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Comment by olivercameron | Hacker News Reader

We are an optimistic bunch, and it will be a slow rollout (constrained by vehicle build-outs), but we also have experience launching such self-driving taxi services.

We have a service that's live today in San Jose that serves tons of (repeat) riders daily. We've learned a lot there that we're applying directly to Florida.

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How autonomous is the service in San Jose then? Do you mean to say that you have cars without drivers that serve ride after ride and come home to charge? If so I'm far behind the curve.

We still have Test Drivers behind the wheel as a last resort, but we regularly give passenger rides with zero or low disengagements.

As a real-world example: we have a couple who uses our self-driving taxi service multiple times a day every day (The Grims), and their rides are ~95+% autonomous.

You mean 95% of their rides are entirely autonomous or their typical ride is 95% autonomous?

I remember how voice to text got to 95% in the nineties. It's used for a lot of things these days, still not for safety-critical tasks.

A typical ride is 95% autonomous.

A long way to go for sure, but having been at this just less than a year, we're feeling good!

So how do you get rid of the human backup driver? Until they go, this technology has negative cost-effectiveness. Remote manual control at slow speed for difficult situations? Dispatching a backup driver?

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