I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years, and I know there will be benefits, but has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry once this "works"?
The fall-out is going to be intense:
* Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point.
* Reduced downtime on goods movement will impact uptime in every other industry.
* Autonomous-vehicle-only lanes that line up with traffic timings creating a two-tier driving experience
* Huge influx of unemployed drivers who I guess might get "chauffeur" style jobs.
* Security issues, complex legal issues when there's accidents.
* Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols".
I know all this is extreme, but if history is studying the past to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the "future" to predict the problems of tomorrow.
There's no need. This transition will be slow. A few cities first with a limited number of cars. And then it grows organically and probably initially quite slowly. It would take many years to upgrade all taxis world wide. The production capacity to produce the vehicles simply does not exist yet.
So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight. Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.
10 years is a pipe dream. It will be much slower. And you seem focused only on the easy cases, when it's the hard ones that will make it such a slow transition.
Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars.
Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.
>>I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years
That's sarcastic, right? Like "we'll have fusion power in 50 years"? Except that we might actually have fusion power in 50 years and I don't actually think we'll have truly driverless cars within 50 years.
A blueprint for handling this can be cribbed off of "just transition" plans for folks in fossil electrical generation (coal) [1] [2] who are going to be out of a job in the next 5-10 years. Looking back at history, the productivity gains from automated vehicles can be split with the firms operating these fleets with those being transitioned out (as happened with the invention of the cargo container and Longshoremen's unions [3]). Another resource that covers this topic (in part) is The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger [4].
>>but has any government yet started planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry
Let me put it this way.... How often do any governments have a plan for changes *beforehand?."
Almost every western country saw "deindustrialization" at some point, predictably cutting off whole cohorts from wages, pensions and lifestyles. None had a plan.
They watched Walmart behead high streets and then watched Amazon behead the survivors. No plan. War is, arguably, the thing we plan and provision for the most. Wartime refugees always seem to take us by surprise.
I'm sure someone somewhere, in theory, had a plan for a pandemic. But when it happened, a whole lot seemed to be off the cuff.
> * Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols".
Some of the other points seem legitimate, but this one seems silly.
It's trivially easy _now_ for someone to sign up for uber and drive people to random locations, and that doesn't happen.
Presumably, with driverless taxis, we'll still have the same level of assurance we have now (use the app, app tells us a license plate for a valid car, that's the one you get into). Right now, you can get a driver who misbehaves, or uber could get hacked and send incorrect dropoff locations. In a driverless world, only the second attack matters since the chance of a malicious driver is gone.
I, personally, am waiting for the first self-driving car flash mob where everyone on 4chan decides to order a taxi to pick them up at mission & embarcadero (as an example) to swarm and DDoS intersections - or try to route a lot of requests to an intersection cut off by a parade. If self-driving cars were a thing last year do you think antifa folks would order a bunch of cab pickups for key intersections in the middle of the Jan 6th march?
It will be interesting, but I'd guess the "near instant" part is wrong. Goods need to be moved around - trucks are in constant use. It will take a long time to retro-fit trucks or manufacture new ones. It will still be positive ROI to have a human driving an existing truck for years. Taxis is harder and could happen faster, but I'd still bet it's a 5-10 year process.
I hope there are new limits to trucking and a concentration of those that are licensed to off hours. I-80, for instance, already feels like a truck route more than a human commute route. That said, so many of the accidents (jack knifing) there are trucks in wintery weather, I don't see that being included v1.0 of the new trucking reality.
I am a bit petty. After my last speeding ticket in a small drive through town I thought to myself "In a decade or two, these police departments will need to find a new way to fund themselves"
I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years
You certainly don't know that - at least on roads generally. You might have a reasonable hope that in some highly constrained environments they might be an option, but that's very different.
On top of all these , this particular announcement is nothing close to a commercial launch. It is like this forever beta phase where only Waymo engineers are getting picked up and nothing different than a thousand other startups that are running autonomous cars in SFO along various spectrum of autonomy.
Andrew Yang has been hammering this issue home for years. There are millions and millions of jobs on the line here, and "just learn to code" is not going to cut it. I suspect the transition won't happen overnight, but nor do I believe it's going to happen gradually over 50 year. It will be a catastrophic disruption to multiple industries, including insurance and finance, the entire oil industry, the entire delivery and transport industries, automotive repair/paint, and everything related to these industries. Which is basically everything.
