems to have recently gotten worse too. I'd never had a bad experience driving near them until recently, and all of a sudden every time I'm near one it's doing something annoying/worrying.
Driving in a chaotic dense urban environment like San Francisco is much harder than driving in a giant suburb like Phoenix, which is among some of the most car-optimized, easiest places to drive in the world.
Cruise also operates in Phoenix; it would be interesting to contrast its performance with Waymo there.
I walk my dogs twice a day and the cars are constantly driving by with their array of sensors. Made me feel like I was being constantly filmed and recorded... which as I understand them to work I certainly was/am. Outside of that, I resented being involuntarily part of a science experiment that is objectively pretty dangerous all things considered. For example, I would never cross the street when one was coming down the road. I didn't trust them.
> What about the experience of using the service changed your opinion?
The UX is really incredible. The car handled driving very, very well. Much better/safer than most Uber/Lyft's I've been in. Made me realize how freeing this technology will be for those that don't have the ability to drive. If you don't have a car / don't have the ability to drive in Phoenix, you're going to have a bad time. Walkability here is typically very poor.
Yeah, as a skateboarder in SF a few years ago, the driverless cars for testing were already way more predictable and generally chill than the human Uber drivers, who would do all kinds of crazy, erratic things.
In an ideal world, we'd have physical separation for peds/bikes/skateboards/etc and motorized vehicles, but if we have to share, I'd much rather share with AI than humans.
(That's my pedestrian perspective. As a driver, I love driving and would hate to lose the right. But honestly I think the writing is on the wall, especially in dense urban environments.)
Regarding the risk of stepping out in front of a Waymo vehicle, I personally wouldn't be too concerned about it as long as there's adequate stopping distance to begin with. You're most definitely being picked up by at least a few different sensors, even from hundreds of ft away. If the car is able to correctly categorize you as a pedestrian, it's constantly re-assessing the probability of you stepping into its path based on multiple visual cues, adjusting its behavior accordingly. If the car isn't able to categorize you, it's still seeing you as a large blob that isn't in its static world map, so it's going to aggressively stop out of caution rather than try driving through you.
The reliance on a static world map is a very big safety feature in my opinion. I wouldn't be as confident stepping into the path of a Tesla.
Yeah I hope Waymo expands soon out to Mesa/Gilbert area where I am. My wife has never driven in the 20 years we’ve been together. Fortunately we live within a 5-10 minute walk of an intersection with multiple grocery stores, lots of restaurants and medical offices but it would be nice for her to be able to go beyond that bubble without my help. She feels bad about using Uber for 2 mile drives (even though she tips well) but wouldn’t feel bad about using a self driving for those purposes.
For folks that are interested, the discussion at /r/selfdrivingcars [1] picked out some of the salient numbers. Brad Templeton also did his own write up at [2].
I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.
I really hope that I can get access in San Francisco soon. The closest grocery store to me in Bayview is a 30 minute walk across one of SF's riskiest pedestrian intersections and my neighborhood's only bus service is a corporate shuttle. Cruise just announced coverage for the "entire city" but it won't actually include my neighborhood. I've been well aware of Waymo for a long time, and been on the waiting list for over a year now! I've actually seen people getting in and out of Waymos near my apartment, and my limited experiencing riding the Cruise beta has me really excited to someday traverse SF in self driving vehicles. Can't wait.
Yeah it's weird for me that the CEO bragged about it on Twitter as if it was open to everyone, when it's only open to employees?
I'm in the beta but still haven't tried it because unless you live directly in the zone it operates it's not useful. Even then rarely am I ubering in the middle of the night anyway.
As is, I'd have to take an uber to the zone it operates in after 10pm, then get a cruise point to point in an area where everything is closed, then take an uber home.
How well does this scale? At some point do you just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country, or are you reliant on ongoing large amounts of support for the cars which means that the costs for expansion make it currently non viable?
Not OP, but I work in the industry. It's not as simple as opening the tap for three primary reasons: 1) localization, 2) operations, 3) cost.
Localization means that you cannot generally (with current-state tech) ship a bunch of cars to a new city and turn them loose. You have to do a large amount of detailed mapping, characterization, and training in every area you want to launch. That's why you see all the self-driving companies slowly expanding availability areas after their test cars have been running around for many thousands of miles in the area.
Operations is all the stuff that's not the car driving itself around. The cars need a home base where they can park when not in use, recharge, get cleaned, have sensors checked and calibrated, and get maintenance when needed (scales linearly with number of vehicles). The cars are also not 100% flawlessly handling every situation and rider issue - there still needs to be human support in the loop, both in terms of a dedicated remote support team (scales linearly with number of rides) and in terms of local rescue people to get cars when they're really stuck (scales linearly with number of vehicles).
Cost is the cost of vehicles, tech (ADKs), and operations. Waymo and Cruise are currently operating at absolutely massive loss and will continue to do so for years. It's generally not a great idea to open the faucet on a money-losing business until you at least have a solid way to get to profitability. Yes, I know, Uber and other giant startups basically never made money, etc. etc. but the market has changed and owners are looking to decrease costs of tech and operations before really scaling up. It's going to take a couple years still.
I would only caution that people shouldn't overindex on mapping costs. When you're talking about entering a major metro area, you need lots of vehicles and depots and so on anyway just to provide the eventual service. So the upfront initial map build out is certainly a component of starting in a new geography, but I think people assume it is somehow dominant. It's not.
The current approach then for ride hailing, which requires depots, means that:
> just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country
There seems to be a lot of misconception and misinformation about mapping. People (mostly influencers associated with Tesla) constantly cite it as a major bottleneck for scaling. And there are barely any technical details about the mapping process. Are you able expand on the following:
- Is the initial mapping effort very high and expensive? How long does it take, on an average, to fully map a city the size and complexity of San Francisco?
- How much of the mapping process is automated?
- How are the maps kept up-to-date? We know from Waymo's blog post a while ago [1] that the cars map continuously. But is human intervention required to verify an update (like a new construction zone that was encountered)?
- How much of the country have you already mapped? Waymo says they are testing in 25 cities, so I'm assuming the number is at least 25 cities.
- What does a vehicle do if it detects a mismatch of road conditions vs the onboard map? (I already know the answer, but this is one of the most frequent points of misinformation where people say it stops working)
Anything you can share without revealing your secret sauce is appreciated!
I haven't taken a ride but I expect that Waymo/Cruise just set their current price/ride to 80% of whatever Uber etc. charge. Since that cost is just a made up number anyway as they have accepted operating at a loss.
When you take a hard look at exactly how to get the costs down to the point where that price is profitable, that must be a monumental challenge. The cars must cost maybe $100-150k more? Maintenance on the sensitive custom-fit equipment, software and operations costs, yikes.
This claim in the Forbes article doesn't make sense to me: "It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for."
