
Waymo to customers: “Completely driverless Waymo cars are on the way” - sahin-boydas
https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/09/waymo-to-customers-completely-driverless-waymo-cars-are-on-the-way/
======
Judgmentality
This sounds familiar. Here's an article from 2 years ago saying the same
thing:

[https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-
drivi...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-driving-
safety-driver-chandler-autonomous)

Hopefully this time it's the real deal. I remain skeptical.

~~~
anoncareer0212
The difference here is that now the "public paying customers" and "full self-
driving" customer groups are merged - so this means there's genuinely a paid
full self-driving service launched as of today! A miracle

~~~
Judgmentality
Calling this service public is misleading, especially since Waymo created the
bifurcation between Waymo One (no NDA) and Early Riders (NDA). Both of these
programs you have to apply for and be accepted, so neither is public. And
Waymo has made no claim of merging these. The upcoming driverless rides Waymo
refers to in this article could very well be for the Early Riders still under
an NDA - which theoretically could already be happening based on their past
announcements (although the abundance of cell phones strongly suggests this is
not the case).

This announcement is just a repeat of what they've said before. If they
actually do it this time then that's great, but they haven't actually said
anything new here.

~~~
tigershark
Wait, what? Waymo does also some rides hailed via lyft, or are you saying that
you have to apply also in lyft? If this is not a public service with paying
customers then I don’t know one...
[https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/way...](https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2019/06/27/waymo-
starts-self-driving-pick-ups-for-lyft-riders/amp/)

~~~
Judgmentality
I am unaware of anyone getting picked up in a self-driving car using Lyft
(outside of Aptiv in Las Vegas and other testing that has nothing to do with
Waymo). Although honestly I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong on this one,
and there have been people that got picked up in a Waymo using Lyft, but a
quick search on twitter and google shows up nothing (but I spent less than a
minute searching just now and welcome being proven wrong).

This just reinforces my point. Waymo can announce anything with vague
terminology of things happening "soon" but we still don't have any
verification of anything happening.

~~~
whyaduck
Lyft has been dispatching Waymo self-driving vans (with safety drivers) in
Chandler AZ for a while now. I've opted out of Waymo for my occasional rides
with Lyft, so I can't say how frequently they show up. But I can say there are
lots of the vans running in the service area.

~~~
xxxtentachyon
Why did you opt out?

~~~
whyaduck
All I can say is NDAs are a hell of a thing.

~~~
Judgmentality
Wait, the Waymo Lyft drives - the ones that are supposedly public - are under
NDA?! Well I guess that explains why I've never heard of it happening.

~~~
whyaduck
Not that I know of.

Waymo is still Waymo whether they're running rides on their own behalf, or
under the Lyft name. Someone who's ridden Waymo in an early adopter program
may make their decision on whether to ride Waymo under Lyft based on that
experience.

Get it?

------
harry8
How to predict:

1) Say what but don't say when.

2) Say when but don't say what.

Never, ever, ever bet tempted to say something specific will happen in a
bounded time range.

Flying cars are on the way! That disease you hate, a cure is coming! Next year
will be a big year for other breakthroughs not mentioned here.

~~~
p1necone
This is the golden rule of software dev too - promise features or promise a
release date, but _never_ both.

~~~
avip
Be conservative in _what_ will be delivered, and liberal with _when_ it'll be
delivered.

~~~
rightbyte
Does 'a liberal' overestimate or underestimate the time needed here?

~~~
amyassin
I think the liberty meant here is not estimating anything :)

------
just42
(throwaway account to protect friends at Waymo) data points of 2: 1\. took a
ride, at one point a sudden violent sewering and breaking for no apparent
reason - explanation from the backup driver - the truck in the next lane was
too close. Then it couldn't take a left turn into the parking lot in front of
Waymo HQ and was just stuck even though the maneuver was simplest to anyone.
remote driver couldn't do it anything and backup driver had to do the 'normal
driving'. 2: spoke to someone (again a waymo employee and her friend) just
after the ride and the friend was visibly shaken and verbatim expression
"worst ride of my life". This is all around the MV campus and in the last
couple of months. So Waymo's claim seems way off unless they are talking about
absolutely fixed paths, much like a public transit and maybe, just even then,
a big maybe.

------
jonplackett
I have very mixed feelings about autonomous cars. One side of me is so excited
about the prospect and finds it all amazing and futuristic. I love reading
about how Tesla and Waymo approach it differently.

The other side of me is absolutely not ready to trust my life to a machine -
even though I know I do that all the time in other ways in modern life.

I think it will be people's emotional evaluation that will matter more than
anything else and it will be a bumpy road to acceptance.

Driverless cara will probably be safer statistically but they’ll
simultaneously make errors a human wouldn’t, so some people are going to die
in what will seem like really dumb ways. This will be hard to accept even
though that already happens with human drivers. Probably because their
mistakes will be easier to identify with and explain.

