Thanks! That's very interesting.

Toyota lost a lot of money the first few years they sold the Prius, but they were happy to do it because they believed they'd work out the production cost issues over time. And they were right. Clearly Waymo's going for a similar strategy here. But one difference is that Toyota at that point had decades of experience wrangling the cost curve for cars. It'll be interesting to see if they can get capital cost plus mapping cost plus operational cost down low enough so that they can at least break even on a ride.

I thought remote drivers were supposed to handle such issues?

Remote drivers can only override some things. They can do things like telling the car that the lane goes to the left or right of a cone.

Or they can mark a vehicle as parked so the car won't wait for a stationary vehicle it thinks has right of way.

But they can't directly drive the vehicle. The whole software and Comms stack is far too slow to do that safely.

> 50ms glass to glass latency.

You are potentially overlooking application level latency, just because the packets arrive in 50ms time does not mean the video latency is upper bounded to that. I think 100-200ms is more realistic.

If your one way network latency is 50ms, it takes 150ms minimum to send a packet on 1.5x round trips which is necessary to confirm round trip connectivity and notify the other party. If you can assume clocks are synchronized you can send packets one way in 50ms to confirm connectivity and latency.

> Usually that will involve either slamming the brakes on hard or gently, depending if there is an obstacle ahead or someone following behind.

you’re specifically in a situation in which the car has failed, so im not sure how you can assume the car will make these kinds of decisions correctly.

> I personally think they should just update the stack so they can do realtime control.

Lets assume video latency of 100-200ms can be achieved, its still potentially dangerous. There are however some companies i am aware of in certain countries that are doing it anyway!

Even if glass to glass latency was 1ms, perhaps its not a technological issue but a PR issue. Maybe they don’t want news headlines about people driving cars with mario kart steering wheels or it’s easier to get regulatory approval by reassuring the public they will do the safest thing possibly.

I wonder if the problem could be solved via a semi autonomous mode with manual input from a remote human source? Yes, it would still be slow, but for weird situations where the car is just stuck it might be good enough? They could incorporate some techniques from multiplayer games where things are estimated via simulation so that the experience doesn’t suck too much.

I wonder what the air force does with remote drone pilots?

It took four times as long to get it, you had to endure this also and you still liked it?!

I think you may be an outlier and early adopter type person and may not represent the average customer.

> took four times as long to get it, you had to endure this also and you still liked it?

Yup! It as far more forgivable than an Uber driver taking the wrong turn half a dozen times in a row. It was half the cost, before tip. And it was up to four times as long a wait, not always four times as long. All of that more than makes up for the fun.

It’s not ready for mass roll-out. But there is a massive beachhead to grab.

Did you tip robot?

Hey I'm cheap, that might be the killer app feature for me too if I used ride sharing services.

Dude, it's a freaking self driving car from the future.

That is exactly how an early-adopter outlier would feel about that. And I'm not saying you're wrong; those are valid feelings. But if you look at the distribution of people like that [1], it's not representative. Imagine how most people would feel if a taxi driver did that to them: "Oh, sorry, I'm scared to turn the car around; please wait until a supervisor can pick you up." They'd be annoyed at the delay and would be less likely to rely on the service again.

Props to Waymo for what they've accomplished; they've been very clever in working around the limitations of the tech. But it sounds like it has a long way to go before they're ready for general-audience usage.

[1] E.g., the Crossing the Chasm model, although this is more the behavior of the "visionary" segment than what he calls "early adopter"; scroll down to the first big graph here: https://thinkinsights.net/strategy/crossing-the-chasm/

I'd do it once for the experience. I doubt there's any real appreciable actual personal danger. But, with that experience, I probably wouldn't do it again anytime soon.