Alphabet has been pressured to show more tangible financial results by activist shareholders[1]. Waymo has 2,500 employees. Waymo's annual budget for headcount alone include stock based compensation is over $1B by my estimate.
Activist investors spur changes with that share of ownership all the time. The exact size of their current stake matters much less than their expected ability to marshall much larger amounts if desired; by buying more stock and/or convincing existing shareholders to vote with them.
> “We are writing to express our view that the cost base of Alphabet is too high and management needs to take aggressive action,” TCI wrote in the letter, signed by managing director Christopher Hohn. “The company has too many employees and the cost per employee is too high.”
1. TCI writes a letter to Google saying that they should layoff employees.
2. A few weeks later, Google lays off employees.
3. Literally the day the Google layoffs are announced, TCI writes a letter to Google saying "I have appreciated our recent dialogue concerning Alphabet's cost base. I am encouraged to see that you are now taking some action to right size Alphabet's cost base and understand that it is never an easy decision to let people go."
We currently only operate the public service in Phoenix and San Francisco. There isn't a wait list in Phoenix, anyone can ride, but there is in San Francisco. So... technically they're currently independent.
But our goal in any new area would be to focus on the people that live there, because they would use the service regularly. Of course, the broader goal is no waitlist anywhere :).
Is the waitlist FIFO or does it prioritize? For example, suppose a Googler signed up for the waitlist, and since they already have ~all Googlers on it, they won't get access before 2026. Could they get access faster by quitting their job, deleting their Waymo account, then re-enrolling as unemployed?
Seems to be waitlist per city. But they only have a waitlist in SF currently. Phoenix is fully open to the public and LA is employee-only so far, so no waitlist open there yet.
Really love what waymo have been achieving with a relatively small team, but more importantly, they’ve had their heads down working and solving hard problems instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises (e.g. delivering robotaxies that make you $30k/yr by next year!), getting into ideological (sensor) wars, etc.
(How many people know the name of their CEO? And yet they’re slowly and steadily marching along, hitting one milestone after another.)
> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises
Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]
Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.
Definitely. The big picture is that they are very careful and conservative with their statements about the future, but if you look hard enough you can always find something. With Tesla it's the polar opposite.
I didn’t realize Tesla’s team was so small. Both companies have truly done incredible work!
It’s funny watching HN comments trying to tear down Musk and Tesla while their software—which has driven billions of miles—continues to just get better and better.
I love that we have these companies all investing billions of dollars on trying to solve this problem in very different ways. Truly a beautiful example of capitalism at work pushing technology forward in a way that (sooner than you think) will be saving millions of lives and trillions of dollars.
A lot of people bought cars based on bad, lying, PR. Appreciating assets, $30K/year robotaxi service next year, we'll rent out your car for you. Coast to coast in 9 months, again, again, again, and again.
It's sort of the opposite of what OP praised: loud, not quiet, scrambling in public, not head's down.
I see it completely differently. Up until Tesla made it possible, no one would ever even imagine buying a car based on functionality that would be added later. It was simply never done.
Tesla pioneered the model of a unified fleet software with constant updates and new features. And with that architecture they consistently deliver incremental value to every Tesla owner on a regular basis.
I’ve been an M3 owner since 2018 running software that had barebones visualization, basic lane keeping, TACC, and not even a dash cam or sentry mode, or the ability to automatically change lanes on the highway.
Today I drive FSD beta 11.3.6 on the same car which regularly brings me door to door, drives impeccably on and off the highway, handles lane changes, off-ramps, unprotected left turns, etc.
Truly hands off, unsupervised, self-driving is the target. Owners see Tesla’s relentless drive towards this goal, and FSD Beta gets better with each release.
Elon did think he would get there sooner. He did say at the 2019 Autonomy Day he thought it would be feature complete by 2020. But Tesla never promised it would be done then, and Elon even said his biggest criticism - and he said it’s a fair one - is he gets the time wrong. “Sometimes I’m not on time. But I get it done.”
Honestly it remains to be seen if they will pull it off. The level of improvement in the last year has me more optimistic than I have been previously. In the meantime a Tesla is still the best car and by far the best value on the market.
I appreciate the scale of the challenge; what Tesla is trying to do with FSD, and what it will mean for the world if they succeed. Turing awards and Nobel prizes alike.
I personally don’t begrudge that it’s taken longer than Elon hoped to achieve one of humanity’s most ambitious and meaningful technological breakthroughs. I love being part of the process and contributing to its success.
Frankly it’s the people who would never by a Tesla who complain about the timeline. The fact is that the vast majority of actual owners are extremely satisfied with their purchase. Consumer Reports surveys found Tesla was the #1 brand for customer satisfaction several years now.
Not sure what the last paragraph is saying, but it is regrettable how consumers were led to believe that this problem would be quickly solved.
In their defense, the whole AI industry was convinced of this. It’s known as the long tail. An absurdly huge number of small edge cases to fix before it’s a solved problem.
Exactly this. You can find so many videos of various self driving vehicles safely traversing the roads, highlighting the truly incredible work they’re all doing.
It’s gross how many people ride the bandwagon of anti-Tesla or anti-self driving because it’s not coming out as fast as the next iPhone revision. It’s a damn hard problem that’s going to take a bit of time and deliver serious rewards to our society.
This must be what it felt like in the early days of automobiles or other highly disruptive, society changing innovations.
Sadly I think it’s just human nature. Problems always look easy from the outside. Underdogs which are at first rooted for, if they succeed enough, become reviled. New things that challenge the status quo are scary and vilified.
In the end… if the day comes that I install a new update on my Model 3 and it boots up with full-release FSD with an Enable Robotaxi button, fact is people will still hate on them.
I recognize it as hugely advanced, world changing technology. If they truly nail it, every other passenger car is obsolete.
The idea that such powerful technology would be locked up and controlled by Google of all companies… on highly customized vehicles that only they own… you would think HN in particular would realize how badly that future turns out.
What Tesla is doing in entirely laudable, and they’re doing it in a way that democratizes rather than monopolizes the technology. And this fits with Elon’s entire ethos of tackling challenges he sees as necessary as a way to protect humanity.
Yup, I very much liked the broader approach of solving the general problem, but this actually seems to be doing better.
The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.
Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.
> The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
That's certainly the intent with Waymo Via for trucking, and we drive multiple routes today including say Dallas <=> Houston for beer [1]. The video at [2] includes some footage of the trucks on a highway.
Google has a strong foundation for estimating this effort because they already do it at lower fidelity with streetview. I would assume they are considering these questions regularly as part of whatever long term planning goes into the rollout.
Interesting question. I'm guessing the information density of 100 miles of standard American interstate is less than that of 1 city block in Manhattan.
