When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
both!
You can walk or cycle... Modern bikes are light and pretty fast too.
We need regulation to ensure they don't come here.
Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos. Those Roadster jets may finally make a smooth ride throughout the whole of the city possible.
The ultimate test would be Cairo or Mumbai or Lagos :-)
It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).
Letting women get home safely with a robot driver is a thing that can happen today.
Honestly the last thing I thought would happen would be that it would get lost. I thought maybe it would get confused on the road, but it drove better than most human drivers.
I understand the issue of technical power, mind you, but I don't really see how US companies expanding into Canada is a good idea as long as a hostile orange individual keeps on potty-mouthing Canadians.
"I will show that America first President who wants to fracture global trade...by arguing for fracturing global trade."
That gen pops tune changed with the political climate just like big corp previously going on about left wing shit is stunning
Ya'll are just LARPing what you watch on TV and read online
Orange guy may make news, but Canada has greater problems from within.
Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?
The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.
Toronto is already on Lake America (approved by Google). Maybe bring out the traffic cones or get another trucker protest.
I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.
They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
Lidar is cool when you want to get a point cloud from a fixed location, or dealing with perfectly uniform surfaces (which cars don't because humans can't do this either), but beyond that there are better ways to do things.
Not always. Definitely not all freeways.
> And every car has its own lights for seeing where you are driving
Not always far enough. Especially at freeway speeds on unlit freeways.
If humans don't have lidar but can drive it's an existence proof of the viability of that approach.
1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.
2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.
3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)
4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")
5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).
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Tangent for the "how do you handle lanes when you can't see any" ... old school approach: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/833362
> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.
Ford is already removing bike lanes.
Tax dollars to put in bike lanes, and then tax dollars to remove them.
Otherwise you're just being racist.
Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.
I'm generally enthusiastic for electric vehicles, but batteries and FSD don't really work in a 12 hour blizzard at -40. Doesn't match my use case. :)
pothole observed. Diverting a-
pothole observed. d-
pothole.
po-
You’re either dodging construction site, homeless people, or just sitting in traffic.
Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.
Basically if the planes are flying the robotaxis will need to work.
There was also controversy over proper names v. decryptions. "Macdonalds" is a proper name but should "Burger King" be translated to "Burger Roi".
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
Doesn’t change my desire for better public transport though.
There are lots of reasons somebody might prefer a driverless car and lots of reasons somebody might prefer a human driver. Why not have a choice?
- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.
- obeys traffic rules
Imagine what cities could do with 50% higher bus frequency or more bus routes.
There are issues though. If you remove the staff from the bus you will need to handle some particularly unruly passengers in a different way. Currently the driver just stops until that person leaves or gets police / special constables involved.
- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,
- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,
- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),
- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,
- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,
- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.
There are three major disadvantages right now:
- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,
- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,
- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.
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