
Waymo’s autonomous vehicles are driving 25,000 miles every day - sahin-boydas
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/20/waymos-autonomous-vehicles-are-driving-25000-miles-every-day/
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RestlessMind
As an HNer, I find what Waymo (and other autonomous vehicle companies) are
doing is simply fabulous. Technology improvement is a big impetus for human
progress. Looking back over the past century, inventions like transistor,
rockets, internet, satellites, nuclear power and aviation significantly
improved our quality of life.

Autonomous vehicles belong to the same league. I am very happy that a non
trivial amount of resources are devoted to them and it's not just a next SV
fad like some ICO / Juicero / photo sharing app. Rooting for the success of
this technology.

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njoro
While I hope the technology succeeds I don't think it is going to be as big of
a change as people think. If you are upper middle class in a large city where
labour is cheap, like in some Asian countries, driving is already close to
free. And while that is somewhat nice from a quality of life perspective, it
also means that rush hour traffic is horrible and sitting in a car isn't much
more fun just because it is cheap. Basically a car is still a car.

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airstrike
The idea is that with autonomous driving nobody needs to own a car and traffic
jams are severely reduced because robots don’t drive like assholes (or at
least by design shouldn’t...)

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njoro
Not having to own a car to travel by car will of course increase driving, or
being driven really. A situation where there is only self-driving cars is
probably decades away at he minimum. And that doesn't really solve inherent
throughput or speed issues.

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jellicle
Not only "doesn't really solve", but "makes vastly worse".

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tim333
Not necessarily

>... technology move people from their homes or work to existing public
infrastructure hubs

could be a thing. Also maybe some sort of road pricing to stop them being
clogged with empty cars going to get pizza.

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dzdt
Human drivers average about 1 fatality per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.
[1] So we are still a long ways from being able to access safety in comparison
to humans. [1]
[https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...](https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812451)

~~~
hcnews
Number of fatalities per million miles driven is only one of the metrics.
Hours spent per lifetime driving is arguably a more important metric. I can't
wait for everything (cities, highways etc.) to be redesigned for self-driving
cars but looks like its not going happen in my life time :(

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ucaetano
> I can't wait for [cities] to be redesigned for self-driving cars

Personally, I hope it never happens. The US is still suffering from when its
cities were redesigned for cars, vs. public transit and pedestrians.

Self-driving cars can and will play a very important role in transportation,
but cities should be designed around people, not cars.

Edit: I'm by no means criticizing your hope, and I do agree with you that
cities should be redesigned to "accommodate" self driving cars, such as
"buffer garages" (where autonomous cars are parked in a FIFO way, not in the
way cars are parked today), auto-charging stations, smart curbs for pick-
up/drop-off, etc.

~~~
kjeetgill
One of the biggest issues is that the road infrastructure and the city layout
is already there. Sure cities may be better if they were walkable but most
people live across the full metropolitan areas.

Taking the SF Bay area an example: Sure I can take the Caltrain or the Bart to
get to nearly any city but it'll always be the long way around.

Think San Mateo to Union City. Crossing a bridge it's direct. The road infra
structure is already there and the cities are built around it. Sure there's
probably some cryptic bus route but the difference right now is (with a quick
google) 35 mins vs 1.5 hr.

I think self driving cars have the potential to build on our car centric
ecosystems. Look at how Uber/Lyft have adapted into Uber Pool and Lyft Line.
They've done more to change people's driving habits than any changes to the
public transportation system. I'm excited to see how self driving cars solve
this by dropping the price point further and exploring larger pools.

~~~
ucaetano
> I think self driving cars have the potential to build on our car centric
> ecosystems.

But the problem is that car-centric systems are not scalable and sustainable.

Sure, self-driving cars would do well in the Bay Area, but they would only
make traffic worse, as now people are willing to spend a longer time in
traffic, since they are no longer driving.

Self-driving cars actually remove one of the negative feedback mechanisms of
traffic.

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Fricken
Waymo has tested in 25 cities, they aren't currently in 25 cities. Of the 600
Pacifica's they have, only ~160 are deployed. So to do 25,000 miles per day,
that's an average of 156 miles per vehicle.

~~~
blacksmith_tb
That does seem like a lot, I suppose they theoretically could be driving
24/7/365 (the wear and tear would be serious, you'd think).

The idea of moving people to public transit sounds good, but I wonder if
there's enough spare capacity in most transit systems to serve lots of new
riders...

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vkou
There is spare capacity in most transit systems to accommodate new riders,
just not at the SLA that prospective new riders are accustomed to.

If your suburban bus stop is a 10 minute walk from your home, and the bus
comes by once every half-hour, and then you have to transfer to an every
20-minute bus, that is sufficiently offset to make the transfer take time...
You aren't going to have a good time on your commute.

