
A Waymo One Rider’s Experiences Highlight Autonomous Rideshare’s Shortcomings - motiw
https://futurism.com/waymo-one-early-rider-autonomous-vehicle
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ivanhoe
Carl wants to live in the world where traffic is safe, no accidents happen,
but wants AI that can drive in human-like aggressive manner. Carl's
expectations are a bit too high, I'd say...

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crooked-v
For my part, I'd just want the results to be very predictable. If I know that
a drive from A to B will always take X minutes +/\- 5%, I can just use that as
part of my day doing whatever while the car drives itself.

~~~
Cyph0n
That simply not going to happen until essentially all other cars on the road
are self-driving cars.

~~~
twblalock
And when the weather is perfect and the snowplows always clear the roads on
time, etc.

There are too many variables. It's incredibly difficult to get consistent on-
time performance out of a train system which has far fewer variables to
anticipate. It will never happen for cars even if they are self-driving.

~~~
njarboe
Unless they also have their own lane/road. Maybe in built up areas we will
have to build tunnels for them.

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seibelj
It’s mind blowing that even skilled software engineers were fooled into
thinking that self driving cars were only months away. The hype was blinding.

The amount of complexity involved in a self driving car is unfathomable. They
can’t even get the thing to work on simple trips in mega-sprawl Phoenix with
perfect weather and solid lane markings. We are decades out, and maybe only if
they ban human drivers.

~~~
empath75
The hype is because not very long ago nobody even expected that what they’re
doing now would be possible. That they can even do what they’re doing now is
an amazing achievement.

It turns out that it’s not enough and we need another breakthrough, but it
might not have been possible to see what the limitations of the new approach
were going to be when they were doing new, previously impossible things every
week.

I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after the
moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy. We had been bound to
the surface of the earth for thousands of years of civilization and then
suddenly it seemed like we had no limitations. You can probably excuse a
little bit of excess enthusiasm.

~~~
rayiner
> I think this is similar to the belief in the 20th century that right after
> the moon, we’d be colonizing mars and exploring the galaxy.

The takeaway from the history of 20th century technology is that a given field
plateaus much more quickly than the optimists expect, sometimes short of
what’s needed to be truly useful. Something simple like voice recognition has
been an area of intense research for 30-40 years. And it’s still not useful
for all but the simplest things. I have 10 Siri reminders from the last couple
of days. 4 are so badly mangled I can’t figure out what I meant to remind
myself. Barring some fundamental advance, we’re not going to be talking to our
computers as a primary input.

The same thing with other technologies. We broke the sound barrier, but never
developed the tech to make supersonic travel cost effective. We put a man on
the moon, but have yet to develop the tech to colonize off world bodies.
Transistor speed and density have plateaued. After years of doubling CPU clock
speeds every year, Intel crawled from 3 GHz to 5 GHz over 15 years. (If CPU
speeds improved so slowly back in the day, we’d be using 200 MHz Pentium Pros
today.)

~~~
dreamcompiler
Likewise flying cars. They have existed for several years; I saw one fly in
2013. But they cost at least $250,000, or (for newer electric models) they
have ridiculously short runtimes. These drawbacks weren't part of the plan in
bubbly 1960s predictions, and they're not going to be quickly overcome.

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maxyme
Living in Phoenix for several years and working in Chandler (the headquarters
for the self driving car division where my office was actually on the initial
training route before they allowed passengers) I can say the cars suffer from
being overly conservative. I don't think this is a bad thing for self driving
cars, in contrast Ubers cars (before they were banned from the state for
disabling collision detection and killing someone) drove aggressively. Ubers
cars needed to be taken over to stop from hitting pedestrians crossing at
intersections and continually drove at least 5mph above the speed limit.

In Phoenix everyone drives fast on the highway, but Waymo cars drive 5-10mph
under the speed limit. There are some unprotected left turns across 4 lanes
they may try but being conservative they crawl across and eventually get stuck
in the middle. This is probably a good thing for now and as confidence with
the engineering team on the hardware and software goes up it can likely be
tuned.

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super-serial
I think a lot of people in this thread are underestimating the possibility of
safety drivers going remote and how that could be a solution to these edge
cases.

