Cruise's failures, in my view, have come broadly at the long tail where their cars stall out entirely in the road due and it cascades to other Cruises.

Did you make sure to reply like this to poster I replied to as well?

dopamean's partner: "Hey dopamean, in my experience, the grocery bags full of canned goods are heavier than the ones full of chips. Let me take the heavier ones and you can take the lighter ones!"

dopamean: infuriated "How could you possibly know which bags are heavier? It's a ridiculous thing to say. By couching it with 'in my experience' you attempt to make it sound like you're just talking about your personal experience but then you go on to say something that sounds objective and _could_ be measured but wasn't! Did you weigh each bag to determine their objective heft? No!"

dopamean's partner: distraught "I'm so sorry, dopamean! I will never again share informed personal experience with you about objective matters without first conducting a rigorous measurement program beforehand to confirm my priors. Thank you for showing me just how much better I can be! I can tell you're so much smarter than me and I can learn so much from you."

dopamean: angrier than anyone has ever been "Oh 'I'm so much smarter than you' am I? You fail yet again! Did you measure my IQ, did you measure yours?? Have you learned nothing!? I could easily be 3 or even 4 standard deviations below your IQ!"

Fin.

I realize I don’t have a real concrete sense of just how many of these there are. Like is this a whole thing already?

In SF yes. Even small amounts of driving in certain areas will have multiple daily interactions with these vehicles.

https://youtu.be/iNlS1LSDjl8?si=Me-zKKD7g0dPo6tH

After evening rush hour has concluded, they're a plurality of vehicles on the road.

On the most recent drive, I was in the right lane on the freeway and an AV was merging from the on ramp. It was driving extremely slowly and did not react to me (IIUC I have "right of way" and it should either speed up or slow down) so I basically had to change lanes to avoid it merging into me.

They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.

I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.

That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.

By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.

The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.

Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.

2) move to a location where you're statistically most likely to pick up your next passenger, to reduce average wait time

There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.

Can't wait for them to be able to take freeways over to Oakland and down to Cupertino.

Self driving cars are useful to replace various maintenance or delivery trucks in cities, and farm transport. However mass transit is better for most things people are thinking about them for.

However, if you’ve only experienced terrible public transit then it’s far less appealing.

I am not in great shape but I know which I prefer.

1/8th of a mile is every 660 feet, but the farthest you can be from one is the midpoint so 330 feet. However for every trip starting at the midpoint there’s another at and the bus stop thus the average would be 1/2 that distance again or 165 feet.

Assuming a 1D world, you can beat this in practice.

As to unbearably slow, there’s this idea of express busses and buss only lanes etc. The core of cities really isn’t that big, it takes forever because traffic is slow or mass transit is infrequent.

Ideally you want a grid where bus lines are near intersections so going from North to East means crossing 1 street so you can go anywhere with 2 waits and a street crossing.

You cut it in half because you can walk to the closest stop and cut it in half again before you’re starting at a random point not the worst possibility so 5280/8/2/2 = 165 feet. Except we don’t exit buildings or get on busses in the middle of the street so it’s not random.

Edit: ca. 2008 the policy was 800–1,000 ft for bus stops and 1,000–1,200 ft for street car stops. On grades between 10–15% the standard is 500–600 ft for bus stops, and on grades above 15% the standard is 300–400 ft. Trunk routes have 24x7 service, and (I can't find it now) there are standards about the amount of service on the other routes but it's something along the lines of 80% of residences are supposed to have frequent service ~18 hours a day and reduced service in the wee hours. Currently the tightest headway I can find is 8 minutes for travel during peak hours along the busiest routes.

Muni is often inefficient but it can get you pretty much anywhere in the city (including places you can't walk to like Treasure Island) for most of the day.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Dolores+Park,+Dolores+St+%26...

I'd argue that we'll be able to make this much better with driverless cars than with public transit.

The crazy thing is bad transit needs a larger subsidy because people don’t want to use it. So good systems get better and bad systems get worse.

Bad service is much worse on transit though.

People in NYC don’t just save money using the metro vs a Taxi they save time.

In a completely empty city, the first car handily beats transit. Of course.

In a traffic-laden city, separated PT tends to determine how long it takes to travel instead. 12AM it takes me 25min to get into the centre of the city - at peak hour it's more than an hour. Curiously, the train also happens to take approximately an hour to get into the city.

If public transit exists, it becomes the upper-bound for traffic travel time as if it takes longer than that people start to take the constant-time PT trip instead of the variable car trip.

In a software sense you can usually view decent PT (ie. not busses stuck in traffic) as having a high but constant time cost, whereas cars have a low but increasing cost corresponding to the traffic load (with non-separated transit incurring the same costs but being worse due to traffic stops :()

I want to have my cake and eat it too and I think we can with driverless cars. Lots of software tricks we can do with a network of driverless EVs + city traffic lights to dramatically increase capacity.

My roadmap for SF would be:

- allow waymo and others to scale driverless cars

- stop spending ~$2B for a 1.7 mile subway to chinatown, spend that money on a traffic light control network (ideally just let google run it)

- give the same per passenger subsidy to riders of driverless cars that current public transit passengers receive per trip

- require that driverless cars in SF should send realtime destination info to the traffic light network

- remove parking spots on high traffic streets effectively creating two more lanes

- allow bus lanes to be exclusively used by driverless cars

- tax driverless car rides based on occupancy+distance+time of day so you can traffic shape

Meanwhile the solution you've put forth is almost entirely political and even were there general acceptance of privatizing the roads that sort of project would be mired in just as much NIMBYism. Even then you're talking about, what, refunding federal monies that have already been spent? Levying a new tax (which will require a 2/3 voter approval), subsidizing private corporations, and kneecapping transit? And for what? A system that has a fraction of the capacity of the existing bus and tram infrastructure?

Beyond the gall to suggest privatizing our roads, you're suggesting handing it all over to Google? Really? A corporation with a track record of zero customer or long-term product support is not in a position to run our roads.

- cities already pay private companies to help manage the traffic infrastructure so it doesn't seem too crazy. Seems hyperbolic to claim that's "privatizing roads"

- subsidizing private corps - ok maybe we shouldn't do this. but we should stop subsidizing public transit. it should have to compete with private alternatives now that we have them. previously there were no alternatives to public transit so we kind of had to subsidize it for equity, but now I think private enterprise (given fair competition) could deliver the same outcome. Instead of subsidizing the method (public transit) we should subsidize the outcome we want (equitable access to transport - which might mean that you need to provide low income rides as a ride share provider)

- on the money spent on the SF subway and bus lane, you're right, we're not getting that back. But we can just stop doing those going forward.

- regarding van ness bus lane, I didn't know it was because of the street lamps. But that actually proves my point. Basically to make any improvement, we just have to steer clear of new physical infrastructure. I'm suggesting no new physical infra, just software.

- regarding the tax on driverless rides, we kind of already have it. SF has a 3.25% tax on all ride sharing rides. We'd just need to update that to price the tax dynamically to help traffic shape. And if we don't get that piece, it's not critical.

- on giving it to Google. Fine... not them then. Whoever can provide the best service for the lowest cost. Perfect for free markets. In fact, if we make the API to traffic system standardized, you could plugin and hot swap different providers. You could even back test new providers on historic data to see what their performance would have been like and swap to new providers as they demonstrate their improvement over the current system

- cars have a fraction of the capacity of buses - yeah only if they are fully utilized and you're not counting getting to and from the bus station nor the loss of productivity waiting for a bus

- Build a real time monitoring system of people travelling on these services to allow instant arrests by diverting the vehicles.

- Sell all the data to advertisers and unscrupulous individuals, who may or may not be stalking someone.

- Allow authorities to use the cars as weapons to kill dissidents and other threats to government.

Building something this complex and all-encompassing goes 90% of the way to building a dystopia.

As long as we're throwing out fantasies, I'd like us to spend $2B more, and have the Chinatown subway run all the way out to Fisherman's Wharf and the Marina district, and also expand capabilities west out to the avenues.

I'm amazed we got the Chinatown subway and I'm excited to see the city develop around it!

Like I just implicitly assumed that that is way too much money for the value it provides but admittedly I didn't think much about it. Can you quantify how the benefit might be worth that much?

I think Cruise Automation has roughly raised that amount over it's entire lifetime. Even if we had to fund 10 of those companies for a similar amount, that seems like a better investment than the dozen or so subway miles that would fund.

Subway lines can pay for themselves across hundreds of years. It’s the best kind of investment for cities because it operates on their timescales and use ultra cheap bonds responsibly and it doesn’t interfere with free markets.

just pick the low hanging fruit first and let driverless cars operate freely with data sharing. then build your pyramids.

Cities taking advantage of people with ultra low risk tolerance to make infrastructure investments at ultra low rates that only make sense with very long time horizons is dependent on markets.

Ahh, so by ‘we’ you didn’t actually mean a group you are part of but instead other people.

It can actually fit 150.

Some behaviors I’ve seen on public transit in the Bay Area: loud music, dumping beer and food on the floor, clipping toenails, smoking, jumping up and down on seats, drug deal, fighting, hitting the driver, attacking the bus with a machete. All in the past year. Granted I take transit more than most.

And people are generally afraid to speak out against bad behavior because you never know when someone has a knife/gun and is mentally unstable.

So I don’t think it’s just a frequency/headway problem. I wish it was better, but I also understand why many people are decide they’d prefer a private car.

e.g.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/15-month-old-baby-riding-in-vehicl...

https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/02/man-flashes-gun-drives-bac...

Making the news isn't really a good indicator of risk here.

OTOH, stealing a phone, smoking meth, or disgusting excretory things outside of a bathroom would be unthinkable. I would not worry if I left a cell phone on the seat if my pickup in Waxahachie or Hurst with the window down all day. I did leave my wife's cell phone in the seat of my pickup with the windows down when I ate in a restaurant in Waxahachie a day or two ago. She made fun of me for it, and I replied "It's Waxahachie."

