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Comment by MBCook | Hacker News Reader

> Hacker News has always assumed this problem is easy. It is not.

That’s the problem right there.

It’s EXTREMELY hard.

Waymo has very carefully increased its abilities, tip-toeing forward little by little until after all this time they’ve achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.

Tesla appears to continuously make big jumps they seem totally unprepared for yelling “YOLO” and then expect to be treated the same when it doesn’t work out by saying “but it’s hard.”

I have zero respect for how they’ve approached this since day 1 of autopilot and think what they’re doing is flat out dangerous.

So yeah. Some of us call them out. A lot. And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.

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I’ve often felt that much of the crowd touting how close the problem was to being solved was conflating a driving problem to just being a perception problem. Perception is just a sub-space of the driving problem.

Genuine question though: has Waymo gotten better at their reporting? A couple years back they seemingly inflated their safety numbers by sanitizing the classifications with subjective “a human would have crashed too so we don’t count it as an accident”. That is measuring something quite different than how safety numbers are colloquially interpreted.

It seems like there is a need for more standardized testing and reporting, but I may be out of the loop.

> achieved the abilities they have with great safety numbers.

Driving around in good weather and never on freeways is not much of an achievement. Having vehicles that continually interfere in active medical and police cordons isn't particularly safe, even though there haven't been terrible consequences from it, yet.

If all you're doing is observing a single number you're drastically under prepared for what happens when they expand this program beyond these paltry self imposed limits.

> Some of us call them out.

You should be working to get their certificate pulled at the government level. If this program is so dangerous then why wouldn't you do that?

> And they seem to keep providing evidence we may be right.

It's tragic you can't apply the same logic in isolation to Waymo.

Waymo overall has a FANTASTIC safety record and has been improving steadily. You can't say the same about Tesla's FSD and Robotaxi.

LIDAR gives Waymo a fundamental advantage.

Elon definitely has this cult of personality around him where people will jump in and defend his companies (as a stand-in for him) on the internet, even in the face of some common sense observations. I don't get the sense that anything you've said is particularly reasonable outside of being lured in by Elon's personality.

This is absolutely true. There is a flip side however, where people who dislike Elon Musk will sometimes talk up his competitors, seemingly for no good reason other than them being at least nominally competitors to Musk companies. Nikola and Spinlaunch are two that come to mind; quite blatant scams that have gotten far too much attention because they aren't Musk companies.

Tesla FSD is crap. But I also think we wouldn't see quite so much praise of Waymo unless Tesla also had aspirations in this domain. Genuinely, what is so great about a robo taxi even if it works well? Do people really hate immigrants this much?

I think we’d see praise, but maybe not as much. Every time it’s clear Tesla screwed up it’s an incredibly obvious thing to do to compare them to the number one self driving car out there. Tesla provides such an obvious anchor point for comparisons it’s really hard for Waymo not to come out on top.

What’s so great about a robotaxi even if it works well? It’s neat. As a technology person I like it exists. I don’t know past that. I’ve never used one they’re not deployed where I live.

Kind of like how people maintained that LLMs were trash well past the point where it was obvious that that wasn't true anymore, I often wonder how many people who talk confidently about Tesla FSD have actually used a recent version. Because when we tried a recent FSD and Waymo, we found FSD to be excellent in handling pretty complex scenarios, including one of the worst, a busy airport loop, and we found Waymo to behave a bit weirdly (but still good). But FSD clearly isn't the dumpster fire that people try to make it out to be. v12 was a bit sketchy, and I was too nervous to use it past the first couple of times I tried it, but v14 is great.

It isn't about hatred of the human drivers for me. Waymo's service is so safe and consistent that I would trust my 10-yr-old to take a ride in it solo if it were permitted by the ToS. Most Uber/Lyft/etc. rides are just as safe, but due to the inconsistency I would never reach that level of trust.

I don't live in a covered area, but when I am in range I will gladly pay 10-20% more for a Waymo ride than an Uber/Lyft/etc.

Waymo started rolling out freeway trips in some cities late last year

Freeways are far easier for a robot to drive on than streets. Driving on freeways would significantly lower Waymo's accident per mile rate.

The difference is that accidents on a freeway are far more likely to be fatal than accidents on a city street.

Waymo didn't avoid freeways because they were hard, they avoided them because they were dangerous.

Freeway accidents, due to their nature, are a lot harder to ignore and underreport than accidentally bumping or scraping into another car at low speeds. It's like using murder rates to estimate real crime rates because murders, unlike most other crimes, are far more likely to be properly documented.

> Driving on freeways would significantly lower Waymo's accident per mile rate.

Maybe. We don’t know for sure.

You seem to frame that a bit like Waymo is cheating or padding their numbers.

But I see that as them taking appropriate care and avoiding stupid risks.

Anyway as someone else pointed out they recently started doing freeways in Austin so we’ll know soon.

> You seem to frame that a bit like Waymo is cheating or padding their numbers.

Not sure how you read that. I'm saying Waymo was prioritizing safety.

Oh, sorry. I thought you were arguing from the other side, saying that Waymo only looked good because they were avoiding anything difficult.

Same argument, different sentiment.

I said they were avoiding the easy thing.

dunning-kruger effect at the corporate level?

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