Be Excellent To Each Other

They'll just stop

I guess you'd need to be a bit careful though. Anything you do to one of them and it'll probably just file a Police report with reams of data. In fact they're going to be a fucking wet dream for the security services. The entire road network filled with 360 degree CCTV cameras.

Waymo, the former self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Google parent company Alphabet, has become the first company to deploy fully autonomous vehicles on public roads without a driver behind the wheel.

About 100 of the company’s self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans are now driving around Chandler, a suburb of Phoenix, without a human test driver—a move that catapults Waymo ahead of its competitors. Waymo has been testing the self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans on public roads in Chandler since 2016. But the vehicles have always had a human test driver behind the wheel.

Waymo CEO John Krafick shared the company’s milestone during a speech at the Lisbon Web Summit.

For now, these fully self-driving minivans—sans human test driver—are limited to a defined “geo-fenced” area. This means the vehicles can only drive in a specific geographic area. The self-driving cars are completing all aspects of driving however, such as the more complicated left-hand turns.

Waymo and Fiat Chrysler announced on Tuesday that the automaker will supply the Google spinoff with "thousands" of Chrysler Pacifica minivans in order to swell its fleet of self-driving cars sufficiently ahead of any service rollout.

As of right now, Waymo has a fleet of 600 Pacificas, so this announcement marks a serious jump forward. Waymo receives the minivans from FCA, and it then outfits them with the hardware and software required to enable SAE Level 4 autonomy, which means a driver is not required as a failsafe in certain modes.

The AV developer intends to launch a single driverless pilot program in Phoenix this year, but the minivans aren't for that city alone. Instead, it's thinking about expanding the program and preparing to launch similar programs in other locations.

"With the world's first fleet of fully self-driving vehicles on the road, we've moved from research and development to operations and deployment," said Waymo CEO John Krafcik in a statement. "The Pacifica Hybrid minivans offer a versatile interior and a comfortable ride experience, and these additional vehicles will help us scale."

Ouch

The self-driving Volvo SUV was outfitted with at least two video cameras, one facing forward toward the street, the other focused inside the car on the driver, Moir said in an interview.

From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The police have not released the videos.

The article said that it made no attempt to brake but presumably this would have been after the collision anyway. Although these Uber things don't seem to be the best example of self-driving cars, requiring a lot of human intervention.

From viewing the videos, “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Moir said. The police have not released the videos.

Mabye, but maybe the conclusion it came to is "I'm going to hit her."

Presumably they can do the maths now, right? As in "AI driven cars have killed one person per X miles, compared to I driven cars which kill one person per Y miles".

In 2016, 37,461 people died in traffic-related accidents in the United States, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That amounts to 1.18 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled in 2016. Waymo, which has been testing autonomous vehicles on public roads since 2009 when it was Google’s self-driving car project, has said its cars have driven more than 5 million miles while Uber’s cars have covered 3 million miles.

So a woman ran straight out into the road unexpectedly? I assume that the car did react, but not in time, right?

Oh man, I think it should have avoided her.

I welcome our drunk driving speeding robot overlords.

Fixed.

Those figures lump all driverless cars together, though. Which you'd have to assume is something google/waymo would take exception to. They seem to be ahead of the Uber ones with their technology and haven't even killed anybody at all. Although to get figures on safety you would really need to know whether in any of those occasions where the human had to take over it might otherwise have been a really bad crash.

Uber’s robotic vehicle project was not living up to expectations months before a self-driving car operated by the company struck and killed a woman in Tempe, Ariz.

The cars were having trouble driving through construction zones and next to tall vehicles, like big rigs. And Uber’s human drivers had to intervene far more frequently than the drivers of competing autonomous car projects.

Waymo, formerly the self-driving car project of Google, said that in tests on roads in California last year, its cars went an average of nearly 5,600 miles before the driver had to take control from the computer to steer out of trouble. As of March, Uber was struggling to meet its target of 13 miles per “intervention” in Arizona, according to 100 pages of company documents obtained by The New York Times and two people familiar with the company’s operations in the Phoenix area but not permitted to speak publicly about it.

I mean, I didn't want to mention it as it feels harsh, but what the fuck is that sat behind the wheel of the car in the video.