That's what happens when you have a reasonable sensor suite with LIDAR, instead of trying to rely entirely on cameras like Tesla does.
At least the repair for a camera-only front is cheaper after the car crashes into a parked white bus
Tap for spoiler
/s
Why are we still doing this? Just fucking invest in mass transit like metro, buses and metrobuses. Jesus
Also, Note that this is based on waymo's own assumptions, that's like believing a 5070 gives you 4090 performance...
That doesn't solve the last mile problem, or transport for all the people who live outside of a few dense cities.
Yes it does, if done properly. I have stops for four bus lines within walking distance. During peak hours, buses come once every 15 minutes. Trolleys in the city centre, every 10 minutes. Trams, every two minutes, and always packed. Most of the surrounding villages have bus stops. A lack of perspective is not an excuse.
Well if YOU have a bus stop near you then everyone must! That's just science!
Uh, yes, actually. I know someone like you can't even fathom the possibility of a public transit system being well-built because you've been gaslit into believing that whatever happens in The West is the best humanity can offer, but we've got 80 bus and trolley lines criss-crossing the city. As a guesstimate, three quarters of the city is within a 10-minute walk from a stop, and the elderly and disabled who can't walk benefit from the resulting reduction in traffic.
"most of the surrounding villages"
I live on a 40mph road with no sidewalk or shoulder. That is connected to a 45mph road with no sidewalk or shoulder. My nearest bus stop is 3.2 miles away.
I'm not even that far out, I can drive to a major city downtown in 30 minutes.
That's great that you have all this infrastructure around you, but not everyone does. Like you said, a lack of perspective is not an excuse.
That's not out of necessity. It's a design decision. You could have one nearby with the right elected officials and public effort. You also chose where to live, with the ability to know where existing stops are. If you chose the live away from a bus stop or other public transport then that's on you.
Why are we still doing this?
Because there's a lot of money in it. 10.3% of the US workforce works in transportation and warehousing. Trucking alone is the #4 spot in that sector (1.2 million jobs in heavy trucks and trailers). Couriers and delivery also ranks highly.
The self-driving vehicles are targeting whole markets and the value of the industry is hard to underestimate. And yes, even transit is being targeted (and being implemented; see South Korea's A21 line). There's a lot of crossover with trucking and buses, not to mention that 42% of transit drivers are 55+ in age. Hiring for metro drivers is insanely hard right now.
Taking waymo's numbers at face value they are almost 20x more dangerous than a professional truck driver in the EU. This is a personal convenience thing for wealthy people, that's it. Fucking over jarvis and Mahmood so we can have fleets of automated ubers...
So we can have autonomous metros, buses and taxis that allow people anywhere when they need it so they don't rely on having a car?
This would be more impressive if Waymos were fully self-driving. They aren't. They depend on remote "navigators" to make many of their most critical decisions. Those "navigators" may or may not be directly controlling the car, but things do not work without them.
When we have automated cars that do not actually rely on human being we will have something to talk about.
It's also worth noting that the human "navigators" are almost always poorly paid workers in third-world countries. The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.
@Curious_Canid @vegeta this is the case for the Amazon "just walk out" shops as well. Like Waymo they frame it as the humans "just doing the hard part" but who knows what "annotating" means in this context? And notably it's clearly more expensive to run than they thought as they've decided to do Dash Carts instead which looks like it's basically a portable self-service checkout. The customer does the checking. https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/17/24133029/amazon-just-walk-out-cashierless-ai-india
Yeah we managed to just put the slave workers behind a further layer of obfuscation. Not just relegated to their own quarters or part of town but to a different city altogether or even continent.
Tech dreams have become about a complete lack of humanity.
I saw an article recently, I should remember where, about how modern "tech" seems to be focused on how to insert a profit-taking element between two existing components of a system that already works just fine without it.
That's called "rent-seeking behavior," and it's not new
The system will only scale if there are enough desperate poor people. Otherwise it quickly become too expensive.
You can also get MMORPG players to do it for pennies per hour for in-game currency or membership. RuneScape players would gladly control 5 'autonomous' cars if it meant that they could level up their farming level for free.
The game is basically designed to be an incredibly time consuming skinner box that takes minimal skill and effort in order to maximize membership fees.
Because they are driving under near ideal conditions, in areas that are completely mapped out, and guided away from roadworks and avoiding "confusing" crosses, and other traffic situations like unmarked roads, that humans deal with routinely without problem.
And in a situation they can't handle, they just stop and call and wait for a human driver to get them going again, disregarding if they are blocking traffic.
I'm not blaming Waymo for doing it as safe as they can, that's great IMO.
But don̈́t make it sound like they drive better than humans yet. There is still some ways to go.
What's really obnoxious is that Elon Musk claimed this would be 100% ready by 2017. Full self driving, across America, day and night, safer than a human. I have zero expectation that Tesla RoboTaxi will arrive this summer as promised.
