Isolated I get why you're baffled, but given GM being GM this is par for the course.
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
The simple reality with remote controllers is that there is a lot of extra network latency that pretty much makes any real time controlling of the car impractical. Most of this stuff happens over mobile networks too so there might be package loss, low resolution video. Maybe the video freezes for a second or two occasionally. Etc.
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour?
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
I do a lot of driving in Austin for a living. I am not a fan of these for several reasons. But on average they're quite competent and I see humans do dumber stuff all the time. I can also cut them off in traffic without repercussions!
Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
I’m imagining these vehicles on a sort of track, this way if the automation fails, it can still be guided. Also, the track could even potentially deliver power. The vehicle can be any number of connected pods.
No it won't. Waymo's can drive without LIDAR, btw. It's a red herring. The thing is, we want these things to be better than human drivers. I can't see in the dark, through rain, and past fog. Radar can.
> In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
The industry is already concluding that Tesla made the right choice with vision-only. Their technology is the clear leader in the space (Waymo is good, but much more on guard rails in terms of its limits). Jensen Huang probably knows what he's talking about.
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
I just want 2 lanes on the highway of interconnected cars talking to each other so they can do 100mph at 5in from each other all in sync and 1 or 2 other lanes of human driven cars.
> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
"Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency."
ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on.
My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
The zeekr vehicle mentioned here is made in an almost entirely dark factory in China. It has very few humans on the floor and spits out 800 cars per day. It’s literally dark in there.
They've already talked about this new hardware many times, this is just announcing that said new models are starting fully driverless operations.
Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.
I actually hope that they do not succeed in the end. Ubiquitous self driving cars will spell the end of what's left of walkable areas in North America and bring about (in time) similar destruction of the urban fabric to Europe and elsewhere. I'm not very articulate and English is my second language but this video below is really worth watching before we all swallow as an axiom the idea that autonomous cars are going to be a good thing:
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
Why would driverless cars mill around? They would just wait around in underground garages. They can even block each other, so they don't need that much space to park.
I find the title delightfully vague and open to interpretation. Does the title imply that prior to the sixth generation, the fifth generation and earlier generations cannot have fully autonomous operations? Or does the title merely suggest that an earlier version of sixth generation was not ready for fully autonomous operations but now is?
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
Can anyone else not see the photo of Waymo Driver's camera? I'm so interested but it doesn't seem to be showing up for me on iOS...
The image caption reads:
Compared to a traditional automotive camera (right), the 6th-generation Waymo Driver camera (left) delivers significantly higher resolution at cost parity, allowing the system to make better-informed driving decisions.
>When are they going to trivally stop breaking traffic laws?
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
There are so many downvoted comments at the bottom of the thread that rebuke this PR puffpiece pointing out that it's all smoke and mirrors (re: Philippines, fleet response agents, doordash, etc.). And the upvoted comments on top are Reddit-tier shit cheering on "another milestone for humanity achieved by engineers who truly love their job".
My take on autonomous driving is this (I'll leave it here for posterity). There will be no winners. Fully autonomous, flexible, dependable driving requires some degree of general intelligence. This will not come from clever algorithms or accumulation of proprietary data, but from progressive improvements in AI. Different sensory hardware will also make marginal difference as the bitter lesson will always hold: real driving ability mostly comes from bigger, smarter systems.
This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:
If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.
A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
Safe, autonomous cars would be a godsend to parents with kids. I don’t know if we will ever get consumer models of this but if we could put our kid in a vehicle at home to take them to school and all of their numerous activities it would free up many, many hours of my wife’s time.
Congratulations to the Waymo team! I was excited reading through the overview. What I'm monitoring in the self-driving space is Lidar and Radar integration. There are leaders like Elon with Tesla who insist that they're not necessary yet Waymo has devoted effort for them in their 6th generation. My personal perspective is that Lidar and Radar are a core requirement for self-driving because "These upgrades help the lidar penetrate weather and avoid point cloud distortion near highly reflective signs, expanding the Waymo Driver's ability to see through heavy roadspray on freeways and other complex edge cases."
"leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens" - sick burn Waymo haha
From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."
50 comments
[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 55.5 ms ] threadNice abbreviation.
(Disclaimer: former Cruise employee)
Check out their history of EV or hybrid vehicles or even the history of Saturn - they stumble onto something awesome that people love and it's the company mission to destroy it.
> Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Even if human controllers actually could pay attention 100% of the time, they'd struggle to respond in time to a lot of dangerous situations. Most accidents happen when one of the cars (or their drivers) fails to react in time with what is effectively a split second decision.
Autonomous driving (with or without a controller) means a computer takes essentially all of those decisions for the simple reason that any human controller would probably be too late way too often.
Once you accept that simple logical reality, the role of that controller becomes more clear: they are there to step in and provide instructions to the car when it encounters some challenging situation and slows down, pulls over, or stops in a safe place. This probably doesn't involve any joysticks or steering wheels.
Controller responses are not real time critical. They can't be. It would fail to work too often. Also, most controllers probably need to monitor more than one car. Which only makes the problem worse. And they might have to juggle two stuck cars at once.
Mostly autonomous cars are pretty good at object detection and not crashing into stuff (all the real time stuff). It's object classification and interpreting complex situations where cars get stuck or might sometimes still do dangerous/illegal/sub optimal things. Getting stuck or slowing down is fine. The human controller can fix that. Doing the wrong thing is more problematic.
Not 99% of a chauffeur, 100%. (or 99.99999%)
The roll out of this is clearly limited by the number of remote employees that are filling in the 1%.
