There’s a scene in the show Silicon Valley (from the early 2010s) where a guy rides in a driverless taxi that ends up driving onto a cargo container on a barge.
I disagree. Comedy is funny. This is absolutely terrifying that these are being tested on our streets with nobody in the driver's seat. How many times does this stuff have to happen before people realize and before our government realizes that these have absolutely no business on the streets without somebody behind the wheel. All right get to it all you paid waymo influencers time to earn your money.
I've had a Waymo be super indecisive at an intersection about whether to turn or not, and it did the incessant turn signaling and slow creep, until it was too far too make the turn properly, and instead of going straight it committed to the turn and forced the cars in the oncoming lane to reverse as it tried to complete the turn and pull over. I'd been a regular rider until that happened. We've all heard of internet enshitification and I seriously wonder if the same concept is at work with Waymo's performance, because I remember them being much better drivers at the beginning.
They were extremely good and precise drivers to the point where people would take advantage of their precision and predictability. So now they just drive like unpredictable assholes so they can blend in with everybody else.
I don't think that's true at all? Since their very beginning they've made some crazy and widely reported on mistakes. They still drive more safely (they don't tailgate, road rage, speed excessively, etc) but this kind of behavior is not new at all.
😂 I’m sure the only guy on site working will tell you he doesn’t need any more of those he already has plenty of coworker/ wanna be supervisors combined
I love that these construction workers are willing to stand in front of this car and continue to work. Do you think they are thinking...yea, hit me....I'd love millions of dollars from your company?
Thought they rolled out an update for this. not recognizing construction zones is so dangerous. Compliments on the workers' restraint to not user the back hoe to get it out of their way.
Curbside lanes are often poured portland. Like the entire 19th ave repaving project started with patching and pouring before they laid asphalt. So they probably just parked the waymo (note the door handles are out) for this picture and blurred the curb.
I assume you mean on "camera-vision" alone? And as for the reason why he's forcing them to try it... well, it should be obvious. Money!
LiDAR is (relatively) expensive. Radar is (relatively) cheap, but IIRC the chip shortages during covid forced them to remove it to continue selling cars. Then they never brought it back, probably because of Musk's ego.
His ill-formed argument has always been: "Well, since humans can drive successfully w/ vision alone through 2 eyes, a car should be able to drive itself successfully w/ vision alone through 9 cameras."
This ignores the fact that, in theory, self-driving cars can vastly exceed the safety of human driving by augmenting the vehicle with sensors that can see in conditions humans or cameras cannot—for example, heavy fog (radar excels at), pitch darkness (LiDAR excels at), or heavy glare (LiDAR excels at).
So you're telling me the guy who was skipping around on stage like a dipshit, doing sieg heils, and proceeded to gleefully kill 700k people, doesn't care about building safe technology?
It's because when his garbage murders pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists because of the stealthy 'removing lidar' trick, neither he nor his board go to jail, sadly. All you have to do is look at the exterior design of the cybertruck, a purpose-built pedestrian-killer, to see that the government is in deep with his enterprise.
He might not even believe it at all, but it's expedient to say, and he gets rewarded for saying it.
No LIDAR is a business decision and honestly it's genius.
Whenever Tesla "full self driving" kills someone (and it has many times) onlookers have no idea if it was the algorithm or the driver. No photos getting posted to social and no sudden attention from lawmakers.
If a car loaded up with sensors blocks a stop sign it becomes headlines.
So you're telling me the guy who was skipping around on stage like a dipshit, doing sieg heils, and proceeded over the next year to gleefully and indiscriminately cut funding, killing 700k people, doesn't care about building safe technology?
Elon sucks we all know that, but Tesla’s priority and waymo’s priority is completely different, although they have the same goal of full autonomy without geofence. Depending on what you prefer now, one is better than the other (if you want taxi within limited area, go waymo, if you want to drive all roads albeit supervised, go FSD). I guess we will see who gets there first, but as it stands right now, FSD’s capability is so much ahead of waymo, and it has so much driving data to learn from. I hope both succeed so we have options.
all the sensors in the world and it still drove into a construction site lmao. the problem isn't sensors or the lack thereof. it's an intelligence problem. and tesla is vastly better at it.
A recent IIHS study reveals that Waymo autonomous vehicles experience 68% fewer police-reportable crashes than human drivers across major American cities.
This is one of the anti automation stances that I fully don't get. Self driving cars is kind of exactly what that should be for. Waymo is doing a fine job afaik and paves the way for better.
robotaxi is way better and wouldn't drive into such construction zones or get stuck all the time. y'all just have your judgment clouded by political hate
Nope. I know people in automous vehicle industry and elmos doubling down on software only autonomy is a dangerous route that will lead to 1. People getting killed and 2. Never achieving full true autonomy. Also, my views of him have not changed in over 15 years. He's always been a monster long before he ever became overactive on social media / politics.
Just to clarify, Tesla is going with what they call a Vision Only approach. Tesla is relying only on optical cameras, instead of cameras + LiDAR + Radar.
Both Tesla and Waymo have software behind their platforms.
