I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
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.
I imagine most traditional taxi drivers converted into Uber and Lyft drivers. Unique regulatory circumstances in places like NYC might have delayed that process some of course (eg trying to pay off a medallion).
It's funny how "exploit workers worse (medallions) and worse (rideshares) until we can fully cut them out" has played out in such a perfect microcosm, and yet somehow people here don't seem to register that it was never the workers' own fault.
Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.
Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.
And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.
When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)
Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.
There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.
Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.
There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.
I think you have to go market by market to make that statement. In NYC, for example, it was explicitly illegal for yellow cabs to accept radio/pickup calls, which was the domain of the livery cabs (black cars). The tradeoff was that only yellow cabs could do street hails. That worked for everybody for years - yellow cabs did a volume business, livery cabs were for outer boros or luxury/business travel and would sneakily try to pick up street hails.
In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.
The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.
No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.
At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.
But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.
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.
Waymo cars are also more likely to be properly maintained. I've noticed that a lot of Uber / Lyft cars have some kind of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, low tire pressure, overdue for service.
Waymo cars are new. Wait until their fleets are 10+ years old. They'll have all the same bad maintenance issues that airplanes, semis, rental cars, and any other company-owned vehicles have.
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.
Very few airliners depart in perfect working order. There is a "MEL" (minimum equipment list) that details which systems can be inop and still operate the flight.
I had my first waymo ride in Austin recently and it suddenly slowed down to 20mph in 40mph zone for 5+ mins before returning to normal speed. Cars were passing around us and it felt like the car was glitching out, which felt very sketchy.
I was doing this a lot in US whenever I’d see construction work speed limits and had similar experience. Realized no one cares about these custom signs.
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.
In my corner of the world it was the workers who demanded section control limiting speed to 70kmph in a segment of highway that was being renovated.
Authorities later said that they only went after 30% of the worst offenders, because otherwise the sheer number of tickets would be to high to process in a reasonable timespan.
Once word got out that the limit was actually enforced, speeds dropped. Now we have section control on some highways and personally I'm a fan, as I was always going around the speed limit anyway.
What do you mean by "section control"? A did a quick search and founds lots of possibilities but none that seem to apply to construction zone speed control.
Average speed camera. "Section control" is how they were named in Austria where I've first encountered them and the term translates to something similar in my language, so I assumed that was the English term, but it appears to be a case of Önglish.
I've been in ride shares where the driver has crossed a curb road divider or squeezed through tiny gaps in front of trucks. Going too slow sounds like a better 'bad' experience to me.
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
So it might come down to how many "9s" you're comfortable with. The experience is really good 99.999% of the time until it's not, and that "not" could be catastrophic. I suppose the data engineers are quite confident in the 9s.
Lyft is 99.99999% with 1.02 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled[0].
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
> 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.
They’re a good experience, but consider, the other day I took an uber in sf with a gay taxi driver who sang along to the Tina turner he had on full blast, told me I was fabulous and almost caused a crash at a 4 way stop. 5 stars. No notes.
Oh great! Doing life-threatening activities is now verified by anecdotal evidence.
I get there. Basically isn't any laws for corporations anymore, is there any way I can see anything in regards to the safety of this at a statistical level?
Where is NHTSA? Oh right, no federal agencies exist anymore except for those that maintain the oligarchy.
And I don't give a crap if Uber has really good statistics and studies and evidence. We are talking about one of the least ethical companies in the last 20 years.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
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.
Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.
It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.
Eh this doesn't mean much. The quality of drivers is pretty bimodal.
You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.
The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.
If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.
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.
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.
There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.
I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
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.
At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
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.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic.
No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.
The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass. You are not there to enforce the speed limit; the fact that another car is passing you might be speeding does not give you the right or duty to block them.
"a person who knows, or should reasonably know, that another vehicle is overtaking from the rear the vehicle that the person is operating may not continue to operate the vehicle in the left most lane"
I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:
> No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation. [1]
Versus California:
> No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, _or in compliance with law_. [2] (underscore emphasis mine)
It’s part of the Uniform Vehicle Code but each state has its quirks in how they adopt it since theres no federal mandate.
My apologies though, this seems way less common than I thought. As far as I can tell Georgia and Oregon are the only two states left that don’t have that compliance exception.
On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
> Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
So you’re saying they had to pass a law clarifying a contradiction in previous laws? Those contradictions were my original point. And it still only applies to the slow poke lane.
It's very clear in this instance if you don't view the law as a programming language, aren't a 2 year old, and don't go around viewing everyone in the world as a bunch of NPCs in the main story of your life.
I get that even that's hard for some people. But it really isn't. We just stop trying to teach people to not be assholes once they leave elementary school.
You’re literally viewing the law as a precise programming language, whereas I’m arguing that the reality is that laws are written in natural language that contains not only semantic ambiguity, but temporal ambiguity where one law is not coherent with another because they were created by different people at different times with different incentives.
You also didn’t bother responding to the meat of my argument, but hey you do you. Personally I’ve found that anyone who refers to other human beings as “NPCs” is void of any substance.
> 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.
A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.
I feel like I won the lottery whenever I have an aggressive driver that knows the city well. It makes me wonder if breaking the law will be the main value proposition of human drivers at some point.
In NY city, I've noticed that taxi drivers will get agressive when we are stuck in traffic. They will start honking, yelling, or changing from one almost stopped lane to another almost stopped lane. I always thought it was theatrical, to show me that they were trying hard, and not just letting the fee increase while they sat stopped in traffic.
We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.
> Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
> it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
Perhaps. But if you have a taxi or car service driver who's not willing to ever break any traffic laws in New York, you will not arrive at your destination in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time.
For example, getting at the back of the line for an exit rather than trying to go to the front and cut your way in could be a multi-hour mistake.
This is absurd, and it's a**hole behavior you're defending.
You don't need to break any laws to get to where you're going, what are you even talking about? And you think that just because you're in a taxi you should get to magically cut to the front of a line of cars, made of the vast majority of New Yorkers who actually respect each other? What could possibly make you feel so entitled?
And if you think waiting in line for an exit takes multiple hours, I question whether you've ever been to NYC in the first place.
No, I don't think it's because you're in a taxi. I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well. It's pretty easy to understand what's gonna happen next.
