Comment by themafia
6 days ago
> are bringing a bad name to the entire field of autonomous driving.
A small number of humans bring a bad name to the entire field of regular driving.
> The average consumer isn't going to make a distinction between Tesla vs. Waymo.
What's actually "distinct?" The secret sauce of their code? It always amazed me that corporate giants were willing to compete over cab rides. It sort of makes me feel, tongue in cheek, that they have fully run out of ideas.
> they will assume all robotic driving is crash prone
The difference in failure modes between regular driving and autonomous driving is stark. Many consumers feel the overall compromise is unviable even if the error rates between providers are different.
Watching a Waymo drive into oncoming traffic, pull over, and hear a tech support voice talk to you over the nav system is quite the experience. You can have zero crashes, but if your users end up in this scenario, they're not going to appreciate the difference.
They're not investors. They're just people who have somewhere to go. They don't _care_ about "the field". Nor should they.
> dangerous and irresponsible.
These are, in fact, pilot programs. Why this lede always gets buried is beyond me. Instead of accepting the data and incorporating it into the world view here, people just want to wave their hands and dissemble over how difficult this problem _actually_ is.
Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.
That’s the problem right there.
It’s EXTREMELY hard.
Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”
I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.
So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem.
Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.
It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.
> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.
Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.
If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.
> Some of us call them out.
You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?
> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.
It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.
Freeways are far easier for a robot to drive on than streets. Driving on freeways would significantly lower Waymo's accident per mile rate.
The difference is that accidents on a freeway are far more likely to be fatal than accidents on a city street.
Waymo didn't avoid freeways because they were hard, they avoided them because they were dangerous.
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Waymo started rolling out freeway trips in some cities late last year
Waymo overall has a FANTASTIC safety record and has been improving steadily. You can't say the same about Tesla's FSD and Robotaxi.
LIDAR gives Waymo a fundamental advantage.
Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.
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dunning-kruger effect at the corporate level?