Notably, "At the start, Waymo-trained drivers will be riding along to supervise our vehicles for riders’ comfort and convenience."
Edit: Re-reading my comment, it sounds negative, so I want to acknowledge that I think this is a big deal. No matter how "soft" this launch, it's still a historic moment.
The milestone to mark is the day when you or I can, at least theoretically, download the the fricken app and request a ride in an autonomous vehicle that has no safety driver.
I think that line is going to a bit more blurry than you think. Waymo has already done fully driverless testing during the early rider program, with plans to roll that out to Waymo One in the future[1]:
> We’re never done learning, and our early rider program will continue as a way for a select group to give us ongoing insights. They’ll help test early features before those new capabilities graduate to Waymo One. For example, we’ve already offered fully driverless rides to some of our early riders.
And the number of people with access to Waymo One is going to steadily increase over time[1]:
> We’ll first offer Waymo One to hundreds of early riders who have already been using our technology. Over time, we hope to make Waymo One available to even more members of the public as we add vehicles and drive in more places.
So with that in mind, let's imagine if, for example, at some point in the near future 10,000 people have access to Waymo One and 1% of Waymo One rides are being completed without a safety driver. Would that satisfy your milestone? What about 100,000 people with 10% driverless rides? If Waymo eventually reaches a point where 95% of rides are fully driverless, and 1 million people have access to the app, would Waymo opening the app up to everyone _really_ seem like that significant of a milestone anymore?
I've been following the industry so closely for so long that I have a bottle of champagne in the fridge to commemorate the day that a publicly accessible, fully driverless pilot project opens up somewhere in the world, and that bottle has been in the fridge for 3 years now.
However anticlimactic it may be when it arrives, that day is nonetheless the day when, in my mind, self driving cars have officially gone from zero to one. There will be no apprenticeship this year.
Assuming you are the same Fricken from reddit, it has been interesting watching your demeanor become more and more...realistic as time has gone on.
And it's still unclear to me if everybody is having their NDAs lifted, as they are making a distinction between early riders and Waymo One but not specifying if everybody is making the transition or just a handful of people (or hell, even any).
As always, time will tell - the rollout of this technology has been slow to those of us who have been following it over the years.
Right, the real milestone was when they set Waymo cars with no safety drivers on the streets a few months ago. This milestone realistically is just that the riders don't have an NDA anymore, unlike the previous ones. It's still a cool step forward, but it's still a "private beta". At least now we can start getting photos and videos from the users though which is cool.
That car would probably be called Windows Car (not to be confused with your car's windows), stop irregularly at weird places to allow for mandatory updates, and report your height and weight to Microsoft.
"Oh shit I'm late to the airport!" Get in car, car says, "Critical Updates required before start, please wait 5 minutes". Then 30 minutes goes by, update is at 99%, "Finalizing".
When its done, you say, "Ok car, get me to the airport ASAP!". Car says, "Sorry, why we optimize the download, speed is limited to 30mph, The ETA to your destination, the airport, is NaN"
Probably foolishly, I updated the firmware of my van (a Pacifica PHEV, same as Waymo is using) while driving a while back. Since the update was for the infotainment system, the vehicle continued operating just fine (other than temporarily losing access to settings such as climate control, automatic wipers, etc.).
Mark these words, "At the start", because we'll be hearing them for the next 10 years until Waymo closes up shop. That they are going to market with drivers in the car means that the business has pivoted from "can we do driverless taxi" to "can we make money as uber-but-with-employees".
The next announcement from Waymo will be that they are cutting staff "mostly from R&D". The announcement after that will be that they are opening up the Waymo app for anyone to be a driver. The announcement after that will be that they are closing up shop or being sold to Uber.
Mark these words. In 10 years time we'll still be hearing the same comments about Waymo & their competitors because there still will be certain combinations of passenger, route & conditions that Waymo will refuse to take without a safety driver along.
But since Waymo will handle the vast majority of rides we'll just tune out those comments.
Handling all rides & conditions is a very hard problem and it'll take decades to solve.
But scaling from "a few" to "most" is a much easier problem and one that I have confidence that Waymo will achieve. And "most" can be very useful & profitable.
I assume we're talking about city driving. I'm not sure about the USA, but being in Europe, the average speed my car says I go is 28.5 km/h. Do you think we could not solve traffic for 10 years if we slowed cars down to 30 km/h? With assumption being that a city-wide driverless system would easily 'swim' through the city without encountering red lights or slowdowns due to unpredictiveness of other drivers. We could even tolerate a little bit more errors because accidents would not be harmful too much.
I'm a big fan of Sweden's Project Zero, one leg of which is setting and enforcing a speed limit of 30 km/h on any road or street without fully separated pedestrian & cycle infrastructure. I don't know if self-driving will help accomplish this everywhere, but I'd be ecstatic if it did.
