Waymo Starts To Eclipse Uber in Race To Self-Driving Taxis (sfchronicle.com) 67
Uber barreled into autonomous driving out of fear that it could end up as the MySpace or Yahoo of ride-hailing, a company with early gargantuan success that stumbled as times changed. Waymo, the self-driving offshoot of Google parent Alphabet, has pursued its ambitions more cautiously, accumulating long years of research and testing before pursuing a plan to bring its technology to the public. From a report: Now, as Waymo scales up its self-driving taxi service, Uber's fear could be coming to pass. This week, as Uber continued to reel from a fatal self-driving accident in Arizona, Waymo confidently pushed forward -- landing a deal to build 20,000 self-driving luxury SUVs with Jaguar Land Rover on top of its plan for thousands of Chysler hybrid minivans. Within two years, it aims to have thousands of fully autonomous taxis -- with no backup drivers behind the wheel -- on the roads, starting in Phoenix where it is already giving test rides.
The company predicts it will give 1 million robot-taxi rides a day by 2020. Waymo, the industry pioneer, logged millions of autonomous miles as it perfected self-driving technology. But over the years, engineers defected out of frustration that it was not commercializing the technology. Now with former auto executive John Krafcik at the helm, Waymo appears poised to launch a self-driving taxi service that could conceivably dominate that field, at least early on, the way Uber does now with human-driven cars.
The company predicts it will give 1 million robot-taxi rides a day by 2020. Waymo, the industry pioneer, logged millions of autonomous miles as it perfected self-driving technology. But over the years, engineers defected out of frustration that it was not commercializing the technology. Now with former auto executive John Krafcik at the helm, Waymo appears poised to launch a self-driving taxi service that could conceivably dominate that field, at least early on, the way Uber does now with human-driven cars.
Emergency STOP button (Score:2)
As with any other form of dangerous machinery, I hope it at least comes with one of these...
https://i.stack.imgur.com/jrVP... [imgur.com]
https://incompliancemag.com/wp... [incompliancemag.com]
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rickrolled (Score:2)
hack..
hack..
hack...
waymo.all().entertainment.search('Never gonna give you up').play();
waymo.all().navigation.left(100);
waymo.all().navigation.accelerate(100);
And hilarity ensues.
No one is close (Score:4, Insightful)
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I think this is why they are starting in Phoenix. The roads are in good condition (no freeze-thaw cycle) and the weather is almost never an issue. They already have all the roads mapped out. If your origin or destination is off the pre-mapped roads, they can dispatch a human driven car instead.
Re: No one is close (Score:1)
Er, you might want to check actual statistics before talking about how safely humans drive. Also, how many Uber cars with human drivers have killed and maimed?
Re: No one is close (Score:5, Informative)
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It is pretty obvious there are a lot more than 16,000 accidents per month, if you just look at how many cars are in repair shop yards. This site https://www.driverknowledge.co... [driverknowledge.com] claims 6 million car accidents a year which is 500,000 per month. However if you divide your 3.22 trillion figure (confirmed here: https://www.npr.org/sections/t... [npr.org]) by that you get 533,333 which is close to what you claimed, so I think you screwed up with your quote somewhere.
I'm still a little doubtful. I have a car with about 50
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Virtually no cars go over 1/2 million miles. I just examined the parking lot outside and over half had signs of an accident of some sort. Several had obviously been in a few. The stats are way off.
Most accidents by human drivers are unreported. As long as the damage is minor, there is no reason to raise insurance rates. EVERY accident whether or not there is any physical damage is reported for these vehicles.
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The human accident rate is actually around one per 200K miles. See my other post.
BUT that human rate is for _actual_ accidents -- not near misses. I'd guesstimate that near misses vs. accident is better than 10:1. Let's call it 1 near miss per 20K miles. Meaning a "phew!" moment every year or two for the average driver, which feels about right.
As far as real-world consequences, it'd be much more realistic to chalk up each intervention as a near miss. By that count, 5K miles/intervention is only 4x worse tha
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sorry, throw out the truck drivers and redo it.
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Conversely, throw out older cars. Of the accidents I've seen actually occur, one of them was because an axle snapped and the car completely lost it. If measuring by serious injury, only twice in my experience was an accident so severe it warranted an ambulance for anyone, and that's because that car was older than airbags (the other was not wearing a seatbelt). Also throw out bad weather conditions,country and mountain roads, etc.
Modern cars are increasingly having things like collision alert and lane de
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plenty of weather caused accidents really are the driver going "too fast for conditions."
My family and their acquaintances have people that love old cars and drive them, 30-60 years old vehicles, and never heard of axle breaking. I've seen that on newer cost reduced crap cars though....
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If the system disengages, requiring an intervention, due to a bag blowing in the road, we shouldn't assume a serious collision would otherwise occur (from the point of view of the car; the bag might disagree.) If a disengagement is accompanied by automatic braking, and/or pulling over, then there may be little risk in some situations.
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Of course, this could make for an unacceptable taxi experience. Your taxi gives up a noticable period of time isn't going to be a particularly happy experience. If it otherwise works as advertised, it might make for a solid mode for your personal car or a rental, but not really 'taxi'.
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Would be interesting the percentage of urgent interventions versus non urgent.
I imagine an intervention can be scenarios like car not slowing down despite a pedestrian clearly about to get into the roadway, which would trigger something rather urgent and would indicate at least an increased likelihood of an accident.