I've lived in New York for longer than most HN posters here have been alive, most likely. A couple of times a year, I'll end up in a car with someone who doesn't understand how this whole thing works, and they'll do something insane like getting on the Brooklyn Bridge and then just staying in the right lane the entire time waiting to get off to the right. Or they'll sit on the BQE at the Flushing Avenue exit a mile back from the exit, causing me to waste large portions of my life that I will never get back.
> I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't live here, or at least don't drive here. You're describing some kind of Mad Max fantasy, like the image of New York people get from movies and fiction where everyone is flipping everyone else the bird every thirty seconds.
People in NYC are pretty cooperative. Driving isn't every-man-for-himself. I don't know why you're trying to paint this picture of some lawless fantasy. Maybe you think it's exciting, but it's not connected to reality.
I live and drive in NYC, and this is utter bullshit. To the extent that it's difficult to drive here, it's because of assholes who think they deserve to cut the line and fuck it up for everyone else.
Please stop driving here, you clearly aren't qualified to do so.
Apart from not having to deal with a human, observance of traffic laws is the main advantage I see in autonomous vehicles. Once there are a decent proportion of them on the road we can ratchet up penalties against human asshole drivers, conviction aided by evidence gathered by the sensors on the surrounding non-human vehicles.
Haha, this is both entirely true and entirely the reason why NYC is pretty much stuck where it is. If cities were parables, NYC would be The Parable of the Tragedy of the Commons. Globally, among cities I've been to it would have to be Delhi, but NYC is certainly in that category of South Asian cities where the infrastructure is far outpaced by the population and the population is like a swarming rat king constantly jockeying for a few inches more.
Certainly it sounds like that. However whatever cultural transformation turns Man into Rat King has already occurred so you'll notice that it costs over a billion dollars per mile of subway in NYC. Everyone who hasn't figured out how to leech off the government is a fattened milk cow whose production is harvested industrially.
New Yorkers are already incapable of non-extractive development. Like the GP they have been transformed into zero-sum zombies by their city. A cautionary tale of culture.
> These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
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.
There are many, many, many airports to which it is easier to travel via public transit from their associated city than it is from Manhattan to JFK. For example, all of these global-top-25 airports have single-train access:
I don't get the gripe. AirTrain gets you to A,E,J,Z, and LIRR, all of which get you to "Manhattan" or a significant number of intermediate destinations in about an hour. LGA is far worse.
You do realize that public transportation doesn't provide luggage carts? That you can't take those out of the airport?
If you're traveling with a family or group, it really is often going to be much easier to take an XL Uber than deal with turnstiles and transfers and stairs and everything.
I've come from abroad with two large checked bags, a carry-on, and a backpack. You think I'm trying to take all that through the subway?
Obviously, yeah if you're traveling solo with a carry-on, most people take public transportation.
Or not, if it's 1 am and you don't want to be waiting 20 minutes for each connection.
Also, if you're a tourist new to the city after a long flight, the last thing you want to do is figure out the massively complicated transit system. Just having someone take you straight to your hotel where you can shower and sleep and deal with jet lag can be an important priority.
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.
This makes Dallas much more viable. I'm not sure if I'd have a usecase for waymo other than going to the airport. The other use cases such as going to work when my car is in the shop require the freeway too. Only non freeway thing I'd use it for otherwise is coming home from a neighborhood party or local restaurant/bar when I've been drinking and I don't really drink.
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
I don't have any specific knowledge about Waymo's stack, but I can confidently say Waymo's reaction time is likely poorer than an attentive human. By the time sensor data makes it through the perception stack, prediction/planning stack, and back to the controls stack, you're likely looking at >500ms. Waymos have the advantage of consistency though (they never text and drive).
> but I can confidently say [...] you're likely looking at >500ms
That sounds outrageous if true. Very strange to acknowledge you don't actually have any specific knowledge about this thing before doing a grand claim, not just "confidently", but also label it as such.
They've been publishing some stuff around latency (https://waymo.com/search?q=latency) but I'm not finding any concrete numbers, but I'd be very surprised if it was higher than the reaction time for a human, which seems to be around 400-600ms typically.
Human reaction time is very difficult to average meaningfully. It ranges anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds on the low end to multiple seconds. The low end of that range consists of snap reactions by alert drivers, and the high end is common with distracted driving.
400-500ms is a fairly normal baseline for AV systems in my experience.
> MIT researchers have found an answer in a new study that shows humans need about 390 to 600 milliseconds to detect and react to road hazards, given only a single glance at the road — with younger drivers detecting hazards nearly twice as fast as older drivers.
But it'll be highly variable not just between individuals but state of mind, attentiveness and a whole lot of other things.
Even if we assume this to be true, waymos have the advantage of more sensors and less blind spots.
Unlike humans they can also sense what's behind the car or other spots not directly visible to a human.
They can also measure distance very precisely due to lidars (and perhaps radars too?)
A human reacts to the red light when a car breaks, without that it will take you way more time due to stereo vision to realize that a car ahead was getting closer to you.
And I am pretty sure when the car detects certain obstacles fast approaching at certain distances, or if a car ahesd of you stopped suddenly or deer jumped or w/e it breaks directly it doesn't need neural networks processing those are probably low level failsafes that are very fast to compute and definitely faster than what a human could react to
Waymo "sees" further - including behind cars - and has persistent 360-degree awareness, wheres humans have to settle for time-division of the fovea and are limited to line-of-sight from driver's seat. Humans only have an advantage if the event is visible from the cabin, and they were already looking at it (i.e. it's in front of them) for every other scenario, Waymo has better perception + reaction times. "They just came out of nowhere" happens less for Waymo vehicles with their current sensor suite.
It's actually a really interesting topic to think about. Depending on the situation, there might be some indecision in a human driver that slows the process down. Whereas the Waymo probably has a decisive answer to whatever problem is facing it.
I don't really know the answers for sure here, but there's probably a gray area where humans struggle more than the Waymo.
I think the key is, it's easy to get "self-driving" where the car will hand off to the driver working on highways. "Follow the lines, go forward, don't get hit". But having it DRIVERLESS is a different beast, and the failure states are very different than those in surface street driving.
It's easier to get from zero to something that works on divided highways, since there's only lanes, other vehicles, and a few signs to care about. No cross traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving.
The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading).
Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed:
construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around.
the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver.
it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but-
i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire.
it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do
i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident.
The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
Not at all. We've been working on this for a while, and we're now comfortable with the reliability bar we've hit to begin a gradual rollout to the public. As people said, this has been years in the making.