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brudgers
To me, the very existence of a self driving vehicle is an amazing technical
achievement against a really hard challenge. I suppose that explains why the
math makes sense. 25,000 aggregate miles/day for a fleet of 600 vehicles is
below 42 miles/day/vehicle. Each vehicle is providing a level of service below
2 miles per hour. Again, as a geek I think it's amazing but not convinced it
is going to scale to the point that will justify those governors pushing
public policy changes that impact the general public...at least for now.

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vannevar
The number of miles is not a sufficient metric; the question is, how much of
the automotive phase space (weather, traffic conditions, terrain, road surface
type, time of day, etc) has been explored? Running over the same mile a
million times does not add anything to the self-driving model.

~~~
scarmig
Interestingly, going with that logic disengagements per mile will at some
point correlate with the most advanced AV companies, not the least.

I guess the response would be to target some SLO budget and, once
disengagements get too high, refocus on existing cases to get it down to an
acceptable level.

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tlrobinson
Waymo is supposedly planning on launching a ride-hailing service. Perhaps they
can start giving rides to customers while continuing to test with a live
driver (to take over if necessary). The revenue from the ride-hailing service
could offset the cost of testing, and allow them to operate indefinitely until
full autonomy is ready and legal.

~~~
bob_theslob646
Unfortunately the liability is too high for them to start taking passengers
without thorough.

The idea is pretty clever. People paying to be guinea pigs.

Sure if people signed off, it would reduce some of the liability but that's
still the golden question: who's responsible if something happens?

~~~
ghaff
IANAL but seems pretty obvious. If I'm just sitting in some company's product
and it causes harm to me or someone else, it's 100% on the company. Of course,
anyone can be sued for anything but the idea that I could be criminally
negligent because an autonomous vehicle I'm sitting in (whether car or train)
killed someone seems absurd.

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trhway
5B miles in simulation. I wonder do they source the situations for simulation
from Youtube from crazy/fail/accident driving videos.

~~~
y4mi
I can't imagine these poor video streams are useful inputs for the
algorithm...

Maybe simulations are when the human is controlling the vehicle and the
algorithm is only allowed to .. simulate what it's actions would be if it were
in control?

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Fricken
When they encounter interesting situations while testing on real roads, they
then take that situation over to the simulator and train their algorithms on
1000s of subtle variations of the situation, which Waymo calls 'fuzzing'.

Simulating effectively is non-trivial. In spite of testing on a comparable
scale to Waymo, Uber made very little progress in 2 years because they
couldn't get their simulator to work right.

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oddmind
Are Waymo using AI and humans to build a ginormous curated decision tree that
can be audited or are they doing something more black-box / pure AI /
something else?

I always imagined a big decision tree that could get diff’d after each AI
training run and tuned by an army of humans.

~~~
ebikelaw
Why do you assume there's any "AI" in it at all?

~~~
tim333
There's some info on the systems here
[https://techcircle.vccircle.com/2018/05/09/how-google-s-
waym...](https://techcircle.vccircle.com/2018/05/09/how-google-s-waymo-is-
using-ai-for-autonomous-driving)

>“While perception is the most mature area for deep learning, we also use deep
nets for everything from prediction to planning to mapping and simulation.”
...Dmitri Dolgov, CTO and VP, engineering, Waymo

etc

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droopyEyelids
> ...the company is also working to apply its self-driving system to three
> other areas, including logistics (so trucking)...

This whole 'disenfranchised underclass' thing that America is struggling with
will get considerably worse when automation turns all the truck drivers and
their families out onto the street.

~~~
CydeWeys
Most people used to be farmers, too, but prohibiting industrialization was not
the right call.

Driving trucks is a dangerous occupation that's terrible for your health, and
often takes you away from your family for long periods of time. In a few
generations when it's long gone as an occupation, no one will miss it. Getting
from now to then is unfortunately going to be a rough transition for some
people, but stopping that transition entirely isn't the right call.

~~~
EthanHeilman
> Most people used to be farmers, too, but prohibiting industrialization was
> not the right call.

The industrial revolution caused enormous suffering for ex-farmers. Many of
them lost a life of autonomy to be forced to move to cities and work in
dangerous conditions for starvation wages. It caused significant social
instability.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Standard...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution#Standards_of_living)

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lewis500
1042 miles per hour is a fast car

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YeGoblynQueenne
>> Waymo has “driven” more than 5 billion miles in its simulation, according
to the company.

Impressive. That's roughly equivalent to about 0 miles driven in real-world
conditions.

~~~
bob_theslob646
I'm assuming sarcasm. What other way would you have them test besides current
ways that they are doing now?

