Comment by chairmanwow1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chairmanwow1 | Hacker News Reader

I took a road trip through AZ in January and took a detour to Chandler to try out a fully autonomous Waymo ride. I worked on self-driving at Lyft and I have a comma two devkit installed in my car. I have to say it was actually pretty magical having a robot car glide up to me in the Walmart parking lot and then take me for a drive. It's one thing to read about the launch and a wholly other thing entirely to see a fully empty car slink up to you in a parking lot.

The ride is most likely being monitored remotely. I changed my destination back to the start location after traveling about 20 minutes and an attendant's voice came over the speaker and asked if everything was alright. I said it was fine, but was interested that they had a live team monitoring and able to step in for customer service like that.

I did have to wait 17 minutes for the Waymo to actually show up. This success was after 3 or 4 failed attempts to request a car, so if I actually lived in the area I would probably not even open the app to check the ETA. This point is largely moot, as it's pretty clear that strategically AZ is a testing ground rather than something Waymo expects to make any money doing.

I can't wait for the autonomous future. Best of luck to all the entrants in the competition. I just hope you are able to turn a profit before investor money dries up. We've been waiting on promises of this elusive future for nearly a decade now ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Do you think that SDV is a bit (just a bit) in a kind of skeumorphic zone where mobility was defined by human driven charriot and thus computers are having to replicate all the complex human perception and control.. while, in urban settings, we could pave the roads with markers and beacons so that moving objects could move around without all the sensing technology ?

Absolutely. In the same way that we add street lights for humans, we will add waypoints for cars so they make less mistakes.

You can't pave roads with markers and beacons to do self-driving without simultaneously banning all non-AI traffic participants, including pedestrians.

fair point

unless... we all were antennas under our skin

alright Bill Gates

What you're describing is a reliability nightmare.

Human drivers 'depend' on road markings, but if some paint gets scuffed or a stop sign blows down in a storm, things still work okay. For AI cars to be similarly fault-tolerant, they need to be generally capable drivers who don't absolutely need exacting external markers to get around.

Since you seem to have a lot of relevant experience how likely is it that you think Waymo could ever succeed from a business perspective? As you mentioned, they are going to need quite a few vehicles and at least some form of remote monitoring callcenter. I imagine the economics of this will be fairly unprofitable for many years to come still. Granted, Google has infinetly deep pockets, but thats a lot of money to recoup once it actually becomes profitable years down the road.

I think yes, but the economics are actually very different than their competitors (Lyft / Uber) will be. I also think their path to profitability will not have Waymo acting as the supplier (of rides) and the platform. Lyft / Uber have variable cost structures, while Waymo will be in a race of diminishing returns of extracting value from the fixed costs of their vehicles before they are no longer in service.

There's a great paper [1] that discusses this topic. In the 4th section the authors discuss a very straightforward model for this. They model a maximum time that a car could be in service (say 10 years) and a maximum mileage that these cars could operate. So then the car is in a race to earn as much money as possible to firstly pay for itself and then accumulate excess value before end of life for the robot.

It's harder when the cars are way more expensive ($200k - $1M) and especially when high utilization is table stakes for getting this to work. High utilization can only happen when you have a lot of people successfully getting rides on your platform (which the hard balancing problem of supply vs demand).

All this to say, yeah I think they can. I don't know if it will be the best business (race to low-margin operation of a fleet).

This paper also has an interesting argument against the manifestation of a future where personal car ownership is too expensive and everyone just relies on this fleet of self-driving robots to cheaply go places.

[1] Carpooling and the Economics of Self Driving Cars - https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/sdc.pdf

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