BTW, the last car dealership I passed on the way home (before I stopped for dinner and answered this post) is called "Lifted Trucks." Seriously. You can look them up on Google Maps in Hurst, TX. LOL. This is Texas.

Transit looks worse just because the people most likely to do that have 'mental issues' (possibly drug caused, but there are other causes) that also mean they can't keep a job and thus can't afford a car. However even then they are a small minority that you see because you are paying attention not because it is very common.

True.

When public transit advocates dismiss such inhuman conditions as a non-concern, I can only laugh. The average driver in America will never be shot at in any point in their entire life, but by your own admission inhumane filthy conditions are so common on city buses that you saw all of the above behaviors, excepting only the assault, during a short stay in Paris. I prefer the very infinitesimally small chance of getting into some sort of Mad Max scenario in my car to a 100% chance of encountering disgusting filth on a city bus. Most Americans agree with me. Most people who say they disagree actually have no choice and when they say they prefer the bus they're just coping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fox_and_the_Grapes

If America had a civil and clean population like Japan, then the situation could be different. Clean city buses would be inoffensive, but that's not the reality we're dealing with. The deranged antisocial population of America is substantial. Maybe you'll say that we should fix that. You bet your ass we should. But until that happens, don't expect people to put up with city buses when they have any other choice. Just because you're okay with wallowing in filth doesn't mean the rest of us should be.

Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems. Fair play but I don't think any public money should ever go to solving problems in this way.

Then people will continue to drive, no matter how much you whine about it. If you can't make city buses safe and clean, then people won't use them.

> Seems you think you're rich enough to put a wall around yourself and never see these problems.

In fact, owning and using a car is an effective way to avoid the filthy of city buses. You seem to think this is a mistaken belief, but you're simply wrong. You will never persuade Americans to give up their cars and use buses instead unless you acknowledge the problem of filth and fix it. You can't gas light people into thinking the filth is fine or their cars aren't an option. Denying the problem and trying to shame people who acknowledge it will never get you to the state you want society to be in.

Frequent, accessible public transit is the main point. Anything else is more of an excuse, honestly. Nothing puts people off more than the bus being 15 minutes late on a half-hourly schedule. 5, or even 10 minute frequencies are required to get the level of service you need for people to reliably use public transit in a "turn up and go" manner.

You see the same effect in any pace where the general public visits. Walmart at 6pm is a very different place than Walmart at 3AM not because the store is different but because you’re self selecting for people who don’t need to be asleep at 3AM.

The number of empty bus seats I see go by is astounding Those buses take up a lot of road space and block arterial traffic when people are boarding.

When living in London a few years ago (clearly a major city), the wait times between buses were pretty short. They might have been about 6-10 minutes for some of the more central areas (rough guess from memory).

I'd be surprised if they were "every 3 minutes (average wait time 1.5 minutes) though".

Meanwhile, in Melbourne and Sydney though (substantial cities, but not London sized) the buses are more like 1/2 hour apart.

In Brisbane (capital city of the state of Queensland, Australia) the buses are 1 hour apart, and seem to stop about 7pm each night.

I wish they hadn't, because my commuter card works with the shared rides. So even if a shared ride was the same price as a normal Uber/Lyft (or even more) I'd do it just to be able to use the commuter card.

Honestly (and since this is a hacking forum) I have a theory that if you could hook the Lyft/Uber app with Frida or a modified kernel you could push through payment using a commuter card on regular Lyft/Uber rides.

I live in a semi-rural area that used to have a trolley line to the next town where one could catch a train into Boston. It's also a challenge to optimize school bus routes in a sparsely populated area, and AVs could help with that.

Dynamic means you call and 1-15 minutes later a bus comes. Then it takes you to your destination, but you have no idea when you will get there because sometimes it takes long detours for someone else.

Frequent predictable routing means when you feel like leaving you just walk out the door confident that the bus will be there soon (even if you see it pulling away just as you arrive), and you quickly learn which buses to transfer to, to get where you want to be.

I’m a fan of public transit and have experienced many good public transit systems. The unfortunate truth is that in any neighborhood with less-than-extreme population density, you have to shape your life around the system by living and working near core transit lines to get reasonable travel times. That works great for people who can do that (I’ve done it myself!), but a better system could aim higher to serve the entire public. The American built environment simply can’t be adequately served by traditional bus networks.

Add bus lanes and smart traffic lights (giving busses permanent green waves), this stops being the case. Busses should never be stuck in traffic. That's bad for scheduling and makes them needlessly unattractive.

I'm generally pro-transit and continue to vote for it, but in many places and routes a car is often more convenient if one can afford it.

Can we pretty please stop acting like this is a complete enigma that nobody else has managed to figure out?

[0] https://www.whatsoninoxford.net/pickmeup

It's not just a matter of "fix service", it's you need to completely rebuild the city with 5-10x the population density.

Which..is exactly what is going to happen [1]?

[1] https://www.californiacitynews.org/2021/09/california-says-g...

There are even some suburbs full of single family homes, with yards, which still have buses every 8 minutes all day long, and long-distance commuter train service every 20 minutes.

Yes the US needs more density for this to be feasible. But San Francisco isn’t that far off on the density that it would needs

Also, SF is still pretty unique compared to most American cities. So you might be able to do this stuff in SF, but not so much in places like Houston.

I love autonomous cars, but its not scalable at all. Its obvious to me that public transit is the real future as the population grows.

For existing city infra and politics that we have, I think self driving is def the best way to go. Suggesting that an individual should lobby their gov't to fix public transit seems like lower probability of success than voting with their wallet for longer self driving trips.

Public transit isn't one of those things that can be incrementally fixed. Self driving cars on the other hand can incrementally make everything better, that's why its so appealing imo.

[1]: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....

The ideal transport would be a cocoon just big enough for you to fit in that picks you up at your door and gets you to your exact destination with minimal energy overhead. I'd argue a self driving car is much closer to that ideal and we can iterate our way much easier to it than public transit.

This type of design is terrible for average health outcomes [1]. We should not be optimizing for this. Walking to the bus stop is a good outcome. We should optimize for better more frequent bus routes, but "door-to-door" is unnecessary and counter-effectual.

The rest (iteration speed, filling a bus to the brim etc.) are just political problems just as intangible as "lets build better roads (public infrastructure) for autonomous cars", so we can put that aside.

[1]: https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2023/us-neighborhood-wa...

On filling a bus, I think its a fundamental shortcoming of having fixed routes that they'll never be as efficient as point to point transport, especially electrified transport. i'm not really making a political argument.

Right now, nearly 100% of travel is with "personal cocoons", totally unnecessary (other than for political reasons) and creating immense downward pressure on health and social outcomes. In terms of levers the government has on health and social outcomes, transitway design is a big one, and it should use it.

The fact that its done badly in America is a political problem, and if you have any political power it should be expended fixing that, not rolling back public transit.

People love the equity argument for public transit. Non personally owned, ubiquitous, driverless, cheap, efficient and most importantly convenient cocoons would increase equity a whole hell of a lot more than the traditional definition of public transit imo

Maybe if you were to throw infinitely scalable roads in the way of Boring Tunnels, but now we are off in la-la wish land.

Just seems like a lot of work for what is a solved problem (atleast in the Pareto sense).

Fleets of driverless cars lets you do traffic shaping in time and space. Plus the marginal energy cost is basically nothing. It's basically all fixed cost BUT it's not like a transit project in the sense that you don't have to allocate a bunch of capital ahead of time and wait 10 years and then maybe get what you wanted (or not). Driverless cars are helpful the moment the first $200K car hits the road.

As the population grows the driving times will get worse much faster than in transit because again, spatially, it just doesn’t scale well.

If you take 20-30% of everyone on a BART train and put em in autonomous cars with human drivers in the mix (like in the marginal $200K case tomorrow), what you have is abject chaos on the streets.

Every negative you mention about public transit is a political problem (other first world countries can deliver public transit project in a matter of a 1-2 years and at a fraction of the cost).

population growth - you know this isn't a thing right? we have very slow population growth and we can scale our way out of it with existing infra. more driverless cars = less parking = two more lanes on most streets. that can double throughput.

yes public transit is a huge political problem - so whats your solution? because the tech for public transit has existed forever so why isnt it better in the US? You cant just blame politics and then do nothing. You also cant say "we just need to advocate!" because, well, if it were that easy it would have already happened. Driverless cars are a good solution precisely because it uses existing infra and I think the political hurdle can be much much lower.

well then you can definitely put away your dreams of a magical $2.50 pod travel. You need people, more people, young people to build all that. And if we're saying flat and low population growth that dream is over, all conversation can stop.

But if we can turn things around on population, public transit is the only way things scale. Personal travel pods/cars are a current stopgap that only kind of works for our current population levels. Please re-measure car travel times at 5:30pm on a Wednesday evening when 80% of all trips happen, like I've mentioned, the remaining 20% are highly inconsequential to overall transportation design.

you seem to think there are only 2 worlds: 1) population is exploding and everything has to scale 10x or 2) population isn't growing and apocalypse.

There is a 3rd outcome: slow, moderate growth at 2%/year and things need to scale just a little.

It is worth noting that personal vehicles are getting larger, so the amount of ridership required for a bus system to be more efficient than cars is only going down for the foreseeable future, even before getting into second order effects.

Except for energy consumption. If we were in a world were fossil fuels were unlimited and climate change was not a thing, maybe I would agree with you.

But we are not. We need to get much more efficient with energy, and cars just can't do enough. Better accept it earlier than later and start building public transports wherever it's possible.

Who cares if the energy requirement of public transit vs an EV has a huge delta (spoiler: there isn't a huge delta in terms of energy per passenger mile). They are both super low and efficient.

To you, now. But the biggest problem of humankind right now is energy. Consequences of our use of energy are climate change and biodiversity loss. But even ignoring those consequences, we are going into a world where we will have dramatically less energy. Not in 100 years, in the next few decades. So you will live in that world.

> the energy is negligble

What does that even mean?

