
Waymo's big self-drive car report - aurelianito
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/5-things-we-learned-from-waymos-big-self-driving-car-report/
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nopinsight
Waymo's car safety systems engineered in from the ground up bode well for
their reputation and also distinguish their system from other vehicles with
self-driving "tacked-on".

The latest statistics suggest that Waymo's car requires about an order of
magnitude fewer interventions from safety drivers. If these systems are a key
reason for that or will further boost their safety records, it will be a long
while before competitors can catch up.

"Waymo says it has done extensive work to make sure that computer crashes
don't lead to car crashes. All of the key systems on its cars—the computer,
brakes, steering systems, and batteries—have backups ready to take over if the
main system fails."

"Safety-critical aspects of Waymo's vehicles—e.g. steering, braking,
controllers—are isolated from outside communication," Waymo writes. "For
example, both the safety-critical computing that determines vehicle movements
and the onboard 3D maps are shielded from, and inaccessible from, the
vehicle's wireless connections and systems."

~~~
Roritharr
I wonder how the different error modes are detected so the redundant systems
can take over.

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SSLy
mutual watchdogs?

~~~
Roritharr
But what do they look at? If the failure mode for example is that the steering
signal always signals half a degree more to the left in left turns than
necessary, would the watchdog see that and takeover? How does it know that
IT'S sensing mechanism isn't broken?

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Animats
Link to actual report.[1] (When you're posting a link to something important,
post the link to the real document, not some pundit blithering about it. Yes,
you may have to do some digging to find it when the pundit outlet doesn't
provide a link.)

There's not much new here if you've been following what Waymo is doing. Chris
Urmson's SXSW talk from 2016 [2] covered most of this material in more detail.
This is more of a PR-level version of that content. The new material covers
mainly the limitations Waymo is imposing on their system. It works only where
they have very detailed maps of the road system, with more information than
even StreetView. This is conservative, but not a bad decision for initial
release.

They have a button to call customer service. (That's so unlike Google.)

[1] [https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-
report/way...](https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/waymo-
safety-report-2017-10.pdf) [2] h[https://youtu.be/Uj-
rK8V-rik?t=6](https://youtu.be/Uj-rK8V-rik?t=6)

~~~
whyenot
OP linked to a news article that presented a pretty good summary of the report
along with some additional context. It was not "some pundit blithering about
it."

I don't think there is anything wrong with linking to a news article like this
that is published by a reputable news source such as Ars Technica. Not
everyone is going to have the time to read a 43 page report, especially if
it's not clear why they should be reading it.

~~~
cs2818
It would be nice if Ars Technica would provide a link to their source material
(unless I'm just missing it).

I don't understand why so many news sources skip out on providing references.

~~~
Animats
To make web sites "sticky", so people don't go elsewhere.

That doesn't apply to YC, so when posting here, please give the link to the
original source. Sometimes it's necessary to dig through three levels of blog
to get to the source. (This seems to be especially true of articles about
battery chemistry and surface chemistry ("nanotechnology").)

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pgodzin
It's certainly smart to start this as a ride-sharing service rather than DTC
ownership model. By being able to choose which trips it is confident in
taking, it removes a lot of the remaining question marks that would come up by
a car owner trying to take it anywhere.

~~~
skywhopper
The question is: can this be a viable commercial product if it doesn’t
actually do what people expect from a taxi service? And how extensive is the
deployment going to be that people will choose to use Waymo over just driving?
If I have to plan ahead or wait 15 minutes for a car to arrive, I’m a lot less
likely to even try the service.

~~~
golfer
They have to start somewhere. It sounds like this will be an initial rollout.

Obviously they won't be limited to Chandler Arizona forever.

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CamelCaseName
Can anyone comment as to how realistic the last line is?

>But it's clear that Waymo is aiming to bring its product to market
soon—likely in 2018, if not this year.

~~~
jfoster
They've had cars driving all over the place for years. If they've got the
driving part "done", the other parts of it are about product stuff; how to
request rides, in-ride experience, etc. They definitely would've had that all
happening in parallel with refining the autonomy tech. I don't have any
information, but it seems plausible to me that it could be 2018.

~~~
ManuPop
They have mostly been driving in sunny areas with very nice weather. Driving
with strong weather hasn’t really been tackled by anybody yet. Additionally
the legal side is still not (officially) resolved.

~~~
Retric
_Waymo says its cars can handle nighttime driving and light rain, but its cars
will be geofenced_

Nice weather driving is predicable out ~6 hours and easily 98+% of driving
conditions nationwide. If the system simply checks a weather service before
driving and says no if there is problems with the route that's fine for
version 1.0

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taxicabjesus
> "Passengers cannot select a destination outside of our approved geography,
> and our software will not create a route that travels outside of a geo-
> fenced area, which has been mapped in detail," Waymo says. The Information
> reported earlier this month that Waymo's cars will initially be made
> available in the area of Chandler, a Phoenix suburb.

