But they didnt move fast at all. I saw people driving Waymo’a for years before I saw the first automated one hit the streets. They took their damn time which I am sure was expensive and worth it.
This article is a little light on thesis, but legit.
Personally, I’d like to tie a vision of autonomous vehicles to a broad rethinking of transit and public ownership. What if training data was shared, so instead of allowing Google to create another monopoly we deliberately cultivated a diverse market? What if we designed roads to accommodate autonomous van pools and also bikes and more light vehicles?
We can dream better than this.
Years ago, Microsoft was doing some R&D on autonomous vehicles in a mock city built for it. Instead of each vehicle doing all of the processing, the fake city was built with wireless markers to GIVE the car the information. Like instead of having to “see” a stop sign, the stop sign told cars it was there.
It would be complicated and expensive to implement on a mass scale but I thought it was a really cool idea.
That test sounds like a model trainroad but for billionaires.
Sure. But it’s not like the technology they developed is useless outside of an autonomous city, I’m sure they went into it knowing it would never be implemented for real.
Effectively, this has been an ongoing initiative across DoTs for a long while now. The issue is that it’s a hodgepodge approach baked piecemeal into various grants and other programs. But, yeah, digital, vendor agnostic, secure transit infrastructure is always on a lot of DOT folks’ minds.
I for one believe we’re capable of building trains
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There is a very large safety difference between Waymo and Tesla robotaxis right now.
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Tesla robotaxis had a string of crashes their first day
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As someone who has been on over 50 Waymo rides, I trust them more than any human driver. They drive extremely carefully see things coming that I would have never seen coming. Only thing that annoys me is that they do stupid little things like turning left from the left lane instead of the center lane, or cruising in the left lane, exactly at the speed limit.
That probably is not so comforting when one of them is in control of half a ton of metal, plastic and glass in public.