Bikeable/walkable cities are not an argument against quiet, cheap, ubiquitous, efficient driverless EVs.

https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/7999510360_8e46299621_z....

The only scenario where AV may scale better than cars is if we're talking about autonomous buses, and that will only perform better if they are given the other features of public transit, such as dedicated lanes, which require set routes, and we're pretty much just talking about public transit in general at this point.

Lots of people have been trying to get decent public transit in US cities for decades. There is so much resistance it often seems impossible.

So, yes, obviously public transit would be great. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, it's just not an option for most people. "Talk to your local politicians about fixing service" sounds delusional to be honest.

Did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

I'll take the bus when the bus route is convenient, which is usually, and I'll take Uber/Cruise/Lyft when I'm in a hurry and it's not. I prefer public transportation but I'm more practical about it. Which includes electric scooters (Spin/Lime), or vespa scooters (Revel).

If you tip in Uber/Lyft, Waymo is always more price competitive.

I find that late night you often will not be able to get an Uber. I think drivers have been ceding ground to Waymo's obvious night driving superiority.

There are a large number of homeless people openly doing drugs, and there is some poop, but I find these descriptions to be generally inaccurate.

Don’t get me wrong, the situation is bad, but based on descriptions like this I was expecting far far worse.

- Every billboard on the way to the hotel from the airport was for AI (which not the case a few months ago)

- Uber driver interrogated me all the way to the hotel on the value prop of my current project at work

- Went to grab a burger and had to dodge 2 people screaming at me, walked passed a man crying because I believe a friend had just gotten hit by a car.

- almost stepped in human fecies

- On my last night, took a cruise back to my hotel (thanks to a friend). Honestly it was quite fun.

Nothing in my comment was exaggerated, just edited a bit to make it more coherent. The reality was actually more dystopian.

And I do mean that last line seriously, I had a blast!:

> SF today is so aggressively dystopian that it's sort of hard not to enjoy the experience.

From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably.

I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday.

I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic.

2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways.

This was a good day, FWIW.

Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either.

I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car.

I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.

Yeah we agree?

The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.

Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.

Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...

Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.

Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.

Big is different, and scaling this kind of thing to majority of vehicles on the road can cause all sorts of interesting problems.

I’m not saying it’s inevitable; sure, we can and most likely will improve things on the long road to majority AV. This simply occurred to me and I hadn’t seen it articulated before so thought I’d share.

That said, I don't know if the average human drives acceptably, and I'm very skeptical of a "99%" estimate, but I will say that I would prefer a fleet that consistently drove at the 40%ile of human quality vs. the current human fleet that follows the normal distribution.

If self-driving cars reach 40%ile quality, and enable us to stop the 20% worst drivers from driving (or average drivers when operating at 20%ile due to being drunk or tired), that'd be a huge win for safety.

Right now it's socially unacceptable to increase the difficulty of getting your license, or to take it away for poor performance, because cars are a necessity or near-necessity in most places. If we could provide self-driving vehicles as a fallback, perhaps we could make it easier to permanently lose your license than—checks local laws—repeatedly killing people by driving while intoxicated[0].

[0] https://www.idrivesafely.com/dmv/indiana/laws/dui-and-dwi-la...

But I also recognize that many people, having the suspended license, must now choose between never leaving home or driving with a suspended license.

I feel like better public transit, more than Self-driving cars (which will be expensive to actually own) is the answer here.

We need to lower the cost to an individual of losing driving privilege, so that we can lower the cost to society from bad drivers.

Autonomous vehicles don't get drunk or sleepy, don't speed, don't leave the scene of an accident...

The bar for AI should be way higher than just "outperform mediocre humans".

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...

Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.

That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down.

Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again.

Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?

Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light.

It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.

Is it? Seems like heavy enforcement could pay for itself in terms of fines.

But the better question is why would you need to have overpaid humans drive around in cars to catch speeding violations? In most of Europe you almost never get stopped by cops for traffic violations. Most speeding violations are caught by stationary radar traps, a machine can run the plates and send you the ticket by mail, including a pretty picture of the driver of the car if you want to dispute who drove it. Sometimes there are similar traps activated by passing a red light. It'll even tell you how the long the light had been red when you passed it.

In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases.

For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.

Also bikes absolutely should have lights and are required by law to have them in my country (and to have them on at night, dusk or in reduced visibility conditions). E-bikes and e-scooters also have lights which are typically always-on regardless of lighting conditions.

Pedestrians don't normally have lights (although I've seen joggers wear hi-vis vests or head lamps, especially during early morning or late night runs) but pedestrians also don't move as rapidly and suddenly as vehicles. Plus in urban environments drivers are expected to look out for pedestrians, especially in narrower roads. "Child peeking out between parked cars" is a scenario covered several times during driver ed and the practical exam includes one emergency break without prior warning (tho in practice learners can make an educated guess about when it might be coming up, e.g. being led to a low-traffic street and instructed to "pick up speed a little").

Not to mention, I said "at least" DRLs because DRLs are a watered down version of what the European studies show as safer, which is headlights on all the time. In the US, the brightness of DRLs is limited, so the studies are shit to begin with because they're not even using the right variables to find the safest solution.

I find it remarkable that we haven't done so with cars as well. It seems like a win-win-win? Automakers (and service centers) get more money replacing more headlights, the public gets safer roads, and politicians get an easy win.

baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles.

Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?

Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win.

When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis.

We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers.

However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice.

For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.

Indeed and the most individual form of transport is walking and most cities in the world are built around walking. Only the US lays its cities out to require cars. It never really laid its cities for horses and carts (with the exception of Salt Lake City.) Before the car, cities were being built around the streetcar, and before that around walking. It's not like people lived in suburbs and went around in horse and buggy lol.

I don't know where this comes from, other than the usual "US bad". Go to Johannesburg and live in a regular estate without a car.

I'm not familiar with South Africa, but Australia also copied a lot of US auto-centric code regulations, so have no doubt that they did as well. But they very much aren't the norm. Most of Asia (outside of Middle Eastern cities and even here it's a mixed bag with Oman being different than the rest) and Europe are built around pedestrians.

If you think I'm just angry at the US due to some internet lefty baggage, then I don't know what to say. Japan shows that cars and pedestrians can coexist fine when you don't cater to just the car.

Also relevant is when Anthony Levandowski at Google / Waymo caused a freeway incident through unsafe testing: https://www.businessinsider.com/anthony-levandowski-google-s...

While at the time the DMV did not require reporting, later when Levandowski was on trial Google / Waymo hid the video of the incident when it’s existence was finally reported on.

Imagine driving by a playground and, instead of a dog, you see a ball roll across the street in front of your car, but you can already intuit that it is rolling fast enough that it won't be an obstacle in your lane. A human driver can intuit from the context (playground + ball) there is a chance a child may come running after that ball, from between those same cars.

While self-driving tech may be faster at 'seeing and classifying'* objects, is it able to predict from a larger context? I haven't seen much to indicate it can. I think that's where a lot of the edge cases are going to come from. Driving is more than just 'see object and make a decision'.

*Because most of the tech is relatively opaque to the public, this performance seems to be generally taken on faith. But what the Uber accident in AZ showed is that (with that system, at that time, at least) the self-driving tech really wasn't very good at classification in real-time.

Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars.

We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed.

Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.

This claim gets made a lot but, while I'm not sure how you would test this, I'm not really convinced that an expensive driving school and more rigorous driving test moves the needle much relative to just a lot of hours on the road and perhaps becoming more mature with age. My recollection is that my driving almost certainly approved with a year or two of driving after I got my license; you're not going to replicate that amount of driving with training/testing.

Commercial (not private) pilots would be a good example. They regularly take refresher courses to get updated on the latest laws. They have regular simulator training so they can practice situations harder than anything they will ever encounter. They have to provide proof they are in good health. (I'm not what is legally required, or what something all airlines require but isn't legally needed).

I've seen driving simulators - not video games, but actual driving simulators. They are very good, we can require everyone spend a couple hours per year in one to show they know how to drive. We can setup situations where the other car does something stupid. We can setup situations where you will crash and have to choose the least bad crash. We can setup bikes and pedestrians to ensure that you drive safe around them. We can setup bad weather, ice on the roads. We can setup mechanical car failures. These are things that rarely happen and so you need refreshers to ensure you do the right thing should they happen to you.

A rounding error?

The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad.

Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566

It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.

Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]).

> nobody is talking

No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news.

In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1].

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.

Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.

> That seems like a comically bad baseline.

Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k.

The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline.

If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die.

Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.

I spent a year in the bay area, working in the city for about half of it. It completely destroyed any joy I got from driving. I've been back in Ohio for 10+ years now, and I still hate driving.

It was that bad then, and I hear it's only gotten worse.

When I do have to get from SF to Santa Clara for a 9 AM meeting... the joy indeed slides away.

* Waymo made a right turn up a steep hill. Two lanes each way. It then pulled a bit into the left lane abruptly and I didn't get why until a split second later a skateboarder was crouched down and went by on my right against traffic. There was zero chance a human would pull that off. Not enough time for a head check or mirror check. There wouldn't have been an accident but the Waymo clearly has insane reaction time and vision advantages - and uses them.

This was the turn - https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7337193,-122.4350752,3a,75y,...

They definitely pushed the "aggressive" lever up a little over the last month.

I think it's one of those cases where it's sort of obvious it can calculate trajectories and speeds much better than a human, so it's a safe manoeuvre in theory, but it "feels" bad as a passenger.

Same thing for where it can see that it can squeeze through a tight "lane" but a normal human driver would probably wait until the oncoming traffic had passed.

Human drivers are often conservative because they don't know the speed/acceleration of a potentially colliding vehicle.

We look at something and estimate (How fast? Speeding up or slowing down?), but we don't know.

If you could put an actual number on it, I think you could drive a lot more "aggressively" and still be perfectly safe.

These cars estimate rather than ‘know’.

