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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.
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.
So the fact that after 50 million miles of driving there have been no pedestrian or cyclist deaths means they are unbelievably unsafe for pedestrians and cyclists? As far as I can tell, the only accidents involving pedestrians or cyclists AT ALL after 50 million miles is when a Waymo struck a plastic crate that careened into another lane where a scooter ran into it. And yet in your mind they are unbelievably unsafe?
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.
They’re super conservative. I rode just once in one. There was a parked ambulance down a side street about 30 feet with it’s lights one while paramedics helped someone. The car wouldn’t drive forward through the intersection. It just detected the lights and froze. I had to get out and walk. If we all drove that conservatively we’d also have less accidents and congest the city to undrivability.
How long ago was that? Last year I took a couple near Phoenix and they did great, lights or no. The hardest part was dropping me off at the front of a hotel, as people were in and out and cars were everywhere. Still didn’t have issues, just slowed down to 3mph when it had 15 years left or so
just slowed down to 3mph when it had 15 years left or so
Damn, spending 15 years in a car going 3mph sounds terrible.
Haha, yeah I didn’t check that, was eating. 15 yards. I’m actually still sitting there.
Thing is, the end goal after sorting out all the bugs in the AI is no human druven cars since having both will only lead to crashes dur to AI being unable to predict a human. All the AI cars would be linked to a central system to communicate with eachother and alwats know where eachither are. Then all we have to do is make sure people only use the cross walks and traffic accudents will be solely due to idiots.
I doubt a central system would ever be viable, but they would certainly communicate to other nearby cars with more than just blinky lights
That’s what happens when you have a reasonable sensor suite with LIDAR, instead of trying to rely entirely on cameras like Tesla does.
And are limited to highly trained routes. There’s a reason you only see them in specific neighborhoods of specific cities.
At least the repair for a camera-only front is cheaper after the car crashes into a parked white bus
Tap for spoiler
/s
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
Back when I was a fabricator I made some of the critical components used in Amazon stores. Amazon was incredibly particular about every little detail, even on parts that didn’t call for tight tolerancing in any conceivable way. They, on several occasions, sent us one bad set of prints after another. Which we could only discover after completing a run of parts. We’re talking 20-30 thousand units that ended up being scrapped because of their shitty prints. Millions of dollars set on fire, basically.
They became such a huge pain in the ass to work with we eliminated every single SKU they ordered from us.
Ordering components with unnecessarily small tolerances is stupid and a waste of money but of course they will complain if you can’t make the parts to the specifications.
Why did you even take the order in the first place if you can’t manage to produce them to spec?
of course they will complain if you can’t make the parts to the specifications.
Why did you even take the order in the first place if you can’t manage to produce them to spec?
Where did they say anything about not being able to make the parts to spec?
We produced everything to spec and on time, thanks.
Why did you even take the order in the first place if you can’t manage to produce them to spec?
They were made to spec, but the specs were wrong.
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
Was it The Enshittification?
Could a navigator run you over twice from different companies after they get fired from the first one?
God, I hope so.
If they have to do it a second time, they aren’t very good at it.
Sequel to snowcrash right there
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.
Packaging the job as a video game side quest is genius. Make so the gamer has to do several simulated runs before they connect to an actual car, and give in-game expensive consequences for messing it up
It doesn’t even need to be a side quest, just a second screen activity lol
They’ll do it for pennies an hour for 12 hours a day.
“Damn, I’m sorry my car killed your kids. The Carscape person didn’t get their drop”
The human operators are there for when the AI gets softlocked in a situation where it doesn’t know what to do and just sits there, not for regular driving.
i knew it that AI is just some guy in india responding to my queries.
AI - Actually Indian
Has anyone found the places where the navigators work to see how it goes? Has a navigator shared their experience on the web somewhere?
I am very curious as to what they are asked to do and for how many cars And for how much money
I thought the human operators only step in when the emergency button is pressed or when the car gets stuck?
Do they actually get driven by people in normal operation?
The claim is that the remote operators do not actually drive the cars. However, they do routinely “assist” the system, not just step in when there’s an emergency.
I think they’ve got 1 person watching dozens of cars though, it’s not 1 per car like if there was human drivers.
