
Waymo’s Backseat Drivers: Confidential Data Reveals Self-Driving Taxi Hurdles - ballmers_peak
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/waymos-backseat-drivers-confidential-data-reveals-self-driving-taxi-hurdles?pu=hackernewsfuxi21&utm_medium=unlock&utm_source=hackernews
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Animats
That's useful info. I wonder where they had trouble with erratic steering. One
Cruise video shows that where driving is alongside parked cars on a narrow
street and the parking is irregular. The self driving vehicle is trying to
stay in its half of the street unless absolutely necessary.

Waymo still has to use "safety drivers". So far, nobody seems to have full
self driving without "safety drivers". Which makes it useless. That's the big
milestone to look for. When Waymo can get rid of the safety drivers, which
they tried briefly last year, they're getting close to something useable.

Some products take a long time to bring to market. Xerography - first copy
made in 1939, commercial success 1959. Although we're now 15 years after the
DARPA Grand Challenge, so we're coming close to that 20 year wait.

Television - first broadcast, 1928, commercial success, around 1948. So 20
years agaon.

Roller bearings - Timken founded 1898, Timken bearings in 80% of US cars by
the 1920s. 20 years again. (Although it took a really long time for them to
convert railroads. First locomotive with roller bearings, 1923. In 1949, they
were struggling to get railroads to put roller bearings on freight cars.[1] In
1991, roller bearings became mandatory for US inter-line interchange of
freight cars.) Air brakes and automatic couplers only took 7 years, but that's
because the U.S. Congress made railroads convert and standardize between 1893
and 1900.

What took a really long time, in post-1900 technology? (Before 1900,
manufacturing infrastructure wasn't really ready for fast deployment.)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-1EZ6K7bpQ)

~~~
zdragnar
> So far, nobody seems to have full self driving without "safety drivers".

A common saying around here is that we have two seasons: winter and (road)
construction.

Construction zones have pretty much every obstacle to automated driving you
can think of:

* painted lanes that don't correlate to the temporary lanes marked by cones

* lanes that don't correspond to pre-programmed maps / gps

* irregular and unpredictable vehicle and pedestrian entrances and exits (construction workers and trucks)

* Areas where traffic is reduced to a single lane for both directions, and must take turns coordinated by humans with signs at each end of the lane

* speed limits marked by temporary signs

* rough, temporary transitions between pavement and gravel

Unless we can somehow get every state to compel every road construction
company and every autonomous vehicle maker to use a single communication
protocol, implement it at every construction site (so autonomous cars are made
aware of these dangers) it's not going to happen.

Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start
convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force
them out of their lanes on normal roads.

It's conceivable that the coordinated effort could happen, but I'm not going
to hold my breath (due to the sheer increase in cost to the government) nor
will I trust that said protocol will have fail-proof security.

~~~
falcor84
>Oh, and said protocol has to be hack-proof so trouble-makers can't start
convincing cars that they're in the middle of a construction zone and force
them out of their lanes on normal roads.

Why would it be easier for trouble-makers to fool autonomous cars? As a human
driver, I'd be fooled by pretty much any road marking or guy in an orange
vest.

~~~
nishantvyas
Correct.

It’s amazing, how much forgiving we can be for human errors ( accidents every
year) but absolutely not for machine/autonomous vehicles, even when,
statistically speaking, machines may make better decision much faster(or at-
least no worse than human judgement)... I guess feeling/perception of being in
control is more important to us...

Other interesting observation I find in every autonomous vehicle discussion
is, how we only focus on edge cases... when in reality every tool that we use
(including the car we been driving) today are built for general use case and
operate under mostly a control environment.

Rather if we think autonomous car as additional pair of eyes and hands when we
need it most might serve us well in short run before the technology gets
mature over next decade or two.

I’ll be really happy and relaxed if my car can mostly (70-80%) drive it self
to daily commute or next trip to LA; expecting it to be my chauffeur is bit
too much, personally.

~~~
beefield
This is why I wonder why platooning technology is so much less hyped. Give me
a platooning hardware kit to my current car, enough users after which I can
join on my longer trips and literally more than 95% of my self driving car
needs are covered. I really do not care if I need to drive a 10 minute stint
on the city every now and then. And If I do, I can take a taxi. But getting my
hands off the wheel and eyes off the road on the highway is what would have
real utility to me.

~~~
dmoy
Platooning kind of messes up highway traffic because people need to either
cross a ton of lanes to get in and out of the platoon (if the platoon is on
the left), or non-platoons can't get on/off (if the platoon is on the right).
If everything was forced to platoon on highways it would work. But that's like
30-50 yrs later, _after_ the tech is introduced, barring some really radical
legislation with huge popular and state support.