I saw one of their minivans a week or two ago. Chandler is mostly "new"
construction - New strip malls, newish neighborhoods with nice sidewalks, etc.
It's also relatively well-to-do. Average incomes are much higher than in Mesa,
which is just to the north.

Phoenix (other side of the Salt River) has nice areas, and it has ghettos. I
wonder where the geofence's lines are drawn. Certainly they'd include
ASU/Tempe...

I wonder how these would work for passengers who need to get their illegal
plant products, dealers of which don't always live in neighborhoods with nice
sidewalks. Mostly those passengers didn't tell me what they were actually
doing, but sometimes I figured it out.

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Zaheer
From this report I get the sense that Tesla, Cruise, et. al. are years behind
compared to Waymo. Can anyone that has more knowledge comment on the state of
self-driving companies today? Ex. The level of failure redundancy they
highlight I haven't seen by Tesla which promises the current Model S's etc
they sell have full autonomy capability. I may be missing something though...

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kyrra
This article links to another one of their articles that talks about another
marketing step waymo took in the last week, the partnership with a number of
organizations to help shoe where self driving cars can help various people in
our society.

[https://letstalkselfdriving.com](https://letstalkselfdriving.com)

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MrQuincle
How will people react? I think it's too early.

\+ Jealous cap drivers, truck drivers, neighbors can easily put some chewing
gum or paint on one or a few sensors. The system will be too brittle to cope
with that, so all the time your/the sweet self-driving car doesn't even want
to start.

\+ Joyriding and pranks. Put your silly little brother or the dog who you've
to babysit in the car. Bye bye!

\+ Criminality. Just put your drugs on board or a corpse. Or do the companies
that own these cars use them as remote cameras all the time?

\+ Insurance. Just set up a situation perhaps with multiple cars where the
self-driving car slams in your insured car. Use some doll etc.

\+ Destruction. Do the same to cause the car falling into the river or
crashing into something you dislike.

\+ Vandalism. Graffiti etc. will be recognized much later than with a human
driver.

\+ Theft of sensors or other car parts can be orchestrated on a location the
car first drives to.

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tdb7893
Most of these things with self driving cars already apply to normal cars. Also
with self driving cars having tons if sensors and Internet connectivity you
should have a good scan of whoever messes with one and quick police response
if anything goes wrong. For stuff like bogus insurance claims they could just
add a few internal sensors in the car or something to make sure a real person
is in there. None of these problems really seem all that insurmountable

~~~
MrQuincle
To argue that the legal context is exactly the same for self-driving cars as
for normal cars seems unjustified.

I'm not arguing that it is insurmountable. I'm just saying that it's too
early. Most of these things have not been worked out, which seems unnecessary.

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szczepano
I think Tesla idea of tunnels with self driving cars is more competent then
those autonomous vehicles driving on roads with other cars. At least they got
some data from their cars with real world usage not predictions.

~~~
golfer
Waymo has hundreds of vehicles logging millions of self driving miles on the
road. They have plenty of data.

Tesla's "tunnels": I assume you are referring to elon's Boring Company? How
many decades of tunneling do you think that will require before it even covers
a fraction of routes people want to take?

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visarga
> Passengers cannot select a destination outside of our approved geography,
> and our software will not create a route that travels outside of a geo-
> fenced area

If all our movements will be subject to continuous monitoring and approval,
then SDC's won't be anything better than taxis or planes.

~~~
tehlike
monitoring is one thing, but this particular line seems to me like a safety
measure. If you haven't trained in a particular geography, initially, you
might want to be a bit more cautious.

disclaimer: google employee, but no knowledge of waymo things.

~~~
usrusr
Part of me admires their sober approach to safety, but another part is
extremely skeptical of the implied reliance on mapping. Reality changes all
the time, so your technology should better be able to deal with outdated
models. But if it can, shouldn't it be able to cope with an absent model just
as well? If it does need a pre-made model of reality, I am not convinced of
its ability to deal with unexpected change. In sports climbing terms (hope I
use them correctly, not being one): how bad is the car at onsighting a road
that it needs beta so desperately to flash it?

Maybe their "onsight" capability is just very slow and the first Waymo to meet
a change has to onsight it at hardly more than roomba speed (or worse:
mturk?), sharing the knowledge ("beta") with the Waymos that come later, but
then you still have to reliably detect that your model is outdated while
driving regular speed while all false positives would considerably harm the
relationship with other road users.

~~~
tehlike
I think it is a cautious approach. Mapping is one aspect, but there will
always vehicles and pedestrians that the vehicle has to plan for.

This reminds me darpa grand challanhe and urban challenge difference. The cars
that were built for the desert wouldnt work great in an urban environment.

Over time these restrictions will surely go away.

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0xbear
Come back to me when it can handle fog, snow, heavy rain, and areas it hasn’t
seen before. Until then it’s just overgrown version of driver assistance.

