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Cake day: February 10th, 2025

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  • Honest question, how are you so certain what Waymo claims is actually true when their entire investment depends on it?

    Waymo is the commercial product created from the Google Self Driving Car project which began over 17 years ago. There have been countless demonstrations of the technology that allows these cars to operate autonomously prior to it becoming a commercial venture. This isn’t a scam where they’re pretending to have the technology and using people behind the scenes.

    How can you tell their cars are rarely, if ever, driven by people. How do you know they don’t make tons of small corrections daily?

    There is no evidence that they are driven by people, except in rare cases. On the other hand, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that the autonomous systems work without human drivers (including taking a Waymo during a trip to the west coast).




  • I’m also not sure what point you’re trying to make by saying they used human intervention when they competed in the DARPA competition 20 years ago. Of course they did, it’s not like technology has regressed since then.

    Human intervention doesn’t mean that the cars are not autonomous, that is the point. A vehicle able to operate without a driver is autonomous.

    Every autonomous system that is intended to be operated commercially has humans which monitor the autonomous fleet in order to resolve edge cases that the autonomous systems cannot handle.


    According to the SAE standard, Waymo is NOT fully-autonomous.

    You mean the SAE J3016 standard?

    According to that standard, Waymo cars are SAE Level 4 Autonomous Driving Systems.

    There is no SAE standard which differentiates between ‘fully’ autonomous and ‘not fully’ autonomous. A level 4 car is fully autonomous in its Operational Design Domain. A level 5 car is fully autonomous in all Operational Design Domains.

    The reason Waymo cars are level 4 instead of level 5 is because they restrict their cars’ Operation Design Domain so that they do not operate in heavy rain, fog, or at interstate speeds.

    Here is the SAE J3016 chart:

    According to Waymo, they are

    Source?

    Here’s a paper, from Waymo, from 2 years ago where they correctly refer to their systems using the language of SAE standards:

    https://waymo.com/research/comparison-of-waymo-rider-only-crash-data-to-human/#%3A~%3Atext=SAE+level+4+automated+driving+system

    This paper examines the safety performance of the Waymo Driver, an SAE level 4 automated driving system (ADS) used in a rider-only (RO) ride-hailing application without a human driver, either in the vehicle or remotely.

    So, in summary:

    • The SAE standards use Levels 1-5, it does not define ‘fully’ autonomous vs ‘not fully’ autonomous
    • Waymo cars are SAE Level 4 Autonomous Driving Systems
    • Waymo refers to their cars as SAE Level 4 Autonomous Driving Systems

  • everyone was insisting they cant.

    I get the point that you’re trying to make.

    I was more taking aim at the misinformation implied by the headline and article that these cars are driven by people and are not autonomous. As in it’s some scam where they are teleoperated taxi services pretending to be autonomous.

    The technology used in Waymo vehicles has been being publicly developed by Google since 2007 or so. My early programming classes included lectures by Sergey Brin specifically on the topic of designing autonomous systems. I don’t work in that field, but I’ve worked on projects adjacent to autonomous systems and there is a lot of work put into making these things safe (which includes realtime human supervision/support).

    The technology is pretty cool and it’s a shame to see people buying into the misinformation.






  • I think you’re quibbling over semantics. Fully autonomous does not mean infallible.

    Every company that operates autonomous vehicles has human staff which monitor and correct errors in the fleet. This isn’t a new and secret behavior, it is an industry standard practice. No company operates autonomous vehicles without supervision, none.

    I’m not sure where you have this idea that fully autonomous vehicles operate completely unsupervised without error that has never been the case in any commercial autonomous system. Even the cars in the original DARPA contest which spawn autonomous vehicles were actively monitored by humans. It is autonomous because it can drive without a human operator. The fact that it cannot handle every possible situation doesn’t change the fact that they’re driving autonomously.