(Vehicle) Lidar/image multi-point calculation against a precision chronometer

(Human) Parallax and object size change estimation against an extremely irregular, low-precision chronometer

A brand new top of the line passenger jet would say e.g. "Caution: Acceleration" because it can work out the velocity of the plane, from there the acceleration and the remaining runway length (it uses GPS to identify the runway it's on) and take off speed and conclude we won't make it. Humans only decide that after it's far too late. Because it's much earlier the annunciation allows pilots to abort takeoff and investigate from the safety of the ground - in the Irish case they'd typed the wrong air temperature in and thus the engine performance was much worse than expected, with the right air temp it would have flown just fine

While humans do and will behave differently around these vehicles.

If your sensors can distinguish a Vespa from a sports bike reliably, compared to all the other things that an autonomous vehicle has to cope with programming it to treat those two as different categories of vehicle shouldn’t be particularly hard.

E.g. bicycle vs motorcycle vs Miata vs BMW 8-series vs Suburban vs tractor-trailer

Because that bounds agility, acceleration, and stopping distance, at least to the precision that it would differ in the next 10 seconds.

10 seconds? 10 seconds is an eternity.

Some vehicles of similar size might be more than 1/8th of a mile apart in straight line performance in 10 seconds-- let alone the difference once we've got multidimensional vectors.

(But, they can be quite different on the timescale of a second).

If you can't tell apart a bicycle from a 4-cylinder racing bike, let alone a vespa, that's what happnes. And Tesla can't. It also can't read hand signals given by cyclists. It can't tell apart a donkey and a horse.

If your goal was to interject an anti-Tesla offtopic comment to the general discussion of vehicle dynamics, it was unwelcome.

As you say, this is something they are constantly tweaking to find the perfect middle ground. That being said, maybe people are extra hyper aware of the turns when it's a self driving car, and wouldn't bat an eye or pay attention if it was a normal taxi driver?

“Your Honor, the pedestrian would have never been struck if the driver had set the system in its most conservative mode as we suggest on page 1,047 of Terms and Conditions.” /s

So, if you make it have the same aggressiveness on "average" by having it take advantage of its superior capabilities, those situations are going to feel sketchy to a person.

A self driving car might calculate it can squeeze through a gap in oncoming traffic but doing so probably will cause human drivers of those cars to slam the breaks and create a large crash.

So unless they’re driving on a road where only self driving is allowed they’ll probably need to be much more conservative than they can be.

Also thinking about it, the first roads to become robot-only driven will probably be inner city streets where pedestrians abound, so no aggressive driving there either.

You say this but as a motorcyclist I've learned to have my eyes everywhere. I suspect many others would say the same. You acclimate to the vehicle you most often control: if that's some woolly handling sluggish SUV then I suspect, no, you probably wouldn't have done well in this situation, but if you were more used to driving a vehicle that requires more attention I suspect you'd do better.

As a human driver, I'm keenly aware of the "close calls" I've had where I've narrowly avoided a probable collision through good decisions and/or reaction times. I'm probably less aware of the times when I've just gotten lucky.

No doubt self-driving companies have internally available data on this stuff. Can't wait til superior performance to human drivers is a major selling point!

Just a note that this number is hard to calculate accurately with an acceptable degree of certainty.

Anyone claiming that AVs are involved in fewer accidents per distance traveled than human drivers is either extrapolating from incomplete data or baking some unreliable assumptions into their statement.

Welch Labs has a good introductory video to this topic: https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?si=XEB4aWlYf6gnnTqM

Applying some basic statistics to show to a 95% confidence level that a self driving system causes fewer fatalities than a human you would have to drive 275 million autonomous miles flawlessly.

This would require a fleet of 100 vehicles to drive continuously for 12.56 years.

And in practice self-driving vehicles don't drive perfectly. Best estimates on the actual number of miles driven to validate their safety is around 5 billion autonomously driven miles and that's assuming that they actually are safer than a human driver.

Then you get into the comparison itself. In practice AVs don't drive on all the same roads, at the same times, as human drivers. A disproportionate number of accidents happen at night, in adverse weather, and on roads that AVs don't typically drive on.

Then you have to ask if comparing AVs to all drivers and vehicles is valid comparison. We know for instance that vehicles with automated breaking and lane assist are involved in fewer accidents.

Then of course if minimizing accidents is really what you care about there's something easy we could do right now: just mandate all vehicles must have an breathalyzer ignition. We do this for some people who have been convicted of DUI but doing it for everyone would eliminate a third of fatalities.

In a similar vein, if we put geo-informed speed governors in cars that physically prevented you from exceeding, say, 20% of the speed limit, fatalities would also likely plummet.

But people haaaaate that idea.

If it was 100% accurate and you couldn’t get a speeding ticket if it was active I’d be all for it

I initially read this as "20% of the speed of light", and though you were being sarcastic.

Because what you actually said is true too, and hints at why "it would be safer" is not a good enough reason to implement something.

I'd greatly prefer just automatic enforcement of speeding laws rather than doing things to try and prevent people from speeding.

The toll roads could trivially automatically enforce speed limits. They already precisely know when each car goes through each gantry, they know the distance between each gantry, so they know everyone's average speed.

[1] https://digitalassets.tesla.com/tesla-contents/image/upload/...

[2] https://youtu.be/yaYER2M8dcs?t=477

Which for Tesla's FSD is obviously not the case.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/tesla-fsd-autopilot-crashes-...

Has FSD had a fatality? Autopilot (the lane-follower) has had a few, but I don't think I've heard about one on FSD, and if their presentations on occupancy networks are to be believed there is a pretty big distinction between the two.

With human drivers -- are we blaming Tesla for those too?

You do you, but I'm here to learn about FSD. It looks like there was a public incident where FSD lunged at a cyclist. See, that's what I'm interested in, and that's why I asked if anyone knew about disengagement stats.

> https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/ffdd/sgo-2021-01/SGO-2021-01_Da...

The Reporting Entity’s report of the highest- level driving automation system engaged at any time during the period 30 seconds immediately prior to the commencement of the crash through the conclusion of the crash. Possible values: ADAS, ADS, “Unknown, see Narrative.”

Stuff people made up is a bad reason to blame a company.

> The new data set stems from a federal order last summer requiring automakers to report crashes involving driver assistance to assess whether the technology presented safety risks. Tesla‘s vehicles have been found to shut off the advanced driver-assistance system, Autopilot, around one second before impact, according to the regulators.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/06/15/tesla-a...

Especially because the first sentence you quoted strongly suggests they do get counted.

Nah, that would be illegal. Their statement leaves plenty of room for dirty laundry though. I'm sure they won't disclose disengagement data unless forced, but they have plenty of legal battles that might force them to disclose. That's why I'm asking around. I'd love to rummage through. Or, better, to read an article from someone else who spent the time.

Musk has violated many rules regarding investors.

Yes, I'm addressing that point directly, specifically the fact that this "unthinkable number" is misleading regardless of the number's magnitude.

If I had claimed that the 500 million number indicated a certain level of deaths-per-mile safety, that would be invalid -- but I spent 3/4 of my post emphasizing that it did not, even though you keep pretending otherwise.

California companies with real self driving have to count their disconnects and report all accidents, however minor, to DMV. You can read the disconnect reports online.

As an aside, public acceptance of driverless cars is another story. A story filled with warped perspectives due to media outlets stoking the audience emotions which keep outlets in business — outrage, fear, and drama. For every story covering an extreme accident involving human drivers, there might be 100 stories covering a moderate driverless accident. No matter how superhuman autonomous cars perform, they’ll have a massive uphill battle for a positive image.

Further, most AVs explicitly disengage when they encounter situations beyond their understanding. So again, we’re selecting AV statistics based on generally favorable conditions, but we don’t track human-operated miles the same way.

It’s not really a fair comparison.

What do you mean by disengage? Cruise’s AVs don’t have a driver to take over.

But also, there are explicitly times and areas where Cruises don’t operate due to being insufficiently able to operate. And times where they do just pull over and wait for human intervention when they don’t know what else to do. Both of which are safe and reasonable, but which also selects themselves into a safer set of miles actually traveled.

the bigger problem here is that the machine may not realize it isn't fully understanding the situation; I think that's the more common situation : a computer situational model doesn't match reality, but the machine has the confidence in perception to proceed, producing dangerous effects.

The question is how many accidents (if any) self driving prevents with respect to average human drivers.

They will not function in high grass, I guess from my experience with different parktronics.

The best "off road" demonstration of self-driving and/or AI assistance I've found is this: https://media.jaguarlandrover.com/news/2016/07/jaguar-land-r...

Note they avoid going into grass. Human can deduce trails from grass profile, AI? I don't think so.

Will you count an inability to reach a lakeside as an accident? I guess, no.

AIs need training before they can do things.*

*They just might be learning to do things without being trained based on the emergency behavior I see in LLMs.

As for "emergency behavior" (emergent behavior, I guess) - we do not know how LLMs are trained. Thus, what you consider "emergency behavior," could very well be a part of training.

[1] It tends to be more conservative than human drivers, and in weird ways. If a pedestrian seems at all to be moving in the direction of traffic, even if they're on a sidewalk and just meandering a bit, the car will try to evade (not violently, but it will brake a bit and pull to the outside of the lane).

I haven’t had a phantom breaking issue in a long time either, I’m not sure if this is because of the FSD package or if the underlying autopilot system has improved.

Some over-cautious stuff like mentioned above but also some lane changes and adjustments that were better than what I would do.

I still prefer to drive myself so I’ll probably turn it back off at the end of the month, but I’ve got high hopes for when I’m older.

At this point I trust its microdriving (lanekeeping, distance management, speed control, collision/obstacle avoidance, etc...) more than my own for sure. The higher level stuff is still a mixed bag (will it get stuck at that merge, can it make this lane change in time, does it understand that this other car is going to yield or will it stop, etc...).

FWIW: Stationary junk in the freeway causes accidents with human drivers every day, all the time. People are absolutely terrible at dodging crap in the road. But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd *never* drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.

