I'd personally never trust an autopilot unless it's either backed by human-level AI which has also had years of driving experience, or it's in some very highly constrained environment (maybe airport bus going from gate to plane). Out on a highway or public road system is the most unpredictable environment possible.

This is about the peak of what you can get with automated lane keeping and braking. I don't see any route from this point to anything like level 4.

How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?

Sadly its self-ownership is only "according to legend" rather than anything battle-tested.

Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit!

...

If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?

Your example of needing to read a stop sign isn't a great example. At least in North America, a hexagonal sign is always a stop sign. A better example of your point would be a speed limit sign.

But Waymo never said you don't need cameras. Hell, they have 29 cameras in each vehicle compared to Tesla's 8.

Your point about their approaches being more alike than different is somewhat true, but you wrongly attribute the LiDAR vs camera debate to Waymo marketing. It's Elon and Tesla fans who started it and incessantly repeat it even to this day. Most rational folks say use whatever you can to get it working (which Waymo did) and optimize later.

There are atmospheric conditions and obstructions that lidar can see through that cameras can't.

Cameras also seem prone to being blocked by a small splash of mud/dirt. Is anyone on this thread knowledgeable enough in the domain to know if that's an issue? I thought of it while moving my head sideways to see around a temporary sight obstruction on my windshield. Luckily the windshield is big, and I can move my head. Cameras are small. I guess you just put several so you have an effectively large camera array? It does mean more redundancy is necessary than I would have initially thought.

I just watched the latest video from AIDRIVR on YouTube. AIDRIVR is a TSLA pumper-and-dumper who has dedicated their channel to uncritical praise of FSD. In the first third of the video FSD v12 runs two stop signs, once directly into oncoming traffic in a 1-way traffic control and once at a stop where the cross traffic does not stop. This stuff is not even a little bit ready for fully supervised operation. https://youtu.be/fpoXr_z_6a4?t=565

It is one thing to cherry-pick flawless drives on a sunny day and upload it to YouTube while having someone behind the wheel ready to take over the glorified driving assistant system. It is another to run a commercial driverless service open to the public 24/7 in one of the biggest urban areas, knowing that riders will record everything, assuming accident liability, and keeping a nice safety record without someone behind the wheel.

https://www.teslafsdtracker.com puts miles to disengagement at 30 and miles to critical disengagement at 300 for all v12.x.y versions. Note: this is crowdsourced data and the users themselves get to decide what's critical and what's not.

As far as numbers required to make it fully self driving, it's at least 3 orders of magnitude worse than the big players. Waymo and Cruise routinely had 30,000+ miles per disengagement during their California testing. That's one disengagement for roughly 3 years of driving.

Well, being as how people get to pick and choose when they use it, and that the driver has to remain vigilant at all times, I'm not surprised.

But this is easy to test: stick random people in the car and go to random locations with FSD, see how it works. Why haven't they demonstrated this yet?

I am very skeptical of the "weeks without intervention". It's cool technology, but I never had a single trip where I didn't need to intervene at least once.

It would regularly blow through school zones, failing to read the posted sign.

On a couple of occasions it veered off the road on to the shoulder.

My thinking is the car will never be level 4. It doesn't have sufficient sensors or NN compute power.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/05/on-self-driving-waymo-i...

Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven (i.e., frustration at the driver in front, wanting to take the more scenic route, being undecided about stopping at that cafe halfway).

I'm all for self driving in highly populated areas. In a perfect world I'd like to see it integrated into all vehicles, and when entering specific areas you are told your car will enter self-driving mode. Arguably this makes the most business sense for Waymo, licence the underlying tech to manufacturers that already have capacity to produce vehicles vs compete.

I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver.

I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft.

I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more.

I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.

Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.

You mention American at the end of your comment, but the rest of the world isn’t the same. Waymo doesn’t really have to limit itself to the states once they get the concept worked out.

Americans have become emotionally attached to cars because of what they enable them to do. That might take a while to die. But in Europe cars are more of a pita to own and run because we have less space. I don’t have any great love for mine. As soon as waymo gets here and is reasonably priced I’ll get rid of my car.

People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.

> Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans).

Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around.

If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1.

I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.

I agree with all of your points about Waymo vs. Uber-like ridesharing—the average Uber ride is so much less safe that it’s hard to argue for.

But I also agree with your aside about the growing isolation of society—the longer term implications of every event, meal, and errand being separated by autonomous journeys are staggering.

So the question is, how do the societal isolation factors play into your decision making? (Honest question, not a gotcha, I’m curious how others think about these tradeoffs.)

You won't know if people have Level 3 "Self Driving" cars because unlike Level 4, the Level 3 cars always have a human sat in the driving seat, it's just that maybe the human isn't paying attention and maybe the car is driving anyway. It may be difficult to gauge (beyond guessing) how many people you see are bad drivers and how many aren't actually driving at all under L3...

