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Hundreds Are Alreadying Using Waymo’s Driver-less Taxis In Arizona (forbes.com) 104
Early Riders are also a way for the company to observe how people adapt to a robotic service and the options they want. Recently Waymo integrated Google Play music into the Waymo One app to let riders automatically listen to their preferred songs and artists. Video streaming, games and other in-vehicle options that leverage Google’s many services are likely additions, though Waymo won’t verify that… “Beyond the initial shock of not seeing a person in the vehicle, which we’re getting used to, protocols are being established,” says Chandler Police Chief Sean Duggan. “As a police officer, one of the first questions that gets asked is ‘who gets the ticket? How do you contact whomever?'” There have been a “half a dozen” collisions involving a Waymo vehicle, Duggan says, but not ones where the Waymo vehicle was at fault. In fact, the department hasn’t issued any citations to Waymo in the past couple of years…
Ahead of the commercial launch, there were reports that the vans irritate local commuters because they take too long to make left turns and of assaults on Waymo vans including rock throwing, a slashed tire and even an individual who aimed a gun at one. “People tend to be frustrated when a vehicle is actually obeying the law” by stopping completely at intersections and making turns cautiously, Dugan said. “That happens regardless of if it’s self-driving or a person.”
Forbes describes Waymo’s presence in Chandler as “a test case for the entire industry,” citing an interesting perspective from Bryan Reimer, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AgeLab. “The view for companies like Waymo is ‘we have to be able to show functional safety. Otherwise, we can’t protect our decisions in a court of law, where this will all end up long term.'”
“Elon is working mostly on the deep neural net side where a good chunk of it is a black box. Documenting, defending that in court is going to be tough.”
- by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @06:49PM (#58620364)
I think this is fantastic.
This will be a huge help for the disabled, people who can’t get licenses (or who’ve lost them for whatever reason) the elderly, and anyone who’s too tipsy to drive.
For that matter, depending on affordability, I’d take one of these to work and back every day. I’d read or sleep or watch a movie on the way instead of dealing with traffic all the bad drivers out there.
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Informative)
by Rick Schumann ( 4662797 ) on Sunday May 19, 2019 @08:01PM (#58620624) JournalThis will be a huge help for the disabled, people who can’t get licenses (or who’ve lost them for whatever reason) the elderly, and anyone who’s too tipsy to drive.
So is calling a taxicab, Uber, or Lyft, driven by an actual human being.So is calling a taxicab, Uber, or Lyft, driven by an actual human being.
Sure, but sometimes those aren’t available at some times and places. Ever tried to get an Uber at 2:45am Sunday morning in a residential area? Sometimes they just aren’t there. Not everyone lives in a city where Uber drivers are circling the block like sharks 24/7.
Also, some of the Uber/Lyft/taxi drivers I’ve dealt with are more than enough to make me want a driverless vehicle. And their driving often leaves a lot to be desired, frankly. I’ve had cab rides home from Seatac where I was pretty sure I was gonn
You must own a lot of stock in driverless car startups…
There are no “driverless car startups”.
You’re a liar, Bill. Driverless car startups are all over Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Jose. You know nothing.
Really? Name a few.
Why are you so opposed to the idea of driverless vehicles?
Because new and scary, just like everything else techy. That’s why China has nice things, and we don’t.
Up the pay and you’ll have no problem finding a ride.
I rest my case as to why driverless vehicles are going to become a thing.
Uber driver: “Pay me more or I won’t come!”
Driverless vehicle: “I’m on the way. I will be arriving at your location in 8 minutes.”
- Why do you believe the marketing department and media hype about so-called ‘self driving cars’ being so fucking good?
Re:Fantastic (Score:4, Insightful)
The main difference is that it will initially be probably a third as expensive per mile, and is likely to eventually drop to around a twentieth the cost in the medium term. Also, RoboTaxi services are likely to have better response time, because apart from depreciation of equipment, there’s not much cost to leaving a few extra cars scattered around the area, ready to pick someone up, unlike with human taxi services, where every extra driver is an extra mouth to feed.
Probably not. At present Uber pays drivers roughly 6 cents per mile after expenses. You’re not going to get much cheaper with AI cars.
I was comparing to taxi costs. Uber and Lyft are unsustainable business models, because they rely on an endless supply of suckers who aren’t clueful enough to realize that their long-term costs exceed their income. Without automated driving systems, it’s just a matter of time before either their prices go up significantly or they fail.
That said, automated cars are likely to
- by Hodr ( 219920 )
I don’t have to tip an AI car. yet.
How can you justify the claim that driverless car services will cost 1/20th what they do now?
We already have autonomous cars – they’re called taxis. And the cost of paying the driver of those isn’t 19/20th of the total costs of operating a taxi.