Basically: no, you'll never get the evidence you want to "prove" the logical construct you've created. So Teslas, to you, will never be "safe". But in the real world they obviously are.

You're making guesses about my standards that aren't warranted at all. They absolutely can be met.

First off I'm specifically worried about large objects, a meter or larger.

And let's see, autopilot has done 3 billion miles? Okay, if FSD can manage 1 billion miles of freeway driving with zero or one crashes into large objects, then I'll be convinced they're solving the problem.

That should be fair, right?

> But in the real world they obviously are.

Obvious according to what?

Autopilot wasn't, because it managed to hit entire vehicles repeatedly. There is (or was) a specific warning in the manual that it might hit stationary vehicles when going over 50mph.

What makes it obvious that FSD avoids this specific problem?

> But you and everyone else will swear up and down that you'd never drive over a shed tire or whatever, even though evidence says you totally would.

You made this up about me from nowhere. Please never do that to anyone.

I've personally watched my car go around trash cans and bikes in the road, and (obviously) stop for halted vehicles. So, you'll abandon this argument and concede the point? I suspect you won't, because my anecdote isn't enough for you, and those obstacles aren't sufficient proof, etc...

I think I'm more right than you want to admit. There's nothing I can say here to change your mind, and so coming here and demanding "evidence" isn't really an argument in good faith.

Are you trolling with this?

I'm asking if it can reliably do that. Of course I need more data than one person can collect. I am not being unreasonable to ask for more data than your personal experience. Most people with autopilot never saw this problem either.

And specifically I need to know about freeway speeds, because speed is an important factor.

There is plenty you could do to change my mind. If you link to something published by tesla showing autopilot and FSD accident rates by type then that would be just fine.

> So basically you're sitting here and glibly demanding that this product be 200x safer than its competitors before you'll consider it acceptable

I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.

Do you think that particular kind of accident is responsible for a majority of fatalities, or something?

> I'm not asking for a lack of fatalities. I'm asking for a lack of hitting stationary vehicle-scale objects on the freeway.

Exactly! You've constructed an impossible gateway to understanding; I either find a statistic to fit exactly your imagined failure mode or... I'm wrong, and you don't need to change your opinion.

I'm, sorry, I truly am, that I don't have a statistic to hand you showing the frequency with which Tesla vehicles with FSD beta hit 1m+ stationary obstacles on high speed roadways. I don't. And I won't, and likely never will.

So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.

> Also the freeway fatality rate is about 5.4 per billion miles, not 20.

Not the headline I saw immediately, but sure. That sounds plausible too. The fact that you want to claw back an error factor of 200 by 3.5x is also good evidence that you aren't taking the discussion seriously.

I don't. Again, I wasn't talking about total accident rate at all. I was talking about a much smaller number. The "200" is nonsense and that was just another reason it's wrong.

> So, again getting to the point upthread: you're safe. You can't lose this argument framed like that, and I concede that point. I'm just saying that that's not a very serious position to take if you're actually interested in genuine safety using metrics that other people care about.

Ugh. Look, I can wait for general safety statistics, but it will take longer. Those will exist, and they can convince me if they're within 2x of humans.

Maybe it's unfair for me to want specific statistics here, but it shouldn't be so hard to get them.

But it's just as unfair for you to act like a single person's anecdotes are enough. You can't just say it's "obviously" safe and treat that like a real argument. Of course the discussion is going to go the same way every time if that's the level of evidence you expect people to accept.

And I thought you were claiming that no evidence could convince me because I'm unreasonable. If your real claim is "nobody has bothered to collect much evidence, therefore there is no way to convince you without doing that job" then yes I agree and I don't think that's my problem.

Waymo vehicles impress me, I've seen them perform skillfully like you describe.

I hate that they use giant SUVs, really inappropriate car for small city streets even if people love SUVs.

https://waymo.com/contact/ is the place to go.

Jaguar iPace: 4800lbs, 79inch wide, 183 inches long

Pacifica: 4500lbs, 79inch wide, 204 inches long

Toyota Highlander: 4400lbs, 76inches wide, 194 inches long

Chevy Bolt: 3500lbs, 69inches wide, 163 inches long

The iPace might be great for LA but for SF it's totally inappropriate.

If it was a human that person would have been dead, no question.

Sometimes I'm riding in a Waymo (which I do every single day, 4x) and it does something, and I double take. Then a second later I see whatever it was it reacted to, and I'm like "dang, why did I doubt you, robotic overload?"

The best part is that it works the same way in the day time vs the night time.

Magic.

My biggest fear has always been that Cruise or Tesla would shit the bed so bad we don't get any self-driving, either because of regulatory constraints or ruining the public perception of them.

Any info on this? I would love to learn more about what they're doing.

One of the messages in this thread is literally stating they have special knowledge of the behinds the scene workings of Waymo.

I work in the AV space and I honestly don't think there's much of a competitive mentality between the companies in the space, but at the same time there is a tendency of people to psudeo-astroturf these brands: where they know someone working at the company and take great personal pride because "I know so and so who works on self-driving cars!"

If they explicitly disclose their internal knowledge or affiliation, it's not astroturfing. If they used to work for the company but are now unaffiliated, it's not astroturfing. If the company isn't knowledgeable or supporting of the effort, it's not astroturfing. etc.

They have partial relationships that they don't feel the need to disclose.

Well, that's your assumption. I would preface that with "probably", since we don't know this for a fact.

> Most of them did not mention any relationship: hence the "psuedo-astroturfing"

Side note: I think you mean "quasi-", not "pseudo-". [1]

But, more to your intended point: the point I'm getting at is that that you're really stretching the definition of astroturfing here, even with the weasel wording added on it.

Astroturfing is a central campaign coordinated by a vendor in a manner as to appear decentralized. It's really an accusation against the central entity rather than as the pawns they're using in the process. So quasi-astroturfing might be a situation where (say) the vendor doesn't actually organize the campaign, but pays an advertiser who internally organizes the campaign without the knowledge of the vendor. The vendor might overlook signs that this is happening, without directly supporting it. Or they might not realize it at all. That's something that would be close to astroturfing, but not exactly it.

However, people advocating for a product due to their genuine personal opinions in a way that's clearly uncoordinated and unsupported by the vendor is not remotely "astroturfing" in any sense. It's a biased expression of opinions, with a potential conflict of interest (if they're still affiliated with that vendor).

All of which I think matters not only because words matter, but also particularly because this site's rules treat astroturfing differently from "someone is biased on the internet", and the admins very much don't want accusations of astroturfing without evidence.

[1] Pseudo- means fake, like how pseudoscience is fake science. Pseudo-astroturfing would be fake astroturfing, or the faking of fake grassroots support. Meaning you'd be accusing people of being real grassroots supporters who are pretending to be fake ones, which would make for a funny accusation.

But it doesn't have the malice/intent of astroturfing.

What's important is the existence or appearance of a conflict of interest, particularly if you're not disclosing your connection. Having a friend who works for Google who might be upset at criticism counts. Being a former employee with stock counts. Having any kind of monetary or professional interest in FSD companies succeeding counts.

If someone is presenting their statements as that of a person who is not involved, and they actually are, their behavior is duplicitous, and justifiably characterized as astroturfing.

The point of astroturfing (in comparison to the term it derives from, grassroots) is that it's not people coming together to support a policy, it's people with a vested interest in an entity taking cues from that entity to act in their interests in such a way that it appears as the former. The definition never shifted, the tactics just became less obvious. I would be less suspicious if more comments were complaining or giving measured thoughts, but they weren't.

I would agree that Waymo employees or shareholders shouldn't be commenting here without disclosing their affiliation. But that's a relatively small class: Googlers (and, increasingly tenuous, Xooglers) don't get paid by Waymo and don't get exposure to it through their GSUs. You can make the claim that Waymo's success adds to Google's brand prestige and has knock-on effects, and maybe that's true to some limited extent. But comparing that to being directly paid by the company to spread propaganda is quite the reach.

I didn't. I pointed out the less obvious ways a financial incentive might exist.

Excuse me for being skeptical of someone who uses a cutesy nickname for former Google employees.

You did no such thing, which is exactly the issue.

I may have hinted as such (being an ex-Googler), and I know this thread has gotten kinda buried but I wanted to address the implication anyway.

When I left Google I sold all of my stock. My investment portfolio is independently managed and I do not advise any specific positions except for the exclusion of my current and former employers. I do not stand to gain financially from any company in the AV space.

A sufficiently good product may produce customer reviews that are indistinguishable from astroturfing.

(I kind of agree with him, but you have to understand that there is NO implementation of self driving cars that he would be happy with).

Why do you believe that Tesla vehicles are driving millions of miles a month on autopilot?

I suspect that autopilot accounts for a vanishingly small percentage of Tesla miles-driven. Mostly because it sucks, but also because of how hard it is to not miss a nag on a long road trip, with the result that you are locked out of autopilot until your next stop.

(Yes, even when paying attention to the road, with your hands on the wheel. Hell, autopilot locks you out if you exceed 85 mph for more than a few seconds by pressing the accelerator, such as when passing. This is true even in places where the speed limit is 85 mph, and the slower end of the flow of traffic is 95 mph.)

I love the performance of my Model S Plaid. Autopilot, however, is a joke.

Where do you drive where the speed limit is 85 mph?

Care to expand?

Once traffic rules are enforced by autonomous cars that don't let you go over the speed limit, we can start raising the limit to more realistic levels. I guess currently it is priced in that everyone goes over by x km/h.

Bloody noghtmare fuel that, but it's been the inexhorable direction manufacturers and Governments have been pushing for for a while.

Stop making things that enable people more than it constrains them. The act of velvet glove societal manipulation is pretty damn obnoxious once you realize it's a thing.

Edit: Looks like back in January they were adding 10M cumulative miles driven per month (roughly) - https://insideevs.com/news/633328/tesla-fsd-beta-now-active-...

Surprising, but it is what it is.

Millions of miles per month doesn't surprise me at all.

