Waymo as a system has crossed the threshold where I trust them more than average driver, but all this hardware is relatively new, well maintained, and their software is closely tied to it.

I’m way less confident of self driving in the hands of the general public when differed maintenance often results in people and even companies driving with squealing breaks and balding tires etc.

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mtklein 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.

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jamilton 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What levers are there, really? Waymo has a monopoly and it seems like they will for a while, so they have a lot of power, but all I really see them doing is making it expensive. Anything that makes the experience worse takes away from their ability to take market share away from Uber/Lyft.

	▲	MagicMoonlight 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ads in the car. Forced “safety breaks” due to the newly proven dangers of sitting in a car for more than 20 minutes. Taking place at our safety parter McDonalds. Deliberately taking certain routes and encouraging you to stop at partner stores. Making you pay rent for the self driving. Increasing the subscription costs continuously.

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gfody 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

enshitification should be a new certainty along with death and taxes

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Animats 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That worries me.

Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance. Yet there's nothing like the FAA to enforce a minimum equipment list, maintenance intervals, or signoffs by approved mechanics.

Is there a scratch or chip in the scanner dome? Are both the primary and backup steering actuators working? Is there any damage to the vehicle fender sensors? Is dispatch allowed with some redundant components not working? If so, for how long?

Here's the FAA's Minimum Equipment List for single-engine aircraft.[1] For each item, you can see if it has to be working to take off, and, if not, how long is allowed to fix it. There's nothing like that for self-driving land vehicles.

What's the fleet going to look like at 8 years of wear and tear?

[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/MMEL_SE_Rev_2_Draft....

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jfoster 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance.

That's a hyperbolic false equivalence.

Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. As long as a self-driving car can detect when it is degraded, it can just stop with the blinkers on. Usually with 0 - 2 people inside.

	▲	Ygg2 20 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. Cars are more numerous and could spontaneously either plow into pedestrians, or rear-end someone, causing chain damage and, quite often, a spillage of toxic chemicals (e.g., a cistern carrying acid/fuel/pesticide). Plus, you have a problem of hostile actors having easier access to cars compared to planes.
	▲	Animats 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The question is how broken can a car be when dispatched. What's the safe floor? See the other article today about a Tesla getting into an accident because of undetected sensor degradation.

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bombcar 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s just death and taxes combined.

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jeffbee 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Waymo's software has crossed multiple generations of sensors and vehicles over almost two decades. It does not seem to be tightly coupled to a particular device.

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Retric 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not tightly coupled in obvious ways, but as I understand it they aren’t putting it on pickup trucks, convertibles, or anything toeing a boat etc. Their vehicles don’t have aftermarket suspension systems dramatically changing handling characteristics, or turned one into a stretched limo etc.

Which means the software can safely assume the vehicle will behave within a relatively narrow operating range.

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maxerickson 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I suppose owners will be motivated to have the thing do the driving (and so seek defeat devices and such), but at least the software can have "do nothing" as a safety mode if it manages to detect that the vehicle is not configured as expected.

And maybe the software can be designed to be coupled to a vehicle dynamics model that can be updated.

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cucumber3732842 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't think the vehicle performance really matters in the typical case. They're using like 20% of what the vehicle "can" do. They're probably hedging against the long tail of variance on the road somehow. Kinda like how private people can tow whatever the f they want with their pickups but in a work setting you need to keep it fairly stupid proof.

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jeffbee 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The only thing an autonomous system should do with janky modified cars is drive them very slowly to the state police barracks for destruction.

	▲	Retric 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps, but you can do a lot to a car while it remains street legal.

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int0x29 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The new (as of now than a year ago) Waymo cars still had human safety drivers last I saw one (a month or two ago). I also don't see them taking customers. So they do seem to slow roll hardware rollouts.

	▲	necovek 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A new version rolling out fast and starting to crash will likely kill the program altogether (like it did for some competitors). 10 years down the line, they won't have that risk.
	▲	buildbot 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Which to me is a really good, encouraging thing. Overall I feel safer in a Waymo than a rideshare now and I only spent a few days being able to use Waymo...
	▲	7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		[deleted]

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kirubakaran 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The self-driving software could detect that the unmaintained car isn't responding correctly to the controls and refuse to drive.

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VBprogrammer 10 hours ago | parent [-]

We're not even a decade beyond some poorly conceived software crashing two otherwise functional aircraft into the ground and now it's going to save us all...

	▲	Dylan16807 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah it does lead to silly conclusions if all vehicle software of any kind is treated as a homogeneous blob.