Tbh, the sooner we remove the human from the equation, the better. It's scary to think that we allow so many careless people to drive vehicles that can kill people. I'm not talking just about drunk driving, but all the sort of distractions (smartphone, looking somewhere else, ...).
London specifically, AFAIK after midnight has no tube service. This means that Waymo (or whoever takes a similar initiative) actually helps towards creating a public transportation service that is cheaper and even safer than the current one. I'm personally all up for it - don't tax innovation!
This was solved by taxis, and now uber, decades ago. If you're dumb enough to drive under influence in 2025 the cure isn't a driverless taxi it's 10 years in jail.
If only such things were googleable.
Also, the small streets which are one car wide, and where one often needs to look far ahead to see whether there's a gap for you to sneak into whilst letting other cars by, will also be good to see handled.
When I visited San Francisco recently the Waymos were really awesome and worked well, but also there's barely any traffic compared to London. The streets are all really wide and you can pretty much just pull over anywhere. Some even just stopped in the middle of the road and I was amazed to see people waiting patiently behind them! London is entirely different.
Still, props for trying. Will be very interesting to watch what happens!
Then what? How soon until trucks, ships, etc are now autonomous?
It’s already there for non-freeway driving. (Nobody dying is a perfectionist metric. It’s better than humans.)
What’s limiting it are capital costs. Once Waymo finds a non-Jaguar form factor it can mass manufacture, I imagine this would get rolled out rapidly. (To the extent Tesla has a shot, it’s in its mass manufacturing expertise.)
Granted, Chinese EVs can be half the price, and there isn't any competition at Google's heels, forcing them to rush. But still.
Also, the same event (e.g. someone dying in a car crash) doesn't always have the same responsibilities behind it. If I kill someone by driving recklessly, I have more responsibility than if I kill someone when a bird crashes on my windshield. There are extreme cases where someone bears full responsibility, and extreme cases where an accident is just an accident and nobody is responsible. It may be that with self driving, a larger percentage of cases lean on the "true accident" side. (It's just an idea though, I agree there's an important question here that merits careful consideration.)
That is still the criteria.
I'm also curious to know if Waymo's are allowed to drop you slightly off from the address you specified -- in which case they can drop you at the next corner.
Yes, they do.
>Tell us where you want to go
>Choose your destination and we’ll select the safest spots to pick you up and drop you off.
These cars get away with being incapable of following police instructions, I don't see why they would need to care about other traffic users.
There are video examples of Waymos reversing when a narrow road is obstructed.
There are also many examples of Waymos following directions from police and construction workers.
ageitgey•2h ago
JumpCrisscross•2h ago
Go back through Waymo’s historic announcements on HN. This is said every time.
Autonomy works. Waymo has solved it. There isn’t yet a number 2, though China has strong candidates. But where you can find Waymo, it works so well that we need to see it in a familiar context to believe it really exists.
ifwinterco•2h ago
AlotOfReading•2h ago
4ndrewl•2h ago
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
This is true in New York and, to a lesser degree, San Francisco.
potato3732842•1h ago
Like for example how traffic will often modulate its spacing or time its lane changes to reduce issues with merging or exiting traffic and certain intersections with most traffic doing the same thing become an efficient repetitive cycle, Waymo doesn't "get it".
So it works, in the same way a newly licensed teenager "works". It's no cabbie.
Edit: It's been over a year since I've ridden in one. Good to hear it's potentially better now.
sixhobbits•1h ago
It's different than human drivers for sure, but to me at least it's better.
I agree with MVP part, my understanding is that there's still a lot of Wizard of Oz stuff in terms of regularly mapping and remapping its routes and having a lot of human operators remotely checking and maybe controlling the fleet, but I'm impressed personally.
JumpCrisscross•1h ago
When did you last update this hypothesis?
The Waymos I’ve been in creep, honk and modulate their aggressiveness quite naturally. In the cities they operate in, they’re a premium product to cabs.
The part where you’re right is on freeways. But my point is that tends to be ignored when folks gatekeep “real” autonomy. Instead, it’s some random peculiarity of their city which humans traverse at low speeds. Exactly the thing Waymo has mastered.
IshKebab•51m ago
Sure, but in terms of traffic difficulty they've done like level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and now they're jumping to 100! This is different.
It's not the most difficult place to drive (good luck in India, Turkey, southern Italy, etc.), but it's still far more challenging than any American city.
And it needs fundamentally new capabilities like being able to negotiate with other drivers visually and read implicit signals. You can't do it all just by following what the traffic lights say.
leprechaun1066•2h ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvctCbVEvwQ
mavhc•1h ago
finolex1•49m ago