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Waymo To Start First Driverless Car Service Next Month (bloomberg.com)
Alphabet's self-driving car company Waymo is planning to launch the world's first commercial driverless car service in early December. According to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the plans, the service "will operate under a new brand and compete directly with Uber and Lyft." From the report: Waymo is keeping the new name a closely guarded secret until the formal announcement. It's a big milestone for self-driving cars, but it won't exactly be a "flip-the-switch" moment. Waymo isn't planning a splashy media event, and the service won't be appearing in an app store anytime soon. Instead, things will start small -- perhaps dozens or hundreds of authorized riders in the suburbs around Phoenix, covering about 100 square miles.
The first wave of customers will likely draw from Waymo's Early Rider Program -- a test group of 400 volunteer families who have been riding Waymos for more than a year. The customers who move to the new service will be released from their non-disclosure agreements, which means they'll be free to talk about it, snap selfies, and take friends or even members of the media along for rides. New customers in the Phoenix area will be gradually phased in as Waymo adds more vehicles to its fleet to ensure a balance of supply and demand. The report notes that some backup drivers will be placed in the cars when the service launches, and the cars themselves will be heavily modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
The first wave of customers will likely draw from Waymo's Early Rider Program -- a test group of 400 volunteer families who have been riding Waymos for more than a year. The customers who move to the new service will be released from their non-disclosure agreements, which means they'll be free to talk about it, snap selfies, and take friends or even members of the media along for rides. New customers in the Phoenix area will be gradually phased in as Waymo adds more vehicles to its fleet to ensure a balance of supply and demand. The report notes that some backup drivers will be placed in the cars when the service launches, and the cars themselves will be heavily modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans.
will the CEO volunteer to go jail / prison if the car kills someone or will the rider sign an EULA that makes them take ALL liability?
So just like most drivers?
I have it on good authority from random posters on /. that self driving cars are 20 years away and that taxi cab and Uber drivers have nothing to worry about.
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at least there's that :)
[($)]
Are we all really going to start saying "Alphabet" with a straight face?
The spectrum-disorder math wizzes at Google have absolutely no idea what you're going on about.
I'm constantly confused about the progress of self-driving cars. They're happening right now and they're decades away, to summarize. Obviously, this is proprietary information, but if I'm not part of some hand-selected group in Phoenix, AZ, when the heck can I expect to ride in a self-directed car?
The cars will kill someone. It's not a matter of if, but when. The hope is that they won't make horrible mistakes like Uber's car did (in addition to killing someone).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
This is the fundamental issue with self driving cars: if a person runs someone over and kills them their life is ruined, they are in prison or in so much debt they'll never afford a car again, let alone be allowed to drive. If a megacorp owned by another megacorp as a shell company kills someone the survivors have to sue a megacorp, which they have no chance of winning against (nevermind getting a fair settlement: e.g. every board member, executive, and programmer involved going to jail for manslaughter and getting total ownership over everything possessed by the shell company, the parent company, the board members, executives, and programmers involved.) When a person kills someone they are removed from society, it should be no different for a corporation or the people running that corporation.
the shell company game will not fly in an criminal case. But may take something like an school bus full of kids in bad crash to get to that court.
" drivers will be placed in the cars when the service launches, and the cars themselves will be heavily modified Chrysler Pacifica minivans."
For christ's sakes they're not just going to be drivers, they're going to need to be ASE certified mechanics.
After all, they're driving fucking Chryslers! The only less reliable vehicle is a Fiats (oh yea forgot they are Fiats).
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
My understanding was that the Uber incident was a Tchernobyl type of event where security features were left turned off/overridden intentionally.
Has that changed in the meantime?
It won't be a megacorp owned by a megacorp. Every car will be it's own LLC, with the car 100% financed. No assets for a lawsuit to take.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
only when referring to the parent company. We will not start saying "go Alphabet it!"
Yup. That's the inherent flaw behind our current corporate/capitalist structure. The corporations have all of the right of individuals, and none of the liabilities. Corporations can't go bankrupt, and corporations can't go to jail. Individuals go bankrupt and go to jail every day, That's why the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer in the US (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/wealth-inequality-in-the-us-is-almost-as-bad-as-it-was-right-before-the-great-depression-2018-07-19). The US is really only a comfortable place if you're wealthy. It's increasingly a uncomfortable place to live as a poor or even a middle-class person. That's a large reason why the Great Orange Asshole happened.
I don't respond to AC's.
will the CEO volunteer to go jail / prison if the car kills someone or will the rider sign an EULA that makes them take ALL liability?