Makes sense. There’s less automated cars than human drivers. Human drivers have also been around way longer.
They accounted for that in this report. I believe you are a troll.
I believe you are a troll.
Then you don’t know what trolling actually is.
Okay, I’m sorry. Let me clarify how it’s easy to account for the kind of bias you’re talking about. Simply divide by the population count. So, they divided the waymo crash count by the number of waymos, and the human crash count by the number of humans. This gives the waymo crash rate and the human crash rate. (In reality, it’s a bit more complicated, since the human crash rate is calculated independently each year.)
Let me clarify further: It was an attempt at humor, and not meant to be taken seriously as you are doing.
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.
WVU has a tram system called the “PRT”. It’s semi-automated cars on a track around campus and downtown. It’s not great, but goddamn does it handle a large school population just fine. Very high throughput, and it keeps congestion down. … as down as you can be with such a high density town.
In my country at least (US) that’s just not going to happen.
That, and the inevitable bureaucratic nightmare that awaits for standardising across makes and updating the infrastructure.
Car infrastructure was a mistake. Automation isn’t the solution, it’s less cars and car-based spaces.
Why not both? We can automate the trains (more), the busses, and the occasional rural drive.
The rural drive is the fun one, though…
Sure that’s great, but read the room. It’s like advocating for gun legislation in the US, it can only go so far realistically. The vast majority of US cities are built around automotive infrastructure and the culture is very much anti-public transport. That requires heavy government level buy in. Car automation can be driven primarily by industry. One can happen in a major way in a few years, the other will take decades if it happens at all. Personally I’m all for it, but it’s such a different discussion that it just comes across as distracting when talking about very real delays in car automation and it’s not a valid criticism of moving forward and promoting decreased barriers to fully automated vehicle infrastructure.
Automation also can be abused, which I’m very very cautious about.
And yet it’s still the least efficient mode of transport.
What’s more efficient?
In terms of getting to an exact location.
Public transportation only can get you near your target mostly. Not on point like a car, bike etc.
You ever heard of legs? Mass transit gets you the bulk of the way there, and legs will handle the small bit left.
Bicycles? ride/ walk to were you need to be? Why do you need to be driven to an exact point? All the space needed for parking is just wasted.
You need to create a specific scenario in order to make cars seem more efficient than alternatives. They cause more accidents, take up more space while carrying fewer people at any given time while also causing more pollution than other modes of transport.
Automated vehicles are GPS guided. The US is too big to be walking and biking. That is for an urban environment with proper zoning laws, proper planning, and serves what amounts to be an ethnic group who shouldn’t need cars. What makes automated vehicles more efficient is the removal of labor and lower operational costs. The specialization of transporting people to the exact GPS coordinates is much more convenient. The future is automated travel because vehicles can be used more productively on the margin than everybody having to own their own car. Fewer cars, higher use of the car, or less idling, means lower transportation costs throughout, which includes infrastructure itself; the less need for insurance, less pollution, etc. This technology can be used in bus transit but in a potentially dynamic way.
lol
The “US is too big” is such a bullshit excuse since cars are absolutely crap for long distances compared to trains people already walk and cycle in the US. And why is the richest and most powerful (for now at least) country in the world unable to fix it’s zoning laws? Especially since other countries seem to be able to do it.
Yes, efficiency in reducing the amount of people with jobs but not by getting people from a to b. What is convenient is not having to own a car in the first place and be able to get around with ease because of proper urban planning.
The future is automated travel because vehicles can be used more productively on the margin than everybody having to own their own car. Fewer cars, higher use of the car, or less idling, means lower transportation costs throughout, which includes infrastructure itself; the less need for insurance, less pollution, etc. This technology can be used in bus transit systems as well for a less marginal benefit.
Sooo like a what’s already possible with trains and trams? And buses on dedicated lanes would be far easier to automate and be more efficient than cars.
Trains are for long distances. Trams are for pure urban areas. Metros are for connecting cities within a metropolitan group. All those function within a well planned urban structure, not the suburbs, or exurbs. Cars are the most efficient in the US. That is why most Americans own a car. Without a car, you are asking for long walking distances, and long bike rides. City transit systems don’t work in the US, because too many criminals are out in public, people like their own space, and Americans like the convenience of going, and leaving at their own time. Americans like their own space. Again, you are talking about a specific type of living that most Americans don’t really gravitate to. Americans want a large house in a safe neighborhood in the suburbs, or live in the exurbs. They don’t want to live in crime-ridden urban areas, that is not the American dream.
