Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.
From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.
Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.
Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.
Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.
And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.
> In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
I just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.
Yeah but imagine how hard robotics are if we can’t make a dam thing to just speed and turn correctly(I.e 2 params). You also seem to overestimate the inertia of the tech advantage. Being first is not always the most important thing. See google AI as prime example.
No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
The industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about.
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
This yes.
> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.
This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.
We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.
This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.
I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]
“Cruise” is still churning out good tech, they gave a talk recently about using a lightweight [1] type of planner to train an end to end VLA style planner
Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course.
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens" - sick burn Waymo haha
From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
The simple reality with remote controllers is that there is a lot of extra network latency that pretty much makes any real time controlling of the car impractical. Most of this stuff happens over mobile networks too so there might be package loss, low resolution video. Maybe the video freezes for a second or two occasionally. Etc.
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:
If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.
A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
Agree. Also, you have a general intelligence and a pair of eyes, not just a pair of eyes. In the absence of an artificial general intelligence, we need better sensors than a human has if we are to hope to approximate human performance.
I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.
There is plenty of people saying that Tesla has unsupervised Robotaxis comparable with Waymo, however someone did a research https://x.com/tesla2moon/status/2018815035133313134 , turns out their cars are limited to a single Geofenced Bus Route.
Congratulations to the Waymo team! I was excited reading through the overview. What I'm monitoring in the self-driving space is Lidar and Radar integration. There are leaders like Elon with Tesla who insist that they're not necessary yet Waymo has devoted effort for them in their 6th generation. My personal perspective is that Lidar and Radar are a core requirement for self-driving because "These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases."
Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS...
The image caption reads:
Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions.
Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
"Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency."
ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on.
My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.
They've already talked about this new hardware many times, this is just announcing that said new models are starting fully driverless operations.
Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.
The zeekr vehicle mentioned here is made in an almost entirely dark factory in China. It has very few humans on the floor and spits out 800 cars per day. It’s literally dark in there.
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour?
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
I do a lot of driving in Austin for a living. I am not a fan of these for several reasons. But on average they're quite competent and I see humans do dumber stuff all the time. I can also cut them off in traffic without repercussions!
Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".
This forum is baked by a VC firm that relies on gambling with pension funds to make a billion dollars, are you honestly expecting real tech discussions here and not a bunch of smoke + mirrors?
Everything you’ve mentioned don’t do anything to diminish the magnitude of this achievement in the slightest. It’s clearly just FUD and most people see it as that. There are dozens of refutations of everything you’ve pointed out in this thread already. Maybe besides DoorDash, what’s that about?
There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. 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. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) without some extra guidance. Whether Waymo's business model makes sense primarily depends on how often these agents need to intervene (unlike safety drivers where you need one safety driver per vehicle and you're just running an expensive taxi).
>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?
They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.
The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.
This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.
From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing:
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.
I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit.
I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.
I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.
It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.
NotJustBikes doesn't have a particularly great reputation among transit enthusiasts. A lot of his videos have become repetitive and focused on complaints rather than specific ways of making things better. Understandably, few people are willing to spend an hour listening to someone complain on the Internet.
> "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities..."
Congestion charges. Limited licensing for TNCs. Dedicated public or private holding areas rather than "milling about". All of these have solutions.
> Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks.
It is already best practice in urban design to separate cars that need to quickly transit an area without interacting with it into completely independent routes where there are no bikes or pedestrians, and combine transit/bikes/walking into livable mixed mode streets where cars are not allowed. NotJustBikes has many examples of this, most commonly around Europe.
> To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity.
This is what already happens in places that don't have usable, safe, or car-competitive transit, modulo autonomous, including currently most of North America. The solution to needing fewer cars -- self driving or not -- is investment in transit and in ground-up overhaul of existing cities to optimize for transit and deprioritization of cars.
Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.
Why would driverless cars mill around? They would just wait around in underground garages. They can even block each other, so they don't need that much space to park.
My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems.
This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
mlsu|17 days ago
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
rbbydotdev|17 days ago
AlotOfReading|17 days ago
coffeemug|17 days ago
Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....
harikb|17 days ago
What you envision might happen in 2100+
fragmede|17 days ago
http://zoox.com
Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.
kjksf|17 days ago
Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.
Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.
Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.
So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.
And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.
standardUser|17 days ago
farresito|17 days ago
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
unknown|17 days ago
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culopatin|17 days ago
unknown|17 days ago
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zacmps|17 days ago
jsemrau|17 days ago
thefounder|17 days ago
fragmede|17 days ago
mandeepj|17 days ago
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
nektro|17 days ago
atonse|17 days ago
Which is why their strategy (purely vision/photons in, controls out) seems to be more widely applicable and scalable over time.