Do you think this is the first time industrial robots, faulty medical equipment or otherwise defective products has killed someone? The answer is neither and you're the poster boy for a false dichotomy.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You'll have to ask Uber. Last I heard they started testing again so maybe they think they are doing better.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The difference in those examples is that the automation was an improvement on the human. A self driving car OTOH is still extremely limited in scope and ability compared to a human driver and despite all the usual silicon valley techno-utopia hype and BS, exists simply to save on the cost of drivers wages. So if you cut costs expect to suffer the consequences if something goes wrong.
my vote: Luuffa
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No, and they shouldn't. If driverless cars cause only 10% of the accidents then there is a net 90% of lives saved and you want to put the behind bars for saving people from 90% of wrecks? Let's just focus on decreasing the number as much as possible. We don't expect perfect performance from machines in any other sector. We should be satisfied that they are better than any other alternative. If we don't cut 90% of accidents because we are waiting for 100% perfection that this is unethical. We're wasting human lives and causing undue hardships on familiesl
The difference in those examples is that the automation was an improvement on the human. A self driving car OTOH is still extremely limited in scope and ability compared to a human driver
And yet, it still might do a better job — not only in spite of those limitations, but also because of them. The car isn't thinking about its mortgage, or sally in accounting. It's just handling driving.
and despite all the usual silicon valley techno-utopia hype and BS, exists simply to save on the cost of drivers wages.
Welcome to capitalism, where essentially everything is done for money.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Amusement part rides are effectively self driving vehicle you get into. If one of them fails you could die, or it might fall on the general public milling around the ride.
The park operators try to evade responsibility at four levels
1. Posted warnings
2. Submission to inspections by regulators
3. Good faith in adhering to regulations and documenting timely repairs as needed.
4. limited liability companies as a stop-loss from reachback in law suits
I'd assume waymo is going to do all that, plus probably obtain favorable legislation.
If they are smart then they should adopt the practices of boeing. That company has a fairly solid reputation for being aggressively interested in why their plane crashed so they can make the next one better. In practice that means that they encourage investigators not to be seeking the answer to "Why boeing isn't at fault" but "planes are ridiculously dangers contractions, let's learn from this to make flying safer each time we fail". The result has been, that flying is now very safe, and boeing is not too scared of saying they might have done something imperfectly that enabled the crash.
Just look at the Lion air investigation. Already there's no denying that a "safety" upgrade may also have triggered some unanticipated consequences. This is how things get safer. I hope the settlements for lawsuits stay bounded so we can have more of this
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
will the CEO volunteer to go jail / prison if the car kills someone
Why would they? More importantly why would you think the CEO ultimately ends up having any liability when there's a death of someone, and EULAs are completely irrelevant to the point I'm trying to make.
Can't wait to hear Waymo's excuses about how their cars didn't see that man in that particular shade of purple with the sharply cast shadow with the sun 30 degrees left relative of the vehicle. Then there will be another, and another.. Eventually they will come to tems with how many driving situations there really are in the world.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
It MIGHT do a better job? That's the best you can come up with.
Yep. Welcome to reality.
Snow. Rain. Human behavior. Sandbags by the side of the road. Ladies walking their bikes across a well lit street. Automated driver systems can't handle these situations.
Nor can humans. Those situations trip up humans all the time.
It won't do better.
It will do better than the dick I was behind today who was brushing his teeth on the 1 while driving over the wooden bridge in Albion, or the superannuated dildo behind him who couldn't keep his lane (who thankfully did get out of the way for me.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We already strictly enforce all of those things for provisional drivers, at least in my country. Doing anything on your list will get you suspended, and you must prove your ability to get a less-restricted licence. And they still kill themselves (and others) on the roads more than any other demographic, doing exactly these things.
Sure, they're still relatively new to driving. If they survive, they may learn to avoid those dangerous practices, and develop better reflexes. But every new driver has to learn all this from scratch, while autonomous cars already know - every car fresh off the line inherits all the lessons learned from the many millions of miles driven by its predecessors. And every lesson learned afterwards, anywhere, is incorporated and sent OTA to all those predecessors as well, so the entire fleet improves together.
The best autonomous cars are already safer than the average human in most common situations - certainly they're more reliable. And every year they will improve, all of them. You may be surprised how little time it takes before they exceed human ability in most uncommon situations too.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Citation? Wave it off if you like, but Tesla is delivering regular Autopilot upgrades (now up to version 9) to its whole range, new cars and old, despite the hardware differences. These updates are based on the extensive telemetry from their customers' cars in the field. Waymo is doing the same for their Chrysler minivans and Jaguar i-Paces, based not only on their real-world testing but vastly more miles in the simulator - regularly rolling out new & improved versions to their fleet. And they said years ago they could offer their driving system for any car manufacturer.
No vendor has to start all that again from scratch for each new model. The hardware differences are much less significant than you appear to think. Data from whatever sensors are available are all fused into a best-available model of the environment, and all the driving logic is entirely independent of details like the brand or positioning of the lidar etc.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Nor can humans. Those situations trip up humans all the time."
Speak for yourself. Those situations trip a small minority of humans which could easily be rectified with harder driving tests, but they trip ALL current self driving systems.
Those situations trip a small minority of humans which could easily be rectified with harder driving tests, but they trip ALL current self driving systems.
I've literally watched all of those things confuse human drivers. I'm speaking from experience.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The same hardware independence you think is "magic" makes simulation easy, and lets them test and learn from countless scenarios before they're ever encountered in reality. Read and learn.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
seriously, it's not a problem.
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