I have HW4, and have tried FSD with every major release.
It works brilliantly, 99.5% of the time. The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic. Like getting confused with the lane marking and driving off the shoulder. And the complete inability to read construction zone signs (blasting through a 50 KM zone at 100 KM).
I'm deeply skeptical that the current sensor suite and hardware is going to have enough compute power to safely drive without supervision.
It will no doubt improve, but until Tesla steps up and assumes liability for any accident, it's just not "full self driving".
I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either).
That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
Make sure to do whatever "express interest" is required inside the app. We've often done a first-come, first-served approach for getting people off of waitlists, so get in now :).
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
While young and stupid, I did 100 mph on the 710 once. Driving home from work at 12:30 am on Monday gives opportunity for lots of speed. There's no traffic at that time of day. It was many years ago, and traffic grows with population, but still, I can't imagine there's much traffic then; I visit the area at least once a year for about a week and there's always some opportunities during the trip to travel above the speed limit, even though I'm not out very late anymore.
It's hilarious to see people in LA buying sports cars. Like even if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket you won't be able to drive faster than the traffic in front of you. Just a status symbol, I guess.
I remember my buddy telling me it would sometimes take him 2 hours to go a few miles in LA traffic and sometimes he would just walk to work instead because he'd get there faster.
Have you driven in LA? Traffic speed is generally bimodal: either stuck in traffic jam or easily 15 mph above the limit. (Source: live in LA, drive regularly.)
As someone who doesn’t drive but has done a UK theory test - aren’t you supposed to stick to the “slow lane” (no matter how fast you’re going) unless you’re overtaking? And that’s why it’s not actually called the “fast lane” but the “passing lane”. So I don’t see why you would be in the passing lane unless you’re going faster than others anyway. And there are plenty of lorries and coaches (trucks and buses in US terms?) that are physically limited to below the speed limit anyway
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The slow lane and passing lane dichotomy makes sense in a rural highway with two lanes in your direction.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
(also it’s kind of amazing that 5 parallel lanes is considered normal in the US… I think the most I’ve ever personally seen in the UK is 4 and that’s only on very major routes, and we don’t have any exits on the wrong side of the motorway)
> Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
Not necessarily. I've seen things like the left two lanes at free flow (speed limit or above) and the right two lanes at full congestion (~ 10 mph), and the middle lane(s) somewhere in between. But then you also have sometimes where the left lane is only doing 60 for some reason, but the next two lanes are at or above the speed limits. It's a complex system.
Wrong side exits for interchanges between highways are common, depending on site details and relative flows. When there's congestion on a left exit, you then get situations where the right lanes are flowing faster than the left lanes (sometimes much faster). I don't think interchanges as left exits are necessarily awful.
Wrong side exits to surface streets have been discouraged for new construction for quite some time, but there's a fair number of "legacy exits" in some areas. They're not so bad when there's only two lanes in your direction; but when there's been highway expansion, it can get pretty hard to use. And inevitably rebuilding to current standards would causes a lot of confusion and delay, it's postponed. My exemplar of the worst left exits, the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, was rebuilt in 2012-2022 and I can't find pictures of what it was before, but you had a sizable interchange with right and left exits to other highways, combined with several surface street exits and entrances on both sides, and I think two through lanes. It was a mess.
If there are vehicles going slow due to capability, you are pretty likely to be in an area where traffic density means that there's lots of vehicles in all the available lanes.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
In Ontario we have lots of 3 lane highways (we'll ignore Toronto area, where speed is limited by traffic anyways). What happens is that trucks & people getting on/off exits are in right most lane. Middle lane is everyone else, going 10-20 km/h over speed limit. Leftmost lane is people passing, or the maniacs going over 150 km/h while relying on their map system to alert them of highway patrol
You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.
Yes. People do in fact safely drive the speed limit.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
It depends on where you are. There was a protest in in Atlanta about the speed limit. What did they do? They got in every. Single. Lane. As did the speed limit. This backed up traffic for miles. It stopped commercial delivery and had ramifications for entire area. The protesters were arrested. For going the legal limit. The speed limit did not change, but there is a reason why it's never enforced.
I've lived in a couple of places where going the speed limit is a whole problem that can cascade outside of just yourself. There is an argument to be made that perhaps then the speed limit shouldn't be that low, but in driving safety is far more important than legality. It will be interesting to see how Waymo handles these realities when it gets to those areas.
I'd really love to see some good statistics on the risks of speeding on motorways.
I often wonder about laws that are ostensibly there to prevent dangerous actions, about whether they actually help prevent dangerous driving.
This guy analyses tailgating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_lR09sjoU Awesome software although he seems biased (e.g. no mention of pedestrians), but he does say that tailgating is much more dangerous than speeding.
I'm interested whether cameras will start to catch dangerous drivers. I regularly seeing drivers do very dangerous things. Yet we have no easy way to train them (for those that care but are unaware), or catch them (for the antisocial that don't care).
Not a slow driver in most cases, many slow drivers - all who want to go faster but cannot. There is just so much traffic that you can't go faster, and neither can the person in front of you.
I used to drive 20 under all the time (I achieved 57mpg once doing that) - but since this was an empty rural highway the few cars that were around saw me well in advance and moved over and passed without a problem.
We comply with the posted speed limits. Definitely on 101 near San Francisco where there are 55 mph zones (and maybe even 50 mph?) it's pretty noticeable. But we do hug the right lanes.
With self driving cars population on roads increasing, a side effect can be that all traffic will be shaped towards staying within the speed limits. With more cars staying within the limits, breaking the limits becomes more difficult.
If you watch the videos that insiders have been posting, it never exceeds the speed limits.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
I was on 101 during evening rush hour, speeding along like everyone. Then I saw brake lights from a Waymo. Later followed by all the surrounding cars. Interesting that it was the first to detect a slowdown.
As best as I can tell, not universally. I'm rather obsessive about watching brake lights around me; my state doesn't have safety inspections, so I try my best to alert other drivers when they have brake lights out.
I've definitely observed Teslas coming to a halt, and the brake lights only kick on at the very end. I don't know how widespread the problem is, but it's very annoying.
The omnipresent threat of being splattered by someone who's weaving lanes or distracted by their phone and not expecting to see a vehicle doing 20mph (!!!!) below traffic speed is exactly what I want when I'm in a taxi. /s
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance.
