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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

Waymo ride service is not fully autonomous. There are remote assistant drivers that take over the situation if the system comes to a halt. I am guessing that the number of times they have to take over the cars remotely vs. number of times rides are fully autonomous in Arizona doesn't make it a good business to scale up. It makes sense to go back and focus on technology instead of scaling up a platform that might be just a loss leader.

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Level 4 autonomy is still a far off sci-fi fantasy at this point. The real future for self driving is high quality level 3 technology like Autopilot and openpilot that will solve the 90% case of people wanting highway autonomy and stop-and-go traffic automation. That stuff is already here, and works incredibly well. Once it trickles down to the economy price point, no one is ever going to want to buy a car without it. But robo taxis are not happening until we solve artificial general intelligence.

Problem is humans, we'll treat L3 as L4 and get distracted enough by that funny video or a phone call.

Which brings the ques is L3 really better than whatever L Toyota is at?

Humans already drive distracted (phone calls, texting, eating, makeup), no automation required. If the automation improves the accident and death rate, it’s still a win.

One solution to bridge the gap between 'mostly' self driving and 'totally' self driving is to increase the safety systems.

Currently, safety systems for the people in the car are very good. But for people outside the car, they are very bad. If you can make it such that the car is very safe for all the people in a possible accident, then maybe the AI problem won't be such a problem.

Granted, that's a hard problem too, but we're pretty good with the theorems and modeling that goes into safety. It's more of an economics problem, not a design one.

Agreed, but the "safer for the outside" systems aren't (in my opinion) automation; they're regulations and policy to lower vehicle mass (more mass + velocity = more potential harm) and to be more antagonistic to vehicular traffic to force it to behave with greater care [1] [2] (regardless of whom it in control of the vehicle) around vulnerable stakeholders such as pedestrians and bicyclists.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_calming

[2] https://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/pedestrians/traffic-calmin...

Only to the extent that automation doesn't increase the level / frequency of that distraction.

Does Level 4 necessarily exclude any self driving infrastructure support?

Waymo is far more advanced than anyone else, but not cheap enough to undercut the pay of an Uber driver ($9/hour?). There's still huge value if the Waymo Driver (their name for the self-driving system) can be added to private vehicles as a upgrade. A car that could pilot itself on road trips while you sleep overnight would be a game-changer for weekend getaways. Imagine leaving your Chicago office after work on Friday and waking up in Denver to go skiing Saturday morning with all your gear, no rental car, and no airport hassle.

Sounds like a night train with transit? You'd have to carry the luggage on the station though.

And have no easy way to get around once you arrive

Add some autoracks to the back of the train and let people bring their cars with them. (Amtrak already has such a service between DC and Florida; I've always thought a Chicago-Denver trip would make a lot of sense as well).

The problem is that, unlike Uber, they need to pay the cost to maintain their fleet of vehicles.

I’m guessing they aren’t comfortable enough with their tech to deploy it everywhere. What happens if it starts snowing on your trip to Denver, you’re asleep, you’re in traffic, and there isn’t sufficient internet access for a safety driver to intervene in an emergency?

I'd assume it would have failsafe upon failsafe. E.g. in your example it would pull over at the earliest safe location while waking up the driver because the remote backup was unavailable.

A L4 system should be able to find a safe spot and park there until you wake up

That’s assuming that they have a truly L4 system. I don’t think it’s that simple. Danger can go from 0 to 100 fast in a car. There are so many corner cases that it isn’t hard to imagine a few stacking up and serious accidents happening.

That Phoenix, with its very clear weather, is the only market with their taxi service is damning.

Interesting, I didn't know that. I wonder what the real-world lag is for the remote driver, and how much it matters. Sounds dangerous at face value, like the lag could create a chain of events that ends badly. Even a "stop button" could have unintended consequences.

My understanding is that it's not live remote driving. When the system doesn't have enough confidence in an environment, it asks for remote assistance to label objects and manually add enough data so that it can resume route planning.

You can see a little of it in action in this ride: https://youtu.be/D1sZnbORfAE?t=862

Even in remote assistance mode, the car already has at least a short path planned any time it's moving.

There is also a cruise automation video showing a drive through SF where this same type of situation comes up. I believe both systems rely on HD maps and the route is planned based on the vehicles position relative to the very precise maps. If a large enough obstacle is in the way of the planned route it will disengage to the safety driver to plan a new route around the obstacle.

> it asks for remote assistance to label objects and manually add enough data so that it can resume route planning

It’s like xkcd #1879[0] IRL.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1897/

As long as they have fewer drivers per car than Uber does, they should have an operating cost advantage and viable business.

I don't know anything about their finances but please consider the car is about $200k with current sensors. Just like Uber and Lyft, the load is not evenly distributed. You need a lot more remote assistant drivers than most people imagine is needed.

Those prices should come down, though. Lidar is fairly exotic at the moment, which contributes to those prices. Once more applications are found, I would expect those to drop. One interesting application is for motion detection. Lidar gives a detailed enough image to determine whether an object is a person or not, paving the way for motion detection systems that only trigger when humans move, as opposed to when anything moves.

The lifetime of the sensors is also important. If the sensors outlive the car, you can amortize a big part of that $200k by just putting old sensors on a new car. If the sensors are shorter lived than the car, the total cost of the car over its lifetime will be much higher.

Also, the depreciation hit on miles travelled is taken by Uber drivers. Waymo will have to pay for depreciation.

Uber doesn't own the cars, it passes that significant cost on to the drivers.

The drivers also aren't traditional employees, another major cost savings.

Hmm, that could be a potentially interesting model in and of itself. Rather than presuming near-term viable full autonomy, use the equivalent of drone pilots in remote locations.

If the tech/network were reliable enough to make that work at scale, the service would be much more efficient than Lyft/Uber: minimized cost of labor whether the rider is in New York or India, an abundance of available drivers or riders to match with at any hour of the day, dramatically reduced odds of physical violence between drivers and riders, and elimination of social pressure for drivers and riders to talk to each other. The main (debatable) downside I see is the major up front capital expenditure of rolling out and maintaining a global fleet of remote/autonomous vehicles, whereas Lyft/Uber can rely on drivers providing pre-existing vehicles and eating all the negative externalities of ride sharing.

If you start with the assumption of humans as the primary drivers rather than assistants, then any amount of the work you're able to automate (both in the present and increasingly over time) is just gravy.

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