Google was famously really resistant to ads at first. They wanted to do a subscription service of some kind, but honestly ads just brought in so much more revenue even back then that it was a nigh-inevitable decision. It produces a crazy amount of economy.

I still loathe ads though.

I actually find those amusing because they just make me remember the 'web scale' meme.

It's kind of wild how you have so many ads targeted at devs in SF.

Thanks for that thought. Horrible.

It looks like YouTube Music was only added in October? I took the ride in September.

https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16623742?hl=en

How about some games to pass the time? Make some exclusives so I look forwards to a 20 minute cross-town drive!

This was in September, so I'm happy to see the change!

Can you not steam arbitrary audio to it from your phone?

If there’s a torment nexus to be built they’ll build it.

Might be Orhan Pamuk or JG Ballard's mantle to be picked up

The optimally regulated system doesn't know the road conditions that well. When the road surface is more slippery, it has the most profound effect on lateral friction, way more than braking.

It is still standard advice today, as far as I know. Tires are better, stability control is better, but all else being equal you are still much more dynamically stable and have a lot more friction with the road when the car is stopping in a straight line than when swerving.

Also, in the case of someone running a stop sign, it is far from a sure bet they are going to hit their brakes at all, so by swerving you increase the odds that you will still hit them, but now it will be while you have exhausted all your adhesion on lateral control. So now instead of a front end collision with all the benefits of airbags and crumple zones, you are at a significant risk of rolling the car or spinning off the road and hitting something immovable with a part of your car lacking crumple zones.

What about other drivers in that lane? It would have to be 100% sure that any other drivers near it would have enough time to react as well.

Absolutely. I was recently driving on a motorway in Portugal when a boulder (giant chunk of granite, 10+ tonnes) fell off the back of a truck - right in front of us, in a heavily laden (7 pax and luggage) car. Immediate massive cloud of dust, I checked my blind spot, veered across two lanes, and continued our journey, unscathed. I looked in the rear view, to see the car behind us jump on the brakes instead of evading. They caught the boulder.

Nobody killed, according to the news, but several taken to hospital in critical condition.

Oh, I say unscathed but our tyre exploded the next day, as apparently we caught a fragment, and again, that’s not a “slam on the brakes” moment, but rather “trundle to a stop on the shoulder and walk to the conveniently nearby tyre shop”.

If instant (<50ms) reaction would have lowered the speed only to 40km/h in 10m, Waymo was going too fast for the intersection IMO.

My experience is that for a human driver to react quickly in city driving conditions, style and prep are more important than reaction time: in the case you describe (entering an intersection with another car waiting on a stop sign perpendicular to your path), I'd have my foot hanging over the brake and off the gas pedal — this has helped me avoid hitting many other cars with inattentive/distracted/bad drivers, and even pedestrians running over the road or a red light on a crosswalk. When you are prepared and looking, you slam the brakes much faster!

To be fair, we are not provided with the sensors to swerve safely. If we had some sort of 360 constant recording in the car (on screen?) it would be safer for humans to swerve. Instead we have to move our head, which is cheaper but lacks info. That's why we now have rear cameras

Depends on how you define "average driver": what if 95% of the crashes are caused by 5% of the drivers?

My reading of all the human crash stats has been that majority of them happen when human drivers are impaired (drunk, drugged or too tired): as this is something we could (in theory, at least) control, I'd like to see and compare with stats for non-impaired human drivers too.

Then, I'd like to see it compared to attentive, non-distracted drivers too (but we won't have crash data for this, as they would avoid most potential crashes).

Note that I am only talking things under every human driver's control, and not things like skill, reaction time, etc.

Also, modern cars (like Waymos) will have a much lower braking distance compared to "average": eg. my Volvo has 35m braking distance from 100km/h or 62mph compared to 50m (45% more) listed as average (excluding reaction distance) — so from 50km/h, it should be around 8m!

In Houston the stats suggest that every driver should get into a crash at least once every. But many ppl haven’t been an crash all their lives and more have been in multiple

What was the verdict on the smoothie?

Pffft, like a bot couldn't fake metadata.