Waymo says its self-driving taxis will take customers on freeways for the first time
www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/waymo-says-self…
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Good luck surviving AI taxis at high speed, both for the passengers and the people in the cars around them.
Explain how that is any different from a crash involving all humans.
Given the shit those AI driven cars do on the road, I’d rather drive with a human driver. It’s most likely way safer.
If there were a news article for every time a human driver did something extremely dumb behind the wheel, like there is for when an AI driver does, you’d never see those articles about self-driving cars - the feed would be completely flooded with stories about the stupid things human drivers do.
As much as people want to believe self driving cars are a deathtrap, the reality is, just like flights, they’ve proven to be safer by the numbers - much fewer accidents per mile - than human drivers. It’s the giving away control part that people have a problem with. People don’t feel safe when they’re not the one in control, and when they’ve been mercilessly hammered with bad news and warnings about technology rebelling, it plays into their fears, and magnifies a smalll concern into a world ending problem.
I have used Waymo 11 times now in the Los Angeles area and only once did I have an issue. The issue was turning left when people were blocking the intersection but it could still go around them. It wouldn’t turn and it waited through 2 light cycles.
I used Waymo half a dozen times or so when traveling to San Francisco this year.
The experience was actually quite good. The cars arrive within a minute or two, they’re clean and high-end (for what amounts to a taxi), and you can set up the atmosphere according to your mood. The driving was smooth and uneventful.
Unless they raise the prices significantly, I would continue to choose Waymo over human drivers.
Elon still doesn’t even have a robotaxi service despite promising it a decade ago, yet Waymo are doing freeways now.
Even the tiny Vegas loop is manually driven, despite being mostly through a boring company tunnel.
bookwyr.me
How do they know if a customer has never been on the freeway before?
doing absolutely anything but giving people good free public transport. Do you want to use a self driving car that is run by companies that will start hiding things like heated seats behind a paywall, leave backdoors for governments that will eventually be used by bad actors to track exactly where you’re going? i don’t trust this shit at all waymo is google and google might as well have signed a deal with the devil
Obviously fuck this, but your arguments are the same for public transport. Government run, easily tracked and has paywalls.
It is an efficiency, decency, environmental and cost decision. Waymo loses all. Convenience currently is its seller.
public transit shouldn’t have to track you to give you service, and for buses you can pay with change so unless they check the cameras which they need probable cause to do then no its not tracking anything about where you’re going and logging it anywhere in some database
but i believe in free public transit anyway
Conditions on freeways are usually more controlled than conditions on surface-level roads, and Waymo’s accident record isn’t bad, unlike Tesla’s. I suspect that this isn’t going to generate any post-debut news stories of much significance. (If something bad and avoidable does happen, though, Waymo is 100% accountable—no handwaving it away.)
Yeah, I would be happier to have autonomous cars on the freeway than on other roads.
There are usually no pedestrians on freeways that can be overlooked.
But I’m even happier that there are no autonomous cars driving by itself where I live right now.
My commute to work is about 90% highway, with most of it near my home. If I could take an autonomous car from a parking lot near the highway in my area to a park and ride near my work, I’d do it. Transit there is a nightmare and would take nearly 2 hours each way due to unfortunate transfers, and takes 30-35 min by car.
So yeah, I’m 100% in favor if them running fixed routes until mass transit options can catch up. Run them between park and ride areas near highways to destinations, and maybe a handful of routes within cities (certain designated roads with clear markings and whatnot).
An “autonomous” car cannot be held accountable, therefore an “autonomous” car should never fucking go near a freeway
There wouldn’t be a need for an autonomous car to go on a freeway if we had decent intermodal public transit.
Just have cars like these patrolling the suburbs and picking people up for light/commuter rail, then a hub where you could get within a block of anywhere with no more than one transfer.
High Speed rail if you need to get to another urban center from there.
That’s the dream, at least.
Nobody wants to use public transit, because it’s starved dry. Nobody wants to invest in public transit, because nobody uses it. Everyone just drives, because everyone has cars. Everyone has cars because public transit is terrible.
But I do long for the day that this could pick me up and take me to the bus station/commuter rail stop.
