Waymo is frequently seen on the the I-202 freeway near Tempe with an employee in the driver's seat. Maybe positioning cars or possibly prepping/testing for future freeway use.
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Waymo
- Thread starter Daniel in SD
- Start date
Waymo is frequently seen on the the I-202 freeway near Tempe with an employee in the driver's seat. Maybe positioning cars or possibly prepping/testing for future freeway use.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
Waymo is actively testing on highways with a safety driver in preparation for doing driverless on highways.
Very subtle, made a comparison so it's easier to see the differences. Blue is the new area. It's not perfect, but gives a good idea of it.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
To those who say Waymo is ignoring the concerns of SF and not working with First Responders, it is simply not true:
I think the last tweet is key. It should help reduce the issues with first responders as they can communicate directly with the Waymo team and can also even disengage the car to move it.
I think the last tweet is key. It should help reduce the issues with first responders as they can communicate directly with the Waymo team and can also even disengage the car to move it.
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Just eyeballing it the newly added 45 square miles might be equivalent to the entire SF area. The Phoenix valley is huge maybe covering over 400 square miles.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
Interesting tight squeeze around a double parked delivery truck. A human driver would likely have been more assertive. The Waymo does wait for about 45 seconds but manages to go around in the end. You can see the path on the screen shift to going around the truck, showing the Waymo Driver is planning to go around.
Two points I'll make:
1) While safety is the driving factor (pun not intended), and very important, it's also important to understand that Waymo, and any AV or L3+ ADAS must obey traffic laws. This means they couldn't speed even if they wanted to. Since liability shifts from the driver to the company while in L3+, traffic law violations can/will open up liability to the company they don't want to take on, and potentially lead to tighter regulations on the industry.
2) I think most people still don't understand this point when thinking about L3+ vehicles. Many people want eyes-off hands-off badly (like the Mercedes L3 system), but I don't think they realize the car will not speed and will drive the speed limit on the freeway/highway.
As the vehicle turned on the hazard lights here and there was quite the delay, it may have called home.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
True but I think the point is that AVs like Waymo are much better at obeying speed limits than human drivers. As the Waymo study shows, humans are very bad at following the speed limit which sadly contributes to more accidents.
I am not sure what one has to do with the other. Are you saying that some people want L3+ because they want a car that will go faster than the speed limit? I've heard people say that they want L3+ because they don't like to drive, because they want safer driving or because they want to get their commute time back to do other things. I've never heard anyone say they want L3+ because they want to go faster than the speed limit. Heck. they don't need L3+ to do that.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
I'm not sure that will be the case. Keeping up with traffic is safer than simply sticking to a number. Yes, if traffic is light, the car should follow the posted limits, but if there is heavy traffic moving at well over the posted limit, driving at the slower speed is going to be dangerous for all involved. I'm not claiming to predict how it will play out, but it's food for thought.
I'm certainly looking forward to watching traffic laws evolve as more autonomous cars hit the roads with ever better capabilities.
I think he's pointing out that a lot of people routinely speed now and they'll be disappointed to find that their car refuses to do it for them (see the wailing on here about vision AP only allowing 85mph rather than 90, for example).
I'm not sure that will be that big a problem in reality. The whole point of L3 is that you're free to do something else while the car drives so you're not going to notice an extra few minutes, plus it'll save you money. Unless you're driving a really long way on really empty roads speeding doesn't actually cut your journey time by much anyway.
The point is that a car maker cannot deploy a software solution that deliberately breaks the law, even if there's a good rationale. The entire concept raises interesting questions - in the UK you incur points on your license if you speed, and if you accrue too many in a given period you lose your license for a while. If the car manufacturer is liable for the car (L3 and above), who's picking up the points?
Pish tosh. It's been allowed for decades. Cruise control has allowed drivers to program their car to exceed the speed limit to any degree they desire. In the US, our NHTSA hasn't jumped on that, despite the feature likely having killed its share of people on the roads. It's not particularly advanced autonomy, but it's an illustrating case.
Points are irrelevant because they provide a disincentive to drivers for doing unsafe things on the roads. The disincentive for creating an unsafe product is fines, sanctions and recalls. It's just a different world. The illustrating example here is NHTSA jumping on Tesla for programming the car for rolling stop signs. Now the government can just tell a company to make driving work a certain way and it happens. That, as opposed to making a law that gets enforced on drivers to some degree by police, more or less affecting how driving works.
So in the end, the government will keep an eye on the development of autonomous vehicles and reign them in if what they're deploying looks to be sufficiently dangerous the roadways. The fact that Tesla can put FSDb on the roads with mere consumer supervision is pretty telling right there. They want autonomy to move forward, and I doubt they're going to be excessively strict.
You're describing an ADAS function, not an AV function. With an ADAS function, the driver (the human) is in total control of the vehicle and responsible for all traffic law infractions. If a cop pulls you over for speeding with cruise control, you're responsible for it, and the point goes on your license. If an AV is operating autonomously, and you're asleep, or in the passenger seat, or the backseat, you're not responsible for the driving. Similarly, an L3, while in operation, takes the driving task away from you. You don't even need to be paying attention, and can watch a Netflix video. You just need to be in the driver seat so the car can hand back control when outside its ODD. Who gets the speeding ticket in this case?
If you think the driver should get the speeding ticket while the car was in L3+ mode, then I respect that viewpoint, but I think you'll have quite a few traffic court arguments. I can see the courts automatically subpoenaing telemetry from the MFG to confirm that the driver overrode the speed limit during L3+, putting the burden back on the driver. I can also see liability being removed from the MFG and placed back on the driver if it shows the driver overrode the limit and it resulted in an accident.
I'm saying people are impatient and want to speed, even using the excuse to drive recklessly (defined in many states as driving 20MPH+ over the speed limit), because "the flow of traffic was going that fast, and it's unsafe to drive any slower". People on TMC have complained quite a bit that the limit for FSD Beta / AP is 85MPH, and that's "too slow" or "dangerously too slow". Those people are in for a surprise when they drive an L3+ vehicle and find it will obey traffic laws and cannot be overridden while in L3+ mode - sure they can probably downgrade it to L2 adaptive cruise control and then set the speed to whatever they'd like, but the MFG is no longer liable.
diplomat33
Average guy who loves autonomous vehicles
Thanks for the clarification. I guess these people will just need to change their mindset. Humans might be used to speeding but it is dangerous behavior. AVs will be programmed not to speed because it is safer. They will just need to adapt to that new reality.
NHTSA has muddied the waters here... As they made Tesla recall FSDb, an ADAS system, to make it stop rolling stop signs, and to more proactively adjust to speed limits. But yet they still let the driver set it to go faster than the speed limit, at least for now. (And even after the initial recall for coming to a full stop at a stop sign, they made them have it stay stopped longer, as they didn't like how quickly it continued on.)
Laws are slow to react to technology - gonna get interesting as more FSD Beta type features are rolled out to other MFGs - we may see traffic law changes or regulations forcing MFGs to adhere to all traffic laws even on L2+. For now regulators seem to be okay equating the speed portion of AP/FSD Beta with cruise control, which allows drivers to override.
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