[tyingq]

That is impressive, but isn't Waymo driving on some limited number of pre-set routes?

It would be nice if there were some credible, unbiased sources that were predicting when full level 5 might be viable.

Edit: Maybe a somewhat credible opposing view. Though he may be crabby about his department being drained of talent, and so not unbiased: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/robotics-lab-uber...

[lmkg]

Waymo does a lot of driving in suburban Austin and suburban Mountain View. Their claim is that this is more difficult than most driving, since stop-and-go traffic with intersections every quarter-mile and pedestrians around is a more complex environment than highway driving.

This claim is almost certainly true for the topic at hand, since long-haul trucking is the highway-est of highway driving. Outside of the topic at hand, my own extremely subjective opinion is that they chose some of the tamest suburbs possible (I have significant experience in the Bay Area, SoCal, Austin, and Pittsburgh).

[obstinate]

Unfortunately, there are no unbiased sources that have knowledge of the state of the art, since it exists inside a small handful of companies. The best outsiders can do is speculate.

Personally, I very much doubt we're more than a decade away from cars-drive-way-better-than-people levels of tech. Whether that means you'll be able to buy one is another question.

[maxerickson]

I wonder if Waymo is dependent on their hyper detailed maps of if they are using them to speed up development of their systems.

With a hyper detailed map, you can automatically score your vision/world modeling system (because the static elements are known).

Without a detailed map, the scoring is much harder.

[sien]

Would that allow the creation of a profitable MVP?

It's not 'general level 5' but it might be a transport system in cities with appropriate conditions that have been mapped.

Then it gets gradually expanded out to other cities.

[the8472]

> That is impressive, but isn't Waymo driving on some limited number of pre-set routes?

Even if that's the case, that would probably be sufficient for long-haul trucks. Especially in europe which has a pretty dense network of controlled-access highways.