Posted by krschultz 4 days ago
Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.
Have you been to San Francisco or LA?
"Oh, sorry, I don't carry cash. Better luck next time man!"
"Oh it just started working."
One downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
For those people, rear-facing seats can exacerbate motion sickness. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
I am curious: Unsafe because a " 1970 Plymouth Satellite" or because "rear-facing seat"?
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/img/pictonorzw/plymouth/1...
Looking at that picture, I see belts, but I do not recall those belts and suspect they were deeply wedged into the seat and forgotten about.
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
3. Yay again!
As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.
> Simply open the Zoox app to take a ride from several destinations on and around the Strip.
This puts it dramatically behind Waymo where I can walk out on any block in the coverage area and tell it to take me to any other block in the coverage area, not to mention Uber and Lyft.
I'm sure Zoox can improve this, but right now it resembles a self-driving shuttle more than a taxi service.
What's considered normal for humans, driving higher than the speed limits, will not for automatic cars.
A robotaxi doesn’t care where it can or can’t drive. It just follows graph search and speed limits.
That means we can design cities around how we want them to look, instead of bending everything around today’s messy car infrastructure.
Think about SF, its size is (famously) around 7 by 7 miles. So it'd take 12 minutes to cross (as the bird flies) from one side to another at 35 mph and 17 minutes at 25mph. Which is completely unrealistic, because real travel times are dominated by traffic lights and congestion.
This calculation changes only when we're talking about long-distance travel on freeways. But honestly, I expect that fast long-distance trains with seamless transfer to self-driving taxis would be a better idea.
...dramatically reduces likelihood and consequences of a crash
(Musk 6 years ago saying it's happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8X8NdcV7Wc It hasn't yet of course)
I've seen plenty of robotaxi huckers advocate for speed limits 'appropriate for robot response times'
It's part of discussions around hypothetical futures where everything is self-driving and the vehicles communicate with each other to form dense convoys on places like freeways where there aren't pedestrians.
I certainly haven't heard any mainstream suggestions that self-driving taxis ought to drive faster than humans in spaces they share with human drivers and human pedestrians.
Where?
So yeah, they'll do the same thing as humans eventually.
Speeding can usually be brushed off as carelessness. Where it can’t, we charge it more harshly.
A robot programmed to speed serves a jury mens rea on a plate.
So we're describing a hypothetical problem a decade or more out in respect of a technology evolving so quickly a significant fraction of people still don't even believe it's real.
Announcement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation/zoox-headquarter...
Amazon owns it, not just funded them.
> There is no steering wheel afaik
Maybe the control is in a remote centre then
Here's a speculative but plausible take: Zoox and Waymo are both products of cloud computing and data gathering giants. Maybe that's the important factor.
Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Pony.ai, Baidu's Apollo, Argo.ai and Aurora all have/had very similar approaches to the technology. Tesla is the major outlier and they haven't accomplished much in spite of the hype.
It's a product area that is very far from being able to horizontalize. Waymo Driver is going to run on Waymo hardware for a long time to come. Toyota is supposedly trying to use Waymo technology for personal vehicles. I expect adapting it will take years. The software is nothing like an app running on an operating system. All of these systems probably require years of effort to move them to a different hardware platform.
I'm curious to know where you get information on stuff like this. The Google self-driving car project was fairly transparent in the early days but since things have gotten competitive everybody is pretty tight-lipped about the particulars of what they're doing.
Unfortunately, information ages quickly. Stuff that Waymo published about their architecture only a few years ago is now wildly out of date.
That said, diversity is decreasing. Most players are standardizing on relatively similar hardware platforms using nvidia compute, with connectivity heavily focused around ethernet as opposed to older buses.
I make TikTok's about technology and project management. Elon's management style has been, some might say, a running gag in my videos, so I am more tuned into these topics than your average bear.
Said like someone who doesn't have elderly parents, and doesn't plan to age…
Now to start a tangent, what's the easier problem to solve: FSD, or a robust public transport system? Moving rooms have always been around in the form of trains, busses, streetcars etc...
To people outside the Bay, self driving might still seem like some far-off future tech. I can tell you that the future is already here. I haven't used an Uber in the last 3 years because I will always pick Waymo instead.
I'm being slightly fanatical, but if our priorities were not car-centric in the 50's, do you think we would have spent more, or less money over the last 70 years on the transportation economy?
The global AV industry has taken roughly as much funding as California HSR has on its own, and less than what HSR will need to finish.
I've been doing public transit advocacy for my entire adult life. I've worked in the AV industry somewhat less than that. My advocacy has produced a couple of bike lanes and bus stops, contrasted against 3 AV launches.
I'd love to build more public transit, but experience tells me that the most effective thing I can do to support my community is AVs.
By far the worst part about said Ubers and Taxis is the driver. They're an unpredictable element in a situation where I greatly appreciate predictability. Unlike my parents, I didn't grow up with staff, so I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
This says nothing about self driving cars
> So I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
I don't mean to be harsh, but, get over it? We live in a service economy. Do you feel the same way about the barista taking your coffee order?
> Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
I don't like the assumption you're making that Waymos are the only solution to ubers, taxis or driving yourself. Well designed and well working public transportation (Which is doable and exists in the world) is far cheaper and far more predictable than any form of car-based transportation.
Not only that, but you're not responding to my actual argument. The annoying part of driving is not the act of driving, it's the time spent in your commute.
I very literally did not make that assumption. I pointed out, in a sentence you quoted yourself, that public transit can drastically reduce the amount of point-to-point personal transportation an individual wants or needs. However, sometimes, you really can't beat the convenience of "I am at point A, I want to be at point B, and I don't want to deal with a series of stops and transfers to get there". Maybe your starting or ending point is an unusual location. Maybe it's an unusual time of day. Maybe you're wearing a tuxedo or a cast and don't want to do the amount of walking public transit normally requires.
In any case, point-to-point transit is sometimes worth the expense. And when it is, self-driving taxis are fantastic. Compared to driving myself, I don't have to commit at least 75% of my attention to not killing myself or others. I can just read a book, or watch a movie, or do the morning crossword. Compared to taxis or Uber, I don't need to deal with a driver.
- get lost
- be late
- collide with a moving car
- collide with stationary object
- run over a pedestrian (bonus for multiple!)
Although from the article, it sounds like this might not be servicing a wide enough area to win the bet even if the time was extended a couple years.
1 it's not fully autonomous, there's a remote operator
2 not a wide enough service area as defined in the bet
3 it's a pilot program, also excluded in the bet
4 it's also a year late and the bet is very much still lost
lol but we're going to have self driving cars by 2015 guys!
An 8-10 year delay from expectations is not too bad all things considered.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo...
