> They're getting their money's worth out of that billion dollar acquisition last March. I think Kyle Vogt is GM's MVP.

Many people, including me, were critical of the acquisition; acquiring an year-old company barely having any technological breakthrough for a billion dollars sounded like a folly. Slowly, it has become clear that the impetus behind the deal wasn't necessarily acquiring the technology but bring an ardent person on board who can accelerate GM's self-driving efforts. I have a feeling this deal would cast itself as one of the pivotal moments in the company's history.

I suspect the Waymo miles are not really comparable to the Cruise miles since Waymo seems to mainly test around Mountain View vs Cruise in SF.

The other reason is that the stats focus on disengagements as a result of technology failures or immediate safety concerns, and don't show the "routine" disengagements where the driver switches out of automatic mode for a period to avoid running the autopilot in situations it isn't test-ready for. Different manufacturers will likely have different standards for ruotine engagements/disengagements, and may also have different standards for what they consider a safety concern.

I suspect Waymo doesn't plan to launch in a very large city.

It seems that it would still need to work in places like SF and Manhattan though unless they get drivers to sign a contract that they will only drive in certain areas.

If you've cracked automated driving, I'm confident that you can geo lock where the cars will do it.

Waymo cars frequently drive the same routes several times a week. In fact if you go to certain intersections such as El Camino Real and San Antonio Rd, during the work week you only have to wait a few minutes to see one or more go by.

I think this is true of most of the self-driving cars. Certainly I've seen Uber self-driving cars doing the same routes over and over. And I think I see GM Cruise cars in the same part of town, but they may just be based nearby.

Do you think the routes are designed so that the car encounters specific obstacles the teams are working on, or do you think its more like they are doing extensive mapping of an area to make the autonomy a bit easier?

I suspect it is so that it is easier to measure the effects tweaks/development to the algorithms make.

Do you (or anyone) ever see Waymo cars downtown?

In Mountain View (off Castro St), yep, all the time. In SF, no.

> Cruise is at 181 disengages in 9,776 miles

> Waymo is 2 orders of magnitude more advanced than Cruise

Not to say that Waymo isn't ahead, but if you look at a graph of Cruise's disengagements vs miles over time, they experienced a rapid improvement. By November of 2016 they were at about 2.6/1000 miles. Better than the total would show, but still an order worse than Waymo though.

This article aggregates the miles/disengagement in a nice table at the bottom. Definitely worth a glance. Waymo is 8x better than the nearest competitor (which, as mentioned, is probably an unfair comparison since we don't know enough about comparibility of those miles driven) https://www.wired.com/2017/02/california-dmv-autonomous-car-...

A lot of the roads near me are two lane, but have cars parked on both sides. This requires a lot of hand gestures out of the window to other drivers as we negotiate the roads.

We also have a lot of single track roads with passing places. This also requires a lot of non-verbal communication between drivers.

Are there any videos of self driving cars attempting this sort of road?

I can see us having a lot fewer problems like this in a world with far fewer parked cars.

If you drive around 30mph on average, and hit 100,000 miles after 6 years, your car has spent over 90% of its life parked somewhere.

That doesn't solve the problem for cars sold today though.

Couldn't this be solved with an LED sign or something? Even if not, true self driving cars aren't coming for a while - they will still disengage and force the driver to take control in some situations. I'd be interested in seeing what happens in those situations, too - if you live near CCSF in San Francisco there are a bunch of these roads.

Why do you have to negotiate anything? If you're driving, you're higher priority than the car trying to leave its parking spot. It's their problem to squeeze into the traffic.

What do you do when two cars approach each other on a single lane road, with no room for passing?

This happens all the time.

Generally we look at each other. We make an immediate judgement on who is the better person at reversing and where the last passing spot was. Then one person will reverse while the other thanks him.her profusely.

So, quick rule:

1. The man reverses.

2. If two men meet, the man with the shittier car reverses

3. The younger 'boy racer' will reverse and show off their superior skills.

This gets super complex when two busses meet, both generally have a line of traffic behind. This is when people have to get out and talk. Ugh, this is the worst. Fuck busses.

I suppose this is some sort of game theory, as both partied want to pass as soon as possible. Neither wants to go out of their way too much. They will both come across this situation many times so are pretty much resigned to it happening and that some of the time they will have to reverse. Anyone who doesn't like this will drive to a better road and take a much longer route.

Single lane one-way road you mean?

I don't even know how a human would solve this. I would probably just avoid this road altogether.

Uh, no. It happens all the time in Scotland, particularly the highlands. I ran into it in Iceland as well.

Generally, the car closest to the nearest spot suitable for passing just reverses to that spot. The other car passes, and they both go on their merry way. Very little in the way of communication required.

The person who didn't reverse is supposed to wave politely to the person who did reverse - that's the usual behaviour in Scotland.

Also its sometimes not just who is nearest who reverses back - sometimes things like corners, size of vehicle, if anyone has a trailer come into the decision making.

I assumed "don't be a jerk, wave to the other guy" and "don't make the lorry back up hill and around a curve" were given. :)

Of all the places I've driven, I've found Scotland (Perthshire and into the Highlands in particular) to be the most sane. Polite, little drama, and most follow the rules to a T.

I found it amazing how common this was in India (Kolkata) - and not only were they long roads, with cars parked on both sides of the road, their were some stretches that barely had enough room for one care to get through - as in, I couldn't open the door if the car stopped.

I have no idea how a Automated Vehicle would handle this - the humans had to engage in a lot of negotiations if they came into situations in which both cars were approaching each other - particularly if they had cars behind them.

There's some single-lane Swiss mountain roads, with occasional passing spots. There's a specific rule in the Swiss driving code that the car going up has priority, so the car driving down gets to reverse to the closest passing spot - presumably reversing upwards is less scary, as guardrails may or may not be present...

But then there's the extra rule that on some roads if you meet a "car postal" (bus service run by the Post Office) it gets to decide what you do :)

Same uphill/downhill rule here in California. Besides being less scary to go uphill in reverse, you're a lot less likely to get stuck.

Interesting. I think that's the same rule in hiking as well.

Have you ever driven in the real world? Those roads are very common in many areas. Try driving in Malta sometime.

Yes. I just don't drive in areas like the one described.

I've never driven in Malta, but if I'm ever there, I'll be sure to try driving.

There are a fair number of roads like this in residential massachusetts (Medford and parts of Somerville anyway). Basically one car pulls over in front of a curb cut or where no cars are parked and lets the other car go by.

There is a few miles of roads like this near me:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.2513013,-5.2627719,3a,75y,...

Sorry for the huge URL, but as you can see it is a two lane road where one lane is blocked by parked cars. To negotiate this you drive past a few parked cars then pull into a space. You can't necessarily see a space to pull in, but if the car that is trying to pass you stops you can assume it has stopped in a place that will let you past. There is often a lot of reversing and swearing.

You can see this clearly ... in the distance is a blue car, the driver has noticed that the Google car is coming towards it and has decided not to enter the narrow section until the google car has exited it. Some people will do this, others (as the blue car has priority over the google car) will drive on, making the google car pull into on of those gaps on the left. If there is no gap, google car must reverse and find a gap.