I just can’t see how Tesla self-driving taxis will be safe for unsupervised use any time soon.
It’s going to be so much fun adding these to the extant chaos of Austin roads.
Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.
From what I’ve read, Waymo isn’t doing too bad of a job at it. They obviously aren’t perfect, but have succeeded at being much safer than human drivers. But those cars have a bazillion different sensors bolted on them, while Tesla is trying to do the same with nothing but a few cameras and computer vision systems.
It’s worth noting these companies try to capture & record every inch of a city before entering the market there. Without these models the vehicles would drive significantly worse. This isn’t really a scalable business model from what I’ve read
That feels… very responsible?
I mean, we probably shouldn’t concern ourselves TOO much with the profitability of a Google subsidiary and the pet project of the world’s richest man. I think they’ll figure out the monetization side of things. We should be laser focused on safety, which Waymo is certainly doing to a much higher degree than Tesla.
Truly autonomous driving already exists. It’s called trains.
Anyone trying to sell fully autonomous cars is severely underestimating the complexity of driving. Under highly controlled conditions, it may be possible, but I doubt these people are programming edge cases like planes crashing onto freeways and severe hail. There are far too many times when it takes good judgement to handle a situation properly.
Still, I’m all for the progress this has made towards helping people drive safer. But the best solution is to just stop using cars IMO, just that it’d be problematic to force that for a number of reasons.
My last employer was trying to get autonomous busses going. As far as I knew, when I left a few years ago the only place the busses were allowed to be autonomous was around the bus depot to hit all the maintenance, fueling, and cleaning stations on closed roads before parking itself (and I’m actually not 100% sure they would park themselves) at the end of the day. There was no timeline for on-route autonomy that I was aware of, but I was also not really involved so my info was 2nd hand.
Texas in a couple weeks and California has some trials in San Francisco. Waymo is expanding to other cities, though. They are 100% not ready for live testing, yet here we are
They’re assuming that just because they can bullshit legal authorities to get the things on the road, that’s a fait accompli. Once the services is operating and generating income it’s untouchable.
Thing is, they’re going to cause problems that will affect people, they will cause traffic jams, they will piss people off, they will cause accidents. These vehicles are, by design, unattended, sure they have cameras, but, anyone with nondescript clothes and a face covering can sabotage these vehicles without much risk of legal consequence.
The cost of maintaining a fleet of these vehicles in the face of road rage induced sabotage will sink these companies even if they are able to bribe every politician in every major city.
Oh, they are already causing traffic issues in California. Plus the Waymos have been doing a lot of cacophonous honking when they try to park for the evening. Just chaos every where they go
And of course this is all definitely worth it so checks notes we can become dependent on a handful of private companies to move us through our highly car dependent society and dismantle what little public transit is left.
Yup, totally a good idea and definitely worth it.
A sad reality is that a lot of the time when money is on the line people have to be hurt or even die before anything happens. Every regulation came from too many people being hurt by their absence. And we’ve rolled them back so now people are going to have to pay that human cost all over again in order to learn the lessons we already knew.
Not that I’m defending Tesla’s, but do your busses pull off the side of the road completely like that often? I would be confused as a person driving as well. Usually buses in my area just stop in the lane so it’s a lot more obvious that you stop behind the bus and don’t pass in the lane beside it.
School busses, at least in my region (and it appears in the image this is true as well), have flashing red lights at the top to indicate that traffic must stop. The stop sign also comes out, but it’s the flashing red lights that should be a dead giveaway to anybody driving.
In my region, they also have flashing yellow lights before they stop, indicating that traffic should slow down and prepare to stop.
Edit: and I should add that the expectation is that traffic stops in all lanes, both directions. Being in a different lane or off to the side makes no difference.
Someone else mentioned that over on Reddit, in a very clapback sort of way. Would you happen to be in Texas? I’m learning all about regional traffic law variations :D
So, my thought here: the stop sign is simply not recognized by the vehicle. It didn’t see the stop sign and decide “legally, I have the right of way.” The stop sign just doesn’t appear on the visualization, cameras failed to register the blinking lit up sign, and thus the computer thought it had the right of way.
As a separate critical fuckup, it only realized the pedestrian was a pedestrian like a millisecond before impact. It wasn’t a good test performance at all.