~~~
2bitencryption
every now and then I do something while driving that, IMO, requires "human
cognition". Not just image recognition, obstacle avoidance, rule following,
etc.

Like, I'm cruising along at 45mph and a plastic bag is blown in front of my
car. Yes, I see an obstacle and need to make a decision about what to do - but
I do this as a human who _knows_ what a plastic bag is, and how it is far
safer to drive right over it than slam on the brakes. I know a plastic bag is
not, say, a Pomeranian.

Another example: I'm driving, and from beyond my plane of vision, a basketball
bounces onto the road up ahead. I can't see past a building, but I know I'm
near a park where kids frequently play, and I know it's possible a kid comes
running into the road to grab the ball. I proactively slow down. I guess you
could say a leavel-5 autonomous car would see the ball and slow down anyway,
but there's still that lack of cognition that concerns me.

We like to think of driving as a purely rule-based game that is simple enough
to model and train against. And I believe in 99% of situations, it is. But in
that 1%... the plastic bags and all that...

~~~
jonplackett
I think that sums it up really well. In those kind of edge cases like the
basket ball, if an AI driver didn’t slow down and then killed a kid, we’d all
be up in arms about It saying how obvious it was that a kid would run out, and
we’d have stopped, and we’d be right.

But at the same time that AI driver will have stopped in time when 10 other
kids jumped out without any warning because it has much, much better reflexes.

But it’ll be the first instance that will get all the airtime.

~~~
rubicon33
Nearly 1.25 million people die in road crashes each year.

Think about that.

Self driving cars aren't just a solution to nuisance of driving. They're a
solution to one of the leading causes of DEATH and INJURY in the country.

Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to point
at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"!

But I sure hope when we do that, the car points right back at us and asks "And
for the other 1.20 million lives I've saved this year? You would have killed
them"

~~~
rayiner
> Sure there are going to be edge cases where we as humans will be able to
> point at the car and say "damnit, we could have prevented that"!

This is a meaningless assertion unless you account for how often "edge cases"
arise. If unpredictable pedestrians, unplanned road construction, etc., is an
"edge case" the car basically won't work in DC or New York.

~~~
smt88
It doesn't need to work in every place to be useful or worthwhile.

Sleepy truck drivers are a major safety issue by themselves, and highways are
easier for SDCs to drive on.

------
colorincorrect
I know this is a big task, but could someone give/link me an overview of the
state of self-driving cars and the issues they currently face? I know its a
hard problem but very bright minds have been doing this for a while, so I'd
like to know what is the issue, since we've been told for a very long time
that the technology is right on the horizon.

------
pjdemers
This afternoon I was driving up Alma in Palo Alto, near the Embarcadero
underpass. There was a Waymo test van behind me, and another two cars in front
of me. My thought was: "look at me, actually driving my car, like a sucker".

~~~
masonic
If you then proceeded to Castro and made a right, you can see the Waymos
misread that intersection _every damn time_.

I've also seen Waymos make panicked Lane changes near the JCC many times,
_willing to come to a dead stop_ in the right lane and wait indefinitely for a
break, even though it's an easy go-down-another-block-and-Uturn

------
persistent
Waymo is so far ahead in this game. Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading
section and an "autopilot" that behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise
control with lane keeping that sometimes works, and a pretty big body count.
Uber has a dead pedestrian and a major lawsuit. Cruise has a lot of people on
staff but virtually nothing to show for it. Lyft exists. Waymo is in
production revenue service.

~~~
grecy
> _Tesla has the biggest online cheerleading section and an "autopilot" that
> behaves as a low-budget adaptive cruise control with lane keeping that
> sometimes works, and a pretty big body count_

I don't think you're being very accurate there. There are lots of videos of
people commuting 50+ miles to and from work every day without touching
anything while on the interstates, including interchanges. It's doing _a lot_
more than just lane keeping.

~~~
mdorazio
I disagree. It’s completely fair. Handling basic tasks on nice freeways is
exactly what adaptive cruise control + lane keeping is for. Last I checked,
autopilot couldn’t even stop for a stop sign unless you count “shadow mode”
claims.