I've had access in SF for the past few months and have been really impressed! The Waymo rides I've taken have been confident + a bit conservative (e.g. driving at the speed limit when traffic is flowing more quickly), but overall the team's done a great job with the experience. It's free for now so I've been using it regularly during commuting/rush hour and casual drives. Some quick thoughts:
Advantages over Uber/Lyft:
- Privacy - having the car to yourself is nice!
- Safety - My friends who are women have almost universally said they feel uncomfortable taking Ubers/Lyfts at night and would prefer the Waymo
- Ride matching happens almost instantly
- Estimated pickup times are consistently accurate
- Trunk is open for use and the car will prompt you to grab your items and open the trunk at the end of a ride
- Extra legroom in backseat because there's no driver
- No driver/car confusion - you can set your initials to be displayed on top of the car at pickup
Parity with Uber/Lyft:
- Drives surprisingly confidently/well - can handle complex urban traffic, pedestrians, cyclists without doing anything obviously "dumb"
- First-class native app experience
- Rides are priced upfront
- Rides can be multi-stop
Disadvantages (today) vs Uber/Lyft:
- Driving is conservative - nothing above the speed limit
- Driving is sometimes a little bit jerky (e.g. at stop signs, while inching on a right turn at a red light)
- Routes can sometimes be odd / longer (usually within 25% of the most direct route)
- Rarely (<5% rides), car will stop for pickup somewhere odd (middle of lane when there's an available curb, right turn lane)
- No driver if you leave something behind (there's a support form online, but I left my phone once and a good samaritan happened to call using the emergency number)
- Pickup times can be longer today than Uber/Lyft as they roll out more cars
Honestly, if they fix the occasional indirect routing and eventually are able to let the cars flow at the same speed as traffic, I'd pick the Waymo almost every time.
Did you get access from the public beta sign-up list, or some other channel? I've been on the waitlist for over a year and have seen people utilizing Waymo near my apartment, but nothing's budged for me. I did get into the Cruise beta, and that just made me positive Waymo will almost completely replace other forms of car transit for me once it's available, but Cruise is very limited.
Just public beta sign-up list as far as I know! I don't remember doing anything special besides signing up for the waitlist and filling out a survey, so I guess I just got lucky.
Jumping back to this thread. My understanding is that the California Public Utilities Commission is the body that regulates this and Waymo does have the approval to provide driverless rides at no charge (Drivered Deployment) but does not yet have the approval it needs to charge for those rides (Driverless Deployment). I think Cruise is the only service that's allowed to charge for fully driverless rides in SF so far.
The Waymo approach has proven itself. Targeted testing, running the driver in hard mode as much as possible, is better than the Tesla approach. Tesla’s plan was essentially “machine learning underpants gnomes”. Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ??? -> profit. Didn’t work and now Tesla is recognized as being dead last in the game, behind dozens of no-name Chinese players.
Now what I wonder is whether Waymo has a durable lead over Cruise, or if Cruise succeeds alongside them.
I have always been a huge proponent of Waymo and obviously Tesla doesn't have something comparable to them now.
But if you look at videos of recorded Tesla autopilot drives on Youtube you will see a huge amount of success in terms of getting people to their destination without crashing or killing anyone. And there is constant gradual improvement.
If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service. The trick will probably be that you need to have a driver's license and sit in the front seat at first. But after X months they will probably allow sitting in the back, especially for certain vetted trip regions.
> If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service.
2-3% improvement in what metric exactly? Disengagement rate? Tesla has a long way to go there in anything but highway driving.[1]
YouTube videos are not proof of the safety of an autonomous vehicle. Tesla autopilot is currently very optimistically at level 2.5. 2-3%, even across all metrics won't get them to level 3, much less level 5.
I don't blame the people working in their self-driving program. The expectations that have been placed upon them are unreasonable given the constraints on equipment cost and aesthetic design.
Tesla's advanced-driving systems (AP and FSD) lead the world in terms of deaths. It's not even close: Tesla has more fatalities than every other advanced-driving system in the world, combined.
Even massaging the data in the light most favorable for Tesla, a Tesla is still 3x more likely to be in an accident resulting in injuries than the next worst advanced-driving system, and is more than 50x more likely to be in an accident causing injuries than Toyota's or GM's advanced driving systems.
A 2-3% improvement still means that Tesla is the most dangerous advanced driving system on the roads.
It doesn't matter what advanced driving systems you compare; Tesla is the world's worst in terms of accidents, injuries, and fatalities. For sources: NYT and WaPo both have a series of articles covering this; the NHTSA has released a report documenting over 100 Tesla advanced driving accidents.
> It doesn't matter what advanced driving systems you compare
It doesn’t matter? Sorry, but this is absurd. There are no other advanced driving systems on any production vehicles that is comparable to what Tesla is doing.
This kind of unbacked, vague, hand-wavey, arm-chair cynicism holds society back from making real progress. No thanks.
True, Tesla's ADAS systems are unique in crashing into things like big rigs, police cars, parked cars, children, and other things that every other system is able to avoid.
Silly pro-Tesla FUD is setting back actual progress in ADAS systems by years.
For comparison, the entire rest of the world's automotive industry has 1 fatality and fewer than 100 accidents, despite having advanced driving systems on more than 3 million vehicles.
But nice try, I'm sure Elon would love to hire you hire Tesla's damage control department.
The baby steps makes sense, but you gotta admit Phoenix has to be thr easiest metro area to test with: Little inclement weather, little terrain change, newer infrastructure, streets mostly laid out in an east-west, north-south grid with consistent naming and numbering.
Most of Waymo's hours are in simulation anyway, and that can be as hard as they want it to be. Waymo's meatspace test track is also nothing but edge cases.
I understand that Tesla also learns in simulation.
That's probably the hardest problem. But I think you severely underestimate just how hard getting it to work in a place like SF (in rain and fog) is. To get to where they are is a serious accomplishment.
Tesla approach is to grief their customers into paying for feature they have no concrete plans to ever deliver on (in the absence of lidar/radar sensors it’s a crapshoot) -> profit. Worked pretty well
The argument was more that to do it generally you need vision to work, lidar will always be a narrow solution and redundant when you have vision.
It might end up that solving the narrow city problem with high res maps is valuable enough to tackle anyway, but it could still be true that will never solve the general case.
Of course, it could be true that Tesla was be unable to solve it also. Though at some point attaching some general intelligence to vision can probably do it. Likely will be bigger issues then though.
Just because humans can generally do it without lidar and other sensors, does not mean that lidar and other sensors, would not improve human driving, if we could somehow integrate them seamlessly (and well reduce their price).
A car equipped with more sensors, will always be better at handling more situations, than the one without them, no matter how "smart" their drivers become.
I think the overlooked part is "seamlessly integrate". Signal to noise ratio is important, and it is not trivial to "just add sensors". I think the analogy of "too many cooks in the kitchen" applies here.
