Well it's been a day or two since I've had a comment buried so I might as well not mince words.
It's an incredibly difficult problem and Ford is way behind. So it makes sense for him to try to reduce expectations.
On the other hand, there are a lot of other companies than Ford doing self driving cars, and some are very advanced.
It is really amazing to me that people are still in denial about the existence of self driving cars.
They have existed and worked with various limitations for decades. The latest from Tesla and Waymo are still limited in some ways but also extremely capable.
Teslas can now do all of the driving from one freeway to another up until you enter a normal street.
Waymo is way beyond that. From what the riders are saying at r/selfdrivingcars, the only time the employees actually need to take over are occasions where there are very risky maneuvers in heavy traffic. Now, I believe they could relax the safety parameters and the cars would execute the same as the Waymo employees in those situations. It's just that there is no margin for error sometimes with traffic and if there is an accident at this stage they want to be able to blame the employee.
So what's holding Waymo back from removing the employees from the car is mainly just an abundance of caution.
> From what the riders are saying at r/selfdrivingcars,
Seems like such a community would be heavily biased towards self driving cars. I wouldn't take much from a place like that, even discounting the shill factor.
Self driving isn't going to be a thing any time soon. Luckily for Ford, their CEO is seeing past the hype. And, if such a large company see this, what's a company like Lyft going to do?
Has Waymo expanded the list of routes significantly? Last I read about it, the number of disengagements was very low, but the cars were traveling a pretty low of number of fixed routes in areas with good weather and visibility.
They are not fixed routes at all as far as I know. It takes people where they ask to go on the app according to what I've heard. It is a geofenced area. Phoenix pretty much always has good weather and visibility that's why they are starting there.
It's an incredibly difficult problem and Ford is way behind. So it makes sense for him to try to reduce expectations.
On the other hand, there are a lot of other companies than Ford doing self driving cars, and some are very advanced.
It is really amazing to me that people are still in denial about the existence of self driving cars.
They have existed and worked with various limitations for decades. The latest from Tesla and Waymo are still limited in some ways but also extremely capable.
Teslas can now do all of the driving from one freeway to another up until you enter a normal street.
Waymo is way beyond that. From what the riders are saying at r/selfdrivingcars, the only time the employees actually need to take over are occasions where there are very risky maneuvers in heavy traffic. Now, I believe they could relax the safety parameters and the cars would execute the same as the Waymo employees in those situations. It's just that there is no margin for error sometimes with traffic and if there is an accident at this stage they want to be able to blame the employee.
So what's holding Waymo back from removing the employees from the car is mainly just an abundance of caution.