~~~
xvector
I have never seen another TACC implementation that doesn’t ping from side to
side.

Which cars have you drive with a superior cruise control implementation?

~~~
persistent
Tesla will "ping" you straight into a concrete wall at full speed.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z8v9he74po](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5z8v9he74po)

~~~
shiftpgdn
It's trying to center in an extremely large lane. An easy fix would be to not
have a huge concrete wall jutting into the middle of the freeway without lane
markers.

I feel like people forget human drivers hit those same barriers with alarming
frequency.

~~~
gundmc
The lane markings looked pretty clear in this instance.

That being said, Tesla's cruise control capabilities are best in class, but
it's misleading marketing-speak to call it true self-driving.

------
gfodor
So sounds like we'll get level 4 autonomy in 2020. Once that happens the
discussion around the nature of the approach to level 5 (which is probably
asymptotic) will be a welcome change vs today where people are questioning if
we'll ever have a consumer successfully use an autonomous vehicle.

~~~
dev_dull
the 80/20 principle says it's going to be a long, long time before level 5
autonomy is reached. That's 100% in all conditions. In fact, I would say it's
more theory than attainable.

There's a reason they're testing in Phoenix. It has almost no Inclement
weather. Throw a little snow, mud, or sleet in there and it gets hairy fast.
Level 2 is basically the 20% of effort in 80/20\. It's exponential effort from
then on out.

~~~
panarky
We shouldn't set a dramatically higher safety standard for autonomous drivers
than human drivers.

When autonomous drivers have the same or fewer injuries per billion miles
driven as human drivers, then for all practical purposes it doesn't matter if
it's level 4 or level 5.

~~~
ipython
So it’s ok to have 1+ million dead per year? [0]

If so why go through all this trouble to creat autonomous vehicles? I, for
one, am glad this was not the prevailing attitude when commercial airliner
regulatory bodies were set up.

[0] [https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-
facts/](https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/)

~~~
triceratops
Yes, even if autonomous vehicles are on average exactly as safe as human
drivers, they're still worth the effort. Here are some reasons:

1\. They're cheaper. This sounds crude, until you realize that this makes
things like buses and shared rides far more viable. Meaning millions of people
have a better commute and collectively save many lifetimes worth of time. It
can also mean less air pollution, due to less traffic congestion (this only
applies if congestion pricing is done), which will also save lives.

2\. They can always get better over time. Humans can't.

3\. Fewer parking lots are needed, which makes cities far more pleasant to
live in.

4\. Disabled, elderly people and children have better mobility, and aren't
dependent on others to drive them everywhere.

~~~
majormajor
> 1\. They're cheaper. This sounds crude, until you realize that this makes
> things like buses and shared rides far more viable. Meaning millions of
> people have a better commute and collectively save many lifetimes worth of
> time. It can also mean less air pollution, due to less traffic congestion
> (this only applies if congestion pricing is done), which will also save
> lives.

IMO autonomous vehicles are just going to further push public transit into
something just for the poor. All the convenience and comfort and privacy of
sitting in your own vehicle, but now you don't have to drive yourself! Why
would you choose anything else?

~~~
anchpop
Sure, but but buses would be cheaper to run if they didn't need a driver. My
university runs a bus that you have to call and it drives directly to you and
picks you up, I could imagine something like that being more common (for
public transit)

~~~
masonic

      buses would be cheaper to run if they didn't need a driver
    

But those drivers will be paid regardless, given the strength of public sector
unions. So, no savings.

~~~
jodrellblank
But the buses wouldn't need windscreens or wipers or chairs or steering wheels
or pedals or payment/coin handling, and the drivers wouldn't need uniforms or
eye tests or retraining on routes or overtime or time and a half for holidays.
Bus companies won't have to insure the busses for human drivers.

So, yes savings. Nyah on your "unions defending humans against exploitation
are the worst thing ever" narrative.

------
mikelyons
Just a reminder that they're on their way. We have no idea when they'll get
here, but they just wanted to say that they haven't forgotten that we were
promised driverless cars. Just to remind us in case we forgot. Just wanted to
make sure that we don't forget about waymo!

------
stubish
Driverless, but they didn't say autonomous (yet). I think this means the
safety driver will be remote, teleoperating. It is the obvious next step, and
if things go well they can start lowering the ratio of operator:car in the way
that drone operations already do.

------
Causality1
Nowadays I hope it takes a very long time. As Elon Musk pointed out, once cars
can independently generate income as autonomous taxis, there's no reason to
sell them to the public at all. Self-driving cars isn't the death of personal
driving because they'll be too convenient; it's the death of personal driving
because we won't be able to buy a car at a reasonable margin over
manufacturing costs.

