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by Zarel 2860 days ago
I don't know why people are still casting aspersions on self-driving cars when Waymo is this close to market.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-07-31/inside-th...

They're already testing with customers! Customers who love the service! They're planning for a roll-out later this year!

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/

They can handle rain and snow!

2 comments

Waymo uses remote drivers for their service. It is neat that technology has progressed to allow drivers to sit an office rather than the vehicle, but that's not exactly what people imagine when they hear driverless.
They use remote assistance for tricky emergency situations. That's a pretty big distinction. The remote assistance can be called in to help the car if it gets into a completely unknown state, but otherwise the cars are self driving.

https://www.wired.com/story/phantom-teleops/

Waymo also runs on well mapped, predictable, grid like city patterns. Most of the world is not like Phoenix suburbs or Mountain View.
The second article I linked to also mentioned work on unmapped roads:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/07/mit-maplite-self-driving...

Waymo has solved problem after problem you think they haven't solved yet, for some reason. They've intentionally gone after unpredictable situations and dealt with them.

Look at any video where they explain how it works, and you'll notice how many situations they can manage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSX3qdy0dFg

And even if Waymo only works on well-mapped cities? That's still far from "can only work if they repurpose existing transportation infrastructure to only belong to self-driving cars" which is the comment I was replying to.