
Hailing a Driverless Ride in a Waymo - msh
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/01/hailing-a-driverless-ride-in-a-waymo/
======
jedberg
Last year I got a chance to ride in an autonomous vehicle by a Waymo
competitor in San Francisco, in and around Market Street.

It handled every situation as well as or better than a human would, including
trash bags in the road, a truck driving the wrong way down a one way street,
and numerous unpredictable pedestrians.

It was that day that I was convinced that we would have driverless tech by
2020, and the only thing that would stop it would be laws and regulations.

~~~
sfkdjf9j3j
So, it's now November of 2019, and it seems unlikely that driverless cars will
be ubiquitous or even an available option by 2020. If you could go back and
change some laws and regulations, which ones would you have fixed to hit the
2020 prediction?

~~~
jedberg
This article make it sounds like I was right. The author just took a ride in a
driverless car. Which is limited to driving in Arizona due to legal
restrictions.

But to answer your question, we’d need a whole different legal framework about
liability for driverless cars instead of technological restrictions.

Like for example, the law ~says~ would say “one person must be designated as
legally liable for the vehicle” and that’s it. Drive your driverless car on
any road you want. If it hits someone, the designated person is liable.

~~~
Noos
Why would anyone buy a car where they can be held liable for the software
defects of the manufacturer? The driver has no control over the software and
cannot compensate for it. You're blaming them for putting the thing on the
road at all, and the end result would be not to bother.

~~~
Terretta
Why would anyone buy a dog where they can be held liable for the genetic
disposition of its parents?

The dog has a degree of autonomy or self-agency, and can make decisions that
put its owner at legal risk. Someone else brought it into the world, but you,
ultimately, made the purchase.

You made it yours, the problem’s on you.

~~~
smt88
This is a terrible analogy from every conceivable angle.

Dog owners have physical and (some) psychological control over their dogs. Not
true of SDCs.

Dogs are not programmed, they're bred.

Even very dangerous dogs can be kept in a way that renders them unable to harm
anyone. Not true of a car that must drive around in public.

No breeder guarantees a dog's behavior for its lifetime. SDC manufacturers
will guarantee the car's ability to drive.

~~~
itake
I think a better comparison would be if the passenger in a taxi had to pay the
taxi driver's speeding tickets.

------
BIair
I used to think my daughter may never drive, because autonomous vehicles were
rumored to always be just around the corner.

Now I think she may never ride in an autonomous vehicle. Do autonomous
vehicles drive in the rain? We live in a northern state where snow remains on
the ground for months at a time in ever shifting depths and banks along roads.
Lidar is unable to see through the snow. Road surfaces are sometimes wet,
sometimes snow covered, sometimes ice. Visibility can drop to zero.

I wonder if tech companies will spend the time and expense to solve these
difficult problems for a rather small percentage of the population.

~~~
nexuist
Baby steps. Once the majority of human drivers get off the road we will almost
certainly see an evolution in traffic control systems which will allow self
driving vehicles to conquer poor weather conditions. As of now, each vehicle
can only rely on its own sensor package to understand the world.

Tesla already has a system in place that lets one car learn from thousands of
others; ie if everyone disconnects autopilot at a certain turn each car will
learn to slow down even if they have never encountered that turn before. The
future will have more of this.

Self driving has mostly been a solved problem, it just only works in ports,
warehouses, docks, and factory floors. You might say those are tightly
regulated spaces, but so are roads! All it takes is political will to scale up
the same systems that guide robots today and install them onto every highway
and main road.

~~~
KineticLensman
> All it takes is political will to scale up the same systems that guide
> robots today and install them onto every highway and main road

Well, that and a massive amount of infrastructure spend.

~~~
steelframe
>> All it takes is political will to scale up the same systems that guide
robots today and install them onto every highway and main road

> Well, that and a massive amount of infrastructure spend.

And before we put anything close to that kind of money toward autonomous cars,
I demand the spending go toward urban micromobility infrastructure first.

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xivzgrev
Man I wish I could upvote this 1000 times. This is amazing. How many fucking
edge cases there are in driving, and to be able to develop a reliable
algorithm that can handle all sorts of situations it has never seen before.

I’m also glad to see their rollout seems to be very measured. The standard is
safety is so much higher.

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agent008t
It's amazing how HN sentiment on driverless cars seems to change from week to
week, from article to article.

~~~
skrebbel
HN doesn't have a single opinion. It's different people posting.

~~~
deadmutex
There is a bit of group think though.

