I'm interested to see where all the major players end up in 5yrs:<p>• Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers<p>• Waymo directly rolling their own fleet<p>• Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides<p>• Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up<p>• All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hoping for consumers to still want to own a vehicle rather than just pay $1 to get a ride<p>So: How much is Uber's market share worth? I suspect it'll evaporate overnight in every market where another service has autonomous vehicles and they don't.<p>Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff.<p>I predict blood on the walls.
It feels there's a mountain of hype around autonomous vehicles. I think the core challenges to a fully autonomous vehicle (with no human backup), are still far from solved. They need to reliably deal with an almost infinite number of edge and corner cases, each quite different from the last. For example:<p>- communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block the road, allowing just one car through. Or traffic light out of action, so you negotiate with other cars using hand gestures, light flashes etc<p>- endless roadworks, that change what lane you're allowed to go on, turn a two way road to one way road.<p>- random debris on road. Plastic bag - safe to drive through, wooden plank - safe, plank with nail - not safe.<p>- loss of GPS, mobile data, or both (again, surprisingly frequent)<p>- making way for emergency vehicles (sometimes need to drive into lane you're not normally allowed to go, I.e. Bus lane, pavement)<p>- policeman coordinating traffic<p>So far, I haven't found any evidence of autonomous cars dealing with the above. If anyone has, please post.
More business info in this Forbes article:<p><a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2016/12/13/googles-spins-off-self-driving-car-unit-as-waymo/?utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=partner&utm_campaign=yahootix&partner=yahootix&yptr=yahoo#31c4b6572af4" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2016/12/13/googles-s...</a><p>TL;DR:<p>> “We’re now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,”<p>> Google is currently equipping a fleet of 100 hybrid Chrysler minivans with its sensors and computing gear that will soon join its nearly 60 prototype autonomous vehicles. The company hasn't yet disclosed when and how it will begin generating revenue from its efforts and Krafcik declined to discuss specific business plans today.
I still don't understand why every company doing self driving cars is focusing on consumer cars while no major player is doing interstate trucking. Interstate trucking could pretty much be done now, and has several advantages. Driving on interstate freeways is orders of magnitude easier than driving in a city with pedestrians, bikes, cars parked in the road, etc. And there is a great monetization scheme--no driver means you can get it to its destination more quickly and more cheaply.<p>(The thought is you'd hand off to a real driver once you get in to a city)
It’s going to be interesting watching how local police departments and municipalities handle the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles.<p>In my town (a suburban town with a low crime rate), the police spend the majority of their time enforcing traffic laws. The municipal courthouse is always filled with people, and if I had to guess, I’d say that 80% of the people are there as a result of a traffic violation, while the other 20% are there for drug offenses/other.<p>It seems like autonomous cars would lead to a drop in traffic offenses and thus revenue. Even if only a tiny portion of the town’s revenue actually comes from traffic violations (when compared to local property tax), there would probably be a lot more idle time for police.<p>I suspect that they will first start to raise our property taxes to compensate for the lost revenue, but I would think that the long term effect would be a reduction of municipal workers/police.<p>Of course, this doesn’t apply to other areas like Philadelphia, where police spend only a small percentage of their time enforcing traffic laws.
At least they could have given a more up to date report on what they are doing. 7 years passed since 2009 and all we've seen is a couple of promo videos with scant actual information. We have no idea how they compare to Tesla or other self driving car startups.
Google's commitment to SDCs has always seemed half hearted so I wonder if this indicates that they are getting more serious about it. Moonshots at X have been getting the axe, the SDC stuff seems to be the only obviously viable one right now.<p>To the surprise of many folks (myself included) it has turned out that SDC tech is probably for existing manufacturers to develop versus software guys learning how to build cars without the massive supply chains needed to assemble 4000lb widgets. Before anyone points to Tesla, try getting inside a $140k Tesla and then a $140k Mercedes and it will be obvious what advantages there are to having manufacturing experience stretching decades.