> We could even tolerate a little bit more errors because accidents would not be harmful too much.
instead of "harmful too much" you can simply use "fatal". 30km/h is a pretty magic value: below that speed pedestrian collisions are very rarely fatal. Serious perhaps, but not fatal. Above that speed they are often fatal.
The average human cannot sprint that fast. I'd peg the average person sprinting closer to half that (obviously there's a lot of variance, but I think only the top 1% of athletes could run 30 kph even for 5 seconds). For a frame of reference, try to run at the top speed of a treadmill (most max out at 15 mph, and most people can't go that fast - at least not at the gym).
Maybe if this was Microsoft, and Waymo was the Zune.
Alphabet has given it some 9 years just to get to this soft launch, I think they have the patience to see it through. There is enough money and interest in this space internationally that I'd give it some time.
The news would be different. This news item is focused around the driver and safety. They are slowly changing their messaging from being about self-driving to being about safe-driving.
They can't come out right away and say "guys we failed at self driving, it doesn't work", that would tank the personal careers of everyone important in the company. They have to slowly move the needle away from self driving, and then they'll give us the bomb drop, "we could only build better safety systems, not self-driving systems" and nobody will care because they are happy with safe-driving.
If they truly had self-driving tech, they'd be doubling down on that with their messaging. Not only to let everyone know there's a new sheriff in town (bye Uber!), but also to let their competitor's know to start their death clocks.
Maybe I haven't seen enough large-scale corporate failures (and the associated damage control, which is how it seems you are characterizing this post), but it feels like you're making this prediction on the basis of not enough data.
I can imagine there are other scenarios where Waymo PR makes this post, even though Waymo has not totally failed at producing self-driving cars, but perhaps I'm being insufficiently cynical.
Yes, I agree that I don't have enough data. But previous to this article, I was really supportive of Waymo. When I read the headline about "next steps", I thought we'd hear about some great new systems being rolled out or advancements towards the goal of self-driving, NOT about safety safety safety, drivers drivers drivers. This is how MBAs speak, not engineers.
Uber has poisoned the well with the type of reckless behaviour you are talking about. Self driving cars are no longer assumed to be safe by default. They kill people just like human driven cars, prrhaps they are even worse than humans at driving. So far Waymo has kept it's reputation as one of the few self driving companies that hasn't killed any of it's passengers.
Calling Wqymo an Uber with employees is a pretty big insult to the most advanced sdc company so far. Uber's self driving attempt has failed. Uber is nothing without it's drivers.
I don't buy this. Strategically, it makes way more sense to roll it out as a driver-assisted system. Instead of dealing with the negative PR associated with a mishap or accident (like Uber in Arizona), you can place blame on individual drivers while you gain adoption.
If Google believes its tech is that far ahead, it makes way more sense to minimize risks associated with the public perceiving Waymo's system is dangerous, and let people get comfortable with being in a self-driving car.
> They can't come out right away and say "guys we failed at self driving, it doesn't work", that would tank the personal careers of everyone important in the company.
That's exactly what would happen if a newly developed product killed some people. A human assisted rollout is a cautious strategy that allows them to learn in the real world without exposing their massive R&D investment to the fate of Uber's.
No, that's part of the strategy of shifting the messaging: Use both phrases together so people associate them, and then slowly drop the phrase that you want to go away.
Yeah, but the alternative bet is that they want the "safety driver" part to be the part that eventually goes away. If they want public acceptance, it will make sense to keep safety drivers.
Eventually they will go the way of the elevator operator.
As the article mentions they were always about safe driving and saving lives. I remember the founder talking about it ages ago. It's not really a change of messaging.
I agree strongly that the market for true self driving is a mirage. It's being sold as new free time in your vehicle, but it'll just end up more time for ads to saturate eyeballs.
Doesn't matter, it's not self-driving if you need a driver. And when that driver takes control of the vehicle away from the AI, it's going to be at a startling and dangerous moment when the AI makes a really bad decision, like directing the car towards a barrier or a stopped bus.
If the software driver is bad enough that the safety driver will feel compelled to pay attention at all times but not quite take control unless the car does something actually warranting it. It'll be like teaching a 16yo to drive but without them actually getting better (because the software will need to be tuned to keep the driver on edge). Doing it that way is kind of a backhanded approach but it would force the backup driver to pay attention.
Notably, "At the start, Waymo-trained drivers will be riding along to supervise our vehicles for riders’ comfort and convenience."
Edit: Re-reading my comment, it sounds negative, so I want to acknowledge that I think this is a big deal. No matter how "soft" this launch, it's still a historic moment.