Alphabet Is Finally Taking the Driver Out of Some of Its Driverless Cars (recode.net)

An anonymous reader shares a report: After almost a decade, Google's parent company Alphabet is getting closer to fulfilling its promise of rolling out cars that can take anyone anywhere without a driver behind the wheel. Alphabet's self-driving car company, Waymo, is introducing truly driverless cars to public roads for the first time, the company's CEO John Krafcik announced today at the Web Summit conference. That means there won't have to be a person sitting in the driver's seat, waiting to take over, and that the car's computer system will complete all parts of the driving task -- though for now, only in some of the company's cars in Phoenix, Ariz. While this move is still geographically limited, it marks the beginnings of Alphabet's driverless future finally becoming a reality. No other company has succeeded in operating a fleet of fully driverless cars on public roads.

Comments

Here is a question I have...

[Noryungi]

Quoting from the article:

That means there won't have to be a person sitting in the driver's seat, waiting to take over, and that the car's computer system will complete all parts of the driving task -- though for now, only in some of the company's cars in Phoenix, Ariz.

Now: Phoenix, Arizona. Probably one of the driest spots in the USA, and one with nice, straight roads. Hmmm... Is it possible that the Waymo / Alphabet / Googleplex cars are not that good at self-driving?

I mean this seriously: the more I think about it, and the harder it is for me to take the idea of a self-driving car seriously in anything that is not in the southwestern United States.

A self driving car in some parts of Europe would simply be very, very difficult: anyone who has navigated the beautiful little streets of, say, Granada in Spain knows what I am talking about (hint: very narrow). Anyone who has driven in Norway, or any other country in Scandinavia, knows that the weather can be grueling there (Alaska or North Dakota, some parts of Illinois or Wisconsin also come to mind).

All of this to say, a decade into this slef-driving car project, has Waymo been blowing smoke all along? Is the self-driving car vaporware? Discuss.

Anyone familiar with the technology

[SuperKendall]

Who says the technology has advanced at a rapid clip?

I've spent some of my spare time studying self driving car tech (including the Udacity course). It's not like I'm going to be building my own self driving car anytime soon, but I've learned enough to see that self driving car tech is very real and not hype. There are a LOT of prototype cars on real roads today from a large number of companies,, not just in California, not just Google, but others cities and companies now as well. We are very close to the cars operating in limited areas with no employees - think trucks on highways or cars to transport people in retirement communities.

There has been and continues to be a huge volume of data gathered from current sensors, especially Tesla, that makes getting closer to true self driving tech much more rapid than it might be otherwise. Like I said, at this point self driving car tech can handle most situations better than human drivers - as long as teh sensors are not blocked.