Interesting that this very same day, the US Government is looking into proposals to require vehicle-to-vehicle communication in passenger cars to enhance safety.<p><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-call-on-cars-to-chat-with-each-other-1481645582" rel="nofollow">http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-call-on-cars-to-chat-...</a>
Although this site doesn't really offer any substance, I'm glad that Google is making this project more public. Not only it nice to have updates on the project (I do hope they continue to update this site with their progress) but I think PR campaigns like this will go a long way to swaying popular opinion on self driving technology. The faster they can get the public on their side, the fewer regulatory hurdles they will face.
On days like today, when there are several inches of snow on the ground and more to come, I always wonder how autonomous vehicles will handle such situations. What happens when snow (or mud, etc) accumulates on the camera or sensors? I don't doubt that a computer can react quicker and with more precision in an "event", but what about when it simply can't "see"? I don't see a steering wheel in these videos, so I guess there is no manual failsafe?
There is an announcement today too that <i>Google</i> will not be operating that technology, but focus on selling self-driving to car manufacturers.<p>Does this mean that <i>Alphabet</i> will keep on working on building their own cars but under a different company? The association between the two is a little confusing at the moment.
A lot of comments here and I haven't seen one that addresses the problem of impulsivity. Many / most of the times I need a car are not schedulable events but impulses. For example when I'm working on a project around the house, it's typical to need to run up to the hardware store 3 times in a day.<p>I think autonomous transport will be very popular but <i>shared</i> vehicles will be hardly more popular than Uber / taxis are now. If you think that shared autonomous vehicles will be significantly more popular than shared conventional vehicles are today, I'd be interested to hear why. Is it primarily cost savings?
I feel like they're really getting on the cute-sy theme, from the car's friendly design to the name "Waymo".<p>The lack of control is still kind of terrifying so I think they're trying to make it as non-threatening as possible.
How long until someone puts a personal gym inside a self driving SUV, so you can workout during your commute? I can imagine people running on a treadmill inside a car while it is stuck in traffic. Or at least sitting on a trainer.
What is it about car hardware+software that gives people confidence that the operating system / some core process won't crash or reboot in the middle of a turn or brake? I'm not familiar with the architecture of "mission critical" systems which I assume would be similar to what they use in these cars.
I'm not sure how I would feel about the absence of steering wheels and pedals within their cars.<p>Tesla's auto-pilot can be over-ridden due to the presence of the steering wheels and the pedals. But in a car that has none, you're not in control. And that, is scary no matter how you look at it.
Obviously this vision is compelling. I'm confused by the decision of their prototype car to not have manual control overrides (e.g steering wheel or something similar). Air travel has been revolutionized with autopilot, but there are clear overrides for safety in case systems crash. I don't think we need to be wed to the pedal + wheel paradigm - but having a manual override option seems critical to safety.
How is this news? So what, they slapped a new name on the project. What about actual progress on the tech?<p>Honestly, with Google's track record, I'm starting to doubt that this will ever ship. It just seems like a huge marketing tactic at this point. Plus. all of the talent has moved to companies like Otto and comma.ai; who are making tangible progress in this space.
Its great that waymo has its own brand now. I really wish udacity's open self driving car takes off as well. I predict there will be a linux of self driving car software/hardware kit that will be battle tested, reliable, secure and solid with contributions and test cases from all around the world.<p>I also really think someone should invent a solution to convert existing modern cars with brake, gas and steering from CANbus to self driving cars by installing a kit.<p>The current car manufacturers can simply make really good cars with cameras and sensors integrated. One can then install open software adapted for the region that is always getting updates. The test cases and lidar data is put in a giant shared repo whose ownership is the community. E.g OpenStreetMap and wikipedia.<p>Same software can be used for smaller robots to dispatch packages to the front door, or robotic lawn mowers, rubbish trucks, cleaning trucks e.t.c<p>That would be a fantastic future to be part of.