A taxi costs three or four bucks per mile. An EV costs 15 cents per mile for power, plus depreciation on the vehicle. So if you compare a modern driverless EV to a taxi, 19/20ths of the taxi’s cost comes from a combination of the driver, profits, and maintenance costs. Given that EVs are expected to have extremely low maintenance costs compared with gasoline vehicles, 1/20th isn’t a completely crazy lower bound, particularly if you run the cars for three years and then sell them, kind of like the rental
An EV costs 15 cents per mile for power
This is too high. Assuming a moderately-high power consumption rate of 300 Wh/mi, you’d have to be paying 50 cents per kWh for an EV to use 15 cents per mile in power alone. The average residential rate in the US is 12 cents per kWh, which would be 3.6 cents per mile. The average industrial rate is 6.7 cents per kWh, which would be 2.0 cents per mile. Given that operating an EV fleet would inherently provide lots of opportunities for time shifting — and even more could be done by adding some stationary
So is calling a taxicab, Uber, or Lyft, driven by an actual human being.
Except for the cost of the driver, which makes these options unaffordable by most people for casual transportation.
Driverless cars, obviously, have no driver. So they should be far more affordable once the market develops.
Private cars spend 95% of their time parked. Driverless taxis can be actively driven far more than that, so the cost of the vehicle can be amortized over more miles much more quickly, lowering the likely cost of using them below even that of owning your own vehicle.
For the elderly and di
Ther is no reason for driverless cars to cruise, or to take up parking spaces at businesses. They can park in ‘offline’ locations between rides.
Wait, hold on.
When a person drives their car, they park their car. They drive their car, themselves, wherever they go. They need that resource permanently allocated.
When a person takes a self-driving car or other form of service transit, the car moves them, then goes on to move other people. If the average trip is 20 minutes, then that’s 3 fewer owned cars parked around the road for every 1 hour of time spent between using the transit again (excluding time spent at home, as that space is budgeted to t
- Then a company, and shortly thereafter the government, will control where you get to go. Just think, the app can disallow any destination they choose. It will start with trivial restrictions: crack house addresses, known mafia hangouts, gun ranges, and similar noncontroversial spaces. Everyone will cheer as harm reduction is achieved. Then it will start getting more and more restrictive as people get barred from attending parties at the addresses of political dissidents, locations where protests are schedul
I don’t understand how you doing all those things changes between having a driver and not having one. Can you elaborate?
The cost could be lower (I expect it would be) and availability would likely rise.
Overall safety would probably also improve, given the nature of people in general. People cause accidents, and I suspect driverless vehicle would be far safer in the long run. Driverless vehicles don’t drive drunk or high, they don’t go into fits of rage, they don’t rob or rape you, and they don’t fall asleep on the freeway at 70 miles an hour.
Driverless vehicles would have been awesome for my mom (who was truly unsafe behind
- This is awesome. If this can become a real “thing”, it will be a boon to the elderly, the visually impaired, and kids. You’d no longer have to rush out of work to get little Johnny or Susie to soccer practice. Nana can get to the doctor and do her grocery shopping without having to catch a ride. And best of all, now there will be reason for the braille buttons on the drive-through ATMs.
Can we get this out of the way? (Score:1, Interesting)
by Anonymous Cowardthe human in the driver’s seat didn’t take her hands off her lap during a trip from the library to a shopping mall a few miles away in light, late morning traffic.
That’s for all the trolls who will show up and claim this isn’t “driverless”. Yes, there is an employee on board to give the passengers some comfort that the company has “skin in the game” and is taking ample precautions. But the employee did not touch the controls.
If you still think driverless cars aren’t coming, you have gone into full ostrich mode.
Here, let’s go over it one more time.
the human in the driver’s seat didn’t take her hands off her lap during a trip from the library to a shopping mall a few miles away in light, late morning traffic.
BS. There was a “safety driver”. That isn’t driverless. And Tesla “Autopilot” isn’t even autopilot. It is just a drivers assist, like what has been around for 20 years. Good luck with your VC hype. People are realizing that all this stuff is fake. That is why Tesla’s stock is collapsing. No one is buying the story.
- You might want to look into what autopilot actually is. Both the airplane version and the Tesla version. You should also look into what drivers assist was available 20 years ago. You don’t seem well informed about any of those things.
I’ve already looked. It is a joke. Go take your hype and shove it. Tesla was bragging out a software update recognizing TRAFFIC LIGHTS last month. They still don’t even recognize road signs. Volvos and Audis have had that for a decade. Ignorance. Tesla is dead.
Drivers assist has been around for decades. Tesla’s don’t even recognize traffic signs, even though other manufacturers have had it for years. But yeah, self driving cars is around the corner, because “tech companies” or something.
- Autopilot on planes AFAIK can seldom if ever do anything like recognize traffic lights. Autopilot on planes was, for a long time and in many cases still is, incredibly basic.
- BS. There was a “safety driver”. That isn’t driverless.