~~~
Groxx
Links that appeal to one group more than another tend to attract that group
more. That's pretty normal.

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ufmace
This article touches a bit on what I think is one of the more interesting
problems - exactly where to pick up and drop off. I gotta wonder what they're
doing for that. I guess most suburban homes and apartments aren't too hard,
but I wonder how they handle stuff like malls, stadiums, airports, festivals,
etc.

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etaioinshrdlu
I got some thoughts on the lidar vs vision debate.

Remember the goal is to drive better than humans. Lidar gives better-than-
human depth sensing performance in many cases.

Furthermore, human eyes are substantially better than small digital cameras at
this point, in terms of low light sensitivity and resolution.

It may be a problem that lidar is ugly right now. But that can change.

I'm of the belief that more and better sensors is better.

~~~
TaylorAlexander
I don’t think anyone debates that LIDAR plus cameras is “better” than cameras
alone. The real question is whether it is possible without LIDAR. (AFAIK all
self driving cars use cameras even when they also have LIDAR).

~~~
mercenario
‘Anyone relying on lidar is doomed,’ Elon Musk.

Around 1:41:00
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ucp0TTmvqOE)

------
Zush8phoog
Could somebody estimate how much additional sensors cost over the stock car
waymo uses? I see at least 4 LIDARs if I am not mistaken...

~~~
dpiers
Waymo designs and builds their own LIDAR units. As of almost 3 years ago,
estimated costs per unit had fallen to $5,000.

[https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-
sta...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/06/waymo-to-start-selling-standalone-
lidar-sensors/amp/)

------
greenyouse
If using driverless cars for rideshare companies becomes more popular will
they start designing cars for computer control only? Has that already been
started?

It seems like they would have no use for human steering controls and they
seats could be moved around to open up more space for passengers.

~~~
Noos
They shouldn't. What happens if the car runs our of gas or the
software/internet is down and it needs to be manually steered even a slight
distance? Say up onto the lift in a mechanic's garage? There are at least few
situations where direct control is easier and safer than software control.

~~~
IanCal
Being designed to be movable short distances manually is wildly different from
being designed to _always_ be driven manually.

> There are at least few situations where direct control is easier and safer
> than software control.

Is there any direct control now? Acceleration, breaking and steering all have
tech interaction.

If you don't need completely direct control and just need manual control,
being able to connect an Xbox controller to a car and drive it at max 3mph
would probably deal with most issues (like the garage example).

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jagged-chisel
OT: This title parses strangely. Why are you "in a Waymo" hailing a driverless
ride?

Ah, a Waymo is a driverless ride, and you have hailed one. I don't think I've
ever seen someone say "Hailing a Ride in a Lyft" or "...in an Uber."

------
humbleMouse
I'll be impressed when they can make a car that can drive thru a foot of snow
in minnesota.

~~~
falcor84
Generally speaking, getting an AI to learn anything that a human can learn is
easy, the hard parts are the competencies we acquired through evolution [0].
As such, once self-driving cars fully reach the level of the average 17-year
old new driver, it should be a relatively easy path to the level of the best
drivers in the world.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox)

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libpcap
Lidar seems to be a necessary augmentation to complement cameras to be able to
achieve this level of drive autonomy.

------
valine
A geofenced robo taxi service does nothing to improve my life. The real
usefulness of self driving cars will come when you can fall asleep in the back
as it drives across the country. Also you can’t set up a mobile office in the
back of a taxi, so productivity in robo taxis will be no better than regular
taxis.

For self driving to be truly useful to the end consumer car ownership needs to
be an option.

~~~
imtringued
You can already sleep in an aircraft, train, bus or car as long as someone
else is driving the vehicle. I don't see how that is innovative.

~~~
valine
A car can go pretty much anywhere, public transportation not so much. If you
can sleep in a self driving car then logistically much more of the world will
be accessible to you. Hit a button, go to sleep, wake up wherever you want. To
me this would be much more exciting than cheaper taxies.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Except sleeping in a car (or a bus, train, airplane) is really really
uncomfortable. But cars more than the rest, since you are much more restrained
due to seat belts.

~~~
valine
That’s because cars are not designed to be slept in. Inflatable mattress and a
seatbelt/harness designed to be worn lying down and the problem is solved.

~~~
falcor84
Exactly. And perhaps it's even that once autonomous cars have proven
themselves enough, you wouldn't even need a seatbelt for a regular ride. The
car might just beep once every few hours to ask you to buckle up on
particularly dangerous sections, like on an airplane.

