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by jefftk 1574 days ago
Why do you need A and B? Waymo is operating driverless taxis at Level 4 in Phoenix; what do you see as fundamentally missing (aside from expanding range) for Carmack to be able to win?
4 comments

The gap between level 4 and level 5 is huge.

Basically, if you can find videos online of Waymo giving up and requesting backup for a situation not severe enough for humans to do the same, then you are not really at level 5 yet. If you cannot rely on the car to handle driving though any circumstance you could reasonably expect your hired chauffeur to handle, well then you are not level 5 yet. Examples of situations where humans give up are hurricanes, and blizzards.

And there are plenty of videos of it stopping for situations where no human would ever be equally confused, plus a good handful of videos of the cars doing absolutely unacceptable things resulting in near misses.

Are you really that confident that by 2030 Waymo's roadside assistance program will be disbanded, or at least reduced to a killswitch, summoning a replacement car and a tow truck (because obviously the car must be broken if assistance was called)? Because if they need more than that, it sure isn't level 5 yet.

Those taxis can’t even reliably drive in the rain yet, hence Arizona for the staging grounds. So they’re a far cry from meeting the standard, unless rain is now considered a natural disaster.
From what I'm reading, L5 would need to handle the annual meeting of the summer tires club... Assuming that's a problem in NY or Chicago.
I’ve driven in one. Felt like I was driving with a 16 year old driver. I’d never drive in the rain with it. Through intersection with faulty traffic lights, and police directing traffic? Nope. It never got onto the freeway, and it avoided complicated driving/merging decisions by driving through neighborhoods.
The claim is that you need A or B, not A and B (“Fully self-driving cars need one of two things:”)