~~~
beefield
Not sure if it would be techically possible to have gaps in the platoon after
every five cars, but at least it would be trivial to set max size of one
platoon to something reasonable.

~~~
pnutjam
You honestly trust some random driver at the front to make your decisions?

~~~
beefield
Well, that sounds pretty much like flying commercial flights or traveling by
bus. So I guess based on my travel history, answer must be yes.

~~~
pnutjam
When I fly, it's a trained pilot. Even for driving is stricter licensing for
cdl.

~~~
beefield
And you think there would be no extra qualifications required for the platoon
heads?

------
dmix
> The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience
> inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn’t disclose the information even
> though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

Why would it riding on public roads matter when it's about what happens
_inside_ a private vehicle during a high-value R&D experiment? They got
permission from Arizona to run the tests and it will likely benefit Arizona's
economy in return being the first to get the most training data.

~~~
jessriedel
That phrase is just thrown in there to stoke the reader and create a story out
of nothing. It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

~~~
calcifer
> It indicates a lack of journalistic integrity.

Or, the author is suggesting that public resources should be used for public,
not private benefit?

~~~
jrockway
How is someone driving to work in their private vehicle public benefit? The
roads are for driving on, nothing more, nothing less.

~~~
pnutjam
Not true, the roads are for the use and benefit of citizens.

~~~
zodiac
How about tax-paying non-citizen residents, tourists etc?

~~~
falcolas
They pay for their road use through gasoline and sales taxes.

~~~
thwythwy
And Waymo got a deal from Arizona that waived all sales tax and provided for
unlimited free gas?! That's outrageous!!

------
mdorazio
Interesting analysis using comments/rider scores. 10% improvement over 6
months is actually pretty good, though. Even if that rate slows as trickier
edge cases get handled, It still implies early 2020s for true driverless
readiness in select locations. That's pretty much on track with overall
predictions for the autonomous market.

~~~
mactrey
10 percentage points, 25% relative improvement (40% non-5 stars to 30%), seems
quite good to me.

Although I wonder if seasonality is important here - obviously Phoenix isn't
Minnesota but could driving conditions have been worse in Q1 compared to this
summer, from the perspective of a self-driving car?

~~~
mdorazio
Definitely could be a factor. Other drivers might also be more used to seeing
them on the road, which could have a positive impact in some way. I think the
overall trend is probably pretty strong at that level of improvement, though.

------
xivzgrev
Despite the complaints, this is fucking amazing. I remember just earlier this
decade I was pissed off at a taxi company for saying a taxi will come in 20
minutes...maybe, dispatcher can’t promise. Now we got Uber/lyft, and
then...DRIVERLESS vehicles?? Always seemed like science fiction but the future
is here...

The bitch of this business is the long tail of possible scenarios - before
people have confidence you need to solve the long tail which is hard because
not as much data / much less predictable. Sounds like from article though they
are making headway!

------
avocado4
10500 rides, 70% are rated 5 stars (perfect). 10% increase from last year.

~~~
scarmig
5 stars isn't perfect. 5 stars is "there's nothing so bad that I want to take
the time to complain about it."

Waymo employees, who are encouraged to be especially tough, give reviews that
are 47% negative. That's likely closer to the metric for perfect.

We don't get perfection from human drivers either, of course. Though part of
the promise of Waymo is much better performance than humans, which it
apparently isn't close to yet. And this data is for relatively common cases:
for the long tail, one-in-a-million case, the conventional wisdom is that
humans would do better.

~~~
falcor84
If I were "encouraged to be especially tough", I can promise you that the
taxis I ride in would get a much worse score than 47% negative.

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
For entirely different reasons, though. Your taxi driver is not going to
randomly freak out because they mistook a bush for a pedestrian or didn't
understand what traffic cones mean. The bad taxi driver is just going to drive
too fast while talking on their cellphone.

~~~
BigJono
> or didn't understand what traffic cones mean

You'd be surprised. I've had a taxi driver turn up train tracks before.

------
gok
What a strange thing to have leaked. Not details how the tech works, but the
database of customer ride reviews?

~~~
yifanl
I imagine ride reviews are considerably less confidential than training data.

~~~
m3at
Yes, also a few hundreds of terabytes of data are much less convenient to
upload and share.