And waymo seems to be arriving there too as they keep reducing the equipment (it would seem)
Rover222|17 days ago
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
MetaWhirledPeas|17 days ago
Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.
SecretDreams|17 days ago
This yes.
> The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill.
This, I don't think so. I think it'll be more like the space race. Or the LLM race. Anytime money or data is all that's required, you won't hold the lead forever. The reason big tech holds their leads today is not innovation, but critical mass combined with user entrapment. Waymo is not positioned right now for either since their space is primarily focused on taxis, whereas the real winners (in auto) will be whoever does it best (and there may be a few) for consumer auto ownership.
We can talk about robots all day, but we haven't gotten to mass robots yet because of cost and reliability. It'll be a bit still for those to work and it won't surprise me if robots end up in homes and wars sooner than factories, since those former use cases are shockingly more fault tolerant than a high paced environment.
garbawarb|18 days ago
(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
lacker|18 days ago
If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.
So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.
It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.
xnx|18 days ago
Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.
syntaxing|18 days ago
(Also former Cruise employee)
RivieraKid|18 days ago
Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)
ibejoeb|18 days ago
someonehere|18 days ago
Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.
I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.
If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.
Hawkenfall|18 days ago
GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...
[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!
KenSF|17 days ago
[0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/
rangestransform|17 days ago
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03349
hypercube33|17 days ago
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
kjkjadksj|18 days ago
cortesoft|17 days ago
He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.
Eridrus|17 days ago
ZuLuuuuuu|18 days ago
Nice abbreviation.
fragmede|17 days ago
plmpsu|18 days ago
nickpinkston|17 days ago
From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
ilaksh|18 days ago
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
hnuser123456|18 days ago
jillesvangurp|17 days ago
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
treespace8|17 days ago
Not 99% of a chauffeur, 100%. (or 99.99999%)
The roll out of this is clearly limited by the number of remote employees that are filling in the 1%.
unknown|17 days ago
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testing22321|17 days ago
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
zellyn|17 days ago
If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.
A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
seanhunter|17 days ago
nutjob2|18 days ago
Nice dig at Tesla.
qwerpy|17 days ago
matada_|15 days ago
kittikitti|17 days ago
LoganDark|17 days ago
The image caption reads:
but the image itself for me is blank.arjie|17 days ago
dyauspitr|17 days ago
dyauspitr|17 days ago
TulliusCicero|17 days ago
SeanAnderson|17 days ago
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
azernik|17 days ago
"Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency."
ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on.
My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
giobox|17 days ago
TulliusCicero|17 days ago
Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.
dyauspitr|17 days ago
MagicMoonlight|17 days ago
heisenbit|17 days ago
devmor|18 days ago
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
ted_bunny|17 days ago
nradov|17 days ago
jayd16|17 days ago
Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?
standardUser|17 days ago
tgrowazay|18 days ago
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
xnx|18 days ago
aggie|18 days ago
But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.
rainbowresource|18 days ago
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ewuhic|17 days ago
shimman|17 days ago
dyauspitr|17 days ago
madduci|17 days ago
[deleted]
dweinus|18 days ago
[deleted]
Rudybega|18 days ago
YeGoblynQueenne|17 days ago
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. 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. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
From: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
rcxdude|17 days ago
nielsbot|17 days ago
socalgal2|17 days ago
Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo.
I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.
cucumber3732842|17 days ago
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
fragmede|17 days ago
IsTom|17 days ago
kccqzy|17 days ago
RupertSalt|17 days ago
They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.
The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.
This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.
From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"
abraxas|17 days ago
https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
hadlock|17 days ago
SeanAnderson|17 days ago
I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.
I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.
It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.
torton|17 days ago
> "Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities..."
Congestion charges. Limited licensing for TNCs. Dedicated public or private holding areas rather than "milling about". All of these have solutions.
> Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks.
It is already best practice in urban design to separate cars that need to quickly transit an area without interacting with it into completely independent routes where there are no bikes or pedestrians, and combine transit/bikes/walking into livable mixed mode streets where cars are not allowed. NotJustBikes has many examples of this, most commonly around Europe.
> To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity.
This is what already happens in places that don't have usable, safe, or car-competitive transit, modulo autonomous, including currently most of North America. The solution to needing fewer cars -- self driving or not -- is investment in transit and in ground-up overhaul of existing cities to optimize for transit and deprioritization of cars.
mclau153|17 days ago
kccqzy|17 days ago
TulliusCicero|17 days ago
I regularly bike, which is why I'm hugely in favor of self driving cars; they're way safer for me when biking than human driven cars.
gniv|17 days ago
throw310822|17 days ago
This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
TulliusCicero|17 days ago
Eventually, it will become more of a commodity-level task, but by then most of the big incumbents will already be very established.