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.
Drivers can improve, but they won't. They will talk about the abstract just fine, but always in context of how "the other guy" is so bad, they resist any suggestion that they might not be good either. As soon as your point out something that nearly everyone is doing wrong (as backed up by statistics and traffic safety engineers who study this) and suddenly they will shut you down. As the other reply said: drivers vote and so any change that would affect all of them is impossible.
I'd love to see better public transit, but transit is so bad for most of us that it would take a massive investment before there is any return, and half measures won't work. You have to go all in on transit before you can see any significant change - if you invest in the wrong network you won't know until a massive amount as been invested and there is no return (leaving open the question of if a different investment would have worked).
If only we honked the horn when our cars are stopped, to let people know where it is. And honked before putting our cars in motion, to let people know we're about to move. And while the car is in motion, to let people know the car is in motion. I saw no collisions while visiting India, and continuous honking must be a significant part of the reason.
True, the UK is basically an alien civilization compared to the average american state. No comparison is meaningful unless we compare it to every nation state in the world.
Deaths and accidents are different measurements. Cars are much safer in an accident than they were in the early/middle 20th century.
Per-mile-driven deaths started climbing again around 2012 in the U.S., I'd wager due to the trend towards larger vehicles causing more collateral damage.
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that
buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other
types of vehicles."
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term?
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available.
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality.
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
Sorry about that. Please file in-app feedback (now under Help > Leave Feedback) any time you experience something like that. There's a dedicated "Car Condition" tag.
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
Waymo is in another league compared to every other autpilot system out there - I've used Tesla, Toyota, and Cruise before it got shut down.
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
> However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.
I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
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.
This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years. I don't feel too bad if they didn't manage to pivot in that time period.
"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?
I've been in plenty of Uber & Lyft rides in what were literally taxis.
I imagine most traditional taxi drivers converted into Uber and Lyft drivers. Unique regulatory circumstances in places like NYC might have delayed that process some of course (eg trying to pay off a medallion).
Uber and Lyft drivers are taxi drivers.
Drivers rarely owned the medallion. They leased the cab for 8-12 hours and drove it on behalf of the medallion owner.
> You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?
For the most part, they were the same drivers I think
It's funny how "exploit workers worse (medallions) and worse (rideshares) until we can fully cut them out" has played out in such a perfect microcosm, and yet somehow people here don't seem to register that it was never the workers' own fault.
Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.
Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.
And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.
When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)
Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.
There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.
> some cabbies were nice, honest people
Most were, in fact. You just remember the assholes a lot more.
Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.
There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
> Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place.
This shows just how badly behind they were. All the large cab companies have had apps for years. No one knows about them.
Here's YellowCab's: https://rideyellow.com/app/
> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.
I think you have to go market by market to make that statement. In NYC, for example, it was explicitly illegal for yellow cabs to accept radio/pickup calls, which was the domain of the livery cabs (black cars). The tradeoff was that only yellow cabs could do street hails. That worked for everybody for years - yellow cabs did a volume business, livery cabs were for outer boros or luxury/business travel and would sneakily try to pick up street hails.
In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.
The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.
No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.
At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.
But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.
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.
the history of humans on earth has been pivots, even amongst people who had few options.
I don't subscribe to feeling guilty every time somebody loses a job. I feel empathy, but telling people to "feel bad" is not constructive.
"Feel bad for" is not the same as "feel bad". The former is the same as feeling empathy, in colloquial English
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.
If he can create a buisness of operating a fleet of self driving cars fine, but 99% of regular taxi/uber drivers will loose their job.
> 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?
AI doesn't replace programmers, it's used by programmers for efficiency.
Waymo is most definitely not being used by taxi or rideshare drivers to be more efficient.
As I understand, Waymo still uses humans in some circumstances. Theoretically, the drivers could do this job instead.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Waymo cars are also more likely to be properly maintained. I've noticed that a lot of Uber / Lyft cars have some kind of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, low tire pressure, overdue for service.
Waymo cars are new. Wait until their fleets are 10+ years old. They'll have all the same bad maintenance issues that airplanes, semis, rental cars, and any other company-owned vehicles have.
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.
Really? I fly a lot and Part 121 commercial airliners seem to be pretty well maintained.
Very few airliners depart in perfect working order. There is a "MEL" (minimum equipment list) that details which systems can be inop and still operate the flight.
I had my first waymo ride in Austin recently and it suddenly slowed down to 20mph in 40mph zone for 5+ mins before returning to normal speed. Cars were passing around us and it felt like the car was glitching out, which felt very sketchy.
I was doing this a lot in US whenever I’d see construction work speed limits and had similar experience. Realized no one cares about these custom signs.
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.
In my corner of the world it was the workers who demanded section control limiting speed to 70kmph in a segment of highway that was being renovated.
Authorities later said that they only went after 30% of the worst offenders, because otherwise the sheer number of tickets would be to high to process in a reasonable timespan.
Once word got out that the limit was actually enforced, speeds dropped. Now we have section control on some highways and personally I'm a fan, as I was always going around the speed limit anyway.
What do you mean by "section control"? A did a quick search and founds lots of possibilities but none that seem to apply to construction zone speed control.
Average speed camera. "Section control" is how they were named in Austria where I've first encountered them and the term translates to something similar in my language, so I assumed that was the English term, but it appears to be a case of Önglish.
I've been in ride shares where the driver has crossed a curb road divider or squeezed through tiny gaps in front of trucks. Going too slow sounds like a better 'bad' experience to me.
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
So it might come down to how many "9s" you're comfortable with. The experience is really good 99.999% of the time until it's not, and that "not" could be catastrophic. I suppose the data engineers are quite confident in the 9s.
Lyft is 99.99999% with 1.02 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled[0].
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.[2]
0: https://assets.ctfassets.net/vz6nkkbc6q75/3yrO0aP4mPfTTvyaUZ...
1: https://www.airsafe.com/journal/issue14.htm
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
How many 9s does lyft guarantee?
> and that "not" could be catastrophic
Any different than with a human taxi driver?
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
> 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.
This also applies to getting in a car with a human driver, or to driving yourself. Or to any other way of getting from point A to point B
They’re a good experience, but consider, the other day I took an uber in sf with a gay taxi driver who sang along to the Tina turner he had on full blast, told me I was fabulous and almost caused a crash at a 4 way stop. 5 stars. No notes.