In typical human fashion, we're not going to do anything until everything blows up.
This is (hopefully) overly cynical, but having worked in and closely with politicians in the past, I highly doubt it.
There are surely interest groups and think thanks that are working on the problem, and they will (if they don't already), have some legislation either ready to go or close to it.
The politicians won't even think about it until it becomes an actual problem that threatens votes, and when they do start caring they will just take whatever they can get from friendly/trusted think tanks and try to ram it through. The bills will be thousands of pages long and practically nobody will read them before voting for them.
I will believe self-driving car is near once I see truck drivers automated. If truck-driving cannot be profitable (with the advantage of no breaks, unlike humans, and a semi-fixed route) how could a personal vehicle or taxi be profitable? It seems it could be one of the first places to optimize. Trucks are so expensive, so they could be early adopters.
I still think your prediction is too optimist. IMO (I admit, based on gut feeling) either we won't have it or the goals will have changed and it will only work in special roads (almost like rails for trains). See you in 10 years (if hn still exists!)
I was biking in SF the other day, pulling my kid in a bike trailer. A waymo vehicle pulled up behind me while I was waiting for the traffic light. I was pleasantly surprised that it waited for me when the light turned green and didn't run me over. Robot anxiety is real though.
Edit: anxiety also because I wasn't sure it would recognize the bike trailer as a real thing. How many bike trailers end up in the training set?
Waymo has taken a responsible approach to self-driving (level 5 only, Lidar) over Tesla's collateral reduction approach. Lidar gives you exact distance to obstacles around it. Given those 2 factors, I expect Waymo to have an inbuilt hard-stop for when it is on collision course inside of braking distance.
I expect it to be friendlier to bikers and pedestrians than human drivers.
As a biker, most of close calls are due to impatient drivers who try to overtake me through close calls and when they enter turns without looking first. AFAIK, Self-driving cars do not initiate same-lane overtakes and can be hardcoded to be paragons of patience.
With how hostile American drivers are towards bikers, self-driving cars would need Skynet-esque malice towards us to match those injury rates.
I would like some kind of visual feedback (maybe countdown timer for how long it has stopped for?) from autonomous car.
Something similar to checking if driver is paying attention and is aware that I'm going to cross in front of their car by looking at direction where driver is looking or a hand gesture.
They sometimes post videos of situations they deal with, especially around bikers and pedestrians. It's quite impressive how well it handles such cases.
Scania did a neat affordance for this in their (otherwise rather incremental) autonomous AXL concept. A band of LEDs around the vehicle that light up "towards" a pedestrian once the vehicle takes them into account: https://youtu.be/0WN9xvAvEls?t=499
Waymo and cruise vehicles are much safer for bikes than other drivers in my experience. I've been commuting by bike in SF for years, have a near miss every few days but never even close with a waymo vehicle. Every single time I've been hit has been a door, another bike, or a taxi. Taxi drivers in SF seem to see themselves as natural predators for bicycles.
I wonder what the stats are on those bike trailers. I see people using them in traffic and they look plain terrifying: a child dangling out in a flimsy canvas pod behind the cyclists's back, too low for drivers to see when close, surrounded by vehicle wheels... yikes.
I bike around the city often, mostly at night. In the last week I almost got hit by one turning in front of me, and I watched another blow through a red on 9th and Judah. I've also observed them slowing drivers down with erratic behavior. Now I understand why the sudden uptick in volume, but am predicting it gets locked back down soon bc from what I've seen they have much more to learn. I'm very cautious around them. Good for the company and team behind it tho, it's a good fight to wage. Fingers crossed.
Surely you don't solve this problem by recognizing specific objects, you just identify "is there /anything/ in front of me except for road or vehicle travelling at a similar speed to me/within a certain distance of me" and stop if so.
It's been about a year now, but I used to skate around the city all the time -- even then I found the self-driving test cars to be way less treacherous than the human-driven ones!
Pulling your kid in a bike trailer in SF is awesome and admirable, but also a little bit crazy :-)
Yeah it's funny how human psychology works! We know the rational truth is that the AI drivers are millions of times less likely to run us over than human drivers, but we still can't get rid of the image of evil robots going bezerk from Hollywood movies and the (extremely unlikely) possibility of a malfunction in the back of our minds!