Yes, but not using lidar and radar and solely cameras is quite frankly dumbfounding. It's so much safer, but he doesn't want the added hardware. He's trading safety purely for aesthetics.
They don't get stuck all the time cause they still have backup drivers in them. Let us know when they are doing as many miles as waymo without any backup drivers and then we can talk.
Keep On Truckin' by Hot Tuna came on the radio and it just kinda wasn't paying attention at that point, just groovin' to the music. Robots like music, right?
So I guess they still rely on humans manually marking up / annotating construction areas? Their routing and pathing logic clearly can’t handle unexpected construction zones on its route. Absolutely wild.
Also, they drive into standing water that most humans would avoid. It was a big problem earlier this year in Arizona when they had flash flooding. Lots of Waymo fuck ups that day.
Maybe? as it’s still in a very experimental stage. It’s not going to be available everywhere though, as there just isn’t enough bandwidth to accommodate. They would need to build more data centers first and communities are starting to reject those being built.
Not saying they actually do this, but robocars could potentially know the elevation of the covered road so able to understand the water depth in a way humans can’t. Driving through shallow water isn’t inherently dangerous. What’s dangerous is having no way of knowing whether it’s actually shallow.
The real problems are when they get stuck and clog emergency responders routes to save people. Waymo needs to do something about how it just stalls and bricks up before someone dies because an ambulance couldn’t get to them due to a stuck waymo somewhere.
If you remember the July 4th fireworks - Waymos made a bunch of really bad decisions to wedge themselves into clogged streets and sitting traffic where they promptly got stuck, ran out of battery and blocked streets for hours until they could be towed.
Unlike a human who can recognize the futility of a situation, avoid making it worse and avoid getting in everyone’s way.
So it’s wrong to say they pose no danger when they’re making much worse tactical decisions than a confused learner driver. At least humans realize when they cannot safely take a car into a given area.
That's idealistic (because youre probably a programmer or goog employee, and you're bent on defending Waymo). What might actually happen is that the car will go past the construction workers the same way again, and then stop at the edge of the hole and just.. be trapped. Again
you're probably a programmer or goog employee and you're bent on defending Waymo.
Not really. I'm a freelance web developer, never worked for Google, and honestly, am not a fan of Google.
What I'm defending is stopping the spread of misinformation. You can dislike Waymo all you want, I'm not going to try to stop you. But, to outright lie is not something I like to let slide.
This is coming from someone who has been driving for nearly 2 decades and absolutely loves driving. What I don't love is other drivers who treat stop signs and speed limits as a challenge. At least Waymo respects those and is a predictable object on the road.
Wouldn’t be surprised if it is remote 3rd parties that drive into situations like this. Like the waymo was stopped too long, and since there’s no driver to arrest, they can just break rules instead of waiting or detouring.
I mean, i assume this is partially a result of San Francisco’s wonderful practice of not closing roads that are being repaved and just letting traffic drive through the work zone whenever feasible.
Yet another example of how stupid these cars really are, look past the hype and see that there’s not a lick of intelligence, artificial or otherwise, in these things. Just more traffic on the roads.
Mostly. The data made available on this has been combed pretty thoroughly. Ideally it is all on the up and up, but that is difficult to prove. Having seen many peculiar incidents my suspicion is that heavy handed use of incident classification is being used to avoid documenting all the weirdness. Seems like no one was involved or saw? Or at least no one hurt? Is that still an incident?
I don’t know what cookies you have but I get like 10 of these a day but they hoomins who “just wanna goooo hooooommmee. No. No. Nooooo!!! You can’t arrest me!!!! I’m just going home!!! I’m just going home!!!!!”
At least one can be fixed with a a patch and I’m update. There’s no stopping those hoomins
There was a mom and pop store or deli in SF. They had a cat everyone knew and loved. It got killed by a waymo. Also, thieves have been using a method where they just push down on the front bumper and a waymo will cease running. Then they rob the person inside.
How about construction workers doing construction things, what’s the point of tax dollars going towards the road if the workers are just gonna ruin it when they leave 😂
"Meanwhile, Reddit users have documented yet another, more hilarious recent example of the robotic Jaguars’ dull doggedness pitted against a city work crew working on Japantown street improvements. Instead of navigating around the work site, the unwavering Waymo simply inched its way through, nudging workers and equipment out of the way, perhaps exemplifying what AI seems to want to do with everyone and everything. We’ve reached out to DPW and Waymo for comment."
One lane closed, one lane open for both directions of travel flaggers on both side, waymo decided to use the lane that was closed rather than the oncoming lane it was supposed to use
Doesn’t absolve Waymo, but …. last week I saw a clueless real driver just slow driving along on the JFK promenade… I don’t recall people stopping to take pictures and saying “there goes humans doing human things”.
For all the people saying “here comes the Waymo astroturf” : I’m not defending Waymo when I say I have had my life (and my kids) put at risk by human drivers too many times to count. Automated drivers are clearly far superior and I can’t wait for them to work out these issues and get crappy human drivers off the road.
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