I am also imagining scenarios like the coast is clear, but the car refuses to execute some maneuver. Then the human driver intervenes and does that left turn or whatever.
Either way, it speaks t
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Intervention != accident (Score:2)
Numbers don't pass the smell test (Score:2)
550K miles doesn't even begin to cover the fender-bender rate. You're quoting a number similar to *police-reported* accidents. According to the DOT [dot.gov]"In 2016, there were an estimated 7,277,000 police-reported motor vehicle crashes in the United States, resulting in 37,461 fatalities and 3,144,000 people injured." That's roughly 440K miles per _police-reported_ crash, not 550K.
Problem is most accidents aren't police reported, and certainly not fender benders. Apparently, the average driver has an accident eve [foxbusiness.com]
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"Waymo Starts To Eclipse Uber"
That's a joke, Uber is years behind Waymo, Waymo cars get on average 5600 miles before the human driver has to intervene, Uber cars? 13 miles!!! That's a roughly 400fold difference.
They've always been ahead. (Score:5, Insightful)
To get a sense of how far ahead Waymo is, take a look at the disengagements report [ca.gov] Waymo published last year and then look at everyone else's. At least in California, Waymo has more miles driven than everyone else combined and their disengagement rate is much lower
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Wow, only Chevy looks close, and they're about a year behind.
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Also, miles driven means nothing if nothing unexpected is happening during most of those miles.
This depends both on what happens and on what range of events are expected/handled by the system. Most of Waymo's driving in California is on busy surface streets where lots of random things happen.
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It looks like it is. According to the CA DMV, disengagement is “a deactivation of the autonomous mode when a failure of the autonomous technology is detected or when the safe operation of the vehicle requires that the autonomous vehicle test driver disengage the autonomous mode and take immediate manual control of the vehicle.”
It may be a terminology issue. If you're looking at Arizona, they may have different terms than California does. And whose accounts have Waymo at about 4900 miles per r
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Whoops! Okay, I see the discrepancy. You have to figure that your statistic of 4900 miles is an average--how many miles driven divided by the number of times a person had to step in and take control of the car.
So, yes, November 2017 had one case in 30,516.7 miles, which is pretty darned impressive. Conversely, April 2017 had 10 such disengagements in only 27,238.7 miles. Some simple math tells us that's 1 disengagement every 2,723.87 miles.
If you take all the disengagements and divide by the total miles
Simple, or stupid (Score:2)
So, yes, November 2017 had one case in 30,516.7 miles, which is pretty darned impressive. Conversely, April 2017 had 10 such disengagements
Well then it seems like the software is obviously getting better as we know they would have deployed a lot of updates to the system in that time, so surely the stupidest possible thing you could do is average these two points into an absolute number because it's obviously increasing in quality continuously...
Some simple math...If you take all the disengagements and divid
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I would say the data is too noisy to be that confident the trend is precisely as described. For example August looked pretty good, then september was suddenly way worse. February looked as good as October, but April was horrific.
It is nice to review the data in more detail. It affirms that it's pretty solid on highways, less so on streets. It also shows that the most prominent intervention is user taking over due to an unwanted maneuver by the car. It shows that early on, almost all the events were hum
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To get a sense of how far ahead Waymo is, take a look at the disengagements report [ca.gov] Waymo published last year and then look at everyone else's. At least in California, Waymo has more miles driven than everyone else combined and their disengagement rate is much lower
It's hard to derive any useful conclusion solely from these numbers. It's not clear what the apples-to-apples bases of comparison are. Disengagements are self-reported and perhaps interpreted differently each company. Waymo says, "The vast majority of disengagements are not related to safety." Nvidia says, "Disengagements were when a driver completed a test, or assumed manual control of the vehicle due to discomfort." So, it is not clear whether the metric is uniform or even useful for evaluation of sa
Turn the damn Lidar ON next time. (Score:3)
I Wouldn't Get In A Self-Driving Uber After They (Score:2)
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I wonder more why they put a "driver" behind the wheel who obviously was neither qualified nor paying attention.
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The issue presumably is competence, not character.
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They can just rebrand as 'Death Race 2000: The Ride' and it'll be a smash success. Throw in an AR HUD, microtransactions, and it'll be a real hit.
Actually, Carmageddon might be a better license; kill off competing Uber cabbies to increase your surge pricing profits.
Place Your Bets! (Score:2)
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When I was in a car as a child, I'd play "stick my hand out the window and use it as a wing", "jump Mario over street cracks" and "hop Mario over the wiper blades". Not sure you want to use children as your standard for 'understanding obstacles'.
Waymo is not a Taxi service (Score:1)
So what are their plans, since they are not a taxi service and don't have the stuff Uber has set up around the world?
So they are going to licence the cars to Uber? Sell the Tech to the highest bidder or Lyft or buyout Uber or Lyft?
Even if they are ahead, they have no customer.
It will be just another google 'app' on your phone (Score:2)
What might be the relative safety of such systems? (Score:2)
This subject brings to mind a question. My post is not about the pros or cons of self driving vehicles or taxi services, not about Waymo versus Uber versus any other. It is an abstract speculation.
Will self driving cars have different types of accidents or injury rates than human driven vehicles? For instance, if there are crashes with injuries, will the ratio of pedestrian versus occupant injuries or fatalities differ between self-driven versus human driven cars, or between different self driving compan