E-bikes and E-trikes would be able to get you to the nearest station just as easily for most people, if there was proper infrastructure. I have an E-bike, and basically use that and the trolly/ Amtrak to get around in Southern California. It’s not perfect, but it works, and I can actually do stuff while I am commuting.
Nobody wants to ride bikes because everyone in the cars are too dangerous to be sharing the road with.
Nobody wants to put in protected bike lanes because everybody drives.
If you build it, they will come. The Netherlands used to be very car dependent until the government put in a massive effort to build out bike infrastructure, and now it’s the bike capital of the world. Here are a few things they changed to make it happen:
Once the cars started moving outside the city center, cycling and transit became became much more practical, but it all started by making driving less convenient so other modes of transportation became more attractive.
Define “held accountable”?
If you mean who will pay out if there’s an accident, presumably Waymo will have found an insurer willing to cover them. But if you mean that someone out there must be punished to satisfy some sense of vengeance, then you may want to re-examine your values.
How about faces the same punishment someone that isn’t an incredibly rich corporation would face? If that’s insurance then sure, if thats jail time then yes someoen should be punished just like anyone else would.
Jail should be reserved for cases where there’s intent/malice, or significant negligence. For example, drunk or aggressive driving qualifies, whereas speeding and most fender benders don’t. An automated system likely doesn’t qualify, so restitution should be sufficient.
Yes I did mean punished. Specifically whipped, in fact. With brake cables.
What’s wrong with my values ???
Awesome, I hope we get something similar in my area in Utah. We have awful traffic, and I’m convinced a large part of it is awful drivers and road rage. If people could instead take a self-driving car and do other stuff, I am hopeful road rage would reduce.
If there was an option that would take me from a park and ride near the highway to a park and ride near my work, I’d take it. Mass transit to my work sucks, and this would fill that gap until the state prioritizes that area.
These things are literally known to make improper decisions and have been caught on camera crashing into things. What the fuck are people doing?
Drivers are literally known to make improper decisions and have been caught on camera crashing into things. What the fuck are people doing?
Difference is a driver can be held accountable.
That’s a hell of a goalpost move. And anyway the accountability issue was already brought up. See https://sh.itjust.works/comment/22111884
Waymo “presumably” paying for what they destroy isn’t the same as saying yes, they will 100%. Its pure speculation.
And its not a goalpost move, driving puts you and everyone else at risk humans have been tested and insured to drive. This thing is like in BETA version.
Puts on red!
God help us,
oh yea there is no god…
this is a suicide carriage, but I guess its useful for when I lose the will to live lol
AFAIK nobody has died in a Waymo, and they have a very low accident rate, lower than human drivers. Calling it a suicide carriage is just not reflecting reality in any way.
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I mean honestly I’m not even mad that a self-driving car isn’t taking the freeway. It’s pretty scary that Tesla is considering and is actually taking people on the freeway but I understand that their requirements are that they have to have a driver behind the seat which really doesn’t make the car self-driving.
because it is better… teslas full self driving literally causes accidents all the time because of not using actual sensors for depth and lidar, there have been tons of cases of people using their teslas on freeways and it just crashes them out of nowhere, they just don’t care about forcing out a release even if its extremely dangerous and proven to be so
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I do research in 3D computer vision and in general, depth from cameras (even multi view) tends to be much noisier than LiDAR. LiDAR has the advantage of giving explicit depth, whereas with multiview cameras you need to compute it, which has a fair amount of failure modes. I think that’s what the above user is getting at when they said Waymo actually has depth sensing.
This isn’t to say that Tesla’s approach can’t work at all, but just that Waymo’s is more grounded. There are reasons to avoid LiDAR (cost primarily, a good LiDAR sensor is very expensive), but if you can fit LiDAR into your stack it’ll likely help a bit with reliability.
that is exactly what i meant by it yes, predictive depth using cameras is way less reliable as it is vs direct sensors that are expensive but if they cant make something cheaply that wont kill you it shouldn’t be sold period
I’m glad someone else already said it but camera depth sensing is way less functioning and safe than these other sensors and is way more prone to environmental factors fucking with it. You should do some research instead of listing off something elon says without any understanding….