Alphabet's Waymo Reveals Its Self-Driving Chrysler Pacifica Minivans (theverge.com)

Artem Tashkinov writes: Waymo, what used to be a Google division and now is a new division in Alphabet, has revealed its first production ready fully autonomous car based on Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid. The new vehicle for six passengers will retain all its human driving features such as a steering wheel and foot pedals. A limited production -- a fleet of 100 cars -- is expected to hit the road in 2017.

Comments

Less space than a Nomad.

[0100010001010011]

production ready fully autonomous car

I've been told on Slashdot that this will never happen. These cars will never be in production. Self driving cars will never hit the road. Google spinning this off meant the technology was dead.

What gives? Slashdotters have never been wrong about technology. /s

Bring on the self driving cars. I wonder how much better these vans are against motorcycles vs soccer moms.

Re:Less space than a Nomad.

[0100010001010011]

This is will never happen

And as I said last time, can you please cement in your goal posts.

Define a 'production' run.

There is a good chance these might never make it down to the average consumer. These are going to be bought by fleets in droves. Some people view car ownership like they view horse ownership. No one is going to come take away your hor^H^H^H car.

Is it when they make 1,000? 10,000? When the first corporation buys one? When someone earning less than $50k leases one? What is your goal post for what will *never* happen because every year you're going to get proven more and more wrong. Military and heavy equipment makers have had commercially available options for a while now. Caterpillar, Oshkosh, etc have been beating the tech to death off road since the 2004 DARPA.

Most car makers are going bottom up adding auto stopping, blind spot detection and lane assist to all new vehicles. I wouldn't be shocked if near full autonomy was a software upgrade away.

I honestly don't get how a website for a technical crowd still has people that think this isn't going to happen. Start reading academic papers on picture description and how long we've had the tech to identify every little thing in a photograph. Every time you complete a reCaptcha you're training a google self driving car. Forward neural nets are trivial to run on modern hardware. I wouldn't be shocked if ASIC chips doing image identification were already out there.

The sensors watch 360 degrees, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They don't drink, they don't become tired, their reaction times don't depend on how old they are, they only get better with time. We have to retrain an entire fleet of drivers when they hit 16.

In my opinion for them to be on the road they only have to be statistically safer than a 16 year old. In the future if you want a drivers license I wouldn't be shocked if you had to beat an AI in a driving test. Don't beat the AI, don't get to drive on public streets. That way all of you driving experts on the road can still keep your drivers license. You can still drive as much as you want and never have to worry about a soccer mom again. [Since we're making prediction on Slashdot for the next few decades, expect your insurance premiums to go up, way up. If you own a vehicle that anyone can easily control you are a liability.]

Lead, follow or get out of the way. The rest of us want to move on so 2116 makes 2016 look like 1916, ... range(1906, 0, -100).