This has been my gripe for a long time. I feel like many in tech have conflated two problems. With current software the problem of perception (ie "understanding its surroundings") is largely solved*, but this shouldn't be conflated with the much more difficult problem of self-driving.

*for sure, there have been issues with perception. A glaring example is the Uber fatality in AZ.

Also, we can drive just fine with two cameras and a neural net, no LIDAR.

In engineering, you don't add something unless it's necessary, not because "well we may as well have it."

And no, a neural net and two cameras are not "just fine". The day cameras will be as good as your eyes and your neural net will be on the level of human intelligence (AGI) then maybe it would be possible. But until then you will need to rely on extra hardware to get there.

Go check on youtube how FSD behaves in city with 1/10th the complexity of SF/Waymo. And remember the difficulty is with the long tail of unexpected events.

Even your basic non-fancy non-AI car these days have a variety of sonar/radar assists to help out their cameras. Tesla is just being cheap (and getting people killed because of it).

A driver (bot or not) needs very good reactions to bad situations observed in the field. And ideally a good sense for when a situation is one step from trouble. As a driver, if I can’t see through a bus then I’m going to assume a crazy pedestrian is waiting to jump in front of me.

(A lot of drivers are quite bad frankly and don’t do most of the stuff you’d want someone to do if they’re directing a one-ton blunt weapon around town at 35mph.)

I'd say 90% of driving is good/safe driving is mental, with at least half of that bening based on the decision making capability. Yet our tests are mostly focused on physical ability with a small amount of memorizing a subset of the rules.

The multiple choice and practical exams are not done by the school, but by an accredited / governmental institution. Each have a ~30% failure rate.

Counting 1 lesson unit as 45 minutes it’s definitely not quite as rigorous as a PPL, but certainly in the same spirit, I’d argue.

Being completely honest, I did not feel totally comfortable behind the wheel until maybe a week or of actually driving myself, post-license. (Not that I didn't have a lot more to learn, obviously)

During that week, I could have easily gotten into an accident and did have one or two closer calls.

I would not all be opposed to maybe an additional ~10 hours of more rigorous behind-the-wheel driving, or a very good-quality sim for that same amount of time.

But realistically, I'd imagine making this a hard requirement would hit some massive walls. Good simulators are expensive, everyone wants to drive, and states have very limited budgets for this sort of thing.

Such as?

Exactly this. When I saw Tesla releasing their half-backed crap I feared they will damage the public perception so badly that we wouldn't have self-driving cars for years.

The competition:

Uber kills someone and turns out they disabled "breaking due to objects in the way" because it makes it jerkier.

Tesla is often killing the drivers because they marketed it as "auto-pilot"

Cruise rolled over someone for 20 seconds.

I would have to agree. I honestly hate regulatory capture in most industries, but perhaps Waymo's "unit tests" should be turned over to the DMV and made as the gold standard driving test for AI drivers.

The variable that differs is time to pickup. I've found Waymo is generally pretty good for me in off-peak times - perhaps on average 2-3 minutes further away on average. But I have got the odd "20 minutes away" and I then just order an Uber.

But I will always pick a Waymo over an Uber if they are the same distance away. I love playing my own music and just being in my own world without another human to consider. It is truly a relaxing commute.

Not to ruin your commute, do you know if there are interior-facing cameras monitoring the passengers?

It's possible, but I don't think it's something you can assume. Having to pay for a chauffeur isn't cheap, and that's what you're doing with Uber. A robotaxi avoids that cost since it drives itself.

Currently they have ~250 cars in SF, and 2,500 employees of which about 600 are engineers.

To break even I'd say they probably need at least 12,000 cars, assuming they don't hire any more engineers and the other 1,900 employees are costless. This also assumes that the cost of the Waymo is exactly the same as a regular car, which at least today, isn't even close. And that the server infrastructure is free, and that insurance is comparable. It's probably also too early to know what the maintenance cost of these systems is compared to a vanilla vehicle.

In fact, this is the way economics work for many forms of automation: you're replacing a large amount of labor time with a much smaller amount of engineering time. The engineering time is more expensive of course, but the much smaller amount more than makes up for the increased cost.

https://fourweekmba.com/uber-losses-by-year/

And it will be offered, when Waymo's onboard AI detects you're on a date, verbally, so the date can hear.

So even if you give to charites in a meaningful way, you'll end up doing it again or look crass and be embarrassed. And as with many of these "at the till" charity collections, there is a fee given to the collector.

Who will be Google! Plus, not only do they get to track your co-riders, eg who you associate with, and where you go, and even all conversation in the car (anonymized, of course), now they get to track your charitable predilections, by offering choice.

(I know it's sarcasm and you're spot on about the charities lmao)

You own the phone. And they mostly get in trouble for lying about the things they record on phone, not for doing it.

But they own the car. And is it illegal for a cabbie to listen, and then tell their boss a stock tip, or that the Jones are buying a new house?

To add distance, they could real time listen in car, process locally, and only upload highlights as tags/text, so no recording. They could also process live, and then offer services in ride, eg "notice your hair is shaggy, Google Maps says this is a good barber!", and of course if you want that referral, as a barber, Google Maps you pay.

Google can't help itself. It is like a kleptomaniac, it knows it shouldn't, but for those voices in its head(managers), do it.. do it! You know you want to, you need to, you should!

Oh it's so shiny oh god...

And it relents, turning all pure dreams into ashes.

Waymo will be the ultimate platform to know even more about you, and to monetize it further.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38012649

If the Sounder would run like the ferries do (say every hour until like 8PM and then a couple more trips before midnight) it would really take the hassle of going to the city for much more people than robo-taxis ever could.

You shouldn't be asking for a couple of trains between 8pm and midnight. They should be every half hour, or more! Midnight until 6am on Saturday and Sunday could be every hour or two.

(I live in Copenhagen, half the population of Seattle. Commuter trains run every 20 minutes from 5-24h, every 10 6-18, all night on Friday and Saturday nights. Other trains also run, and the metro is 24/7.)

There is so much thing to undo and people are so overly sensitive of the value of their property it is nearly impossible or would take centuries to fix.

Honestly I think busses are far superior due to not having so many dependencies.

I've ridden the train in Copenhagen. The stops are near things! Stores and parks! Apartments and hotels! Shopping malls! Like, actually right there! There's a few stops like that in Seattle, but they're also the ones with junkies nodding off, con men "looking for some gas money", and other anti-social behavior.

But you are absolutely right, Tacoma and Everett are 3rd and 4th largest cities in the state and are in the same metro area as Seattle. The north line is actually worse, only 2 trains a day (plus 2 Amtrak Cascade trains) even though there is major Ferry terminal connection at Edmonds (and a smaller but significant at Mukilteo). The Sounder service is dismal and needs to be improved (thankfully we are getting more service on the Amtrak Cascades which runs the same corridor but goes all the way to Portland and Vancouver BC. but not nearly enough)

That said, the bulk of the population in the Seattle metro area is serviced with the Link light rail. They are almost done with an extension east to Bellevue (turns out building rail on a floating bridge is hard) and eventually it will reach both Tacoma and Everett. Then they will get the frequency they deserve.

As for me, how do I get home. My ferries actually run all night (although with up to 3 hour gaps in the middle of the night) and frequently enough. If there isn’t a bus on the island, I usually just call my partner and she picks me up at the terminal, sometimes I also meet someone I know in the ferry.

The funny bit is that I actually immigrated here from Europe, and my tiny European island in the North Atlantic actually has way worse public transit system as Seattle. So for me this is a huge improvement. I’m actually going home to visit and am planning to see a friend of my play at a concert it a town 40 min from the capital, but there are no buses, so I actually have to call my mom to pick me up when the concerts are done.

But the population of the whole country is 1/100 of Seattle. Buses in some place during the day, and taxis at other times, is proportionate to what's available in Copenhagen.

I grew up in a small village in England. Choices for a night out were staying over at a friend's house (much preferable) or splitting the £15 taxi between several teenagers, which was a decent price as far as our parents were concerned. (Or walking for two hours and keeping the money, don't tell mum.)

Not quite that tiny. Iceland. The public transit system inside the capital area is decent (probably better then Spokane’s despite being similar of size) but after midnight it is really nothing, and on the weekends the frequency gets kind of bad (not North America level bad though). However ones you go outside of the capital area the system really sucks. Despite receiving over a million tourists which more then justifies an airport train, there is only a bus every couple of hours to the airport and adjacent towns (with a pathetic shelter).

Most US towns are basically uber/taxis only at that time. I live in Austin where you could theoretically be one of the lucky 1% of the population that both lives near a train station and wants to go somewhere near where that train station is. Even then you can’t use the train past something like 11pm on weekends. Capmetro’s hours are a pretty decent source of consternation for us here

The Seattle area has a newer, dedicated light rail system (Link) that runs every 5-10 minutes from about 5AM to about 1:00AM. The stations are located much more conveniently and frequently, because they were placed based on where a commuter train should stop, not trying to piggyback on existing freight lines. There still isn't as much parking as there should be, but at least the stations are placed so that more than a tiny handful of people can get there without driving and parking.

The South direction is a little better (and is improving even further with more Cascade runs on the horizon) but it is the same story. For example, Pyuallup and Sumner are both decent sized towns wit centrally located station, which won’t get light rail and the 1 line won’t reach Tacoma until 2035 at least. There is also a decent transit center at Lakewood, however I would argue it should probably be better to run the 620 all the way to Tacoma, from where Olympia people could jump onto a Sounder or light rail.

To me (European) that would cost a fortune... probably doing that distance for a night out would be something to do by local train or bus service.

Well worth it to me because i dislike traffic and parking that much. However i bet i could find a park and ride that's easy and save myself a decent chunk. .. not sure how to find a _safe_ park and ride, though.. heh.

Autonomous rides would be great for me though as they represent stability. Getting a driver was always a mixed bag. Would they be creepy? Talk a lot? Drive poorly? etcetc. Down in Florida i had one break the law several times and in general drive like a maniac. I don't take that many ubers/etc, but the ones i have have really felt like a mixed bag. A dice roll on all the variables, more bad than good.