When making decisions or coming across strange situations the AI has a
confidence level, and when that falls below a threshold it can notify a remote
person to potentially handle the situation. Right now Waymo has problems
merging on a freeway with asshole drivers... but what's the big deal? It's
maybe 1 minute out of a 30 minute drive.

If you only need a human operator to take over the vehicle 2 minutes out of
every hour of autonomous travel, then you could probably get by with 10 remote
operators monitoring a fleet of 200 vehicles. That could translate into way
better profit margins than any current ride-share service.

~~~
aedron
Now I'm imagining a guy whose job is to sit all day in a simulator vehicle,
'teleporting' from one stranded Waymo to the next and taking it around school
buses and manhole covers, parallel parking, etc.

I kind of think that is viable. Replace thirty regular drivers with one. That
kind of model doesn't look too far off.

~~~
cheald
We already do it with military UAVs. Assist-by-wire for vehicles seems like
it's not too far-fetched.

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dqpb
On a side note, I'd like to lament the dystopia of reading articles online,
where every 4 paragraphs your attention is hijacked by a video ad. Fuck that.
Fuck futurism.com.

~~~
lquist
Blame the fact that people will pay for very few media sites. Realistically,
Futurism’s choice is have ad supported content or don’t exist

~~~
daveguy
They do have a third option: unobtrusive ads.

~~~
scarejunba
Those are worth very little when untargeted.

~~~
seslaire
Quite the contrary: [https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-
exc...](https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-
europe-ad-revenue/).

Discussed on HN:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920079)

~~~
scarejunba
The NYT is a different story. There's a critical mass after which it becomes
worthwhile to just target your audience. I doubt these guys are at it.

Don't believe me, though. Talk to ad execs (spending money on this) or ad ops
(using the money on this) and see what they think.

In fact, since you won't have the GDPR hassles if you go untargeted, you
should consider following this thesis to its logical untargeted exchange
conclusion because with CCPA and GDPR you could push the targeted guys out of
business and that's a many billion dollar market. If you're convinced of your
thesis, then you're on the cusp of mega money.

Good luck.

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buboard
If that's the entire list of shortcomings it sounds they re in pretty good
shape. There are audiences for which this car is an essential, and hopefully
drivers will adapt to robocars , just like horsecars adapted to autos.

~~~
skywhopper
I’m not sure. So long as a safety driver is needed there’s no cost savings
over regular taxi service. Given the human infrastructure that will be
required behind the scenes to support the fragility of these cars’ operation
(sensor cleaning, monitoring for problems, etc) and the added expense of the
self driving tech, I’m not seeing much opening for money to be made here
ever...

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thenanyu
I like to think of autonomous vehicles like trains rather than cars in the
general sense. They can operate on pre-existing tracks that were previously
unexploited. A lot of track exists out there, and as the technology gets
better, they can utilize a higher percentage of what's available.

~~~
lsc
this requires cultural change... living more densely, and being willing to
share our commute with other people.

Cultural change is... often rather harder than technological innovation.

~~~
m0zg
If anything, autonomous cars should enable us to live _less_ densely. If
you're in a dense area already, you probably don't need a car at all.

~~~
lsc
I was responding to a comment about using trains.

Yes, autonomous cars would make spreading out easier.

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norswap
I like these pieces for tempering the hype around driverless cars.

But it's also true it is still early and the technology will improve.

I personally don't believe it will become as reliable as people think. The
last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car better than
a human, they're crucial.

But who cares what I (or others) think? We shall find out the truth of the
matter soon enough. I just hope whoever mispredicted will take a note of it
and keep that in mind the next time they make a prediction.

~~~
vntok
> The last percent are always the hardest — but to make a driverless car
> better than a human, they're crucial.

The last % being crucial is debatable. A self-driving car could be way more
reliable than a human driver at all times except during blizzards in which
case it's known to crash.

That car would be extremely reliable, viable and useful to operate everywhere
there's never any blizzard, and even when there happens to be a few blizzard
events per year it would only need to be automagically rendered inoperable
during those times. The town hall could send that kind of command, just like
it would ring a civil defense siren.