Look how well that American dream is going
In terms of getting to an exact location, the most efficient is no vehicle, walking.
Cars are less efficient, followed by busses, then probably trains, then boats, then airplanes (unless you parachute).
Cars are the least efficient in terms of moving large numbers of people from places they can then walk from.
It is hard to take you seriously. Open up Google Maps in the USA, and see how long it takes you to walk, and bike to a place. People buy the expense of a car for a reason; biking, and walking, is the least efficient. Transit systems do not work in the US, because everything has to be planned around them. They’re bureaucratic, and rote. City transit systems are the essence of this bureaucracy and rote. It does not serve people as they intend to live.
The most efficient is obviously a combination of methods, using the fastest methods for each leg of the journey.
In the US, right now, taking a car from point to point, then walking into your location is the fastest combination in most cases.
If someone can’t walk a few blocks, that’s on them. Airplanes don’t get you exactly to the destination either. There’s a tradeoff.
E: For all the “What about the elderly or disabled?” If they can’t walk a few blocks and also can’t afford a car or taxi/Uber, what should they do? Mobility devices exist. Handicap accessible buildings are federally required. Your argument is merely a thought terminating interruption. That problem can easily be addressed.
Yeah fuck disabled and elderly people.
Public transportation and walkable cities are much better for the elderly and disabled who often can’t drive due to their age and disability?
Taking a wheel chair or mobility scooter or be guided by your service dog are all subsets of “walk there”.
@meco03211 @Jayk0b cars can’t either - it’s a false premise. Not everything is drive-thru. How far is, say, the bakery section from your car when you go to the supermarket?
Rip disabled people.
Good transit gets you close enough (as others have said, you don’t drive your car down the aisles of the supermarket). That few people have good transit is the problem that needs to be fixed. Sadly few really care - in the US the republicans hate transit, and the democrats only like transit for the union labor is employees - importantly neither cares about getting people places.
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?
I live in Phoenix, Arizona and these are all around. Honestly I feel like the future everyone will have Waymo type services and no one will own cars or even need to learn how to drive one. Who needs to worry about car repairs insurance etc.
I’ve rode in them a few times, fell asleep even. I trust a Waymo more than most human drivers. Best test of its capabilities I saw was when school let out and the side road was covered in kids and parents and cars in random spots waiting for people. It stayed in the “lane”, no lane lines, and calmly navigated forward as people gave it space. I was in the car the whole time. Still there are some issues to be ironed out, but ultimately I don’t think I have ever had a bad riding experience.
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.
@MoreFPSmorebetter @vegeta I just can’t see this type of tech working in places with a more pedestrian-first culture / more unpredictable human behaviour, i.e. countries without jaywalking laws. If you tried to drive this through London and people realised it will just have to automatically stop for you (and also *won’t* stop for you out of politeness if you wait hopefully) then everyone will just walk in front of it. What’s the plan, special “don’t stop the Waymo” laws?
Obviously we install a padded arm that grabs the pedestrians and throws them back onto the curb so they learn not to just walk out in front of the moving vehicles.
Idk how it is where y’all live but generally people only jaywalk when there aren’t cars driving on the road at that moment. Other than crosswalks it’s kinda expected that if you are going to jaywalk you are going to do it when no car will have to stop or slow down to avoid you. Obviously not everyone follows that rule but generally speaking.
@MoreFPSmorebetter it’s not called jaywalking here, it’s just called crossing the road, and there are plenty of places where if it’s busy if you just kind of wait hopefully someone will wave you across. Or you look for a big enough gap that you can’t make it all the way across but a driver will see you and have to slow. We also have zebra crossings which you just wait next to and drivers have to stop; up to the driver to interpret if someone is just standing around or waiting to cross.
People in London just walk in front of all cars all the time. Including me. That’s not an unpredictable behaviour, that’s a default and very predictable behaviour. If you’re in a car - you stop.
