[flokie]

I know the community is generally very negative/skeptic on this (at least based on the 21 comments so far below), but this is an amazing technical & business accomplishment. Congratulations!

The blog post is relatively clear that ramp up will take a few weeks - "we’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app"

before you comment watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4

[cyrux004]

People are dissatisfied because of the vageuness around the start date for general public; not at the state of self driving. By Waymo's own timeline; they were supposed to deliver this atleast 3 years back. This seems to be a much bigger problem than anybody anticipitated

[ma2rten]

* this is an amazing technical & business accomplishment*

No, it's not. Waymo has been doing amazing work, but the problem is that they PR department is a little bit too good at it's job.

Waymo has these kinds of announcements very couple of months (sometimes more often) and if you don't pay close attention all of them sound like Waymo finally had a breakthrough. But if you look closer each of them is only small incremental progress from their last announcement. In this case, Waymo was already doing driverless rides and they also didn't open them up to everyone. So even though I think that Waymo is making great progress towards a self-driving future, I understand that people get Waymo announcement fatigue.

[Ajedi32]

Yes it is. True, this isn't some sudden breakthrough; just the culmination of many years of slow and steady progress. That doesn't make it any less of an achievement though. This is the first time ever that fully driverless cars are going to be available to members of the general public who aren't under an NDA.

Waymo is taking a slow but steady approach to the development and roll-out of self-driving cars, and I agree with you that that can sometimes make the individual milestones they choose to announce along the way seem pretty minor. Milestones are arbitrary by nature after all, and Waymo has a long road ahead before driverless cars become ubiquitous. Over time though, this sort of slow, incremental progress is going to add up.

I made this same point a couple years ago, when Waymo first announced Waymo One[1]. The point where "self driving cars are here" is going to be a blurry line.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18609982

[neil_s]

Thank you for voicing some sanity here. This comment thread has all the standard HN cynicism (Google killed Reader omg), but criticism over a gradual rollout over a few weeks for a physical service is new to me.

[jeffbee]

The HN discussion around Waymo is always overwhelmingly negative because Waymo doesn't fit into the HN cosmology of innovation. Self-driving will come to pass when we force an AI to watch us play Pole Position for a million years, is the HN timeline. HN is comfortable with this Tesla narrative. Less comfortable is the idea that self-driving will be brought to market by lots of control theory PhDs and a really large number of unit tests.

[bsaul]

You seem to know a lot about the difference of approach between waymo and tesla. Do you have any links that would give more on that ?

[mav3rick]

LOL LIDAR vs non-LIDAR

[nickik]

HN is one of the most negative about Tesla of any place I have seen, including car forums. The hate against Tesla and their approach is about 10x more aggressive then the skepticism of Waymo.

Also, I'm pretty sure Tesla has a lot of PhDs and probably about 100x more unit tests then Waymo as they have an gigantic amount of strange real-world corner cases that they have converted to unit-tests. There is no way Waymo has anything like that database, as they simply have never encountered all the strange scenarios Tesla see daily on the roads of China and all the other places they drive around in.

[dang]

This is an extreme case of the notice-dislike bias leading to false feelings of generality: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

I assure you that people on the other side of this "Yay $Bigco" vs. "Boo $Bigco" death match feel that HN is extremely biased in exactly the reverse way, and make just as grandiose claims.

[jowday]

The reality of Tesla's data pipeline is nothing like what Elon presented during autonomy day. If you wanted to be generous, you could describe that presentation as a very forward looking vision of what they want their pipeline to look like at some point in the future.

A bunch of hobbyist reverse engineers have explored how Tesla's data pipeline works in practice. @greentheonly does great work.

[WhompingWindows]

A lot of sites/people/institutions are very negative about Tesla, and a lot are devotional to Tesla. If you're reading social media, keep in mind that negative/controversial/strong opinions are upvoted/elevated relative to moderated/reasonable stances.

[revscat]

I’ve noticed this as well. Tesla here is treated like Microsoft was on Slashdot in the 2000s.