A couple of weeks ago I came across a biker partially lying in the road, trapped by his bike. I parked my van at an angle, so if it was hit from behind it should roll past him. I jumped out and performed an assessment (I'm a qualified, OK: certificated first aider). I diagnosed "pissed" and ascertained he was unharmed. We got his bike in the back of the van with the help of some concerned pedestrians who initially thought I'd hit him. I drove him home.

I'm not sure a machine would have noticed an odd lump next to a lamppost, with a civic rubbish bin next to it, in the rain. What sort of sensors do these Waymo things have? They will have to be really, really clever and seriously expensive.

I don't deny that eventually a vehicle with enough decent sensors and some fancy processing will outperform me but I've managed 30+ years on the road with just a few scratches, a broken wing mirror and a rear ending from an articulated lorry.

I've managed to return a hire car around Napoli (Italy) after a couple of weeks without any issues! That may not sound too impressive but have a look at the state of vehicles around St Antonio Abate etc - it looks like the locals play bumper cars. May I also note that I'm a Brit and we drive on the left. Italians don't. So I can adapt to local conditions. I have also driven across large parts of the rest of Europe and the north Americas. I can adapt to local driving styles from the "use your entire car as the indicator" as seen in the Amalfi coastal area (int al) to "no after you" as you tend to see in large parts of the UK and Eire. I can deal with all the different regulations. A classic European one you don't see elsewhere is the white diamond sign with a yellow centre that indicates that you have right of way until it is cancelled with black stripes. Then there is the French "priority to the right" thing (which has also pervaded the UK somewhat wrt roundabouts).

I can negotiate this with ease: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5628345,-1.7713341,110m/da... and this on a wing and a prayer: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@48.8654026,2.3222455,464m/dat...

I'd love to see a Weymo navigate those.

However you finish with an assertion with no evidence. Care to elaborate? What on earth does this actually mean:

"Waymo provided a larger margin of error for the board rider than a human could possibly have."

I believe that we will get there and sooner than skeptics believe, but we are so far away from machines having driving skill equal to that of the average human driver, who happens to be driving while distracted 99% of the time.

But can they look at a driver's face and realise that they are distracted with their phone and haven't seen you?

These are really sophisticated systems and they've really thought of a lot of issues. All of these companies have hundreds, if not thousands of engineers who have been working on this problem for over a decade, as well as an army of lawyers trying to get things into compliance. I don't think "well it can't do x as well as a human" is going to hold up in 10 or 20 years when these systems are clearly much safer. Human driven cars will eventually be uninsurable.

So do a lot of tech companies that make a lot of dangerous, fraudulant, or just bad products, or that try to develop technology that never comes to fruition.

The tech is impressive, but that doesn't lead to an assumption that it must be able to do whatever is needed. I've seen enough tech hype cycles to know them when I see them. In the end it will have great strengths and great weaknesses, and we should learn what they are.

But 'looking at gestures' isn't the same thing as having a real-time interpretation of the sensors. This, to the point of another comment above, may be conflating 'perception' with the larger problems of 'self-driving.'

Humans see a gesture and understand the meaning very fast because we process a lot of communication on the subconscious level. If you read the safety report of the Uber incident, it shows that the self-driving system could 'see' the pedestrian, but it struggled to effectively classify them. To be fair, that was years ago and another company, but we (as the public) don't have much insight into how good (or bad) the software is.

So 'seeing gestures,' 'correctly classifying gestures', and 'correctly classifying gestures in a time-sensitive manner' are varying levels of difficulty. The last one is the one that matters for safety-critical operations, and the requirements change with the velocity of the vehicle. IMO, there should be a regulatory framework that addresses a baseline of performance on these systems.

(one study - 100% reduction in the frequency of bodily injury claims and a 76% decrease in property damage -https://www.ktvu.com/news/waymo-says-its-driverless-cars-saf...)

I rate at around 20% the amount of drivers that really should be allowed to drive given their current driving standards. Possibly more could be allowed after additionnal training and showing better driving standards knowing their license is at risk.

Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for. I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...

The only gripe I have with the system is that elderly are not automatically subjected to a regular test of their mental faculties and remaining sight. I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".

That is a tricky one.

> Also, I was under the impression that in most countries on this planet, the priviledge of being allowed to drive a car is handed out with the drivers licence, which in most countries, you actually have to have training and a test for.

Training which varies a lot depending on the country. I did a lot of hours + 3000kms under supervision of my father + dedicated classes with emergency from 90kph to 0 braking on varying surfaces, including having 2 wheels on gravel and 2 wheels on pavement to be able to handle situations where the car would naturally go sideways. My Mexican partner in comparison took a handful of classes using an automatic car and only passed the test using a simulator and there you go she had her license.

> I also thought it was normal practice that these licenses also get revoked, based on tickets...

It needs an absurd amount of them for it to happen and we should still require periodic tests and knowledge refresh of the rules of the road.

> I am getting sick of 90 year old grandmas killing 3 year olds "by accident".

I am pretty sure they represent a marginal fraction of the accidents/killing compared to distracted drivers.

And yes, I know that the standards of different countries are vastly different when it comes to obtaining a drivers license. I could have bought a drivers license while in south america. I am writing this because I am blind. Entertained the thought just for fun and to be able to show how broken the system is.

In Germany, if seniors end up in traffic incidents, they are in a vast majority of cases ruled responsible for causing them [1]. They may not be the group that causes the most accidents, partially because they drive less than someone in their 40s commuting for hours every day, but the difference of at-fault cases is nonetheless significant.

https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/verkehrsunfaelle-senioren-1...

Your super-claim that you are indeed empathic because you're concerned about everybody else does not justify the lower-level empathy violation.

You have been P.C.'d

Well I may not have phrased it correctly but I am not claiming that. Lack of empathy is one of the various causes of a majority of drivers being unfit for driving.

I don't know where you are but in the UK the driving test is pretty tricky. I failed it twice before passing and that was before it had the theory test added on. That was 30 years ago.

We all have our own perceptions of other drivers but you do need to try to think in their shoes. Today, whilst driving home I noticed a police car lights to the left and decided to indicate and move from lane one to two to give them room. The land rover behind me decided to undertake me and blunder through in lane one. Now the LR made a perfectly legitimate move - stay on track. They then undertook me (naughty). They did their thing and came across as wankers.

I doubt the public and their political representatives (absent regulatory capture) would turn over control to a mere average robot. Do you think, for example, most people would be okay in a drone airliner that is equivalent to the average pilot? I suspect most people would balk at the idea. A large part of the public policy piece is about trust; humans have evolved to understand and predict the behavior of other humans which leads to mental models about who can be trusted and who can't. We don't have those same evolved intuitions about robuts and, when combined, with our natural risk aversion biases, it's going to take a lot more than "average performance" to get society as a whole to fully trust robotic safety critical operations.

Yes trial attorneys will keep the bar very high for safety. As they should. But the bar in not infinitely high. Tech companies are salivating to disrupt the transportation market. They want a piece of your car payment, your insurance payment, your taxi spend. Insurance converts the minute risk of large accident costs into fixed premium payment. Lobbying helps convert financial capital into political capital and then into regulatory change. Our political process tends to follow the desires of the top 0.1% more than the bottom 40% combined.

Our current regime of car infrastructure was once unthinkable. Entire neighborhood were bulldozed to make way for highways. Yet today the government paying for highways, roads, and mandating each building be surrounded with amble parking is the status quo.

Rail is a much more efficient way to move troops and equipment. Modern warfare requires lightning fast movement which means cargo planes. Eisenhower himself used a “New Look” policy of relying heavily on nuclear weapons so that the army could be scaled back.

Good tip!

As opposed to what? You don’t have RADAR, or LIDAR, or echolocation, or any other way to “detect” a person in the road. You have human vision.

This is the idea behind Tesla FSD. If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough. We have cameras that can approximate human vision. All the other companies using sensors are doing so as a crutch, because they didn’t have the chops to solve the vision problem.

and why gimp ourselves. if we had an extra sense to navigate with we would 100% be using it.

LIDAR is simply a sensor and a very inferior one, in general, when compared to my visual system. For starters it needs something to interpret it. My eyes have a 52 year old brain stuffed with experience behind them and it isn't always a hindrance!

I can reason about other people's driving style and react accordingly. I can also describe my actions and reasoning on internet forums.

I really do not want an inferior sensor such as LIDAR inflicted on me, nor would I want it to be the sole source of information for something that conveys me.

My office has an entrance onto the A37 in Yeovil (1) Bear in mind we drive on the left in the UK. Picture yourself in a car next to that for sale sign and trying to turn right. That white car will be doing 20-40 mph or much more. In the distance is a roundabout (Fiveways) which is large enough to enable a fast exit and people love to accelerate out of a roundabout. As you can also see this is a hill so the other side is quite fast because cars have to brake to keep down to the speed limit of 30 mph. That's just one scenario.

Anyway, back to your idea that Tesla FSD (Full Self Driving) ie RADAR, LIDAR etc is equivalent to "me" is debatable. I do have my limitations but I can reason about them and I can reason about what FSD might mean as well.

You assert: "If human vision is good enough, computer vision is good enough." People and computers/cars/whatevs do not perceive things in the same way. I doubt very much that you have two cameras with a very narrow but high res central field of view with a rather shag peripheral view which is tuned for movement. Your analogue "vision" sensors should be mounted on something that can move around (within the confines of a seatbelt). Yes I do have to duck under the rear view mirror and peer around the A pillar etc.

I have no doubt that you have something like a camera with a slack handful of Google Corals, trying to make sense of what is happening but it is really, really complicated. I actually think that your best bet is not to try to replicate my or your sensors and actions but to think outside the box.

Have you ever considered a drone?

Cheers Jon

(1) - https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.9471642,-2.6382854,3a,75y,...

I like how it's indicated with road paint here in Switzerland, e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/Switzerland/comments/wp6clo/who_has...

