Autonomous Driving
Jun. 18th, 2022 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
walkitoutTikTok now has at least one tiktok of a person getting a Waymo ride.
Waymo has been running a taxi service in the “suburbs of Phoenix” (you can go find the service area in the app, I feel sure) for about a year now. There are safety drivers when the weather forecast hits certain criteria, but otherwise, it truly is a taxi ride without a non-fare human in the vehicle.
There’s a human available in operations to talk to if you, say, find a lost hat, or if the taxi is pulled over by law enforcement or whatever, but it truly is autonomous level 4. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes. The environmental control required to get to this point (it is _Phoenix_, after all) has been expensive and limiting; logistics space has given up on full autonomy in vehicles in favor of amplifying what humans can do. But Waymo is also working on trucks, however, the taxi service area does not include freeways, and it’s just not obvious to me what the market space is like for autonomous trucks that don’t go on freeways. Either they have to figure out the freeway thing (doubtful — it’s apparent from descriptions that Waymo’s driving strategy is braking for safety, which honestly we all should do, but that’s also not at all how freeways work culturally) of they would have to identify a market which doesn’t involve freeways. That seems possible, but it is not obvious to me that it’s big enough to justify the gargantuan money involved, and the weather issue would appear to make it even more complicated anyway.
I’d love to see this get out of the playpen _safely_ and in a _regulated way_, but the cost to get to this point, and the limitations still in place, and the amount of equipment to make it all work is pretty daunting still.
Waymo has been running a taxi service in the “suburbs of Phoenix” (you can go find the service area in the app, I feel sure) for about a year now. There are safety drivers when the weather forecast hits certain criteria, but otherwise, it truly is a taxi ride without a non-fare human in the vehicle.
There’s a human available in operations to talk to if you, say, find a lost hat, or if the taxi is pulled over by law enforcement or whatever, but it truly is autonomous level 4. It’ll be interesting to see how this goes. The environmental control required to get to this point (it is _Phoenix_, after all) has been expensive and limiting; logistics space has given up on full autonomy in vehicles in favor of amplifying what humans can do. But Waymo is also working on trucks, however, the taxi service area does not include freeways, and it’s just not obvious to me what the market space is like for autonomous trucks that don’t go on freeways. Either they have to figure out the freeway thing (doubtful — it’s apparent from descriptions that Waymo’s driving strategy is braking for safety, which honestly we all should do, but that’s also not at all how freeways work culturally) of they would have to identify a market which doesn’t involve freeways. That seems possible, but it is not obvious to me that it’s big enough to justify the gargantuan money involved, and the weather issue would appear to make it even more complicated anyway.
I’d love to see this get out of the playpen _safely_ and in a _regulated way_, but the cost to get to this point, and the limitations still in place, and the amount of equipment to make it all work is pretty daunting still.