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dpflan
It's interesting to consider how much money is required to validate this idea
-- there are multiple companies, many investors, and focused engineers trying
to solve this problem. Are those resources emotionally driven to a short-term
outcome that is proving to be far away (how far, and can this push result in a
non-linear jump somewhere?). What is the real hypothesis here that bridges the
idea and valuation creation?

~~~
tedsanders
The market is so huge that it's worth it even if it takes decades of R&D
costing billions a year. Some numbers:

~100M cars are made a year

If 10% of those are self driving, and if they have $1,000 in gross margin due
to self driving features, that's $10B a year to cover past R&D. Over 20 years
this adds up to $200B. Optimistically, if the tech eventually reaches 80% of
new cars and $3,000 margin, then we're talking $4,800 BILLION in profit over
20 years to cover R&D. Waymo is probably spending like $1-$2B/yr right now.
Their engineering headcount is not huge, it's like under 1,000 based on a
LinkedIn search I did last year.

Really the potential market is so huge that it can justify many many billions
spent on R&D. I am relatively bearish on the technology, and doubt it will be
commercialized in 10 years, but I still think the investment is justified.

Apologies for the poor writing - typed from my phone. I have more thoughts
here: [http://www.tedsanders.com/on-self-driving-
cars/](http://www.tedsanders.com/on-self-driving-cars/)

~~~
semi-extrinsic
I think the main point, as this article alludes to, is that we may end up with
safe and actually fully autonomous vehicles, but they're bloody annoying to
ride in. At that point nobody will be willing to pay that $1000 premium, and
you'll never recoup costs.

Personally I think given the prior that we can achieve self-driving tech,
there's a ~75% probability people won't want that tech.

We've seen it so many times before, companies spending $$$ on R&D of some cool
new thing and people just go "meh." I don't see a compelling argument for why
this won't just join the ranks of 3D-TVs, Google Glass and flying cars.

~~~
lsc
> I think the main point, as this article alludes to, is that we may end up
> with safe and actually fully autonomous vehicles, but they're bloody
> annoying to ride in. At that point nobody will be willing to pay that $1000
> premium, and you'll never recoup costs.

I think you underestimate what a difference riding in back makes.

Yes, yes, when you drive, you get angry and aggressive. I do too; my
observation from taking ride share (I gave away my car and now almost
exclusively use the rideshare) is that almost everyone rages out from time to
time when they drive.

Sitting in back with a book is such a different experience. "Wow, I used to be
like that?" I mean, it seems so weird to see someone get mad about traffic
when you haven't taken the wheel for a month yourself.

Edit:

To be sure, if we don't get full level-4; if you still need to be the 'safety
driver' and actually pay attention, that's a different thing, and yeah, that's
a whole lot less useful.

And to be clear, I am not saying that I think we are close to full level-4.
I'm just saying that if we get there? it will be wonderful in ways that
weren't obvious to me until I switched from driving to being driven for quite
some time.

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burger_moon
I'm only about halfway through, but what are the chances 'Carl' doesn't get
identified through this story? It seems like it'd be very easy for them to
cross check this story with ride history to figure out the person, especially
since it's a closed beta kind of thing it sounds like.

What kind of consequences will 'Carl' face by speaking to the press about
this? Do you just get dropped from the program or are their real consequences?
(It doesn't sound like 'Carl' is a Google employee at least)

~~~
jfoster
I'm pretty sure I know who Carl is. I don't think he's concerned about his
identity as much as the article has been written to make you believe. I think
the author was trying to make it seem more like an inside scoop when it isn't.

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shiftpgdn
Off topic: Is it just me or is the font on this site completely unreadable? I
had to copy and paste it into a text file so I could actually read what was
written. It's like medium but 80x worse.

~~~
glenneroo
Agreed. In Firefox I had to Ctrl+ 3-4 times to enlarge the text to make it
readable.

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kalenx
> it would seem Waymo programmed its autonomous vehicles to treat turn signals
> as an indicator that the car is about to execute a turn or merge, not an
> indicator that it is looking for the opportunity to do so.

Well, here's one, if not the issue... I do not know the precise wording of
trafic Laws in each state, but in many if not all, turn signals should _not_
be used as "an indicator of opportunity".

Now, it is already difficult to build a law abiding autonomous car; expecting
the car to also break the law in day-to-day cases (not just an emergency) will
be downright impossible -- and I'm not even considering the media storm that
would be created by a company saying "we program our cars to break the law all
the time"...