Attributing every great outcome to "talent and sweat" is dangerous in safety critical domains. Often it's (at least partly) luck, and missing that distinction (combined with a lot of human biases) can make a team confuse "being lucky" with "being good". The problem with luck is it tends to eventually run out.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rxvl3INKSg

Someone in the comments also mentions that the destination was in a dead end street, which may be the reason the drop-off is a 5 minute walk away. The 5 minute walk was also apparently indicated when she entered the destination. This along with the pick-up location being on the other side of the road feels like it might be the result of the AI being overly cautious. I'd find that acceptable for an "autonomous car" but not one advertised as a replacement for taxis (which as the presenter mentions are also used as accessibility aids where a 5 minute walk uphill can be unacceptable).

There's no footage of the car stopping at the green light, just her saying it's come to a full stop and then an external shot where it's already stopped. That's not enough information to call the stop "unsafe", even if it was impeding traffic. It also stopped with flashing hazards, assuming Waymo doesn't flash hazards during the entire ride (which I hope they don't). It's not clear why it stopped there but based on the little footage we have it doesn't seem very abrupt so any traffic behind it would have had plenty of time to notice and react the decelerating car in front of them.

The stop seems unnecessary and because it's AI and Waymo didn't provide additional information, it's impossible to say what caused it. The message she saw also indicates it was caused by an error, presumably a navigation issue. Although it is impossible to tell based on the editing, the issue seems to have been resolved within a few seconds. A human driver would have probably decided to just follow the direction of traffic for that amount of time, or change lines to come to a full stop at the side of the road but in an urban environment (not at highway speeds) the behavior is not completely unreasonable. What's more concerning to me is that the AI ran into a problem while in traffic that required the car to come to a complete halt and presumably wait for external (human?) intervention, green light or none.

I'd prefer a car that slowly comes to a full stop at a green light because of a software issue over one that keeps dragging a pedestrian it ran over for several seconds to avoid impeding traffic but the bigger issue with Waymo here is that the car runs into a software issue at all while in traffic.

* Not recommended in SF. But I imagine on the 280 it would be great one day.

I hate “whimsical” stuff like this. Part of maturity/adulthood is coming to the realization that you don’t have the right to conscript other people into your sense of humor.

And yet, you aren't willing to accept that they have a different sense of humor without hating them. Ironic.

They can, that is why cars have all this pretty lights in the back! They can warn of several things, like intention of turning, braking, accidents, is amazing.

And it works wonders if the human driver focus on the trafic ahead of the car just in front

- The car is going to turn left (one blinking yellow light) - The car is going to turn right (one blinking yellow light) - The car is stopping (three solid red lights) - An unspecified error occurred (two blinking yellow lights).

It's not exactly a high - bandwidth form of communication. Most of the purpose of the lights behind your car is to remind other human drivers of your continued existence. As you point out, some of this deficiency can be made up by not looking at them.

Imagine a world where you could automatically talk over an intercom with the driver in front of you about traffic conditions. I bet you'd find safer, better-informed driving. Self-driving cars make that theoretically easy and humanly pleasant.

For those interested: _Generally_, Bay Area natives will refer to highways as "280", "101", maybe even "Highway X".

SoCal natives (and many others) will, _generally_ say: "the 101", "the 280", etc.

What is your motivation here? I can see why some think it looks like promotional material.

That's because you asked a question with no valid answer.

Seriously, what would you accept as being an innocent response? Anything equivalent to "I thought it was neat" is apparently not good enough since that sentiment was already in the previous post.

If you want to accuse them of being a shill, just do it directly. (But only if you have a good enough reason to break the rule against doing so.) Don't do this roundabout "what's your motivation" thing where you implicitly reject the innocent motivation.

And why would it need to have "other value"?

> a good way to avoid answering

Since I'm the only one that responded, are you suggesting I'm in cahoots with them? Come on, dude.

It turned out I was wrong about the windscreen wipers. LIDAR from other vehicle tripping the rain sensors.

In any event, I do wish Waymo the very best. They aren't just trying to do something hard, they are doing it whilst getting lots of opposition from SF gov. Whether the business model works - time will tell.

> b) I'm a believer

That is interesting to me. Not that you shouldn't be one, or that such an attitude is new to the world, but I always wonder: Why care about a for-profit company's product? Usually these companies don't care about anything or anyone else.

Pretty sure that's just lidars messing with Jaguar's rain sensors.

i'm sure this is sometimes true, but at least sometimes i'd guess that the route selections would make more sense if you saw the conditions and traffic on the route the car didn't take you on.

_defensive driving has entered the chat_

Seriously, anyone here who rides motorcycles can pipe in, but some of us out there never assume anything on the road and thusly avoid a lot of trouble because of it. Assuming incorrectly is the root cause of probably 99.999% of accidents.

Wonder what it would have done if it didnt have room to pull into the left lane without hitting a car. Or perhaps another skateboarder.

Ultimately, I don't think the driving screw ups were that big of a deal (just my opinion). The big deal though is the moronic lack of customer support. How hard is it really to have a customer support staff a phone call away that can reassure the customer and either debug the issue to get them sorted out or at least offer alternatives. It would do so much to improve the users perception.

So, typical Google... Phenomenal engineering, and horrible customer service.

Maybe it was a just hit piece though and they cut out some contextual video? No idea.

How can a company with THAT MUCH MONEY be THAT plagued with an issue that everyone has been shouting about for more than a decade ??

I wonder if there is a business model in contracting in Google's customer care. I'm sure someone could do a lot better with Google's customer budget. Google can start off with a few departments, and then have performance based expansion. If it goes too well, they can always get acquired in.

Their peer tech companies - MSFT, AAPL, AMZN all managed to become industry leaders into a completely different sector while maintaining their moat in their original revenue sources.

Google is still only makes money on ads. Google has created a monster products in B2C search, ads and software platforms. But, their B2C services are lagging far behind, and customer service really helps here.

This isn’t to say the Waymo car did a bad job. It sounds like a good choice in the situation.

Waymo has way more sensors. Most importantly, it has Lidar.

Also, isn't there an implicit assumption that all Waymo "drivers" would perform in exactly the same way?

In case it's not clear, I'm refering to California st starting downtown and going all the way up the hill.

Car lanes in the city consume a significant public resource (space) and encourage negative externalities (noise, heat, air pollution, etc.). They should absolutely be replaced with more space efficient options: tram tracks & bike lanes.

You've just described the average Subaru driver in the Seattle area. How is this notably different? Should they be banned from the roads as well?

I have all sorts of thoughts on the quality of driver assist from various manufacturers, but that's out of scope here and better material if I ever do Youtube.

Waymo rides feel much more predictable and human like.

Although note that “human like” and “smooth” rides do not necessarily mean safer, but qualitatively Waymo feels that way.

Cruise cars do not perform acceptably in SF but they probably would if they deployed in the bazillion mid-sized cities out there with wide streets and ample shoulder space.

Wide fast streets come with their own set of problems. For instance, stopping in the middle of an intersection is much riskier, the car needs to see objects farther away, etc.

Waymo's are far, far better. I ride one every day, and trust them more than I trust 99% of Uber/Lyft drivers.

Are they performing worse, or are they just making a better risk tradeoff? Human drivers kill a lot of people every week.

I frequently walk my dog where a lot of cruises operate. I dislike there's no.. two-way communication? with car. I mean that with a human driver if we make eye contact then I know they see me and I can safely (yes yes not 100%) cross the street. With a cruise I have no idea if it sees me, or if there's a bug that will make it drive as I'm in the middle of the crosswalk. They actually make me jog across out of fear.

Still feels like "a LOT" when I finally get home, and I also don't know anyone personally who drives nearly this much. Probably biased by my living in the city.

one-third of all road vehicle deaths resulted from speeding [2]. > traverse, say, a left turn against traffic is absurd

Because that is how most people in SF pedestrians are killed: in an unobstructed left against traffic.

    More than 300 people are injured by left-turning drivers every year in San Francisco. In 2019, 40% of traffic deaths occurred when drivers making left turns hit pedestrians – mostly people using crosswalks who weren’t seen by drivers until it was too late [1]

While the median driver might not be that bad, the average driver sure kills a lot of people. The average person crashes their car 3-4 times over a lifetime

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90702355/40-of-san-franciscos-tr...

[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/speed-campaign-speeding...

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> Waymo vehicles are objectively far better. They drive like Humans do. Still some issued with weather and construction, but they work well alongside busses, trucks, and private cars without slowing anyone down.

In that sense, I agree that we should aspire for better self-driving cars in general. Technology allows us to have some of our cake and eat it too.

I'd take this further. Given that self-driving cars not a fashion/emotional purchase, we should similarly tech-them-out to improve collision outcomes. Make the car collide with a pedestrian at their feet rather than the torso. Make it impossible for someone to go 'under' the car. promote outside-airbag design to minimize collision impact.

For starters, mandating driverless cars for all people with DUIs (at any phase in life), the elderly and those who have been in serious at-fault-accidents is a policy I support. Yes, self-driving cars are worse than the average human driver. But these people are clearly in the bottom 10 percentile.

And as we agree; there are clearly better technologies ( waymo) out there that let us have it both ways.

Can you share your source? I didn't see it in the two links provided.

I think this is really jumping the gun given how limited current self driving tech is. The amount of people who do 100% of their driving in the few cities where Waymo operates is a tiny part of the population. Until commercial self driving cars can function in the remaining 99% of the country this is a non-starter. Maybe in 10 years this will be possible, although there are plenty of reasons to be skeptical.

But now it seems their strategy is paying off, at least in terms of developing an acceptable solution. It still remains whether they can monetize it well, but other people will have to more or less adopt Waymo's model or they won't have a business.

Knowing about software, if the key differential factor is how well you can handle a long tail of edge cases, it'll take years before others can compete with today's Waymo in fully autonomous self-driving cars. If you don't have an architecture and culture to obsess about edge cases, it could even be easier to tear down the software and rebuild.