I believe Waymo’s strategy has always been to shoot for level 5 autonomous driving and not bother with the others. Tesla not following that strategy has proven them correct. You either have a system that is safe, reliable, and fully autonomous, or you’ve got nothing. Not that Waymo has a system at this point that can work under all conditions, but their approach is definitely superior to Tesla’s if nothing else.
From what I’ve seen, most issues with Waymo are that they are too careful, too rigid with laws and too easy to fool with things like traffic cones and lines of spray paint. Meanwhile Teslas speed past stopped school buses mowing down children and crash in to walls and parked cars at highway speeds.
Imma take my chances with the car stuck in the middle of the road because someone plopped a traffic cone on the hood, thank you very much.
Waymo is currently level 4 autonomous driving. The difference between levels 4 and 5 is that level 4 is geofenced and level 5 is not. (And level 5 has no steering controls).
And a orange safer than a knive.
But they didnt move fast at all. I saw people driving Waymo’a for years before I saw the first automated one hit the streets. They took their damn time which I am sure was expensive and worth it.
They’re mobile spyware belonging to an alphabet agency.
LIDAR, baby!
lidar Deez nuts
gottem
or seemingly an act of God. (In one case, a pickup truck being towed in front of a Waymo came loose and smashed into the vehicle.)
Baffling to see god mentioned as a possible cause.
“Act of God” is actually a legal term and not really a religious reference and more. It means a freak event that cannot really be anticipated or planned for.
Seriously? That’s crazy. I didn’t know that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_God
In legal usage in the English-speaking world, an act of God, act of nature, or damnum fatale …
God should’ve secured his load
This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.
Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?
We can dream better than this.
I for one believe we’re capable of building trains
autonomous van pools
We could even call them busses
I love buses too, but a van pool is materially different. Buses travel fixed routes. A van pool can act as a shared taxi that shuttles people directly between points of immediate departure, transit stations, and final destinations.
Years ago, Microsoft was doing some R&D on autonomous vehicles in a mock city built for it. Instead of each vehicle doing all of the processing, the fake city was built with wireless markers to GIVE the car the information. Like instead of having to “see” a stop sign, the stop sign told cars it was there.
It would be complicated and expensive to implement on a mass scale but I thought it was a really cool idea.
Effectively, this has been an ongoing initiative across DoTs for a long while now. The issue is that it’s a hodgepodge approach baked piecemeal into various grants and other programs. But, yeah, digital, vendor agnostic, secure transit infrastructure is always on a lot of DOT folks’ minds.
That test sounds like a model trainroad but for billionaires.
Sure. But it’s not like the technology they developed is useless outside of an autonomous city, I’m sure they went into it knowing it would never be implemented for real.
Safer than ChatGPT you say? Wow…
That isn’t a high bar.
Move fast, break laws, escape repercussions.
They moved on to calling it “disrupting the market”. I think the latest is “Revolutionize the way we do …”. Same thing really.
10x!!!
yea right. time will tell.
As someone who has been on over 50 Waymo rides, I trust them more than any human driver. They drive extremely carefully see things coming that I would have never seen coming. Only thing that annoys me is that they do stupid little things like turning left from the left lane instead of the center lane, or cruising in the left lane, exactly at the speed limit.
There is a very large safety difference between Waymo and Tesla robotaxis right now.
teslas looked safe for a while though. imma take my time.
Tesla robotaxis had a string of crashes their first day
i didn’t know that 😂
Yeah but they didn’t move fast. autonomous road vehicles have been in development by one company or another for what, twenty years at least? It’s only in the last couple of years that they’ve started hitting the road.
Yep, the DARPA Grand Challenge of 2004 spurred the modern self-driving car era. But attempts at self driving cars were made as early as the 70s - earlier, depending on how you define autonomous driving. And Waymo has had driveless cars on roads since 2017.
That probably is not so comforting when one of them is in control of half a ton of metal, plastic and glass in public.
Except for people just walking around getting irradiated at a high enough level to provide feedback for the taxi’s radar. I assume people will start getting cancer… The cancer levels might be funny like 98% on people’s left side or maybe only on people who walk on the sunny or shaded side of busy streets.
I’d give it a few years for the cancers to start showing up.
The sustained dose from a class 1 lidar is well below critical safety levels. You’re no more likely to get cancer from car lidar than you are from regular use of household LED lights. But sure, let’s just add lidar to the long list of things that people will irrationally scaremonger about.
They’re using lidar not radar, it doesn’t cause cancer, but prolonged exposure can damage your eyes because it’s basically just blasting IR rays 24/7
Even radar would not cause cancer. At least not that I know of
Here’s the thing: wavelengths shorter than visible light cause cancer. Wavelengths longer…don’t. They’re using the long wavelengths.
Not exactly how that works. But go ahead.
Not exactly how that works.
Got any pointers to references we can read up to learn more?
The Wavelengths used are 0.905microns to 1.55microns, while Class A, they are still lasers.
If you happen to be carrying the right sort of material on your skin for example, the wavelength could halve or quadruple. That would locally irradiate you at UV or microwave.
People looking straight at the sensor could get cataracts or irritated corneas.
Its unnecessary technology exposing everyone around it to new unknowns.
You are very confident for someone who uses radar and laser interchangeably
I mean if they’re going to misuse words, might as well do it with confidence
Let’s say it halved. That’s visible light, which at low wattage, is harmless.
If it quadrupled, its still infrared. Also harmless at those wattages
Remember here: youre dealing with something that is less harmful than visible light. So whatever fear you have must be much worse when it comes to things like daylight, indoor lighting, headlights, etc
If near infrared (1000nm) can become uv with the wrong material, surely visible light from the sun can do the same and would become an even more dangerous wavelength? Or is this an effect that only happens to near-infrared? Ive not come across it before…
Wouldn’t that sort of material also double the frequency of any other light source? Like a street lamp or the sun?