Vegas sure has a lot of pedestrians doing a whole lot of unpredictable things.
@ripcord unpredictable but maybe not standard practice? Just a guess, could be a bad assumption! British driving culture is reliant on eye contact and waves and nods and flashes - you have to signal if you’re giving way (to other drivers as well), and say thank you; lots of places where there’s only room for one vehicle on a two way road and someone has to decide who’s going. Might be my failure of imagination but I don’t know how that works with no driver.
It is absolutely common for people to do something unexpected in Las Vegas, particularly near the Strip and other pedestrian-heavy, gambling/drinking-heavy areas.
Erratic driving is also higher than average for most western cities.
My point though was that this is one of Waymo’s main testing areas.
With that said, like other people have mentioned, there are a lot of potential gotchas here like Waymo running on fairly limited routes and still potentially needing a lot of human intervention.
Also the idea that someone can shut down or take over control of my car remotely is extremely creepy and dust I piano seeming to me.
That’s when vehicle to vehicle communication will come into play. When we can automate the driving and link the cars’ comm systems together, it becomes a network management problem.
@dogslayeggs this is not a good solution unless you’re expecting to mandate that all pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, guide dogs, whatever, wear them too, and that all existing cars are retrofitted with them. Kind of dystopian.
I was clearly only talking about cars, not pedestrians. Driverless cars have already shown they are pretty good at avoiding pedestrians and cyclists and scooters and dogs. Even in the case of the pedestrian hit by the Cruise car, that pedestrian was hit by another car first and then thrown into the path of the Cruise. The one case of a dog hit by a car was a dog running out from behind parked cars with no time for a human to stop, let alone the Waymo… and dogs don’t usually wave and signal to drivers on the road.
As far as retrofitted cars, this is about improving the current system not requiring 100% compliance. Do you ban people from driving on the roads if they don’t wave at you on a one-car wide road? No. So you don’t have to ban cars that don’t have this tech. But when more and more cars DO have the tech, then you get improvements over time.
@dogslayeggs I know you were only talking about cars. My point is you can’t only think about cars because there are too many other factors, including drivers of other cars who don’t know whether or not they can go if the other “driver” doesn’t indicate whether they’ve seen them or not. It’s not about “banning people for not waving”, it’s that if someone doesn’t let the other person through, nobody moves. The endpoint will be everyone hating Waymos and always going first.
But when it does crash, will Google accept the liability?
They both own and operate the car. Even if it was a manned taxi, they’d be liable.
They consult Gemini. If it gives a cogent answer, they consider it a “yes”. So, no.
Probably depends who is at fault. I also would be that Google has insurance for this sort of thing.
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.
There’s a limit to what assist systems can do. Having the car and driver fighting for control actually makes everything far less safe.
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.
driving might not produce the mountain of corpses it does today.
And people wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere. Which could very well be a good thing, but still
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.
Waymo can absolutely drive at night, I’ve seen them do it. They rely heavily on LIDAR, so the time of day makes no difference to them.
And apparently they only disengage and need human assistance every 17,000 miles, on average. Contrast that to something like Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” (ignoring the controversy over whether it counts or not), where the most generous numbers I could find for it are a disengagement every 71 city miles, on average, or every 245 city miles for a “critical disengagement.”
You are correct in that Waymo is heavily geofenced, and that’s pretty annoying sometimes. I tried to ride one in Phoenix last year, but couldn’t get it to pick me up from the park I was visiting because I was just on the edge of their area. I suspect they would likely do fine if they went outside of their zones, but they really want to make sure they’re going to be successful so they’re deliberately slow-rolling where the service is available.
Waymo can absolutely drive at night
True I just checked it up, my information was outdated.
I have zero expectation that Tesla RoboTaxi will arrive this summer as promised.
RoboTaxis will also have to “navigate” the Fashla hate. Not many will be eager to risk their lives with them
I think “near ideal conditions” is a huge exaggeration. The situations Waymo avoids are a small fraction of the total mileage driven by Waymo vehicles or the humans they’re being compared with. It’s like you’re saying a football team’s stats are grossly wrong if they don’t include punt returns.
“Waymo reports that Waymo cars are the best”
“Waymo reports the statistical data it has, which happens to be pretty good.”