Oh great! Doing life-threatening activities is now verified by anecdotal evidence.
I get there. Basically isn't any laws for corporations anymore, is there any way I can see anything in regards to the safety of this at a statistical level?
Where is NHTSA? Oh right, no federal agencies exist anymore except for those that maintain the oligarchy.
And I don't give a crap if Uber has really good statistics and studies and evidence. We are talking about one of the least ethical companies in the last 20 years.
I want independent Federal testing.
Waymo is overly conservative last time I checked. Driving the speed limit basically means getting to your destination twice as slow.
"Twice as slow" is not even slightly accurate.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
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
It's not just overconfidence, it's selfishness.
Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.
It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.
Eh this doesn't mean much. The quality of drivers is pretty bimodal.
You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.
The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.
If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.
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.
Yeah, speed shouldn't be about time-to-destination except for emergency vehicles. It's about fahrfegnuggen.
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.
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.
There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.
I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
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.
At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
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.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic.
No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.
Or perhaps you have a documented counter-example.
The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass. You are not there to enforce the speed limit; the fact that another car is passing you might be speeding does not give you the right or duty to block them.
"a person who knows, or should reasonably know, that another vehicle is overtaking from the rear the vehicle that the person is operating may not continue to operate the vehicle in the left most lane"
With of course some reasonable exceptions.
https://law.justia.com/codes/indiana/title-9/article-21/chap...
I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:
> No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation. [1]
Versus California:
> No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, _or in compliance with law_. [2] (underscore emphasis mine)
It’s part of the Uniform Vehicle Code but each state has its quirks in how they adopt it since theres no federal mandate.
My apologies though, this seems way less common than I thought. As far as I can tell Georgia and Oregon are the only two states left that don’t have that compliance exception.
On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-40/chapter-6/arti...
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
> I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:
Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
> On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
It really isn't.
> Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
So you’re saying they had to pass a law clarifying a contradiction in previous laws? Those contradictions were my original point. And it still only applies to the slow poke lane.
> It really isn't.
Oh you sweet summer child.
> Oh you sweet summer child.
It's very clear in this instance if you don't view the law as a programming language, aren't a 2 year old, and don't go around viewing everyone in the world as a bunch of NPCs in the main story of your life.
I get that even that's hard for some people. But it really isn't. We just stop trying to teach people to not be assholes once they leave elementary school.
Projection. Projection. Projection.
You’re literally viewing the law as a precise programming language, whereas I’m arguing that the reality is that laws are written in natural language that contains not only semantic ambiguity, but temporal ambiguity where one law is not coherent with another because they were created by different people at different times with different incentives.
You also didn’t bother responding to the meat of my argument, but hey you do you. Personally I’ve found that anyone who refers to other human beings as “NPCs” is void of any substance.
> It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic
As others have mentioned, this is dead wrong.
But the actual complication is enforcement usually requires a margin of error, and in some states (e.g. Wyoming) you can go 10 mph over when passing.
> 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.
A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.
I feel like I won the lottery whenever I have an aggressive driver that knows the city well. It makes me wonder if breaking the law will be the main value proposition of human drivers at some point.
In NY city, I've noticed that taxi drivers will get agressive when we are stuck in traffic. They will start honking, yelling, or changing from one almost stopped lane to another almost stopped lane. I always thought it was theatrical, to show me that they were trying hard, and not just letting the fee increase while they sat stopped in traffic.
We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.
> Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
> it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
You want your cab driver to drive on the shoulder and break the law? What?
You may want to become aware of the existence of New York City. It's a pretty interesting place.
Yeah, that sounds like NYC nonsense. I assume it's still illegal to drive on the shoulder in New York.
Perhaps. But if you have a taxi or car service driver who's not willing to ever break any traffic laws in New York, you will not arrive at your destination in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time.
For example, getting at the back of the line for an exit rather than trying to go to the front and cut your way in could be a multi-hour mistake.
This is absurd, and it's a**hole behavior you're defending.
You don't need to break any laws to get to where you're going, what are you even talking about? And you think that just because you're in a taxi you should get to magically cut to the front of a line of cars, made of the vast majority of New Yorkers who actually respect each other? What could possibly make you feel so entitled?
And if you think waiting in line for an exit takes multiple hours, I question whether you've ever been to NYC in the first place.
No, I don't think it's because you're in a taxi. I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well. It's pretty easy to understand what's gonna happen next.
I've lived in New York for longer than most HN posters here have been alive, most likely. A couple of times a year, I'll end up in a car with someone who doesn't understand how this whole thing works, and they'll do something insane like getting on the Brooklyn Bridge and then just staying in the right lane the entire time waiting to get off to the right. Or they'll sit on the BQE at the Flushing Avenue exit a mile back from the exit, causing me to waste large portions of my life that I will never get back.
> I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't live here, or at least don't drive here. You're describing some kind of Mad Max fantasy, like the image of New York people get from movies and fiction where everyone is flipping everyone else the bird every thirty seconds.
People in NYC are pretty cooperative. Driving isn't every-man-for-himself. I don't know why you're trying to paint this picture of some lawless fantasy. Maybe you think it's exciting, but it's not connected to reality.
I live and drive in NYC, and this is utter bullshit. To the extent that it's difficult to drive here, it's because of assholes who think they deserve to cut the line and fuck it up for everyone else.
Please stop driving here, you clearly aren't qualified to do so.
Apart from not having to deal with a human, observance of traffic laws is the main advantage I see in autonomous vehicles. Once there are a decent proportion of them on the road we can ratchet up penalties against human asshole drivers, conviction aided by evidence gathered by the sensors on the surrounding non-human vehicles.
I hope robocars get really good at maintaining close formation and keeping out asshole linecutters.
Haha, this is both entirely true and entirely the reason why NYC is pretty much stuck where it is. If cities were parables, NYC would be The Parable of the Tragedy of the Commons. Globally, among cities I've been to it would have to be Delhi, but NYC is certainly in that category of South Asian cities where the infrastructure is far outpaced by the population and the population is like a swarming rat king constantly jockeying for a few inches more.
It's a viral race to the bottom.
This just sounds like an argument to ban cars for private use and invest more in transit.
Certainly it sounds like that. However whatever cultural transformation turns Man into Rat King has already occurred so you'll notice that it costs over a billion dollars per mile of subway in NYC. Everyone who hasn't figured out how to leech off the government is a fattened milk cow whose production is harvested industrially.
