There are a lot of big claims in this article. As someone who hasn't been paying much attention, is it credible that they have a near-ready-to-go self-driving car right now?
Evaluating technical capabilities in autonomy based on youtube demo videos is like evaluating the military potential by watching army parades on holiday.
The truth is, none of these companies is any close to full autonomy. Full autonomy _testing_ will begin once they deploy cars without backup drivers, to actually see how bad can things go without watchful human supervision.
Waymo had <100 situations where they required human involvement in tens of million miles they drove so far. They are probably already safer than human drivers and would likely cause fewer accidents. The issue there is a legal one - who is going to be responsible for a crash? The company that produced the driving software/hardware, or the owner of the car? Or even the passengers in case there will be city-wide car pools one could call when needed?
No. They had plenty more. Approximately 100 cases over 600k miles last year (their own data from California) which would have lead to a dangerous situation, and 9 cases which by their own admission would have resulted with a collision. Now it is hard to compare crashes of different magnitude, people often are engaged in fender benders, but only on average after 100 million miles driven there is a fatal accident, who knows how many of these 9 cases would have ended up in a fatality. But nevertheless, this is only 600k miles not 100m. Stop spreading misinformation.
Tesla is the leader leader in terms of released driver-assist technology. But they're years behind in the full-self-driving game. They're no way near where Waymo is now (and most likely Cruise, Drive.ai, maybe others).
Their in-house developed Autopilot v2 is still worse than the third-party (MobileEye) Autopilot v1 they got rid of last year.
Yep, they're pretty close. Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty. GM has consistently been underestimated by the public, but they've played their cards very well. It's in no small part due to the drive and leadership of Kyle Vogt, who is on his way to the big leagues to join the ranks of Musk, Bezos, and Jobs and those guys.
Once they actually have cars driving empty we will actually learn how close or how far are they. I've seen a lot of PR muscle flexing from big companies before and no longer believe any such stuff. They do that to impress investors and the public, but this has nothing to do with reality.
Your comments sound like a PR statement, what goods? How do you know how close they are?
Looks to me that they designed a mass-producible car outfitted with self-driving systems (which is very cool!). But they are only just starting to do employee testing. Waymo has been doing that for years.
Waymo is ahead on the technology. They were ready to begin public trials with their Koala cars in 2015, but the California DMV shut them down, and many of their key people jumped ship.
Waymo has since been proceeding a bit more cautiously, and their efforts at this point are oriented more towards smoothing out ride feel, testing under adverse weather conditions, and their early rider program in Phoenix.
Whether it's Waymo or GM to officially be the first to have an empty car driving on public roads, the other won't be far behind, though the victory will be largely symbolic. GM's cars still need a lot of polish, and Waymo needs better manufacturing partnerships.
What's also interesting is that Cruise is hiring 'autonomous vehicle support advisors', which is for remote assistance. Not something you need to do if you plan to have a test driver in the front seat for year(s) to come:
> It's a prediction, I can't provide a source for events that haven't occurred.
Using the words "they will" makes it sound like an assertion. How are you so confident about "events that haven't occurred" will indeed occur? You listed out reports and demos, none of which necessarily suggest that "Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty"? Do you have additional inside information that the rest of us don't have?
> Also, because Kyle Vogt said so, and he's never bullshitted me before, he's got credibility.
If I tell you the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning, I don't actually know it's going to do that until it does. That's kind of the thing about future events, it should go without saying. Nothing you've written is a counter argument. You just used way more words than you need to to say 'I don't believe you'. Yay.
My points are that GM is doing well, and that they are scaling up their operation to a degree that wouldn't make sense if they didn't intend to deliver the minimum viable commercial robotaxi service sometime over the next year or so.
The counterpoints are that 'this smells like PR bullshit', and that Kyle Vogt is an asshole (because no asshole has ever successfully led a technology company before).
You guys have nothing substantiative to argue with.
For comparison, it's about 28x higher[1] than Waymo reported for the same period. I'm not sure how similar the driving conditions were but I would guess pretty close.
That's their average for the year. They were way worse at the beginning, and way better by the end. They continue to improve, though I can't give you data on that until late December when this year's disengagement reports are filed. Like once you get to the point where you can go, say, 10 miles in urban traffic without a disengagement, the improvements from then on (as measured by disengagements) improve dramatically, up until you get to the point where it's really hard to discover new edge cases. Waymo in 2016 was at 1 disengagement every 5000 miles, and that's a 4x improvement over 2015.
Arizona. Their weather and regulatory climate has Waymo, Cruise, and Uber all testing there. I believe Michigan and Florida are also willing to permit fully autonomous cars on their roads, but most of the action is in and around Phoenix.
Volvos were supposed to be rolling in London and Gothenburg this year but it hasn't happened yet. They were supposed to have a member of the public who could snooze or read a book.