I can see the potential of self-driving cars for long distance trips (e.g. SF-LA) or for big trucks, but I can't see it for everyday use especially if someone has kids. How many times an average person in US uses her car? 2-3 without kids and maybe more than 4-5 with kids(I think my numbers are probably too low)?
For this to be viable economically, the pricing has to be very low and in order to be very low all of the people has to use this "self-driving service". This creates another problem though, you will have to plan your "short ride" ahead of time, e.g. what happens if you want to leave at the last moment and no car is available around you? And then there is another problem, if the self-driving service is cheap the ownership of the car is going to be even cheaper. A lot of variables and difficult to answer questions. I don't know if we ever going to be a society without car ownership and to be honest as long as there is no traffic I like driving, and it makes me relax. I see it more as a fancy option for cars, like what Tesla does, but to completely remove the car ownership is going to take many decades. Before cars there were horses and stuff so the transition was easier. This is going to be very tough.
You'd think Google would have considered optimising the content on this page as per their own recommendations:<p><a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwaymo.com%2F&tab=mobile" rel="nofollow">https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...</a>
My real question is whether they will be able to convince american customers to give up one of their most prized status symbols. It feels from this webpage their main argument will be safety, so I guess we will find out how much human life weighs against the thrill of owning and controlling fast, expensive and shiny machines.
More power to anybody who's willing to put their children in a car and not pay attention to the road or have control the outcomes of relentless traffic threats all around them.<p>In my view, all of this technology is much better suited to aid the human driver as a safety enhancement system rather than a full replacement for vehicle navigation.
On the FAQ section,<p>Q: "I'd like to join the team. Where can I find a list of open roles?"
A: "You can learn more about available roles here[1]."<p>And interestingly, that link[1] is broken :)<p>Update: it's fixed NOW!<p>[1]: <a href="https://waymo.com/join/" rel="nofollow">https://waymo.com/join/</a>
What I don't understand is if trains aren't completely automated, planes aren't completely automated, subways aren't completely automated, ships aren't completely automated,<p>How are CARS supposed to be automated??
Really shallow of me, but the name kind of turns me off. "Uber" or "Lyft" are just whatever, but Waymo sounds like... something an infant would sputter out. Or "Lame-o".
Looking at it, I'm thinking google hasn't learnt anything about the failure of google glass, who wants to buy a car like that?<p>A car is more than a commuting tool, it really matters how it looks.
Being a pedestrian sharing space with moving autonomous cars is not a future I'm looking forward to, not one bit.<p>1. Pedestrian->driver observation and interaction are the primary factors in deciding what's safe.<p>2. Roads full of networked autonomous vehicles are a hack away from becoming hoards of hurtling tonnage.<p>In my opinion this is all a solution looking for a problem and we should know better than to make our roads so utterly hostile to our own kind.
... meanwhile Microsoft successfully attacks the billion dollar office communication market.<p>Seriously, Google has had so many growth businesses in their hands and just fails to execute on them. This might be for one part because of its internal structure but I get the impression that many of these things look not exciting enough for its leadership.
The hardest problem to solve will be the humans who bully the polite self-driving cars:<p><a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/17/humans-will-bully-robot-cars-mercedes-chief-warns/" rel="nofollow">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/17/humans-will...</a>
If you look at the cumulative miles driven, the slope has a tendency to increase, as you'd expect as you added more cars to your fleet.<p>In 2013, though, there's a regression in number of new miles logged, and it took until 2015 to catch up to 2012 numbers. Can anyone give insight into the cause?
this comment section is hater news at its finest. autonomous will change all of our lives for the better sooner than you think. edge cases will be solved. the competition will be interesting, rooting for everyone.
There's also a Wired article about this at <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168781" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168781</a>.
The only thing I really learned watching that video is that google decided to call its autonomous vehicle unit 'Waymo'.<p>While I'm excited, I'd love to know how they actually plan to roll this out!