New Yorkers are already incapable of non-extractive development. Like the GP they have been transformed into zero-sum zombies by their city. A cautionary tale of culture.
> These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
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.
JFK to Manhattan is actually not that easy for a newcomer. JFK → Airtrain → LIRR → Subway is a very stupid design.
That said, yes GP is obviously a psycho.
There are many, many, many airports to which it is easier to travel via public transit from their associated city than it is from Manhattan to JFK. For example, all of these global-top-25 airports have single-train access:
London Heathrow (LHR)
Tokyo Haneda (HND)
Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS)
Paris-Charles de Gaulle (CDG)
Frankfurt (FRA)
Dubai (DXB)
Seoul Incheon (ICN)
Guangzhou (CAN)
Shanghai Pudong (PVG)
New Delhi (DEL)
Madrid Barajas (MAD)
Beijing Capital (PEK)
Chicago O'Hare (ORD)
Denver (DEN)
I don't get the gripe. AirTrain gets you to A,E,J,Z, and LIRR, all of which get you to "Manhattan" or a significant number of intermediate destinations in about an hour. LGA is far worse.
You do realize that public transportation doesn't provide luggage carts? That you can't take those out of the airport?
If you're traveling with a family or group, it really is often going to be much easier to take an XL Uber than deal with turnstiles and transfers and stairs and everything.
So what you're saying is if you're not in a big group or traveling with family, you absolutely SHOULD take public transportation.
...no? Maybe re-read the first half.
I've come from abroad with two large checked bags, a carry-on, and a backpack. You think I'm trying to take all that through the subway?
Obviously, yeah if you're traveling solo with a carry-on, most people take public transportation.
Or not, if it's 1 am and you don't want to be waiting 20 minutes for each connection.
Also, if you're a tourist new to the city after a long flight, the last thing you want to do is figure out the massively complicated transit system. Just having someone take you straight to your hotel where you can shower and sleep and deal with jet lag can be an important priority.
Oh my sweet summer child.
I've got news for you about how dysfunctional New York City transit planning has been and the status of transit to our three giant airports.
couldn't you have arrived 10 minutes later or was endangering life worth it?
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.
Uh...driving in the shoulder is illegal.
This makes Dallas much more viable. I'm not sure if I'd have a usecase for waymo other than going to the airport. The other use cases such as going to work when my car is in the shop require the freeway too. Only non freeway thing I'd use it for otherwise is coming home from a neighborhood party or local restaurant/bar when I've been drinking and I don't really drink.
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
Those constraints apply to humans too. So it seems likely that:
- it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets
- it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets
Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
I don't have any specific knowledge about Waymo's stack, but I can confidently say Waymo's reaction time is likely poorer than an attentive human. By the time sensor data makes it through the perception stack, prediction/planning stack, and back to the controls stack, you're likely looking at >500ms. Waymos have the advantage of consistency though (they never text and drive).
> but I can confidently say [...] you're likely looking at >500ms
That sounds outrageous if true. Very strange to acknowledge you don't actually have any specific knowledge about this thing before doing a grand claim, not just "confidently", but also label it as such.
They've been publishing some stuff around latency (https://waymo.com/search?q=latency) but I'm not finding any concrete numbers, but I'd be very surprised if it was higher than the reaction time for a human, which seems to be around 400-600ms typically.
Human reaction time is very difficult to average meaningfully. It ranges anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds on the low end to multiple seconds. The low end of that range consists of snap reactions by alert drivers, and the high end is common with distracted driving.
400-500ms is a fairly normal baseline for AV systems in my experience.
> Human reaction time is very difficult to average meaningfully
Indeed, my previously stated number was taken from here: https://news.mit.edu/2019/how-fast-humans-react-car-hazards-...
> MIT researchers have found an answer in a new study that shows humans need about 390 to 600 milliseconds to detect and react to road hazards, given only a single glance at the road — with younger drivers detecting hazards nearly twice as fast as older drivers.
But it'll be highly variable not just between individuals but state of mind, attentiveness and a whole lot of other things.
My experience is from another prominent AV company; I do not have Waymo insider knowledge.
Even if we assume this to be true, waymos have the advantage of more sensors and less blind spots.
Unlike humans they can also sense what's behind the car or other spots not directly visible to a human. They can also measure distance very precisely due to lidars (and perhaps radars too?)
A human reacts to the red light when a car breaks, without that it will take you way more time due to stereo vision to realize that a car ahead was getting closer to you.
And I am pretty sure when the car detects certain obstacles fast approaching at certain distances, or if a car ahesd of you stopped suddenly or deer jumped or w/e it breaks directly it doesn't need neural networks processing those are probably low level failsafes that are very fast to compute and definitely faster than what a human could react to
What gives you that confidence?
You're quite wrong. It tends to be more like 100–200 ms, which is generally significantly faster than a human's reaction.
People have lots of fears about self-driving cars, but their reaction time shouldn't be on the list.
The better part of a decade as a SWE at another AV company. In practice the latency is a not a concern, I was just sharing some trivia.
Waymo "sees" further - including behind cars - and has persistent 360-degree awareness, wheres humans have to settle for time-division of the fovea and are limited to line-of-sight from driver's seat. Humans only have an advantage if the event is visible from the cabin, and they were already looking at it (i.e. it's in front of them) for every other scenario, Waymo has better perception + reaction times. "They just came out of nowhere" happens less for Waymo vehicles with their current sensor suite.
It's actually a really interesting topic to think about. Depending on the situation, there might be some indecision in a human driver that slows the process down. Whereas the Waymo probably has a decisive answer to whatever problem is facing it.
I don't really know the answers for sure here, but there's probably a gray area where humans struggle more than the Waymo.
I think the key is, it's easy to get "self-driving" where the car will hand off to the driver working on highways. "Follow the lines, go forward, don't get hit". But having it DRIVERLESS is a different beast, and the failure states are very different than those in surface street driving.
It's easier to get from zero to something that works on divided highways, since there's only lanes, other vehicles, and a few signs to care about. No cross traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
One of the first high-profile Tesla fatalities was on a highway, where the vehicle misunderstood a left exit and crashed into a concrete barrier.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
> remember people saying the exact opposite
It was a common but bad hypothesis.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
Highway is easier, but if something goes wrong the chance of death is pretty high. This is bad PR and could get you badly regulated if you fuck it up.
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving.