~~~
mattkrause
> turn signals should _not_ be used as "an indicator of opportunity

Are you certain about that?

When I learned to drive, we were told to indicate a few seconds _before_
turning, changing lanes, etc. This communicates your intentions to other
drivers. In other words, the blinker says, “I’d like to get in the left lane”
or “I’m getting off the highway”, not “This car is currently moving leftward.”
Otherwise, why not just connect the turn signals directly to the steering
wheel?

~~~
kalenx
Yes of course, but it is a _signal_, not a request. You should _not_ put your
signals if there is no room, just to "ask" other drivers to clear the other
lane.

~~~
mattkrause
Suppose you're in the center lane during some stop-and-go traffic. You want to
take the next exit. Do you really just drive along in quiet desperation,
hoping for a gap?

I—and everyone I know—would leave their blinker as they creep forward,
"requesting" that someone leave a gap big enough to take the exit.

~~~
kalenx
Of course, the vast majority of drivers would do so (including me). That would
just be incredibly inefficient to do otherwise. Nevertheless, in my home town,
it is against the law (Ontario btw, so I confess I cannot speak for the US).

Same thing goes for the left turn on yellow light. If there is a gapless
traffic coming from the other direction, you will probably just creep in the
intersection and turn at the end of the yellow, when the other cars have
stopped. Nevertheless, by doing so, you are doing two illegal things: 1) going
further than the stop line and 2) passing on a yellow (or even a red) when you
could have stopped (easily, you _were_ already stopped). Is it a bad thing
that people (again, including me) do this? Probably not, doing otherwise would
be a huge loss of time for everyone and it does not really increase the
accident rate. Yet, it is against the law.

~~~
mattkrause
Here's the text of Ontario's Highway Traffic Act:
[https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08#BK232](https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08#BK232)

“The driver or operator of a vehicle upon a highway, before turning to the
left or right at any intersection or into a private road or driveway or from
one lane for traffic to another lane for traffic or to leave the roadway,
shall first see that the movement can be made in safety, and, if the operation
of any other vehicle may be affected by the movement, SHALL GIVE A SIGNAL
PLAINLY VISIBLE TO THE DRIVER OR OPERATOR OF THE OTHER VEHICLE OF THE
INTENTION TO MAKE THE MOVEMENT."

I guess one reading of this suggests that you must first check if it would be
safe to make a maneuver, and if so, then and only then, must you use a turn
signal. I think you could also read this as requiring safety checks and
indicating (in either order) before turning, but I'm not a lawyer. I can't
imagine that people are actually prosecuted for signaling out-of-order though.

The driving handbook, however, tells you to check your mirrors, then "Signal
that you want to move left or right." (here:
[https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-
handboo...](https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-
handbook/changing-positions)) which seems to suggest some level of intention-
indicating is okay.

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DeonPenny
Seemed like it fairly good from what I heard. It didn't crash which is the bar
they are going for. Driving past a place not only is ok I'd be more than
comfortable having the car do so. The issue opponents are going to have in the
future is when waymo actually has a chance to go to the general public in one
of these cities and doesn't crash. The number of riders will easily outstrip
the people screaming. Just like the scooters they will leave for a while but
the damage will have been done. There are no fans currently that depend on
this but thats easily going to not be true.

~~~
CloudYeller
I agree. When I'm dropping someone off, I often drive past the intended drop
point, let them out across the street, etc, because there is an unreasonably
high cost to hitting the exact drop point. It sounds like self driving cars
are only allowed to do exact drops, which is an irrational constraint IMO.
Clearly there's a trade-off between trip time and drop accuracy, and time is
usually 10x more important than accuracy.

~~~
UncleEntity
> ...because there is an unreasonably high cost to hitting the exact drop
> point.

That is literally the difference between a professional driver and a "ride
share" amateur.

Yeah, yeah, cheap shot but those ride share drivers drive me crazy with their
antics.

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F_J_H
_What good is a newborn baby?_ Benjamin Franklin [1]

[1] [https://www.americanheritage.com/content/“what-good-new-
born...](https://www.americanheritage.com/content/“what-good-new-born-baby”)