Nope. And, it isn’t because of ‘public relations’ or ‘getting people used to it’, it’s because they don’t even trust it themselves, and rightly so.- That’s because most people are dumb, naive, and beleive the marketing and media hype about so-called ‘self driving cars’. “Oh they’re 100% safe you have nothing to worry about just sit back and enjoy the ride, LOL!”. Sure thing and that carnival ride operator is totally not stoned out of his mind either and the ride is 100% inspected maintained properly and safe, LOL. The ‘technology’ is half-baked at best, so-called ‘AI’ has no cognitive capability, doesn’t ‘know’ the difference between an inanimate object
- by galgon ( 675813 )Telsa’s Autopilot is definitely more of a driver assist but it does more than others and it is better than others. This leads to people trusting it more, not paying attention and getting killed when they hit the side of a truck. Waymo’s current tech is a beta driverless car. But they still have backup drivers so I cannot call it a self driving car. Does the car drive itself nearly all of the time – yes. Does it do it 100% of the time – No. We have California disengagement records for proof of this. Sa
- Driverless cars in ONE medium-sized city that has been EXTREMELY well-mapped. Go there, get in one of those cars, and tell them you want to go to a small rural city in another state. I’ll bet your next paycheck the safety driver touches the steering wheel!
Or follow me around at work one day. I drive on roads that look like driveways! I work in areas that have NO signs for street names, and sometimes NO stop signs. The roads are paved, but most have no center line marked. Sometimes they’re just tar-and-grave- Yes, but conveniently most of the population of the US is in cities so rural areas are edge cases that dont prevent a c1 rollout.
I have the feeling that “alreadying” is the latest abomination culled from gamer chat, and editordavid wants us to know he’s down with the ten-year-old gamers. Which is
Why did a mention of Elon Musk get tacked onto the tail end of this story? Did Rei submit it?
- It’s a direct quote from the article.
- Already dying, obviously.
“Each of the several hundred Waymo One vans in Chandler arrives with a safety driver at the wheel”
You could have stopped there. Self-driving is a VC scam. And Tesla is going down. Sorry Rei. Bankwupt in 2 years.- “A few hundred people are getting rides in Pacificas with no safety driver through its Early Rider program”
I think you missed part of the summary.
Total BS:
“Each of the several hundred Waymo One vans in Chandler arrives with a safety driver at the wheel”
Again, take your hype machine and shove it. No one is buying what you are selling any more.
- So, you trust one part of the summary but not another part! How are you determining what to trust and what not to trust?
- by Kjella ( 173770 )
Different programs. Early Rider is their old invite-only NDA program, it’s still ongoing and used to test features Waymo doesn’t want people to publicly talk about. The only information we have about that is press releases and what can be observed by third parties, since anybody in the program would get sued if they talked about it. Waymo One is their first public service, initially it seemed extremely small and hard to get into but they’ve been expanding and as of now it always has a safety driver.
They’ve
It isn’t a “new technology”. Self driving cars of these types have been around since the 1980s. The only thing that has changed is the availability of cheap money to fuel tech.
- You should post 4 or 5 more times in this thread. By then we should all be clear what your position is on driverless cars.
Stupidity rules. Elon was even mentioned in the summary.
In Newspeak i think that would be “Hundreds alreadying dead”.
I am currently scrambling around to find the latest update to the Newspeak dictionary, and I am sticking to Oldspeak until I find it in case I alreadying plusbadspeak.
But that may be more about public relations than technical necessity.
To my knowledge, Waymo does 10,000 miles per ‘interaction’ on well-learned roads, but a human does 450,000 anywhere without getting in an accident. So unless Waymo has somehow multiplied their safety by a factor of 40, damn rights the safety driver is there for a reason.
- Go stand at an intersection for a day and count how many times the bio-robots should be ‘interacted’ with. Just as with self driving cars, not every dodgy situation ends with an accident, so you cannot compare interactions with accident rates one to one, they are not the same thing.
- by martyros ( 588782 ) on Monday May 20, 2019 @04:25AM (#58621720)
“People tend to be frustrated when a vehicle is actually obeying the law” by stopping completely at intersections and making turns cautiously, Dugan said. “That happens regardless of if it’s self-driving or a person.”
If people really get frustrated when a vehicle actually obeys the letter of a law for things like stop signs, that’s a pretty clear indicator that the letter of the law is broken and needs to be revised.
I’ve lived in the UK for over a decade now, and basically all non-traffic-light intersections are “yields”; which are effectively the same as a roll-through stop. It works just fine. The US rules around coming to a complete stop at a stop sign are unnecessarily strict.
- The main problem here is that a self-driving car obeying the law might get stuck for hours at an intersection. There are times of the day when some left-turns will just never give you a 100% safe opportunity to pass. Those paths should never be used by self-driving cars but it’s hard to predict. So I can totally see why people behind the car get frustrated. Obviously though, the rider will also get annoyed, so Waymo should just tweak their routing algorithm to avoid those left turns or improve their drivin
- I almost think that Slashdot being laden with typos gives it character, but I’m struggling to get past this mess of a headline. I’m sure I’ll be corrected if ‘alreadying’ is actually a word. Thanks.
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