L1 (the machine does some of the work but a human driver is always doing much of the driving) is certainly something you see and don't even think about. Intelligent Cruise control (ie it won't smack into the car ahead but instead slow down) on a motorway, maybe automatic lane keeping on somebody's fancier or newer car, it's not "Self driving" as you'd understand it, but it's something.

The way these "Levels" work is L3 to L4 is the point where we transition from "The human is legally driving but the machine is offering more and more assistance" to "The machine is legally driving and the human is asked less and less often to do anything at all". As a result a person who is literally blind and thus couldn't possible drive the car or obtain a license to do so - can (and they do) use a Waymo, just like they'd use an Uber, but they cannot do the same with Tesla "Full Self Driving".

That’s an interesting way of saying you live in London ;)

(Phoenix urban area is more populous than every urban area in the UK except for London)

Countries develop at different rates on different things.

To put some numbers on it in the US cars are driven about 3.2 x 10^12 miles per year, and around 4 x 10^4 people are killed in car accidents (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists).

That's one death per 8 x 10^7 miles.

There are around 2 x 10^6 people non-fatally injured in car accidents per year in the US. That's an injury every 1.6 x 10^6 miles.

There are around 4 x 10^6 non-injury car accidents per year in the US, which is one every 8 x 10^5 miles.

If we assume all miles driving are equally risky and that we drive 40 miles per day 365 days a year, then we would expect to be in a non-injury car accident around once every 55 years, be injured in a car accident around once every 110 years, and be killed in a car accident around once every 5500 years.

Of course almost no one drives all their miles at times and in conditions when the risk per mile is average so when estimating your personal risk you need to take that into account.

We handle both dense fog and heavy rain on the latest vehicles. The best blog post is probably https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ but you can find a lot of videos in the rain.

Snow and very cold weather is a challenge for sensor cleaning. We've done some testing in both NYC and Buffalo (https://waymo.com/blog/2023/11/road-trip-how-our-cross-count...) to collect data.

Knowing BigCo reputation, I think it’s equally possible that Waymo and/or BigCo accounts will be banned for actual perp, complainant or random rider in-between… what a world…

I recognize accident lawyer work when I see one :) They charged Waymo’s insurance to the max.

Trains (and train-like options such as metros) are vastly more efficient than cars in number of people moved per unit of time per area used. That might not be a big deal in suburbia, but in dense inner cities it's one of the most important drivers of public transport.

https://danielbowen.com/2012/09/19/road-space-photo/

Interestingly, no one ever argued for the profitability of cars, so all we can do now is to calculate the overall economic costs and societal benefits and that's where public transport clearly and easily wins.

But the impact of taxis on road traffic in a dense city is comparable to the impact of private cars - perhaps even more so as they're often travelling empty between rides. If every journey which was previously done with a car is done with a taxi, there's no reduction in vehicle traffic - meaning the same problems of congestion and pedestrian safety.

Driverless cars can probably drive closer on highways to increase throughput, but that doesn't really help in cities or residential areas. Ultimately if lots of people shift to driverless taxis to get around, there will be far more vehicles on our streets.

How much money is Waymo bleeding every quarter? Maybe the investors don’t care, but it’s relevant if you want to call it a real business.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38145997

This doesn't line up with other statements made by Waymo though.

That blog post as an example:

> The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.

Yet in an incident in January when a Waymo ran a red light and caused a moped to crash the narrative is

> In January, an incident took place where a Waymo robotaxi incorrectly went through a red light due to an incorrect command from a remote operator, as reported by Waymo.

So I'm curious, is it a case of "The Waymo Driver doesn't always follow road rules itself." or "Remote Ops can make a car run a red light against the Waymo Driver's programming."

[0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/03/26/waymo-...

1. They're mostly even more local. The Waymo Driver is in your car, the "driver" for say a DLR train is inside the train too. Unlike Waymo they aren't running multiple live feeds to remote oversight, even the emergency human intervention is literally on board with you. There's somebody wearing a uniform telling those tourists that no, Abbey Road is an outer suburb with a sewage pumping station, they're on the wrong train for the famous Beatles photograph. The person in the uniform is trained to drive the train if there's some reason the automation can't do it, nobody can do that from a control room miles away. In the even higher (and rare) GoA systems where nobody aboard can drive the train even if they need to, remote oversight still may need to dispatch a specialist to rescue a failed train.

2. They're mostly "grade separated" that is, they're either underground or suspended in the air, or maybe in fenced off ground-level areas, so you can't use a "hacked" train to hurt anybody except its passengers or maybe, in some cases, passengers on a nearby train.