Have to say, seeing my Auto Pilot graphics with cars "jumping" all over and appearing and disappearing.. (this is not the FSD Beta graphics mind you) compared with what seems like a stable and coherent visualization of the environment, it really makes the difference in my feeling of confidence that it's aware and able to react to the same things I see around me
Glad to see they never exceed 20 mph in this video. If AVs can stick to city speeds that prioritize pedestrian safety over travel time, they'll have a huge head start over human drivers in safety and "human decency" metrics. Hopefully have a traffic calming effect on the rest of us, too.
As far as I know, they still don't/won't drive in the rain, and they operate safely and slowly. I want to believe this thing is moving forward, but I'm skeptical about building a marketplace where the service is unavailable exactly when demand is highest. It creates conflicts of interest, that at best, encourage actors to take risks that can undermine the entire industry.
Just 2 days ago I saw a waymo car stuck at 4th and Townsend in SF facing NE (toward the bay). The car was in the left of 2 lanes. The light for the left lane turned green. The car sat there. People behind started honking. Eventually it went. Not if there was a driver or not.
In the driver's defense (computer or human), SF's signals have gotten very complicated in the last ~10 yrs and even non-robot drivers fail to follow the rules about 20% of the time. 3 places I can see this happen every day are (1) 4th and Townsend on Townsend facing NE (the one above). The issue is the left lane has a green light but the right lane has a separate right turn signal because there is a bike lane further to the right that gets green first. Sit at the corner and I guarantee within 10 right turning cars someone will turn on red.
Similarly, 5th and Bryant on 5th going NW (into the city). This has a similar deal. There's an on ramp to the freeway but it has a separate right turn signal from the green forward signal. This one, for me, is around 100% violation by which I mean I've never NOT seen a violation at the corner. Not ever car, but ever signal at least one car will turn right on to the freeway even though there are 2 large no right turn lights and a green bike light.
The last is 4th and King, on 4th going SE facing the bay. I'm not sure these are technically violations. The left lane is painted as left turn only. The right as right turn only. The middle lane crosses King. Again, this is close to 100% for at least one car per signal ignoring those markings. I don't blame them as there's no way to see the markings until you're just a few car lengths from the intersection and if there are other cars there you can't see them at all. Further, looking up the law, solid white lines are just guidelines. It's legal to cross them. (double white are not). Still, people in the center lane get angry and honk when people in the left or right lanes cut them off since they weren't expecting it.
"Waymo and Cruise self-driving cars took over San Francisco streets at record levels in 2021 — so did collisions with other cars, scooters, and bikes" [1]
"...Many of the accidents, which the companies are required to report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, occurred while the vehicles were operating in manual mode, with a safety driver in control.
...But according to an analysis by Insider, a majority of the 98 reported accidents in 2021 occurred while the vehicles were in autonomous mode, or within seconds after the autonomous mode technology had been switched off..."
I think waymo has advanced the tech pretty far but I am still worried about the legal and business aspects of self driving cars:
1. liability cross section scales with size of fleet if waymo is solely responsible for developing their algorithms
2. added operational cost of running a self driving car - is it worth it to average consumer? This is something everyone throws numbers out for but here is what i'm thinking:
- we have lots of examples of transportation systems that have some level of automation (eg. train, subway, planes) but even after decades of robust operations, nearly all of them still require operators in the loop. This is especially striking since rail systems/subways are as closed-loop and simple as you can get in terms of automation. As an outsider, it's unclear to me why they are needed but they are there. Is it because as fleets age, their parts wear down in unpredictable ways? Is it some regulatory requirement?
- for self driving cars, will the same expectation be there eventually? either a remote assistance driver or a chauffer safety driver? If that is the case, then it will be difficult for a self driving car to be cheaper esp with the added cost of all self driving tech stack and operational costs.
The clip at 0:42s impressed me https://youtu.be/O8TSA-X9UlU?t=42 because the behavior seems to be trying to "edge in" and assert fairness, which is what humans expect of each other in these situations.
I’m curious on the HN community opinion on whether Cruise is ahead of Waymo in SF, or if Waymo is just more careful and has spent less time training models specific to SF, but will expand to a fully public program sooner
When I see one of these cars in South Boston (narrow streets with street parking) during the winter (piles of snow everywhere), I'll believe they're a reality. Until then, they'll remain 90% of the way there.