The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading).
Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.
they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed:
construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around.
the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver.
it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but-
i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire.
it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do
i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
> sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned
This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident.
The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
Not at all. We've been working on this for a while, and we're now comfortable with the reliability bar we've hit to begin a gradual rollout to the public. As people said, this has been years in the making.
You Tesla/Elon stans crack me up. "2 more weeks" has been the claim for literal decades at this point.
Truly curious - have you tried it recently?
I have HW4, and have tried FSD with every major release.
It works brilliantly, 99.5% of the time. The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic. Like getting confused with the lane marking and driving off the shoulder. And the complete inability to read construction zone signs (blasting through a 50 KM zone at 100 KM).
I'm deeply skeptical that the current sensor suite and hardware is going to have enough compute power to safely drive without supervision.
It will no doubt improve, but until Tesla steps up and assumes liability for any accident, it's just not "full self driving".
Daily. I'm still unable to leave my culdesac without phantom leaves causing phantom braking.
There was a time when I believed in the hype, I'm less skeptical than most. But the evidence now is incontrovertible.
I assume this is not a HW4 vehicle?
I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either).
That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
These threads always give me deja vu. I've been reading these exact comments for a decade. Only the version numbers change.
But yes, I'm sure any day now.
I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
Make sure to do whatever "express interest" is required inside the app. We've often done a first-come, first-served approach for getting people off of waitlists, so get in now :).
One time my driver had a TV show playing on their dashboard phone on 101.
How could you tell they were high?
> How could you tell they were high?
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
high on what?
Does it matter? Can't think of a single substance that's safe for driving a car.
antidepressants?
Amphetamines certainly
mj likely? which should be illegal.
High on life!
Speed?
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
Luckily this won't be a problem in Los Angeles, because traffic prevents you from ever going over the speed limit.
While young and stupid, I did 100 mph on the 710 once. Driving home from work at 12:30 am on Monday gives opportunity for lots of speed. There's no traffic at that time of day. It was many years ago, and traffic grows with population, but still, I can't imagine there's much traffic then; I visit the area at least once a year for about a week and there's always some opportunities during the trip to travel above the speed limit, even though I'm not out very late anymore.
It's hilarious to see people in LA buying sports cars. Like even if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket you won't be able to drive faster than the traffic in front of you. Just a status symbol, I guess.
To the extent that it's rational, it's more about acceleration than velocity
It's about acceleration + other things. If the other things didn't matter, they would just drive a Tesla Model S Plaid with 2 second 0-60mph.
A sports car on the roads through the Malibu hills is very fun...
But not as much as knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko
There are many race tracks in LA area.
There are car clubs that go on drives in the twisty santa monica mountains and san gabriel mountains.
I remember my buddy telling me it would sometimes take him 2 hours to go a few miles in LA traffic and sometimes he would just walk to work instead because he'd get there faster.
Have you driven in LA? Traffic speed is generally bimodal: either stuck in traffic jam or easily 15 mph above the limit. (Source: live in LA, drive regularly.)
As someone who doesn’t drive but has done a UK theory test - aren’t you supposed to stick to the “slow lane” (no matter how fast you’re going) unless you’re overtaking? And that’s why it’s not actually called the “fast lane” but the “passing lane”. So I don’t see why you would be in the passing lane unless you’re going faster than others anyway. And there are plenty of lorries and coaches (trucks and buses in US terms?) that are physically limited to below the speed limit anyway
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The slow lane and passing lane dichotomy makes sense in a rural highway with two lanes in your direction.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
(also it’s kind of amazing that 5 parallel lanes is considered normal in the US… I think the most I’ve ever personally seen in the UK is 4 and that’s only on very major routes, and we don’t have any exits on the wrong side of the motorway)
> Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
Not necessarily. I've seen things like the left two lanes at free flow (speed limit or above) and the right two lanes at full congestion (~ 10 mph), and the middle lane(s) somewhere in between. But then you also have sometimes where the left lane is only doing 60 for some reason, but the next two lanes are at or above the speed limits. It's a complex system.
Wrong side exits for interchanges between highways are common, depending on site details and relative flows. When there's congestion on a left exit, you then get situations where the right lanes are flowing faster than the left lanes (sometimes much faster). I don't think interchanges as left exits are necessarily awful.
Wrong side exits to surface streets have been discouraged for new construction for quite some time, but there's a fair number of "legacy exits" in some areas. They're not so bad when there's only two lanes in your direction; but when there's been highway expansion, it can get pretty hard to use. And inevitably rebuilding to current standards would causes a lot of confusion and delay, it's postponed. My exemplar of the worst left exits, the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, was rebuilt in 2012-2022 and I can't find pictures of what it was before, but you had a sizable interchange with right and left exits to other highways, combined with several surface street exits and entrances on both sides, and I think two through lanes. It was a mess.
If there are vehicles going slow due to capability, you are pretty likely to be in an area where traffic density means that there's lots of vehicles in all the available lanes.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
In Ontario we have lots of 3 lane highways (we'll ignore Toronto area, where speed is limited by traffic anyways). What happens is that trucks & people getting on/off exits are in right most lane. Middle lane is everyone else, going 10-20 km/h over speed limit. Leftmost lane is people passing, or the maniacs going over 150 km/h while relying on their map system to alert them of highway patrol
You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.
i think this is a state by state cultural difference
Yes. People do in fact safely drive the speed limit.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
It depends on where you are. There was a protest in in Atlanta about the speed limit. What did they do? They got in every. Single. Lane. As did the speed limit. This backed up traffic for miles. It stopped commercial delivery and had ramifications for entire area. The protesters were arrested. For going the legal limit. The speed limit did not change, but there is a reason why it's never enforced.
I've lived in a couple of places where going the speed limit is a whole problem that can cascade outside of just yourself. There is an argument to be made that perhaps then the speed limit shouldn't be that low, but in driving safety is far more important than legality. It will be interesting to see how Waymo handles these realities when it gets to those areas.
I'd really love to see some good statistics on the risks of speeding on motorways.
I often wonder about laws that are ostensibly there to prevent dangerous actions, about whether they actually help prevent dangerous driving.
This guy analyses tailgating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_lR09sjoU Awesome software although he seems biased (e.g. no mention of pedestrians), but he does say that tailgating is much more dangerous than speeding.