> Imagine if everyone could get around easily and safely, without tired, drunk or distracted driving.<p>I don't really think we should place drunk driving at the same level as tired or distracted driving.
This is really exciting! I see these cars all over the place in the Bay Area, so it's nice to see that they're at least one step closer in making it into a product and thus bringing it to reality.<p>I wonder about the internationalization of this product, especially if (or when?) it's brought to other countries and regions, such as the Middle East. In some of those countries, women aren't allowed to drive and men drive with extreme speed (and park in the most horrible of ways). While this will cut down on things like speeding / drinking / etc, it may also potentially impact social norms as well.<p>I'm hoping to keep a level-head about this project, but any step forward in this endeavor is worth being excited about.
All I can think of when I hear the word Waymo <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lMu8V5Xa90" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lMu8V5Xa90</a>
The self-driving car is just a component of bigger system, as new generation of servers on cloud centers. Riding service is cloud computing. I bet on Uber or Didi in China.
They have a number of blog posts that just launched on Medium: <a href="https://medium.com/waymo" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/waymo</a>
This post seems like a "way-back" post - considering Google has announced pulling from the self-driving car market (another HN post details it)...
What's the story in the video with 'pulling at heartstrings' by featuring a blind person? The problem of a blind person getting a ride is obviously solved. But more importantly it's an edge case of a need for a vehicle that is self driving. And actually I wonder whether someone who is blind actually would rather have a human driver in the car and feel safer generally that way. Seem to me almost like a strawman in a way. In other words 'if you feel that you have to help the handicapped you need to be onboard with self driving cars'.
The website is pretty explicit about it being just self-driving "technology". I wonder if they just plan to work w/ one manufacturer for now or if they're in talks w/ many. With so much competition, if they're all executed to the same standards of safety, my wallet is going to go w/ better design & aesthetics.
definite old-school warner brothers inspired logo they got going on there<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iaz0YyIcmHQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iaz0YyIcmHQ</a>
"The average US city gets 26 inches of snow per year."<p><a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/mountain_view" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/mountain_v...</a><p>"Snowfall is 0 inches."<p><a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/arizona/phoenix" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/arizona/phoenix</a><p>"Snowfall is 0 inches."<p><a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/texas/austin" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/texas/austin</a><p>"Snowfall is 1 inches."<p><a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/washington/kirkland" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/washington/kirkland</a><p>"Snowfall is 4 inches."<p>I hope they are driving far enough from their home bases to get some snow miles under their belt.<p><a href="http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/massachusetts/boston" rel="nofollow">http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/massachusetts/boston</a><p>"Snowfall is 47 inches."
This is such a minor nitpick, but I'm bothered by it because I see so much <i>performance-shaming</i> coming from some Googlers:<p>The site loads large pictures for all viewport widths (ideally they'd load downscaled images for smaller viewports — it's wasteful to load a large image for small devices) and the image files are PNGs when they should be jpeg or webp (example: <a href="http://waymo.com/static/images/journey/streets.png" rel="nofollow">http://waymo.com/static/images/journey/streets.png</a>)
I'm optimistic. I agree with Musks estimates. At most I see first fully autonomous vehicles being on the roads within 5 years.<p>Yes, they may only work in places with clearly marked streets but if I could use my autonomous car for daily commute or roughly 50% of the time it's still an incredible achievement and well worth the cost.
This repels me for a few reasons:<p>- Instead of talking about their car's capabilities on the front page, they include a pathos about drunk driving. I feel embarrassed how Google doesn't have more things to say about the car.<p>- It looks really unattractive, I could hardly call it cute.<p>- It's not in production, it's in testing.<p>These companies are sitting on <i>mountains</i> of cash! And they still fail to do things effectively! Apple and Google are just sitting on their fat cashflows while the world is getting very scary <i>very</i> fast. I'm tired of these "technology" companies doing complete fails of R&D projects, too damn shy to leave their advertising revenues. We need leaders with real courage.