Nice dig at Tesla.
For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.
In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally different size, look, speed, etc. autonomous Golf carts? tuktuks? A moving autonomous bicycle carrier? etc
Like imagine a low speed, electric, autonomous, golf-cart-only lane at every train station, for the last mile.
The lead that Waymo has acquired in perceiving its driverless car's environment will be almost impossible to kill. In about 5 years, it'll be like NVidia and CUDA. Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.
Which is why their strategy (purely vision/photons in, controls out) seems to be more widely applicable and scalable over time.
And waymo seems to be arriving there too as they keep reducing the equipment (it would seem)
If anything, it's the opposite: most people in this space (Elon, George Hotz, Demis, etc.) have been saying for a very long time that autonomous driving is just the first step, and that their objective is to build world models.
Waymo is too deep in their complex hardware stack to do a hard about face at the moment.
Tesla's design team prioritized form over function. Lidars definitely look ugly; they didn't want them on their cars, so as a consequence, they shoot themselves on the foot.
I read the whole thing, but, idk, surprised they didn't include a picture or clarify if this is strictly hardware, or hardware + software changes (with the software changes maybe back propagating to existing Drivers)
"Because we are focused on building a Driver and not a vehicle, we’ve designed a versatile, integrated autonomous driving system that can be adapted to various platforms and use cases over time. Our versatile hardware approach allows us to reconfigure our sensors and generalize our AI to meet each platform's unique needs—whether it is the Ojai or the Hyundai IONIQ 5—providing the Waymo Driver an optimal view of its surroundings while streamlining for efficiency."
ie this is a sensor+software package for any vehicle that they install on.
My understanding of the text is that, to get this to run on the existing fleet, they'd need to go into the shop for sensor/computer replacement, but the text isn't explicit about that.
Waymo announcements tend to be very incremental, each one is only a small change from a prior known state. They seem to operate an attitude of least possible surprise, probably to avoid spooking anyone about scary robocars.
https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0?si=-iffWU43sxwviD5t
[EDIT] Most of you seem unwilling to spend an hour to watch a youtube video (although I believe it's worth your time esp if you're from North America) so here's a summary I attempted in another comment:
"Autonomous cars will clog up existing cities by cruisnig around looking to pick up rides or deliver shit and mill around endlessly or occupy every piece of parking in prime real estate to make sure they are quickly available wherever demand is high (i.e. where people want to or have to be). In time they will phase out human driven cars which will lead to higher speed limits and more infrastrcuture that supports autonomous driving. Meaning fewer "difficult" intersections, straighter roads, no bike lanes or pedestrian sidewalks. Everything optimized for autonomous cars to endlessly mill around. People will be blocked from being near autonomous cars as those will be going too fast for human reflexes to cope with so areas where cars drive will not have sidewalkss nor bike lanes. This will lead to urban areas that are even more car dependent with only pockets of urbanism that support human scale. To get anywhere one will need to hail one of those autonomous taxis and then zoom in it to a destination where it's again safe to walk in whatever pocket of human activity. Since cars need a lot more land area than humans the urban infrastructure will mostly cater to them and not to people because the expectation and argument will be that you can always get your ass shuttled to wherever you need to be."
I regularly bike, which is why I'm hugely in favor of self driving cars; they're way safer for me when biking than human driven cars.
>> The 6th-generation Waymo Driver is the product of seven years of safety-proven service amassed from driving nearly 200 million fully autonomous miles across the densest cores of 10+ major cities and an expanding network of freeways. Our experience as the only company operating a fully autonomous service at this scale has reinforced a fundamental truth: demonstrably safe AI requires equally resilient inputs. This deep understanding of real-world requirements is why the Waymo Driver utilizes a custom, multi-modal sensing suite where high-resolution cameras, advanced imaging radar, and lidar work as a unified system. Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens.
Waymo uses remote safety drivers that they call "fleet response agents", probably to deflect from the fact that they are, indeed, remote safety drivers.
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.
From: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
Note the language: the Waymo Driver "remains in control of driving" but a Fleet Response Agent "proposes" the path.
In other words, Waymo is not "operating a fully autonomous service", nor does it seem anything has changed now, with the "sixt-generation fully autonomous Waymo Driver". It still needs human brains to take it by the hand and help it when it gets stuck in ambiguous situations that arise despite the claim that it "can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week".
The image caption reads:
but the image itself for me is blank.Unlike human driven cars, 100% of Waymos are fully filmed. The proof is on every drive. And there is one entity responsible for all of them, Waymo.
I've enjoyed my trips so far, but want them to stop breaking the law.
When the general public does.
Autonomous cars that abide by the law at the expense of violating the norms of expected traffic behavior like a 16yo in a driver's ed car (which is plastered in signs for exactly that reason) are not a scalable way of sharing roads with the general public.
As an aside, the venn diagram between people who complain about normal traffic behavior being unlawful and people who resist tweaking the law to make what is normal also lawful is far too close to a circle for my taste.
This implies that there is no moat. One company or another might be the first on the market with one system, but the others will catch up in the space of a couple of years. The first to market won't have much advantage over the others. We'll see a replica of what happened with LLMs: any latecomer will be able to replicate the results by putting a few billions on the table and hiring researchers from other companies, Chinese companies will develop a working version that runs on slightly less demanding hardware, open weights and open source will appear. Etc.
If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.
A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)
From: "Using these diverse inputs, the Waymo Driver can confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events we regularly encounter when driving millions of miles a week, leaving nothing to the imagination of a single lens."