------
lallysingh
I wonder if they spread out to more areas - where there's more variety of
driving conditions - if they could start rating difficulty well enough to
estimate when they would be able to operate in each one.

So maybe they could start working in 2 years in sprawled suburbs in hot areas
where you don't have many cyclists or pedestrians? Or is that Phoenix already
and it's still too hard?

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netinstructions
I wonder how many people are upset that the vehicles had to drop them off in a
valid passenger load/unload zone as opposed to the usual Lyft / Uber tactic of
parking in a no parking / no stopping zone, bike lane, crosswalk, etc because
it's most convenient for the drivers and passengers (at the safety and expense
of everyone else sharing the space)...

That quote at the end:

> I guess Lyft has me spoiled. I like getting dropped off in front of the
> place im going too [sic] not just in the parking lot....

~~~
btrettel
Cyclist here. In my experience, the majority of the time a driver stops or
parks in the bike lane in an urban area in the US (e.g., I live in Austin),
there's a legal parking/stopping spot within a reasonable walking distance,
often within 50 to 100 feet. (If this isn't true where you live, consider the
difference in the location. There are probably exceptions too. I'm told that
legal parking isn't typically close in SF.)

Then again, my idea of "reasonable walking distance" seems longer than most
people's. Having spoken to many drivers who have parked in the bike lane, I'm
amazed by how negatively some have reacted to me recommending that they park
as little as 50 feet away. In some cases the non-bike-lane spot is closer but
the convenience of pulling to the side of the road rather than doing a more
complicated maneuver seems irresistible.

If Waymo follows the law, good for them. Makes me more likely to be a customer
of theirs in the future.

~~~
scarmig
In the right light, this is a competitive advantage for Waymo. Prove that it's
possible to have a ride hailing app that strictly follows municipal
stopping/parking rules, and then encourage cities to start strictly enforcing
those rules and ticketing offenders. Self-driving cars would presumably be
better than humans at following those rules (at least, if we're imagining a
world where self-driving cars work safely and consistently).

~~~
Arbalest
A somewhat ironic form of regular regulatory capture, in that it should have
already been captive...

------
damq
> The data provide the most detailed view yet of the passenger experience
> inside vehicles from Waymo, which doesn’t disclose the information even
> though it uses public roads as its testing grounds.

What's up with this statement? Should I be forced to publicize my phone calls
just because I made them while driving on public roads? It's utterly bizarre
that the author thinks he is entitled to see Waymo's data.

~~~
ForrestN
I'm not sure if I agree with the writer's statement here, and I'm not sure the
right outcome is for Waymo to share data, but I don't think your analogy
works.

Your individual phone calls are made as part of your general participation as
an individual in society. One of the largest companies in the world, which
does its best to avoid paying taxes, is using public roads as a fundamental
part of the infrastructure for a project to generate data.

Maybe a better analogy is people who grow large amounts of marijuana in
national parks? Yes, it's true that the growers are part of the public, and
that the public owns the land, but...

I wouldn't have a problem with stuff like this if corporations were taxed at
reasonable rates, and didn't participate so wholeheartedly in efforts to
corrupt our democracy. Google donates to many truly vile, despicable
politicians in order to shirk accountability, hamper regulation, and
accomplish just this sort of de-facto subsidy and others like it.

~~~
kahnjw
How about UPS/FedEx? They certainly test new products on public roads and have
no requirement to make public the resulting data.

~~~
ForrestN
As you can read above, I'm not arguing for the mandatory disclosure of data.

~~~
kahnjw
As you can read above, I wasn't implying you were. Merely pointing out
another, perhaps better, analogy.

------
ttul
The slow progress is not an indictment of self driving. This is one of the
toughest engineering challenges ever mounted by humanity.

~~~
dumbfoundded
Yeah, that's a bit of an overstatement.

We created nukes, landed on the moon, took sludge out of the ground and used
it to power the world. We connected this world with wires and glass fibers to
build a real-time global communication system that also gathered all of the
world's information in a singular and immediately accessible place.

Building a self driving car is hard but really not as tough.

How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the
federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a year
for a decade).

~~~
alkonaut
My guess is that it (full 100% self driving) has around the same technological
difficulty as putting a man on Mars. It also depends on what constitutes
"100%" of course.

> How quickly do think we'd get self driving cars if the USA spent 4% of the
> federal budget on it like NASA received in the 60s. (That's about $40B a
> year for a decade).

At that cost we could adapt all infrastructure to suit self driving cars,
instead of developing self driving cars to adapt to human infrastructure. But
I think that kind of cost is always going to be beyond what's acceptable.

I think the discussion is mostly pointless because of diminishing returns: if
you can have "99.9% full self driving" for a tiny fraction of the cost, who
would want to pay to go from 99.9% to 100%?

Initially human remote drivers will take care of the rest. And then there is a
very slow commercial race towards using fewer humans that drives the very slow
march to 99.9% and 99.99% self driving and so on. Driving the last second of
the last edge case route is basically something that requires AGI (as long as
we don't adapt infrastructure).

