[jefftk]

That it's 70 remote assistance people for 3,000 cars is pretty good counter-evidence to the "they're not driverless, they're remote controlled" claims.

[actinium226]

70 active on average at any given time per the article, which then lists total fleet size, as opposed to number of active cars on average, so it's not a fair comparison.

Although then it says they drive about 4m miles per week, which works out to 57,000 miles per active RA agent per week. A person driving ~25 mph on average 24/7 would do ~4000 miles in a week (and we can assume 24/7 here because they reported active agents, so we assume a team of ~3 people swapping out as driver in this hypothetical).

So that gives you a car/operator ratio of at least 14, and probably more since I bet the average speed is less than 25 mph.

[oceliker]

I think anyone who goes for a drive in Los Angeles can attest that there are way mo than 70 cars active at any point. It's not unusual to see multiple Waymos at intersections.

Also, the average speed is way less than 25 mph, considering it may take 30 minutes to go 3-4 miles in city traffic.

[toddmorey]

Yeah that sentence struck me as very carefully worded. They also don't mention how often RA is needed or invoked. We'll encounter a lot of these autonomous systems (cars, robots, equipment) that escalate decisions and edge cases to human employees until they are trained enough that reliability goes up.

[wheelerwj]

One point. This isn’t an article, it’s a blog.

[CobrastanJorji]

The remote control claim never made sense anyway. "There is no computer driver, it's all fake, they're paying teams of drivers in India" only sounds plausible to anyone who's never encountered lag in a video game.

[netsharc]

Plenty of people believe since Covid is a virus, just like software viruses it was being transmitted by 5G base stations.

I've mentioned to a friend that humans are monkeys, but which are capable of building an Internet. But maybe plenty of us are closer to monkeys...

[Noumenon72]

What is their claim about latency here?

> Our vehicle-to-RA connection is also as fast as the blink of an eye. Median one-way latency is approximately 150 milliseconds for U.S. based operations centers and 250 milliseconds for RA based abroad.

That's still not fast enough for remote control, but are they implying they only send the RAs screenshots, since sending video would take seconds, not milliseconds?

[Aurornis]

It reminds me of the claims that your phone's microphone is always on and feeding your conversations to Facebook so they can serve you ads, even when the app is closed.

Anyone who has experience with apps, permissions, or even basic reverse engineering or network activity monitoring would realize that this couldn't be true without someone having found evidence.

Yet even on HN you find die-hard believers that it's true. I think these stories tickle the conspiracy theorist part of some people's brains and they want to believe it's true. If it's true, it means they were smart enough to see through the facade unlike the other sheep in the world.

[shadowgovt]

Interestingly, the round-trip latency from the West Coast to continental Asia isn't nearly as long as I'd assumed (60ms to 250ms, depending on who's measuring).

Not nearly fast enough for real-time highway remote operation IMHO, but surprisingly fast. That's what I get for underestimating how fast light and electric fields can go.

[kakapo5672]

I've got people in my social network who firmly believe that every car is, in fact, "driven by Indonesians". Apparently a widespread belief.

I've pointed out that these vehicles are quickly become more prevalent, here and (especially) in China. To which the counter is that there plenty of Indonesians to go around.

[Ygg2]

After stunt Amazon pulled off, with its shop, being skeptical is warranted.

I know Google and Amazon aren't the same company, but their incentives are.

[jeffbee]

70 on-duty, that probably translates to 200-300 people on staff.

[ameliaquining]

But presumably most of the 3,000 cars are on the road at any given time? In which case the point stands, namely, that their remote operations people can't be the ones driving the cars because there aren't enough of them on duty at any given time; therefore, the cars really do drive themselves. (Which I would have thought was never in doubt, but I suppose some people are really determined to be skeptics.)

[jefftk]

I wish they included how many active cars they have at any one time so we could make a proper comparison.

[altairprime]

They’re not “no human in the loop” driverless. They’re just on autopilot, same as any airliner. We don’t call planes that takeoff and land themselves “pilotless”, because there’s humans in the loop. Waymo must be rather defensive about being called out for merely having autopilot cars, which is weird because that’s rather miraculous in historical terms — but certainly the generic term “autopilot” is a much less distinctive claim to success than “driverless”.

[estearum]

They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time.

If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless.

Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."

[AlotOfReading]

Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times.

The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.

[shadowgovt]

Pilots in a plane on autopilot are never out of the control authority of the plane (by which I mean: "ready to take over at a moment's notice"). Driverless AVs do drive without perpetual eyes-on oversight. The FAA would never allow that for commercial planes.

[nearbuy]

Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.