From what I’ve read, Waymo isn’t doing too bad of a job at it. They obviously aren’t perfect, but have succeeded at being much safer than human drivers. But those cars have a bazillion different sensors on them, while Tesla is trying to do the same with nothing but a few cameras and computer vision systems.
owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Truly autonomous driving (on general purpose roads) is a lot further off than the hordes of venture capitalists want you to believe. Not sure which state is letting them loose, but I can’t imagine it’ll end well.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
bl4kers@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
It’s worth noting these companies try to capture & record every inch of a city before entering the market there. Without these models the vehicles would drive significantly worse. This isn’t really a scalable business model from what I’ve read
Vodulas@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Texas in a couple weeks and California has some trials in San Francisco. Waymo is expanding to other cities, though. They are 100% not ready for live testing, yet here we are
megopie@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
They’re assuming that just because they can bullshit legal authorities to get the things on the road, that’s a fait accompli. Once the services is operating and generating income it’s untouchable.
Thing is, they’re going to cause problems that will affect people, they will cause traffic jams, they will piss people off, they will cause accidents. These vehicles are, by design, unattended, sure they have cameras, but, anyone with nondescript clothes and a face coverings, can sabotage these vehicles without much risk of legal consequence.
The cost of maintaining a fleet of these vehicles in the face of road rage induced sabotage will sink these companies.
Vodulas@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Oh, they are already causing traffic issues in California. Plus the Waymos have been doing a lot of cacophonous honking when they try to park for the evening. Just chaos every where they go
megopie@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
And of course this is all definitely worth it so checks notes we can become dependent on a handful of private companies to move us through our highly car dependent society and dismantle what little public transit is left.
Yup, totally a good idea and definitely worth it.
TehPers@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
Truly autonomous driving already exists. It’s called trains.
Anyone trying to sell fully autonomous cars is severely underestimating the complexity of driving. Under highly controlled conditions, it may be possible, but I doubt these people are programming edge cases like planes crashing onto freeways and severe hail. There are far too many times when it takes good judgement to handle a situation properly.
Still, I’m all for the progress this has made towards helping people drive safer. But the best solution is to just stop using cars IMO, just that it’d be problematic to force that for a number of reasons.
SteevyT@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
My last employer was trying to get autonomous busses going. As far as I knew, when I left a few years ago the only place the busses were allowed to be autonomous was around the bus depot to hit all the maintenance, fueling, and cleaning stations on closed roads before parking itself (and I’m actually not 100% sure they would park themselves) at the end of the day. There was no timeline for on-route autonomy that I was aware of, but I was also not really involved so my info was 2nd hand.