I think the keyword you’re looking for is ‘sensor fusion’, which apparently is only a problem for Tesla because the others have figured it out years ago. Perhaps there is a talent gap at Tesla or an unwillingness to invest in it. They generally avoid having to do anything that’s hard and try to look for shortcuts.
Case in point: the whole radar removal and reintroduction flip flop. It seems like they don’t believe themselves that cameras are sufficient.
That’s tangential to your original point of discussion which was sensor integration. Sensor fusion is absolutely a solved problem. Autonomous driving requires more than just sensor fusion though.
It's not tangential at all. If the purpose of these sensors is for autonomous driving, and "solving" sensor fusion hasn't gotten you there, how can you possibly say it is a solved problem? Sensor fusion (in this context) is not solved until you are using fused sensors for autonomous driving.
Why are you equating sensor fusion with solving the entirety of autonomous driving? That’s disingenuous. You understand sub problems can be solved, right? Sensor fusion is just combining different sensor inputs so you have high confidence in your object detection and you’re not “confused with disagreements” as Tesla likes to say. Self driving involves solving prediction and planning problems too, not just sensor fusion.
I'm not equating it with solving the entire problem, I am pushing back against the idea that autonomous driving can be sub-divided into completely discrete sub-problems. So I guess you could say no, I do not understand that sub-problems can be solved.
Object detection is inextricably linked with prediction which are both inextricably linked with planning.
Of course, they are linked. It doesn't mean you need to operate worldwide to prove sensor fusion is working. There is no scaling issue with it. Sensor fusion is already proven effective as companies using it are showing excellent safety records where they are operate. The Tesla complaints about "what do you do in case of disagreements?" don't hold good anymore. They just don't want to invest in get it working (but are now forced to as they re-introduce radar in their vehicles).
Sensor fusion has nothing to do with scale. They are merely algorithms that combine multiple real time inputs into a single low level representation. This process remains the same whether you operate in San Francisco or worldwide. How they are interpreted is what differs from a Waymo to a Cruise to a Tesla. Waymo/Cruise get richer input they can feed into their downstream perception algorithms. Look at Waymo’s object detection benchmarks against Argoverse, KITTI and Waymo Open Dataset for their performance. They top most of them.
They don’t have scale yet for different reasons (adverse weather driving, long testing cycles, costly operations setup). “If they don’t have scale, that must mean sensor fusion doesn’t work” is quite a ridiculous argument.
If you think sensor fusion is not possible, then you must also believe Tesla’s attempts at re-integrating radar will not work and that they won’t achieve their stated goal of FSD.
I never said I don't think sensor fusion is possible. My only argument has always been "adding more sensors does not mean you will have a better self-driving car". Richer data does not mean better data. It does not mean more actionable data either. All it means is that you have more data points. I absolutely agree that this can be a good thing, and probably is in the case of self-driving.
But maybe it's not. Maybe the additional flops required for sensor fusion would be more useful if given over to the planning part of the problem. After all, you don't have infinite cycles. This is what I mean when I say it has not been proven at scale. The edge cases matter (arguably they are all that really matter), and "solutions with more sensors work better at object detection in artificial benchmarks" is not nearly as convincing to me as it seems to be to you. Again, object detection does not exist in a vacuum, and a solution that generally behaves better in a very constrained environment might actually behave worse when you throw all the edge cases at it and add on prediction and planning.
> Richer data does not mean better data. It does not mean more actionable data either.
How actionable you make it depends on how good your engineers are. Diverse input data is definitely more actionable than just RGB pixels from images.
> But maybe it's not. Maybe the additional flops required for sensor fusion would be more useful if given over to the planning part of the problem. After all, you don't have infinite cycles.
On the contrary, it reduces your compute requirements. For example, adding lidar means you are getting direct distance measurements instead of wasting compute cycles predicting distance using voxels. It's a much more effective use of compute.
You are getting direct distance measurements for some things, but not for everything, so you still need a system that is predicting distance using voxels.
LIDAR doesn't work great in the rain/snow, so you still need a system that is predicting distance using voxels.
Doesn't really sound like less compute to me. I feel like I'm repeating myself but again this is what I mean by scale matters. A self-driving system that performs better in perfect conditions is not even a good system if it doesn't work in the rain.
Which is the point the detractors of "fuse all the things" have been making. Don't get me wrong, I think probably those same detractors (e.g. Elon Musk) have also not been entirely intellectually honest with their arguments and have ulterior motives like cost savings and saving face, but that doesn't make the arguments wrong.
Example? There are plenty of examples where mistakes that Tesla's cameras make (being blinded by the sun, having trouble with emergency vehicles) are no problem for systems with more sensors.
I interpreted that statement by Karpathy as an accidental admission of Tesla's own limitations and not of the approach itself. (Note: I'm upvoting all your comments because they're very reasonable and supported.)
> A car equipped with more sensors, will always be better at handling more situations
Yes, integrating seamlessly is the hard part.
For Tesla, they found the increased sensor fusion complexity made the overall system less reliable, which was what informed their attempt at vision only. Karpathy went into this on Lex Fridman's podcast.
Only with better sensor fusion algorithms that worst case the overall system performance doesn't degrade with additional sensors. Tesla could have hit compute bounds in order to meet latency requirements for example (or they couldn't find the right technique/algorithms).
Sounds like a hard problem but I imagine this would eventually be overcome in the future. More sensors is definitely the future.
This is retroactive justification for using low-cost sensors. There's a chance they get lucky and pull it off with only cameras, but the chance of Tesla doing that is much less likely than Waymo getting their sooner with more sensors (or even even the Waymo driver achieving it with only vision if they chose. Using a full suite of sensors gives Waymo much better training data if they ever chose to use vision-only.
I think Tesla does use Lidar in training for what it's worth (at least I recall someone telling me this - I think it was a friend that worked there but not 100% sure I'm remembering correctly).
It's possible the lidar approach only really works with up to date high resolution maps and without that you end up in a local max you can't really escape with that approach.
That's been Tesla's argument up to this point anyway and I don't think the success in cities really proves things either way.
It may not matter since robotaxis in cities is still worth a lot and highway driving is mostly a solved problem.
True full self driving though will probably require solving vision - in that case I think the argument that lidar is a local max could very well be true.
> It's possible the lidar approach only really works with up to date high resolution maps and without that you end up in a local max you can't really escape with that approach.
Sorry, but you’re just repeating Elon Musk’s buzzwords like “local maximum”. It doesn’t make sense. There’s no such thing as “lidar approach”. All sensor inputs are fused (early/late fusion) and run through perception algorithms. Lidar is used for localization with maps, but that’s not even its primary use (that’s object detection). And it does not require maps to be up to date either.
