Comment by mmmlinux

I did have one drive straight through a big pothole in LA once, and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes. But neither of those are very surprising.

Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.

"It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you."

You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?

You say the term pivot like its a startup founder who has every option in life. You should feel bad for anyone who would struggle for a basic job.

It's interesting that we're on the cusp of a major change in our world and no one is really talking about it. Self driving cars will have a profound impact on society. Everything from real estate to logistics will be impacted.

Actually i spoke a uber driver about this and he said he was waiting for cars with FSD available to buy then he could make his car work for him.

> This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years.

In 1995 Navlab 5 completed the first autonomous US coast-to-coast journey. Traveling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to San Diego, California.

The history is long, but the technology is finally here. Hopefully soon the technology will be everywhere.

> It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you.

You mean just like programmers watching AI replacing them?

if there's 4 H100s in there, that's effectively a gold bar in terms of value just sitting there

in a vehicle that is unmanned and unguarded, which anyone can summon to a dodgy warehouse

what do you think will happen once this becomes public knowledge?

Yeah it always wigs me out going through those super narrow "55 mph" construction zones on US highways. I'm not in a hurry and want to slow down, but if I did I'd have semis blowing past at 75 which feels even more unsafe. Honestly I think they should put up speed cameras.

Pretty sure but yeah it's possible, either way the traffic was moving fast and we slowed down to the point where it felt unsafe.

I expect that Waymo will have standards. In theory Uber does as well, but since the drivers own their own cars they can't enforce them. A 15 year old car that has been well maintained is still safe to have on the road (within the limits of the safety systems on board), while a 6 year old car with a lot of miles that hasn't been maintained can be deadly.

If you have access to a Google campus that is 10 years old, they seem to be doing fine? A little bit worse for wear, perhaps, but it's not like Google hasn't encountered this issue ever before.

Really? I fly a lot and Part 121 commercial airliners seem to be pretty well maintained.

I’ve been in so many Ubers in the UK with check engine lights and the similar — but at least some of the difference is Uber UK has much higher requirements for cars, which I expect is probably partly because of competition from private hires.

It feels like it would be useful to also know how many fatalities would be expected from Lyft in the number of miles Waymo has traveled based on their calculated rate (which should be fairly straightforward to calculate with only the rate you gave and the number of miles Waymo has traveled, although I'm not sure if it's known) and the probability that Lyft would also see zero fatalities with that number of miles traveled (which I think would require more detailed knowledge like variance, although I admit I haven't spent enough time to convince myself with complete confidence that this is correct).

I imagine it also goes without saying that not every mile of road is equally risky, and I have to imagine that Waymo's miles traveled probably on far less risky roads on average given the way they've been rolled out (which isn't a bad thing, but it does make extrapolations from the data about relative safety a bit more dubious).

> you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.

Another very interesting thing about robotaxis is agency and blame. Taxi driver had an accident? Just that driver is suspect. Robotaxi had an accident? They're all suspect.

I think this is too much credit given for emotional labor. NY has an intrusive din and these people live in their cars all day. They evolve toward chronic irritation alleviated with impotent shows of force.

I think that's kind of their point; if no one else is being aggressive, than being in the one car driven aggressively might be viewed as an advantage. A more civic mindset might prefer a driver doesn't try to take advantage of this because of how it might affect others and a pragmatist might be concerned with the potential to influence others to do the same and ruin the status quo, but I think empirically there are a sizeable number of people who would view it as an opportunity rather than something to avoid .

Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's praiseworthy, or that we should forget what is inevitably coming along with the deal. Maybe we should be supporting human drivers, rather than dissing them as being less-desirable. That makes the mistake of comparing them with the loss-leader version of these services, not what they will really be when fully unmasked.

http://comma.ai seems to be doing alright, they just announced the new coma four. I tell all of my friends about it and that they should get one, or get a better car that supports it, unless they've got a Tesla. It's not self driving, it's just really really good cruise control.

Is it from NHTSA with a NHTSA or an auto industry group diving deep into the software and testing its edge cases? No?

Yes, it is corporate propaganda. "Peer reviewed" doesn't mean anything if it is SPONSORED BY THE COMPANY. There is peer reviewed studies to kingdom come that are industry sponsored and have plagued our society for at least a century.

I AM NOT THE PERSON that should be doing this research. A FEDERAL AGENCY TASKED WITH HIGHWAY SAFETY should be doing it, barring that, the auto insurance industry groups should be doing it. Not a corporate sponsored shill paper.

93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].

This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.

After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.

Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.

Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.

[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1981-svenson.pdf

Yeah, I chuckle a bit when the person who blew by me on the freeway at 80mph is just 2 cars ahead of me at the offramp stop light.

I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.

Twice as slow was probably accurate when comparing Uber with freeways vs Waymo (which wasn't using freeways yet).

But now that Waymo is gonna use freeways, that major speed difference is gonna evaporate.

In the real world 45 in a 40 will often enough get through lights just before they turn to red often enough that your real speed is more than twice as fast! Unless the city has timed their lights correctly - which sounds easy but on a grid is almost impossible for all streets. It all depends on how the red lights are timed.

My understanding was waymo in LA does not yet take freeways (maybe this announcement will change that) which makes it a strictly worse experience in LA specifically.

I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.

It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic. It can technically be illegal to drive at (or below) the speed limit because it creates an unsafe environment for all the other cars on the road that are driving faster, even if they’re all breaking the legal speed limit.

It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.

You may want to become aware of the existence of New York City. It's a pretty interesting place.

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My hot take is that anyone who would take a taxi from JFK to Manhattan, along the most well-served transit corridor on the continent, is probably a psycho and we shouldn't ask for their input on transportation topics.

I certainly could have arrived 10 minutes later, but I wouldn't say that arriving 10 minutes later would result in a better experience in every way. It might result in a hypothetically safer experience (in the instance, there were no collisions so safety was achieved) or a morally better experience (according to the HN consensus morals that deem me a psychopath for either taking a cab at all or because I did not intervene and let the cab driver drive as he saw fit). Up to you what criteria you judge the overall trip on, I'm just pointing out that if the trip time is longer, the trip is not better in every way; at least absent an unusual requirement such as if you wanted to see the sights on the way, a shorter but less scenic trip would be a negative; or if you had a timing constraint that you must not arrive before a certain time, a shorter trip might infringe that constraint and would be a negative --- no such constraint was mentioned.

I don't know that any life was endangered either. I would accept an argument that property was endangered, certainly the margin between vehicles was very close, but at speeds where a collision would not have been injurious.