The big promise of autonomous self-driving was that it would be done safer than humans.

The assumption was that with similar sensors (or practically worse - digital cameras score worse than eyeballs in many concrete metrics), ‘AI’ could be dramatically better than humans.

At least with Tesla’s experience (and with some fudging based on things like actual fatal accident data) it isn’t clear that is actually what is possible. In fact, the systems seem to be prone to similar types of issues that human drivers are in many situations - and are incredibly, repeatedly, dumb in some situations many humans aren’t.

Waymo has gone full LiDAR/RADAR/Visual, and has had a much better track record. But their systems cost so much (or at least used to), that it isn’t clear the ‘replace every driver’ vision would ever make sense.

And that is before the downward pressure on the labor market started to happen post-COVID, which hurts the economics even more.

The current niche of Taxis kinda makes sense - centrally maintained and capitalized Taxis with outsourced labor has been a viable model for a long time, it lets them control/restrict the operating environment (important to avoid those bad edge cases!), and lets them continue to gather more and more data to identify and address the statistical outliers.

They are still targeting areas with good climates and relatively sane driving environments because even with all their models and sensors, heavy snow/rain, icy roads, etc. are still a real problem.

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tialaramex 5 days ago | parent [-]

This whole "But Waymo can't work in bad climates" thing is very dubious. At some point it is too dangerous to be driving an automobile. "But Waymo should also be dangerous" is the wrong lesson.

When the argument was Phoenix is too pleasant I could buy that. Most places aren't Phoenix. But SF and LA are both much more like a reasonable place other humans live. It rains, but not always, it's misty, but not always. Snow I do accept as a thing, lots of places humans live have some snow, these cities don't really have snow.

However for ice when I watch one of those "ha, most drivers can make this turn in the ice" videos I'm not thinking "I bet Waymo wouldn't be able to do this" I'm thinking "That's a terrible idea, nobody should be attempting it". There's a big difference between "Can it drive on a road with some laying snow?" and "Can it drive on ice?".

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lazide 5 days ago | parent [-]

You know how I can tell you haven’t actually lived in a bad climate?

Both SF and LA climates are super cushy compared to say, Northern Michigan. Or most of the eastern seaboard. Or even Kansas, Wyoming, etc. in the winter.

In those climates, if you don’t drive in what you’re calling ‘nobody should be attempting it’ weather, you - starve to death in your house over the winter. Because many months are just like that.

Self driving has a very similar issue with the vast majority of, say, Asia. Because similarly “this is crazy, no one should be driving like this conditions” is the norm. So if it can’t keep up, it’s useless.

Eastern and far Northern Europe has a lot of kinda similar stuff going on.

Self driving cars are easy if you ignore the hard parts.

In India, I’ve had to deal with Random Camel, missing (entire) road section that was there yesterday, 5 different cars in 3 lanes (plus 3 motorcycles) all at once, many cattle (and people) wandering in the road at day and night, and the so common it’s boring ‘people randomly going the wrong way on the road’. If you aren’t comfortable bullying other drivers sometimes to make progress or avoid a dangerous situation, you’re not getting anywhere anytime soon.

All in a random mix of flooding, monsoon rain, super hot temperatures, construction zones, fog, super heavy fireworks smoke, etc. etc.

Hell, even in the US I’ve had to drive through wildfires and people setting off fireworks on the road (long story, safety reasons). The last thing I would have wanted was the car freezing or refusing.

Is that super safe? Not really. But life is not super safe. And a car that won’t help me live my life is useless to me.

Such an AI would of course be a dangerous asshole on, say, LA roads, of course. Even more than the existing locals.

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tialaramex 5 days ago | parent [-]

This idea that they're somehow ignoring the hard parts is very silly. The existing human drivers in San Francisco manage to kill maybe 20 or so people per year so apparently it's not so "easy" that the human drivers can do it without killing anybody.

I live in the middle of a city, so, no, in terrible weather just like great weather I walk to the store, no need to "starve to death" even if conditions are too treacherous for people to sensibly drive cars. Because I'm an old man, and I used to live somewhere far from a city, I have had situations where you can't use a car to go fetch groceries because even if you don't care about safety the car can't go up an icy hill, it loses traction, gravity takes over, you slide back down (and maybe wreck the car).

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lazide 5 days ago | parent [-]

So why do you think they’re only those cities? Because I’m hearing nothing from you that goes beyond ‘nuh uh’ so far.

Because as an old man who has actually lived in all these places - and also has ridden in Waymos before and has had friends on the Waymo team in the past, your comments seem pretty ridiculous.

	▲	tialaramex 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		Unlike Phoenix the choice of SF and LA seems to me like a PR choice. SF is where lots of tech nerds live and work, LA is one half of the country's media. I'd imagine that today if you're at all interested in this stuff and live in LA or SF you have ridden Waymo whereas when it was in a Phoenix suburb that's a very niche thing to go do unless you happened to live there. A lot of the large population centres in the US are in these what you're calling "super cushy" zones where there's not much snow let alone ice. More launches in cities in Florida, Texas, California will address millions more people but won't mean more ice AFAIK. So I guess for you the most interesting announcement is probably New York, since New York certainly does have real snow. 2026 isn't that long, although I can imagine that maybe a President who thinks he's entitled to choose the Mayor of New York could mess that up. As to the "But people in some places are crazy drivers" I saw that objection from San Francisco before it was announced. "Oh they'll never try here, nobody here drives properly. Can you imagine a Waymo trying to move anywhere in the Mission?". So I don't have much time for that.