I expect Tesla's rationalization will suddenly change when the cost for lidar units drops to hundreds of dollars. At that point, Waymo will have a huge head start.
Lidar cost has already dropped a lot. Waymo’s lidar on their I-Pace is 90% cheaper than the previous gen. We’re also seeing car manufacturers (GM, Volvo/Polestar, Mercedes, Chinese OEMs) include inexpensive lidar units for driver assistance.
Tesla’s problem is that they’ve promised their existing cars on the road are capable of full self driving. They can’t add hardware to them, so they will maintain the “camera is sufficient” stance for a long time.
Birds fly by eating bugs and flapping wings, but that doesn't mean we should build planes that way. Tesla is stubbornly handicapping itself by cheaping-out on sensors because they think they can hail-mary yolo themselves all the way full self driving.
The Tesla's do have more than two cameras despite us having only two eyes. I don't think that analogy totally holds. It's more that because roads (and road signs) are designed for human vision and human drivers in order to handle all cases you really need to solve vision and if you do that sufficiently then the other sensors are redundant anyway.
High resolution mapping works for localized solutions, but not in the general case.
I'm glad both groups are working on different approaches, it'll be better for us in the long run imo.
High resolution maps are only one part of the equation. Everyone is working on a generic perception/prediction/planning stack that works everywhere. Only the map changes between different cities. This is how Waymo/Cruise have been able to deploy in different geographies.
Last based on what metrics? I've never seen anything better than the Tesla FSD except for the LIDAR robo taxis, but they are solving a very different problem with different constraints. Most recent cost estimate I can find shows a cost per vehicle of $130-150K for Waymo vs the Tesla system that needs to go in a vehicle costing $40-50K which makes using a Waymo style sensor suite impossible. Would be interesting to see how the Tesla software would perform with the sensor input of something like the superior Waymo suite, but we won't ever find out unless costs come down by a massive amount.
Your numbers are very outdated. Exact figures and targets aren't usually announced, but both Waymo has talked about their upcoming vehicle being designed around a cost/mile ratio lower than consumer vehicles. That's not possible without very reasonable production costs. Cruise has also announced a target production price for their vehicle of $50k at scale, which is around the price of a new Tesla. That's not apples to apples, but it's close enough.
Sensors are following a really great learning curve, rapidly getting both more capable, more reliable, and cheaper. It's reasonable to expect they could be a few hundred dollars per unit soon.
What does “running the driver in hard mode as much as possible” mean?
Why do you think Tesla’s approach “didn’t work and they are now dead last in the game?”
Maybe that’s just an opinion because you provided nothing to back it up - but I can tell you not only does AutoPilot/FSD Beta work, the latest FSD Beta stack (I’m driving 11.3.6) works extremely well.
Tesla has orders of magnitude more passenger-miles driven than any other solution, which is one quantitative way to gauge success.
Tesla’s latest FSD Beta safety record on city streets is also excellent - 10x fewer accidents per mile than Cruise for example.
This is another huge win for Tesla but it’s important to note that this is accomplished in part by requiring strict driver oversight (enforced through gaze & attention tracking in the cabin camera). So the significantly lower accident rate is not an apple-to-apples comparison of two L4 solutions, but it convincingly shows that their L2 solution is actively making the city and highway roads safer for the driver and the cars & pedestrians that they are sharing the road with.
> "we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer"
they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.
Climate yes, but air quality not by as much as you'd think. Multiple studies have come out showing that the weight of EVs puts more pressure on tires and breaks, which in turn increases the particles they dump in the air.
> As a result, total PM10 emissions from EVs were found to be equal to those of modern ICEVs. PM2.5 emissions were only 1–3% lower for EVs compared to modern ICEVs. Therefore, it could be concluded that the increased popularity of electric vehicles will likely not have a great effect on PM levels. Non-exhaust emissions already account for over 90% of PM10 and 85% of PM2.5 emissions from traffic. These proportions will continue to increase as exhaust standards improve and average vehicle weight increases. Future policy should consequently focus on setting standards for non-exhaust emissions and encouraging weight reduction of all vehicles to significantly reduce PM emissions from traffic.
As the quote mentioned, this can be improved. Lighter batteries, better regenerative breaking, and improvements in tire material would all help.
I'm suspicious of that paper. The largest source of non-exhaust emissions comes from brake pad wear[1] and EVs use brakes far less than combustion vehicles. Also the amount of particulate matter put into the air is highly dependent on vehicle speed. Densely populated areas have more traffic, which means cars drive slower and create less non-exhaust pollution.
And it's no longer true that EVs are heavier than comparable combustion vehicles. The Tesla Model 3 weighs 3,550-4,070lbs. The BMW 3 Series weighs 3,200–4,330lbs, though the lightest model is a two door convertible. While combustion vehicles don't carry heavy batteries, they do need exhaust systems, more complicated drivetrains, and bigger cooling systems. Also, more and more combustion vehicles are becoming hybrids to meet stricter emissions standards. That means adding weight for batteries, an electric motor, and a transmission that can handle both propulsion sources.
As I understand it a large component of the particulate emissions from cars is resuspended road dust, so it doesn't really matter than an EV or hybrid has little of its own brake dust. The brake dust is already on the ground.
This isn't even accounting for the efficiencies of an autonomous vehicle decelerating less by better anticipating/timing stoplights. I see so many human drivers keep accelerating into a yellow/red light instead of easing off the pedal so they can resume accelerating by the time it turns green.
I feel like this is a nonsense study. They used a 2013 study that measured gas cars and then just extrapolated that out based on weight for EVs and did nothing to account for regenerative breaking, specialty EV tires, etc. Also the numbers are from the Simons 2013 study seem to be dubious as well.
Anyone who has been to Oslo understands EVs are a huge benefit for urban air quality.
One thing that caught my eye is the study is simply modeling the increased PM10 and PM2.5 based on hypothesised influence of weight difference using gas and diesel cars (from 2013) as a basis.
Obv. I haven't read anything but the summary but the core assumption means it's an extrapolation and not measuring actuals.
For example, while EVs accelerate faster, regen braking massively reduces brake wear - the lack of mention of regen in this extrapolative study seems a huge miss. Also EVs typically don't have the same tire material - they use low rolling resistance tires which do better on particulates.
This is the wrong way to think about it since there's little that suggests AV-taxis also need to be larger than the cars already on the road. When I'm renting a car or taking a taxi I know exactly what my needs are and can decide to not pay for luggage space if I don't need that for instance. Further you can just put a smaller battery in AV-taxis since you can optimise the charging schedule. And lastly, when we've gotten rid of air pollution from tailpipe emissions air pollution from tires would be the next problem to fix and it intuitively seems that all electric, digital cars could have their pollution reduced via a software update.
And obviously the technology making these cars possible also make self driving busses possible, which would allow new ways for urban mobility.