~~~
esoterica
Why would companies not sell autonomous cars if customers exist who are
willing to pay a reasonable margin over manufacturing costs? The fact that
autonomous taxis are viable doesn’t preclude personal car ownership.

~~~
Causality1
Because they would make far more money adding the car to their own fleet. Why
sell a car for $40,000 when it could generate $300,000 in revenue over a
decade? Tesla has already said they'll stop selling to the public after they
have autonomous driving completely safe and working.

~~~
repsilat
> _...when it could generate $300,000 in revenue over a decade?_

If markets are competitive the profits will be lower. If markets are not
competitive (not many companies can make or license self-driving AI) the rest
will sell cars with steering wheels.

The variable that is _actually_ important is demand. If lots of people want
their own car, or want to drive their car, the market will provide those
things. If most people are content to rent, ownership might become an unusual
luxury.

------
yourapostasy
I wonder when rental car buses at airports will adopt autonomous driving. On
the surface it might seem ideal because it is repeatedly the same route, but
the density, diversity and loose rules of vehicular and pedestrian traffic
would make it a very challenging environment for machine learning, and I
speculate whether or not that might accelerate building the "dense urban
environment" corpus.

------
hinkley
"Driverless cars are on the way" is going to be the catchphrase of a dystopian
horror movie at some point. I just don't know when.

~~~
beerandt
But will they get here before fusion power? Which I hear is about 30 years
out.

~~~
hinkley
I'm still a little amazed that the AI hype train is still running. That's been
the fusion power of CS for almost as long as fusion power has been 30 years
out.

------
undefined3840
I want to see the terms of service agreement. Does anyone know if you can sue
for wrongful injury or death? Or do you waive your rights away to Google?

------
choppaface
Will they be the current cars, or cars with the new next-gen hardware that are
substantially safer? The cars that end up driving could signal a lot to the
industry.

New lidar was spotted a few months ago and more recently on the Jaguar cars
and the CEO said it’s an order of magnitude better:
[https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/04/21/new-
waymo-...](https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2019/04/21/new-waymo-lidar-
spotted/) [https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-iaa-
frankfurt-2019-b3cca36d84...](https://medium.com/waymo/waymo-iaa-
frankfurt-2019-b3cca36d8479)

One would imagine this early announcement comes in reaction to their recent
“valuation” cut: [https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-
cut-40percen...](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/27/waymo-valuation-
cut-40percent-by-morgan-stanley-to-105-billion.html)

If Waymo starts driving without safety drivers en-masse, even on small fixed
routes, it will signal certain takeover metrics have been hit. It will be
interesting to see if Waymo uses existing cars (the ML and planners just got
better) or if they use new hardware and signal a certain lidar improvement is
necessary for achieving a viable takeover rate.

The signal won’t be clear but should be there. And then it’s up to the rest of
the industry to show how fast they can react to the change.

------
an4rchy
Good to see this finally happening. I wonder how they're going to scale this
out though -- AVs are still pretty expensive to build/operate
(COGS/TeleOps/Maintenance etc)

Haven't seen a recent study/article around cost/ROI (not sure if these have
gone down significantly) -- any recommendations?

------
c3534l
I'm starting to think driverless cars are this decade's big vaporware.

~~~
bgilroy26
What was last decade's big vqporware?

~~~
c3534l
Ethanol fuel as a green alternative to gasoline, maybe.

------
mikerg87
This is cool. One thing that always bothers me me with these announcements,
you never hear of them testing in the rain or fog in London or Boston in
February or string winds in Kabaaa.

------
macspoofing
If you don't put a launch date on it, it's not real.

------
baron816
I just need it to take me to the bar and back. Is that really so hard?

------
eli
It’s gonna be a few years off for another ten years, at least

------
m3kw9
Hmm no mention of level 4 or 5.

~~~
jedberg
Given that it is geo-fenced and they'll have staff nearby if not in the car
(just not behind the wheel) I'm gonna say it's probably level 4.

------
Pxtl
Relevant xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/678/](https://xkcd.com/678/)

------
seibelj
I guess they are fundraising right now? Not sure why they would keep promoting
something that won’t happen for a decade.

~~~
Gustomaximus
1) A decade? It's happening right now.

2) Check Alphabets/Googles bank balance. They have a few bucks they can invest
for now.