Edit: I'm wrong, misread the context of the quote. Please disregard the below. Thanks to the people who double-checked me!
Despite the claims of "no human driver behind the wheel", there'll still be what amounts to a driver, they're just calling the person a "specialist" instead of a "driver":
> Just as we’ve done before, we'll start with Waymo employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our Trusted Tester program soon after.
One thing I am glad for is the presence of Waymo in SF has upgraded the detail on Google Maps in that city. Every curb, sidewalk, marked crosswalk, and other feature of the streetscape now appears in Google Maps. It's really improving. Compare:
Google Maps has this level of detail in. S.F. and Phoenix, their two self-driving launch cities, and not in other places like say Denver or Charlotte, so I surmise this data is attributable to Waymo.
I'm in Bogotá. Traffic here is worse than anything in San Francisco. The main danger is probably the motorcycles, flying between cars, sometimes with inches to spare. I don't know the fatality stats, but they must be worse than the USA. It's hard to see how an AI could deal with this.
Is anyone thinking about "road neutrality" issues, such as:
- Tiered priority: can people pay up to give their autonomous ride priority over others?
- Differential access: can certain neighborhoods be made inaccessible to Avs originating in certain other neighborhoods? Or only accessible to friends and families of residents? (virtual gated community / virtual redlining)
I hope that Boston Dynamic can do will make robotic horses/tauntauns that need to be tied to a charging post whilst I head into the daily shopping would be awesome.
And if I took one to the pub and later that night it could get my intoxicated body home safely without my guidance yeah that would be a huge plus.
I'm tired of cars and trucks and segways and scooters.
And I have this dream of owning and driving around this very particular supercar. I've been slowly saving up, and within a few years I'll probably be able to outright buy it. And I plan to keep it for about 15 years atleast.
This car is neither electric nor self-drive capable.
Should I abandon that dream because I might not be allowed to drive around for too long?
And yes, I do understand and agree that in the long run, autonomous cars are probably going to be safer overall. Like, I'm not opposed to it.
(Please don't lecture me on why buying a car outright (instead of leasing) is financially stupid, or why buying cars with internal combustion engines or high CO2 emissions is a crime, or how my conscience allows me to buy a fancy car when there are a million other problems in this world).
"On March 24th, 2022, I was riding my bike near the beach in San Francisco down a slight slope. My hands were on my brakes to make sure the bike was in control. About 150 feet ahead of me, a vehicle suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. To avoid oncoming traffic, I veered towards the vehicle's right, which suddenly moved directly in front of me.
At that point, I could not avoid impact and crashed through the vehicle's back window with my bike. As I lay on the road, I saw that the car that hit me did not have a driver."
I can not wait until the day cars no longer break any rules and the police are forced to take a hard look at what they do and justify being employed. How will they civil forfeit if they have no reason to pull you over? I really hope I live long enough to see that day.
I have seen this news but have not seen any videos taken by a rider. On the other hand, members of the public have uploaded videos of their experiences in Waymo (Arizona, driverless).
[+] [-] moritonal|4 years ago|reply
The fall-out is going to be intense:
* Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point.
* Reduced downtime on goods movement will impact uptime in every other industry.
* Autonomous-vehicle-only lanes that line up with traffic timings creating a two-tier driving experience
* Huge influx of unemployed drivers who I guess might get "chauffeur" style jobs.
* Security issues, complex legal issues when there's accidents.
* Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols".
I know all this is extreme, but if history is studying the past to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the "future" to predict the problems of tomorrow.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|4 years ago|reply
So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight. Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.
[+] [-] rootusrootus|4 years ago|reply
Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars.
Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.
[+] [-] gambiting|4 years ago|reply
That's sarcastic, right? Like "we'll have fusion power in 50 years"? Except that we might actually have fusion power in 50 years and I don't actually think we'll have truly driverless cars within 50 years.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.justtransitionfund.org/
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-a-j...
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.96...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
[+] [-] woah|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: Actually it was very quick and easy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&...
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
Let me put it this way.... How often do any governments have a plan for changes *beforehand?."
Almost every western country saw "deindustrialization" at some point, predictably cutting off whole cohorts from wages, pensions and lifestyles. None had a plan.