> Climate yes, but air quality not by as much as you'd think. Multiple studies have come out showing that the weight of EVs puts more pressure on tires and breaks, which in turn increases the particles they dump in the air.
This is total bullshit. EVs barely use frictional brakes at all. My Tesla Model S from 2014 is still on the original set of brakepads after nearly 200000 miles. Several EV car models even have a problem with disks _rusting_ because the frictional brakes are not used except when the car is parked.
If anything, EVs will absolutely cut down on brake dust.
With tires, it's a bit more nuanced. Regular tires can indeed wear a bit faster on an EV, especially if you are addicted to high acceleration. But tire vendors are now producing EV-optimized tires that are a bit more durable, and it seems like the difference is pretty negligible.
Also, keep in mind that your bullshit study only looked at weight. So it follows that buses and trucks (that have MUCH more weight) will leave genocide and devastation in their wake.
I wonder if it would make sense to program robotaxis to use only regenerative braking, maybe with a more powerful regenerative braking system, and using real brakes only for emergencies.
And noise! I will rejoice when idiots are no longer allowed to speed and operate clearly illegal (in terms of emissions and noise) vehicles on public roads.
Don't worry, the gov't is here to make sure you don't miss out. Newer EVs and hybrids are required to make noise at <20mph. Never mind that a properly muffled ICEV is only audible when completely stopped. My neighborhood is getting louder as we all switch to EVs.
I was worried about that back in 2018 when it was announced but having heard hundreds of backup sounds (luckily mine is silent as it's from before 2019), they are all chill and mostly imperceptible.
Driver quality in the US is much lower than in cycling hotspots like the Netherlands or Denmark. Infrastructure helps, but better drivers are critical.
I don't have much international experience, but the level of distraction of US drivers is shocking. Easily 50% of drivers I see are looking at their phones (even while going through an intersection!).
What is the power source for charging these EVs? In Phoenix, I could imagine it might be solar but the cars probably want to charge at night during low-demand times?
If it's utility electric, from what fuel source is it generated?
Self-driving car fleets probably increase suburbization in the same way that trains created suburbs long ago.
Depending on how it breaks out, "more space per person at similar total environmental impact" is a quality of life win but not a climate-change-fighting one.
Pedestrian safety and other externalities are probably a big win, still.
I feel like the increase in suburbanization due to self-driving cars is probably pretty small over person-driven cars. Given the low building density that human-driven cars create (read: parking lots) there's some hope that a large change in car parking behavior would lead to lots of infill development.
If your commute is "sitting in an office doing email or taking calls" instead of "having to babysit your car through traffic" you're gonna see some significant behavioral changes.
The parking lot point is interesting, I hadn't thought about that.
But it's not obviously better to me: commuting behavior is very time-of-day determined, and the cars are gonna have to be somewhere in between rush hours. You don't want them on the road, and you can probably shift around to catch other sorts of predictable demand, but environmentally you're gonna want to minimize the total nubmer of miles driven without passengers.
EDIT: so in areas with less development and commmuters are parking their cars in surface lots all day, yeah, you don't need those surface lots for commuters + all the other lots at retail, residential, etc all at once if the cars are moving around to other uses during the day. But in denser recent-development areas where office parks predominantly have underground or garage parking it may be harder to realize infill there.
There are a lot of possible changes possible with autonomous vehicles (long term, I think it will be rare for an asset that costs tens of thousands of dollars to sit idly for 80+% of its life), but, for a simple example, imagine how many cars could fit in a perfectly packed parking lot: cars packed bumper to bumper and no need to leave space for doors to open.
I don't know. I live in the exurbs anyway and just don't go into the city much. But, if I had effectively a personal driver and I could work in the car, the bar to a 30-60 minute drive in for the evening would be a lot lower for me.
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate
and the air quality.
Counterpoint: no, they wouldn't. Moving towards self-driving automobiles merely props up an inefficient mode of transportation. Imagine sinking all that money that's being blown on self-driving cars into pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure. The problem with cars is cars, not drivers.
Phoenix has some really awesome bicycle paths, like along the ancient canal system. I was able to ride my bicycle home after a concert in Glendale to Tempe. It took hours and hours, but the weather was fine and conditions were favorable.
You can already bike from one part of SF to another, investment in bicycle infrastructure would make that easier and safer. Or, you know, public transit. Individual vehicles suffer from massive inefficiency compared to nearly any other form of transportation – look at Elon's fully autonomous tunnel.
SF is not really a great bikeable city; almost any location to any location involves hills, some of them really significant. The streets are also not laid out in a reasonable pattern in many locations.
Getting from outer sunset to market by bike daily isn't really practical, especially during Weather.,
Well yeah, that's pretty much the point. San Francisco is not particularly walkable or bikeable by an objective standard (although it's still doable). Imagine if we sunk money into improving infrastructure instead of subsidizing autonomous vehicles.
> Individual vehicles suffer from massive inefficiency compared to nearly any other form of transportation
I though this too until I looked at the true dollar costs or carbon impact per passenger mile. That doesn't even account for the externalities of particulate pollution and road wear. The buses in my city are also filthy diesel, belching thick, noxious, clouds of soot as they accelerate away from the stop, right at crowds of people who just got off the bus. Heavy buses also require special concrete pads at every stop and still do heavy damage to the road surface: rutting and exacerbating potholes.
That sounds like a problem with your city. I've not seen a diesel car or truck belching smoke out here in decades. San Francisco phased out the two stroke diesels in the late 00s, and even those were a lot cleaner than the two strokes of my youth.
still do heavy damage to the road surface: rutting and exacerbating potholes.
Sure, the wear goes up exponentially with the weight (and axle loading). OTOH you need significantly more cars than buses to move people around. Investing in mixed-use development and better pedestrian infrastructure means that fewer people need to use mechanized transport.
Look at lord Elno's autonomous vehicle tunnel – individual vehicles simply don't scale.
There shouldn't be a lot of sooty exhaust. Well, there doesn't have to be. San Francisco's run diesel-electric hybrids for about fifteen years now and California is far more stringent about diesel emissions than most of the rest of the country. So, sure, it's entirely believable that you're seeing buses belch smoke but it's also mandatory.
Unleaded gasoline will leave a nasty residue on your exhaust but that's about as bad as it (should) get. Alcohol and gas will burn cleaner but come with their own drawbacks. Trolley buses, of course, don't have tailpipe emissions but not everyone is willing to put up with the overhead infrastructure.
And hey, battery EV buses are starting to become a thing too (e.g. SF is trialing ones from a few different manufacturers).
There's probably nothing better for bikes and pedestrians than self-driving cars. With autonomous drivers, every road becomes safe for bikes and pedestrians.
Bike infrastructure is the ultimate boondoggle. It NEVER pays for itself in the US, it literally has nothing but negatives if you look at it objectively.