I'm interested whether cameras will start to catch dangerous drivers. I regularly seeing drivers do very dangerous things. Yet we have no easy way to train them (for those that care but are unaware), or catch them (for the antisocial that don't care).
I mean, isn't the most common reason people tailgate is that they're frustrated that a slow driver is in a lane they want to use to drive fast in?
Not a slow driver in most cases, many slow drivers - all who want to go faster but cannot. There is just so much traffic that you can't go faster, and neither can the person in front of you.
I used to drive 20 under all the time (I achieved 57mpg once doing that) - but since this was an empty rural highway the few cars that were around saw me well in advance and moved over and passed without a problem.
We comply with the posted speed limits. Definitely on 101 near San Francisco where there are 55 mph zones (and maybe even 50 mph?) it's pretty noticeable. But we do hug the right lanes.
In the few times I’ve seen a Waymo on the freeway in the Bay Area, they have always been in the slow lane and driving 55-65 MPH.
going the speed limit is actually a good thing, even on the 101
With self driving cars population on roads increasing, a side effect can be that all traffic will be shaped towards staying within the speed limits. With more cars staying within the limits, breaking the limits becomes more difficult.
If you watch the videos that insiders have been posting, it never exceeds the speed limits.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
> In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
"Waves" are really what we would want them to prevent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
The autonomous cars can prevent these waves from forming, which would get people to their destinations faster than speeding.
I was on 101 during evening rush hour, speeding along like everyone. Then I saw brake lights from a Waymo. Later followed by all the surrounding cars. Interesting that it was the first to detect a slowdown.
First to apply brake, not first to detect.
Normal human drivers tend to lift off the gas and only brake when they decide that just lifting won't do.
> Normal human drivers tend to lift off the gas and only brake when they decide that just lifting won't do
Don't EVs light up the brake lights when regenerative braking engages?
As best as I can tell, not universally. I'm rather obsessive about watching brake lights around me; my state doesn't have safety inspections, so I try my best to alert other drivers when they have brake lights out.
I've definitely observed Teslas coming to a halt, and the brake lights only kick on at the very end. I don't know how widespread the problem is, but it's very annoying.
The omnipresent threat of being splattered by someone who's weaving lanes or distracted by their phone and not expecting to see a vehicle doing 20mph (!!!!) below traffic speed is exactly what I want when I'm in a taxi. /s
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
Waymo continues to improve every year, but dumb drivers never will.
It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.
Or public transit on a track.
Drivers can improve, but they won't. They will talk about the abstract just fine, but always in context of how "the other guy" is so bad, they resist any suggestion that they might not be good either. As soon as your point out something that nearly everyone is doing wrong (as backed up by statistics and traffic safety engineers who study this) and suddenly they will shut you down. As the other reply said: drivers vote and so any change that would affect all of them is impossible.
I'd love to see better public transit, but transit is so bad for most of us that it would take a massive investment before there is any return, and half measures won't work. You have to go all in on transit before you can see any significant change - if you invest in the wrong network you won't know until a massive amount as been invested and there is no return (leaving open the question of if a different investment would have worked).
Drivers hate enforcement, and they vote.
But the incentives are there. The knowledge is even there. What's left is the sum of all values.
American drivers specifically can be improved. Every other country stands as an existence proof of that.
If only we honked the horn when our cars are stopped, to let people know where it is. And honked before putting our cars in motion, to let people know we're about to move. And while the car is in motion, to let people know the car is in motion. I saw no collisions while visiting India, and continuous honking must be a significant part of the reason.
You clearly haven't been to very many countries if you think American drivers are the worst out there.
I don't need to travel to learn this: https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
What about non-OECD countries? I'm told those are actually most of the world's population and driving.
Ah of course, all other thirty seven countries of the world.
True, the UK is basically an alien civilization compared to the average american state. No comparison is meaningful unless we compare it to every nation state in the world.
Not normalized per miles driven? Sure, makes sense chief.
Weird, because per capita deaths leveled off in the 1930's and declined from that plateau in '70's to lows in the 2010's.
Did we get less dumb drivers starting in the '70's?
Deaths and accidents are different measurements. Cars are much safer in an accident than they were in the early/middle 20th century.
Per-mile-driven deaths started climbing again around 2012 in the U.S., I'd wager due to the trend towards larger vehicles causing more collateral damage.
Waymos do seem to have gotten a lot more aggressive.
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles."
Maybe that got lost.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-03-apnewsbreak-video-google-self-...
Only ridden Waymo twice but I've been much happier with them than the average Uber driver over the past few years.
I keep seeing them around my home in Menlo Park (Redwood City), but they're still in testing phase and not available for booking yet.
As of this morning, they should be. My app sent me a notification today.
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term?
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
To each their own. If you value human interaction, continue to book rides with humans.
Convenience beats everything (in capitalism)
The gap between Waymo's service and Tesla's public beta test keeps getting larger.
Are they fully self-contained or they need to talk back to internet during the ride?
i don't know the answer but i'm curious why you want to know
Nice, there's already a button in the app to get on the waitlist for freeways. I'm curious to see how much it would cost to commute with Waymo.
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available.
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
Can Waymo scale up its fleet fast enough to match Tesla?
Official post: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/taking-riders-further-safely-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905)
I will never understand blog spam. post the source luke!
I want to see the Waymo's go up to Skyline. Can they handle the windy roads?
I rode one through the Presidio which has some windy roads. It didn't have problems.
They should be fine in the wind, they're not driving boxtrucks. :P
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality.
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
Sorry about that. Please file in-app feedback (now under Help > Leave Feedback) any time you experience something like that. There's a dedicated "Car Condition" tag.
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
does anyone know statistics on computer-controlled cars' safety? I can guess "safer than humans most likely", but by how much?
it seems like these robotaxis have been around long enough to have conclusions now
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-fo...
It'll be interesting to follow how these machines will be exploited. I'm waiting for the first robotaxi mediated bombing or similar attack.
No cats on freeways, so they’re safe in that regard. Any word back from Alphabet on the cat their machines killed in SF?
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
In my experience, Waymo's driving style is more comfortable than most humans.
Waymo is in another league compared to every other autpilot system out there - I've used Tesla, Toyota, and Cruise before it got shut down.
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
Waymo isn't relying only on speed matching the car in front, so your experience with SuperCruise and BlueCruise doesn't extrapolate to Waymo.
Honestly you need to try Waymo. It’s in a league of its own.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
> However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.