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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

This is forward progress. Waymo has worked towards this point for years, reporting every disconnect and minor fender-bender. Now they're going to test, cautiously, in Mountain View.

As we've seen with Uber and Tesla, the "safety driver" doesn't add much safety. The "safety driver" is mostly there to drive manually in situations where the automation stops the vehicle and asks for help.

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Why do they not need the safety driver? i’m sure google can afford them. i just don’t see the benefit of no safety driver. especially living in mountain view and seeing the recent tesla crash.

I'd imagine because that means no steering wheel, no manual controls, etc. All that weight can be replaced with redundant everything: engines, brakes...

Because it demonstrates to senior management and the public the progress the team has made.

It also lowers barriers to an eventual widespread uber-like service. That service wouldn't be financially viable with safety drivers in each car.

> Because it demonstrates to senior management and the public the progress the team has made.

Public is not asking them anything. Public does not sign up being part of a beta/alpha or what ever test, for sake of "senior management"...

> Waymo has worked towards this point for years, reporting every disconnect and minor fender-bender.

Is there a list of scenarios the Waymo car can handle?

I think there is a fundamental limitation with detecting stationary objects right in the path of the car. Did the waymo cars share this issue. If not how did they overcame it?

It's not hard. All the DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles, including ours, could do that in 2005. Watch the technical video from Chris Urmson at SXSW about how Google does self driving.

I saw couple of those videos. I didn't notice this addressed in any of those. Most of the stuff was showing how car handles intersections where it is actually slow moving..

The DARPA Grand challenge only required the cars to drive across a desert.

So I am not sure how that answers my question.

As someone who commutes via bike to work, this terrifies me.

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