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> Cruise in March submitted the applications for driverless operations, whereas Waymo in January applied for autonomous vehicle deployment with safety drivers behind the wheel.

Wow, driverless actually means no driver here. But how does that work? What if it makes a mistake? Is there some fallback pilot somewhere that can take over and control it remotely?



Waymo has a similar approach in Phoenix. Passengers can't directly intervene but can call tech support and they'll dispatch roadside assistance to override the car and drive it to safety. Will be interesting to see if Cruise copies this same model.


Waymo also has remote driving navigators/coaches who don't directly steer the car, but can tell it where to go navigation-wise.


Didn't they have "chase" cars in the beginning? Maybe I'm thinking of a different company. Cars that would follow around the driverless cars and could respond immediately if something happened.


IIRC they did chase cars when they started doing fully driverless operations, yeah.


Isn't Waymo also starting the same service in parts of San Francisco?


with safety drivers = not the same


Nope, they announced driveless bay area testing several weeks back. A recent press release confirms this. [0]

Waymo is allowed to test at all hours, in rain and light fog, within a limited geographic area.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28710098


Testing is different than a permitted taxi service.

The permitted taxi service allows them to scale up and charge a profitable fare. In the testing phase, their fares are severely reduce.

Cruise can charge full price without a driver, but Waymo only has the permit for a backup driver at full proce.


Anecdata here, but every waymo car I've seen here in SF for the past several weeks (probably 30+ cars) has had a safety driver.


>> can't directly intervene but can call tech support

"Hi, yeah, car's gone berserk, we're approaching a river, all doors are locked, can't get out, need assistance."

"Hi, thank you for calling. Please hold (your breath)."


What would be your plan if a taxi driver went berserk and did that?

What makes you believe the autonomous car is more likely than a human driver to do that?


1. not get in the car in the first place. unless proven out by 10+ years of human guinea pigs not getting killed.

2. life experience, software expertise, common sense.


Lots of people used to feel this way about automated elevators.

https://medium.com/swlh/what-do-self-driving-cars-and-elevat...


Right, it's eerily similar. People say this about automated railways too. And as with the elevator on your hundredth trip you are not thinking "Oh no, this is automated, it might kill me", because of course it's automated, you're thinking about whether Jim meant to complement you or it was intended as an insult last night, and did you bolt the back door?


I’ve tried to find the original source of that claim and come up missing. All of the online articles either don’t reference a source or they eventually link to an out of print book.[1]

At this point I’m pretty sure it’s not true. If past public sentiment was so against automatic elevators, there would be at least one newspaper clipping or digitized article.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25585122


Wait, when in the history of taxis were there 10+ years of humans not being killed by taxi drivers?

Certainly not any recent (consecutive) 10-year period.


It's pretty rare though. It's far more likely that the taxi driver will be killed by a passenger.


In a typical year, NYC's human-driver taxis had a fatal-or critical-injury crash rate 3x the overall US average: https://www.ingberprovost.com/how-often-do-taxis-crash/

The US average is about 36,000 auto-caused fatalities per year: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...


According to the DMV press release (submitted elsewhere on HN), this is incorrect:

>Waymo is authorized to use a fleet of light-duty autonomous vehicles for commercial services within parts of San Francisco and San Mateo counties. The vehicles are approved to operate on public roads with a speed limit of no more than 65 mph and can also operate in rain and light fog. Waymo has had state authority to test autonomous vehicles on public roads with a safety driver since 2014 and received a driverless testing permit in October 2018.




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