~~~
Miraste
I agree with most of this, but remote drivers are completely unfeasible with
current or planned network infrastructure. You could drive with acceptable
levels of sensor bandwidth and latency right next to an unobstructed low-
utilization 5G tower, and that's about it. That's unlikely to correspond with
the locations one would need remote drivers.

~~~
alkonaut
Luckily the hardest situations at least occur in cities and not on highways,
and cities have good broadband. But yes, it's still "100%, but only here"
a.k.a. not 100%

I think remote drivers will probably have to "rescue" cars without piloting
them, usually just assessing a situation and overriding something (driving
through an obstacle etc). A passenger (if there is one) could do the same. But
sometimes actual remote driving would be required of course.

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scarmig
What's HN's stance on publishers posting links directly to HN?

To be clear, this isn't meant as a blast against The Information or
ballmers_peak; they're transparent about their affiliation and that this is an
article white listed for readers referred by Hacker News. It's also a totally
appropriate article for HN.

That said, I kind of wish there was some in-line indicator of a motivated
submission source. I guess a downside would be unethical publishers just
laundering their submissions through ostensibly unaffiliated accounts, but I'd
feel more comfortable knowing that we did have some kind of system here to
encourage transparency.

~~~
abtinf
As long as HN has effective vote ring detection, I don’t see any issue with
directly posting links.

The crowd helps us here and paternalistic rules can only prevent it from
functioning correctly. If the post is good, it will move up. If not, it won’t.

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jeffk_teh_haxor
A week ago Lyft driver who drove like a maniac. Will he get a saucy exposé
too?

~~~
DiogenesKynikos
If you're planning on cloning him millions of times and putting him behind the
wheel of every car, then yes, he does deserve an exposé!

------
rammy1234
why autonomous cars get so much attention ? Why they are always on news , why
they always trend. Apparently for a common man why we are excited when we
should be skeptical and more careful. so anything other than excited.

But for some reason these driverless cars do get most attention.

------
CloudYeller
When are they going to just seal off an area so it's self-driving vehicles
only, and test them there? In a 100% self driving environment, edge cases are
probably much easier to reason about. And if the future is 100% self driving,
they should probably get some training data from that environment anyway.

~~~
tlb
Waymo has quite a large autonomous-only test facility.
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/inside-
waymos-secret-testing-and-simulation-facilities/537648/) They also use it to
populate simulations with realistic traffic models.

------
moomin
This might just be me, but it strikes me that the biggest problem self-driving
cars has is that no-one actually needs them. Don’t get me wrong, you try to
sell me a car that has the (fully capable) feature I’d definitely want it. But
need it? Well, you’re not going to solve the problem of too many cars and the
slow traffic that results with cars. It’d be hard to get special treatment for
cars with a premium feature. Then there’s the taxi model, where the aim of the
game is to undercut people that Uber has already managed to push below minimum
wage. I mean, there’s a margin there, but is it really “Next Google” sized?
Even with dedicated vehicles, that’s a lot of hardware to maintain.

Now let’s assume it’s successful and sustainable. Let’s say we also manage to
get it to work for freight. What have we achieved? Well, we’ve put a couple
more of the jobs available to low-skilled workers on the scrap heap. There
will be consequences to doing that, but I doubt Waymo will be footing that
bill.

~~~
gpm
There are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US [0]. They are paid at least
minimum wage. Alphabet has 148.299B revenue per year [1]. A conservative
estimate of the revenue waymo could earn just by replacing truck drivers is
7.25 (minimum US minimum wage) * 40 (working hours per weeks) * 50 (working
weeks per year) * 3.5 million = $50 billion a year.

I think once you expand past the US, and past trucks, this is definitely "Next
Google sized".

[0]
[https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Indust...](https://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industry_Data.aspx)

[1]
[https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/reve...](https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/GOOG/alphabet/revenue)

~~~
Noos
That's a pyrhhic victory though. You'd essentially convert trucking into
retail, making a semi-skilled workforce as well as small entrepreneurial one
into a just-in time near contract workforce with high barriers to entry to
start businesses.