Bike lanes don't appreciable increase the percentage of trips by bike, they dis-proportionally slow down car traffic, and the bike commutes themselves are probably the worst transit mode in the US.
Heck, bike lanes almost never even _replace_ the amount of traffic that they displace.
All bike lanes do, is cater to a bike lobby that tries to force their hobby on everybody else, at the expense of practicality.
The “EV” part seems to be carrying the weight there, not the self-driving. Self-driving might even make those problems worse by decreasing the cost of driving.
It’s like saying “self-driving cars and solving the nitrogen fixation problem would be a big win for preventing famine.”
I agree but also worry about the job loss and the inevitable loss of freedoms that will inevitably be 'justifiable' when automatic driving is the norm.
Basically, if the cost can be comparable to car ownership, reducing resource use by making car buying of any kind far more difficult. Which is admittedly entirely a thought experiment. Though it is a thought experiment many authors seem to arrive at.
Edit: I wish I could say I was surprised at the downvotes for a comment that is pro-worker.
Which jobs are you thinking? Bus drivers? Taxis? Car production? Which loss of freedom are you referring to?
I can’t help thinking that the potential upside will far out-way the cost.
London streets are littered with dormant vehicles. Most just sit there taking up room and dominating the city. It would be a whole other city if we could change that dynamic.
I grew up in foster care. One of my guardians made a living driving a taxi. The guy was an absolute wreck of a human and I probably wouldn't break if he was crossing.
It was what he used to survive though, and surely not all cab drivers would be the same.
My brother in law drove Uber when he was illegally canned from his factory work and is the reason he got to eat.
There are options to solve problems that don't require a change in the outcome you desire. Mainly something along the lines of forcing the companies profiting from this to pay a person a reasonable wage to act as the social aspect that will be missing. So the job market can be unaffected.
It's not just a cab job problem either. It's also not about who I like or dislike or whether or not it impacts me or not. I have never used a cab in my life and I cannot drive and thus have no car taking up your street.
I do however see a worsening homeless crisis in my small-ish Canadian city. I would rather see empty cars than tortured souls.
> Mainly something along the lines of forcing the companies profiting from this to pay a person a reasonable wage to act as the social aspect that will be missing.
Force them to hire someone to sit in a car all day and do absolutely nothing?
To do nothing but sit there and look at their device or read
Or perhaps the answer is a tax on automation and everyone can sit at home perpetually online.
Im not claiming to have answers to this rapidly approaching problem. It's definitely a problem though. Even if it doesn't impact myself whatsoever at this time.
What is your job? If it is gone tomorrow and your education is useless, what will you do?
Nobody I know wants this. I’ve had great Uber, Lyft and taxi drivers. But they’re far from the norm. I’d much prefer to be able to play my own music, or take back-to-back phone calls, or snore loudly.
If this is genuinely the service, there is booming business in tour guiding.
I drove cabs for nine years (right up until Covid).
Some people want to talk, some people don’t want to talk, some people just won’t stop talking and you have to tune them out.
What everyone had in common was the desire to get from point A to point B as cheaply as possible. They didn’t care about any social aspect, given the choice I suspect the majority of them would rather not have been paying for my livelihood if it meant the ride was cheaper.
How many people do you think fell for the Lyft “fist bump” BS over taking a VC subsidized ride for a discount over a taxi?
> There are options to solve problems that don't require a change in the outcome you desire. Mainly something along the lines of forcing the companies profiting from this to pay a person a reasonable wage to act as the social aspect that will be missing. So the job market can be unaffected.
Essentially removing most economic incentive to deploy self-driving cars at all?
Market dominance would still allow for it to be profitable.
Is money to goal or is it a better society? Less pollution, less waste, more social interaction, and increased safety. Less colored paper.
Surely the government has an interest in financially incentivising this development. Especially given a decrease in road wear and tear, lower climate impact and surely any number of other benefits.
What about when it's Waymo One or Uber Zero. Support is GPT7 Two.
No call center jobs, no driving jobs, less supporting jobs, less money flow, more homelessness, more violence. Decreasing compensation for the jobs remaining due to increased competition.
Have you tried to get support on Uber, Lyft or a taxi?
> No call center jobs, no driving jobs, less supporting jobs, less money flow, more homelessness, more violence. Decreasing compensation for the jobs remaining due to increased competition
It's difficult to distinguish this from neo-Luddism. Maybe there is nothing productive for those people to do. If so, we can address it then. But the history of technological revolutions–from the agrarian to the internet–suggests the opposite. (We are, after all, discussing jobs which first arose around a century ago.)
If they get over-the-road trucking automated, that also trickles down to many roadside workers...gas stations, restaurants, motels, and so on. Then, some back office functions associated with routing, driver compliance, hiring drivers, etc. I'm sure there's more. It would be a big adjustment.
Not just financial either. When more people are perpetually online in an internet populated by an even larger population of bots designed for engagement, what happens?
Many of the jobs you are referring to are socially fulfilling to some people. It's an escape from a poor home situation or from an addiction.
In this thread I am seeing nearly 100% positive praise for the driving abilities of these vehicles, but that is simply not always true. They are causing almost daily incidents for emergency responders in San Francisco and these companies seem unwilling to address the issue.
I wonder if they plan to test in Europe. I moved to France and one issue I struggle with as a human driver is speed limits. I live in a suburban area where most streets have 30kmh limits (19mph). Nobody respects them, not even busses. I often get honked at when driving the speed limit. What would Waymo do?
It’s not really when you consider their burn rate. Say each of those trips gross 10$. That’s just 100k/week or $5.2 million/year. They’d need to likely 10,000x the ride volume to even be close to profitability.
Uber does 7.64 billion rides per year. And they are not profitable. The waymo cars sure ain’t cheap, and scale of operations will take a ton of cash. I wonder if waymo would ever be profitable.
hopefully we get to 8 before waymo.com posts "An Update on Waymo self-driving cars" and kills the project. That said, this is one project that google really seems to have invested for the long-term.
Counterpoint: Concord, Google Glass, etc. Just because something can be achieved technologically, doesn't mean there is demand for it at the price you'd need to charge for it to make sense.
Don't get me wrong. Self driving taxis are cool. I'd like to use Waymo if it were launched where I live, at that price.
But that's a very large set of very large assumptions, stacked on top of each other! I can immediately think of lots of ways it can go wrong:
1. The economics may never work.
2. The "can't speed won't speed" problem may prove politically unsolvable, meaning people end up preferring taxis who avoid liability by being decentralized.
3. Google's core business may falter before Waymo manages to become financially independent, and in the absence of Waymo other competitors may decide it's no longer worth the investment vs Tesla-style incrementalism.
4. Public transport isn't going anywhere in high density cities simply due to limited road capacity.
5. Many people may simply prefer having their own cars even if Waymo taxis are everywhere, simply because you can't beat the latency of walking to your own driveway.