They watched Walmart behead high streets and then watched Amazon behead the survivors. No plan. War is, arguably, the thing we plan and provision for the most. Wartime refugees always seem to take us by surprise.
I'm sure someone somewhere, in theory, had a plan for a pandemic. But when it happened, a whole lot seemed to be off the cuff.
Stuff happens, then we plan and react. At best.
[+] [-] TheDong|4 years ago|reply
Some of the other points seem legitimate, but this one seems silly.
It's trivially easy _now_ for someone to sign up for uber and drive people to random locations, and that doesn't happen.
Presumably, with driverless taxis, we'll still have the same level of assurance we have now (use the app, app tells us a license plate for a valid car, that's the one you get into). Right now, you can get a driver who misbehaves, or uber could get hacked and send incorrect dropoff locations. In a driverless world, only the second attack matters since the chance of a malicious driver is gone.
[+] [-] munk-a|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielmarkbruce|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] browningstreet|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Seattle3503|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|4 years ago|reply
You certainly don't know that - at least on roads generally. You might have a reasonable hope that in some highly constrained environments they might be an option, but that's very different.
[+] [-] la64710|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gareth321|4 years ago|reply
In typical human fashion, we're not going to do anything until everything blows up.
[+] [-] boredumb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freedomben|4 years ago|reply
There are surely interest groups and think thanks that are working on the problem, and they will (if they don't already), have some legislation either ready to go or close to it.
The politicians won't even think about it until it becomes an actual problem that threatens votes, and when they do start caring they will just take whatever they can get from friendly/trusted think tanks and try to ram it through. The bills will be thousands of pages long and practically nobody will read them before voting for them.
[+] [-] mejutoco|4 years ago|reply
I still think your prediction is too optimist. IMO (I admit, based on gut feeling) either we won't have it or the goals will have changed and it will only work in special roads (almost like rails for trains). See you in 10 years (if hn still exists!)
[+] [-] greesil|4 years ago|reply
Edit: anxiety also because I wasn't sure it would recognize the bike trailer as a real thing. How many bike trailers end up in the training set?
[+] [-] screye|4 years ago|reply
I expect it to be friendlier to bikers and pedestrians than human drivers.
As a biker, most of close calls are due to impatient drivers who try to overtake me through close calls and when they enter turns without looking first. AFAIK, Self-driving cars do not initiate same-lane overtakes and can be hardcoded to be paragons of patience.
With how hostile American drivers are towards bikers, self-driving cars would need Skynet-esque malice towards us to match those injury rates.
[+] [-] antattack|4 years ago|reply
Something similar to checking if driver is paying attention and is aware that I'm going to cross in front of their car by looking at direction where driver is looking or a hand gesture.
[+] [-] kfarr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehsankia|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWvhw1KCmbo
[+] [-] snaily|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgraczyk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omnicognate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imperialdrive|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p1necone|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilap|4 years ago|reply
Pulling your kid in a bike trailer in SF is awesome and admirable, but also a little bit crazy :-)
[+] [-] mikotodomo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hirundo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idreyn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scoofy|4 years ago|reply
As far as I know, they still don't/won't drive in the rain, and they operate safely and slowly. I want to believe this thing is moving forward, but I'm skeptical about building a marketplace where the service is unavailable exactly when demand is highest. It creates conflicts of interest, that at best, encourage actors to take risks that can undermine the entire industry.
[+] [-] greggman3|4 years ago|reply
In the driver's defense (computer or human), SF's signals have gotten very complicated in the last ~10 yrs and even non-robot drivers fail to follow the rules about 20% of the time. 3 places I can see this happen every day are (1) 4th and Townsend on Townsend facing NE (the one above). The issue is the left lane has a green light but the right lane has a separate right turn signal because there is a bike lane further to the right that gets green first. Sit at the corner and I guarantee within 10 right turning cars someone will turn on red.
Similarly, 5th and Bryant on 5th going NW (into the city). This has a similar deal. There's an on ramp to the freeway but it has a separate right turn signal from the green forward signal. This one, for me, is around 100% violation by which I mean I've never NOT seen a violation at the corner. Not ever car, but ever signal at least one car will turn right on to the freeway even though there are 2 large no right turn lights and a green bike light.
