Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads with no one at the wheel

Re:Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads w... by organsnyder on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @01:06PM (#15645822)

I own the same model of vehicle as Waymo is using (2017 Pacifica PHEV). It's cool to see how little they've had to visibly modify the car (apart from the sensors)—the interior looks 100% stock, other than the row of buttons on the ceiling. Given the level-1 autonomous features in the vehicle (self-parking, etc.), all of the integrations are probably done over CAN-bus, with no additional hardware required (again, apart from the sensors and the computing power).

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Re:Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads w... by jvolkman on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @02:38PM (#15646745)

I think there's more than that. The safety report they released recently indicates the vehicles also have redundant power systems, redundant braking systems, redundant steering systems, etc. I doubt that the stock configurations require as much redundancy.

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Re:Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads w... by organsnyder on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @04:39PM (#15647908)

Ah, that could be. Though could that be talking about redundant processing (i.e. two dependent algorithms making the same decision) rather than duplicate hardware?

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Re:Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads w... by jvolkman on Tuesday November 07, 2017 @04:50PM (#15647995)

Don't think so. You can read the descriptions on page 17 of the report: https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/way...

For example: The steering system features a redundant drive motor system with independent controllers and separate power supplies. Either one can manage steering in the case that a failure occurs in the other

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Re:Waymo now testing its self-driving cars on public roads w... by JibJabLab on Wednesday November 08, 2017 @02:51PM (#15656283)

I'm pretty sure there's a huge computer setup that takes up a good portion of the trunk space.

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