But the core problem is going to be price. Taxi drivers are cheap. For years people said Uber/Lyft would build up brand loyalty, raise prices and start making money any day now. After all it's ultimately just a ridehailing app, it's not that hard to make, so how can they not make a decent business out of it? Yet they never did get to that point even though it's a million times easier. Waymo not only has to find a way to turn a regular weekly profit taking into account their ultra-expensive staff, hardware, energy costs, support costs, etc but then maybe even one day yield enough profit to pay off the initial investment! All of that whilst competing in a super low margin market? Maybe it can be done but when I see the reasons people are giving here for why they like Waymo cars (clean, safe, etc) I'm not seeing the basis of a great company. It sounds a lot like the reasons I heard when Uber first appeared, even. And it's certainly WAY easier to compete on those aspects whilst still using human drivers.
Perhaps one day yes, presumably someone will get self-driving taxis to the point of being a sustainable business, but it might well be writeoff for Google just like it was for Uber.
Are we really evaluating a fleet of self-driving taxis on profitability today, though?
If they're reliably doing 10,000 trips a week, I promise you they don't need to worry about finding additional investors.
"It's not really impressive to be doing 10,000 self-driving taxi trips every week, because it's currently costing them money" is a really, really wild take.
The difference is that the variable costs are much lower - just recharging the EV + any other incidentals, as opposed to having to pay a driver for every ride. That's why Uber never became profitable, because they had to share the fare. Waymo has higher up front costs, but if the cars are there, they have much more profitable fares.
Maybe - Waymo has to recharge, clean and maintain a fleet of cars that they own (and which are depreciating and likely have no resale value, at least at the moment) - Uber's drivers effectively use their wages to cover all of those costs. I'm curious how Waymo is handling all of the fleet maintenance, recharging, cleaning, etc, and how they plan to scale that infrastructure.
I also wonder how Waymo plans to handle 'surges' - they either have enough cars to handle peak demand, in which case many are idle much of the time (and thus not making money), or they build a fleet for the minimum/average, and let more elastic competitors cover surges (or it's just impossible to get one at rush hour anywhere). It really seems like Uber/Lyft/etc ought to have a better business model than this very centralized, capital-intensive approach, and they're seemingly incapable of earning a profit.
I would bet on technology being able to handle peak demand better than a non-tech solution. They could pre-position vehicles better, incentivize pooling and transit connections, etc. And just like Ubers they could repurpose vehicles for other tasks (delivery, getting cleaned) in low demand times. But I'm sure there will still be surge pricing as you can't avoid demand spikes completely.
EVs need very little complicated maintenance. At this point, batteries and electric motors are a rock-solid technology.
So you're left with occasional minor maintenance for mechanical issues like broken door handles or jammed windows, and also with interior cleaning.
Even this can in future be minimized by building a taxi-only car model. You can get rid of the steering wheel, instrument cluster, central console, and all the complicated plastic parts that go with all of this. You can just replace everything with durable and easily washable hard plastic, like seats on public transit.
Then make seats easily removable, and the interior becomes straightforward to clean (heck, you can even automate it).
> Uber's drivers effectively use their wages to cover all of those costs. I'm curious how Waymo is handling all of the fleet maintenance, recharging, cleaning, etc, and how they plan to scale that infrastructure.
Probably large regional hubs that cars will drive themselves to for periodic maintenance (or get towed to if the vehicle becomes disabled). Much more potential to bring down total cost than the 'each driver does it themselves' model.
I can't for the life of me figure out how to sign up for the waitlist in SF. The app just says "you'll receive updates about San Francisco." Anyone been successful with this?
I think I signed up twice, a few months apart, because the message in the app didn't give me confidence that I'd signed up the first time.
Separately, the other day I turned right and there was a Waymo car blocking the lane, about to pick up some passengers. My car and the car behind me couldn't continue along the road until the passengers had reached the car had gotten in. They didn't seem like they were in a hurry.
Stopping a couple of extra car lengths away from the junction (or, better still, not blocking in the lane at all) wouldn't have paused other people's journeys.
With all the hype about AI this year, does anyone know whether it's translating in any meaningful sense into self driving? Can they use transformers? If so, is there a step change in performance? Has this already happened?
Yep! Our research team publishes a lot of work (waymo.com/research).
If you're interested in Transformers and attention in particular, the excellently named Wayformer [1] paper is pretty easy to follow and SWFormer is impressive on a lot of levels [2].
The main challenge for autonomous vehicles has been (large) multi-modal inputs, while delivering real-time inference performance on the road. Many of the large-language model things you see produce cool results, but would be much too slow or expensive for a real-time, safety-critical application.
Already happened and still actively happening! In Tesla's latest annual AI day presentation they gave some insights into their training procedures and architecture choices. Lots of transformers, lots of bleeding-edge stuff.
As we Europeans are very far away from seeing any of those, I have a question: how is the refuel / recharge handled? These are EVs, right? Do they some how do that independently, too?
> we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer.
Waymo cars are safer, cleaner and cheaper than Uber, which has never made an operating profit and has abandoned its self-driving development.
Uber is stalled on the railway tracks while the freight train of self-driving tech hurtles towards it. How is it still worth $76 billion?
You start with the easy case then gradually make the model more robust by increasing the difficulty.
What you’re suggesting is akin to trying to develop a jetliner before building propeller aircraft. Too hard too soon and you don’t really know what the target even is. Much learning happens before you can successfully execute a complex plan like that.
Plus it’s better from a business standpoint because you can achieve probability profitability sooner with your MVP.
This doesn't suit the narrative that self-driving cars are close to taking over. Up in the northeast US, drivers are actually a lot better at controlling their vehicles than bay area and southwestern drivers thanks to the fact that everyone has to drive in ice and snow.
We post updates on our blog or Twitter account from time to time. There isn't an explicit, public roadmap of "On this date, we will open in < CITY >", but we have announced LA [1] as our next city for Waymo One (the name of the ride hailing service):
> Los Angeles will be Waymo’s next ride-hailing city, joining Phoenix and San Francisco as we expand to more locations.
Beyond the official service, we also do testing in multiple locations. For example, we announced that returning to Austin for testing [2]. In that post, we mention other weather testing we've done in Miami, NYC, and Bellevue, WA.
Beyond ride hailing, we have separate testing for Waymo Via with our Class 8 trucks, that you might see in Arizona or Texas.
I understand it's interesting to announce accomplishments (such as increased areas for testing), but as someone who lives in West LA, it's slightly annoying to see multiple announcements saying "testing is expanded, be on the lookout!". I'm nearly at the point where I'm just ignoring announcements for Los Angeles because the last two haven't amounted to any changes for someone that lives here and wants to use the service.