The last is 4th and King, on 4th going SE facing the bay. I'm not sure these are technically violations. The left lane is painted as left turn only. The right as right turn only. The middle lane crosses King. Again, this is close to 100% for at least one car per signal ignoring those markings. I don't blame them as there's no way to see the markings until you're just a few car lengths from the intersection and if there are other cars there you can't see them at all. Further, looking up the law, solid white lines are just guidelines. It's legal to cross them. (double white are not). Still, people in the center lane get angry and honk when people in the left or right lanes cut them off since they weren't expecting it.
[+] [-] belter|4 years ago|reply
"Waymo and Cruise self-driving cars took over San Francisco streets at record levels in 2021 — so did collisions with other cars, scooters, and bikes" [1]
"...Many of the accidents, which the companies are required to report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, occurred while the vehicles were operating in manual mode, with a safety driver in control.
...But according to an analysis by Insider, a majority of the 98 reported accidents in 2021 occurred while the vehicles were in autonomous mode, or within seconds after the autonomous mode technology had been switched off..."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/self-driving-car-accidents-w...
[+] [-] _yo2u|4 years ago|reply
1. liability cross section scales with size of fleet if waymo is solely responsible for developing their algorithms
2. added operational cost of running a self driving car - is it worth it to average consumer? This is something everyone throws numbers out for but here is what i'm thinking:
- we have lots of examples of transportation systems that have some level of automation (eg. train, subway, planes) but even after decades of robust operations, nearly all of them still require operators in the loop. This is especially striking since rail systems/subways are as closed-loop and simple as you can get in terms of automation. As an outsider, it's unclear to me why they are needed but they are there. Is it because as fleets age, their parts wear down in unpredictable ways? Is it some regulatory requirement?
- for self driving cars, will the same expectation be there eventually? either a remote assistance driver or a chauffer safety driver? If that is the case, then it will be difficult for a self driving car to be cheaper esp with the added cost of all self driving tech stack and operational costs.
[+] [-] daenz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dontreact|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tapoxi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RankingMember|4 years ago|reply
Despite the claims of "no human driver behind the wheel", there'll still be what amounts to a driver, they're just calling the person a "specialist" instead of a "driver":
> Just as we’ve done before, we'll start with Waymo employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our Trusted Tester program soon after.
[+] [-] jeffbee|4 years ago|reply
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/37.76628/-122.46048
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7663897,-122.4603632,19.6z?h...
Google Maps has this level of detail in. S.F. and Phoenix, their two self-driving launch cities, and not in other places like say Denver or Charlotte, so I surmise this data is attributable to Waymo.
[+] [-] rnikander|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AvAn12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] backtoyoujim|4 years ago|reply
And if I took one to the pub and later that night it could get my intoxicated body home safely without my guidance yeah that would be a huge plus.
I'm tired of cars and trucks and segways and scooters.
I want robotic electro auto-tauntauns.
[+] [-] 2143|4 years ago|reply
And I have this dream of owning and driving around this very particular supercar. I've been slowly saving up, and within a few years I'll probably be able to outright buy it. And I plan to keep it for about 15 years atleast.
This car is neither electric nor self-drive capable.
Should I abandon that dream because I might not be allowed to drive around for too long?
And yes, I do understand and agree that in the long run, autonomous cars are probably going to be safer overall. Like, I'm not opposed to it.
(Please don't lecture me on why buying a car outright (instead of leasing) is financially stupid, or why buying cars with internal combustion engines or high CO2 emissions is a crime, or how my conscience allows me to buy a fancy car when there are a million other problems in this world).
[+] [-] all_usernames|4 years ago|reply
"On March 24th, 2022, I was riding my bike near the beach in San Francisco down a slight slope. My hands were on my brakes to make sure the bike was in control. About 150 feet ahead of me, a vehicle suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. To avoid oncoming traffic, I veered towards the vehicle's right, which suddenly moved directly in front of me.
At that point, I could not avoid impact and crashed through the vehicle's back window with my bike. As I lay on the road, I saw that the car that hit me did not have a driver."
https://www.gofundme.com/f/autonomous-car-hit-my-brother
[+] [-] 14|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
Also, this is just driverless rides for Google employees, not everybody.
[+] [-] redytedy|4 years ago|reply
Are you aware of any such video for AutoX?