Waymo Starts To Eclipse Uber in Race To Self-Driving Taxis (sfchronicle.com)

Uber barreled into autonomous driving out of fear that it could end up as the MySpace or Yahoo of ride-hailing, a company with early gargantuan success that stumbled as times changed. Waymo, the self-driving offshoot of Google parent Alphabet, has pursued its ambitions more cautiously, accumulating long years of research and testing before pursuing a plan to bring its technology to the public. From a report: Now, as Waymo scales up its self-driving taxi service, Uber's fear could be coming to pass. This week, as Uber continued to reel from a fatal self-driving accident in Arizona, Waymo confidently pushed forward -- landing a deal to build 20,000 self-driving luxury SUVs with Jaguar Land Rover on top of its plan for thousands of Chysler hybrid minivans. Within two years, it aims to have thousands of fully autonomous taxis -- with no backup drivers behind the wheel -- on the roads, starting in Phoenix where it is already giving test rides.

The company predicts it will give 1 million robot-taxi rides a day by 2020. Waymo, the industry pioneer, logged millions of autonomous miles as it perfected self-driving technology. But over the years, engineers defected out of frustration that it was not commercializing the technology. Now with former auto executive John Krafcik at the helm, Waymo appears poised to launch a self-driving taxi service that could conceivably dominate that field, at least early on, the way Uber does now with human-driven cars.

Comments

No one is close

[fluffernutter]

Waymo probably has their LIDAR working, but I don't imagine that gets them very far ahead of Uber at this point. Humans drive 551,370 miles in all situations and all kinds of weather and road services without even a fender-bender. Even Waymo is doing a fraction of that per 'safety driver' intervention. Also it is a problem set that gets exponentially harder as you get closer to the goal of being significantly safer than humans.

Re: No one is close

[fluffernutter]

That *is* actual statistics. Humans drive 3.22 trillion miles in the US per year, and get into 16,000 accidents per month. It comes to 551,370 miles without an accident. We should assume each 'intervention' by a safety driver would have been an accident (the industry picked this method of measurement, not me), otherwise there wouldn't have been an intervention. Waymo is at around 4,900 miles per intervention which is 0.89% as safe as a human mile for mile; and consider that Waymo is picking *exactly* when they drive. And someone has already died. Self driving is a long way off.

Re: No one is close

[RhettLivingston]

Virtually no cars go over 1/2 million miles. I just examined the parking lot outside and over half had signs of an accident of some sort. Several had obviously been in a few. The stats are way off.

Most accidents by human drivers are unreported. As long as the damage is minor, there is no reason to raise insurance rates. EVERY accident whether or not there is any physical damage is reported for these vehicles.

They've always been ahead.

[Prien715]

To get a sense of how far ahead Waymo is, take a look at the disengagements report Waymo published last year and then look at everyone else's. At least in California, Waymo has more miles driven than everyone else combined and their disengagement rate is much lower

Turn the damn Lidar ON next time.

[truckaxle]

Waymo jumps ahead... that is what happens when your competition runs someone over. Now UBER stands for UBER = >U BEtterR get out of the way!