You’re not wrong, but arguably that doesn’t invalidate the point, they do drive better than humans because they’re so much better at judging their own limitations.
If human drivers refused to enter dangerous intersections, stopped every time things started yup look dangerous, and handed off to a specialist to handle problems, driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.
That said, you’re of course correct that they still have a long way to go in technical driving ability and handling of adverse conditions, but it’s interesting to consider that simple policy effectively enforced is enough to cancel out all the advantages that human drivers currently still have.
You are completely ignoring the under ideal circumstances part.
~~They can't drive at night AFAIK~~, they can't drive outside the area that is meticulously mapped out.
And even then, they often require human intervention.
If you asked a professional driver to do the exact same thing, I'm pretty sure that driver would have way better accident record than average humans too.
Seems to me you are missing the point I tried to make. And is drawing a false conclusion based on comparing apples to oranges.
I am once again begging journalists to be more critical ~~of tech companies~~.
But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.
[...] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.
This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they're driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it's precisely when they're all driving).
We also need to know how often Waymo intervenes in the supposedly autonomous operations. The latest we have from this, which was leaked a while back, is that Cruise (different company) cars are actually less autonomous than taxis, and require >1 employee per car.
edit: The leaked data on human interventions was from Cruise, not Waymo. I'm open to self-driving cars being safer than humans, but I don't believe a fucking word from tech companies until there's been an independent audit with full access to their facilities and data. So long as we rely on Waymo's own publishing without knowing how the sausage is made, they can spin their data however they want.
edit2: Updated to say that ournalists should be more critical in general, not just about tech companies.
Journalist aren't even critical of police press releases anymore, most simply print whatever they're told verbatim. It may as well just be advertisement.
I agree with you so strongly that I went ahead and updated my comment. The problem is general and out of control. Orwell said it best: "Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."
I was going to say they should only be comparing them under the same driving areas, since I know they aren't allowed in many areas.
But you're right, it's even tighter than that.
Considering the sort of driving issues and code violations I see on a daily basis, the standards for human drivers need raising. The issue is more lax humans than it is amazing robots.
No shit. The bar is low. Humans suck at driving. People love to throw FUD at automated driving, and it's far from perfect, but the more we delay adoption the more lives are lost. Anti-automation on the roads is up there with anti-vaccine mentality in my mind. Fear and the incorrect assumption that "I'm not the problem, I'm a really good driver," mentality will inevitably delay automation unnecessarily for years.
It'd probably be better to put a lot of the R&D money into improving and reinforcing public transport systems. Taking cars off the road and separating cars from pedestrians makes a bigger difference than automating driving.
"After 6 miles, Teslas crash a lot more than human drivers."
I hate felon musk but I honestly believe their self driving tech is safer than humans.
Have you seen the average human? They're beyond dumb. If they're in cars it's like the majority of htem are just staring at their cell phones.
I don't think self driving tech works in all circumstances, but I bet it is already much better than humans at most driving, especially highway driving.
I had a friend that worked for them in the past. They really aren't that impressive. They get stuck constantly. While the tech down the line might be revolutionary for people who cannot drive for whatever reason right now it still needs a LOT of work.
Focusing on airbag-deployments and injuries ignores the obvious problem: these things are unbelievably unsafe for pedestrians and bicyclists. I curse SF for allowing AVs and always give them a wide berth because there's no way to know if they see you and they'll often behave erratically and unpredictably in crosswalks. I don't give a shit how often the passengers are injured, I care a lot more how much they disrupt life for all the people who aren't paying Waymo for the privilege.
The question is are they safer than human drivers, not are they safe. Cars exist, are everywhere, and are very unsafe to pedestrians. You won't be able to get rid of cars, so if waymo is really safer we should mandate it on all cars. That is a big if though - drunk drivers are still a large percentage of crashes so is if far to lump sober drivers together with drunks - I don't know the real statistics to figure this out.
always give them a wide berth because there's no way to know if they see you and they'll often behave erratically and unpredictably in crosswalks
All of this applies to dealing with human drivers, too.
What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash.
Also, I think it's worth discussing whether to include in the baseline certain driver assistance technologies, like automated braking, blind spot warnings, other warnings/visualizations of surrounding objects, cars, bikes, or pedestrians, etc. Throw in other things like traction control, antilock brakes, etc.
There are ways to make human driving safer without fully automating the driving, so it may not be appropriate to compare fully automated driving with fully manual driving. Hybrid approaches might be safer today, but we don't have the data to actually analyze that, as far as I can tell.
As a techno-optimist, I always expected self-driving to quickly become safer than human, at least in relatively controlled situations. However I’m at least as much a pessimist of human nature and the legal system.
Given self-driving vehicles demonstrably safer than human, but not perfect, how can we get beyond humans taking advantage, and massive liability for the remaining accidents?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
