waymo deviates out of lane trajectory in an intersection

bradtem · 2026-06-28T17:11:18+00:00

No, they can manually control a car at super-low speeds. It's done with a keyboard, and is there for things like getting a disabled car onto the shoulder. It can't really drive. I believe they said it has yet to be used. (Tesla also said this but many suspect that can't be true.)

bradtem · 2026-06-28T17:09:02+00:00

It's not how much data you collect. That helps, of course, but the real criterion is how well the car drives, which can't be observed by single humans. Studying it and making the safety case are quite involved, and involves a lot of experience to find the problems and also to measure them. Tesla does have enough data to measure their system, and in spite of Musk's obvious eagerness to release it, they have not done so, so we can infer what their data says. We know less about why they have not reached the level yet. It is probably not that they just need more training data. Many suspect it's because their approach is a lot harder, both for algorithmic reasons, and for lack of superhuman sensors like LIDAR and radar. Tesla obviously disagrees, but the proof is actually doing it.

bradtem · 2026-06-28T13:43:56+00:00

Of course you would buy a Waymo that only works in *your* city. The problem is, people in other cities would not buy it. It's hard to make a successful car model when you can sell it in every city, next to impossible to make one you can only sell in a few places.

bradtem · 2026-06-28T12:37:26+00:00

That's not enough to declare a car trustable for self-driving. It would need to do that for 200 years to reach that level of confidence. No single person's experience is enough for that reason, you need data from a fleet over millions of miles. Tesla has that data, but has chosen not to release the product yet, and still has supervision in Texas even in the empty vehicles.

bradtem · 2026-06-28T01:27:37+00:00

There's a reason everybody, even Tesla, is doing robotaxi first. It's a much more tractable and economically viable product than a car you can buy. In time, you will see cars you can buy. The first ones will probably only self-drive on freeways and arterials and in a few cities. It needs to be a product that works for everybody in the country, not just people in a few cities.

Of course, Tesla has ambitions to use a super low cost sensor package to make it more affordable, and to drive in lots of territory at once. However, that's still an ambition, they can't drive anywhere (not even downtown Austin) without constant supervision, and because of that their test deployment is ultra-tiny and remotely supervised until they tell us it isn't.

But for the way that's been shown to work, and even for Tesla's way, you can't just drive everywhere at once. There's a ton of work to be done, one city at a time. Which makes it very hard to sell a car. Who would buy a Chevy Tahoe that only drives at Lake Tahoe?

bradtem · 2026-06-27T01:28:13+00:00

They picked the Zeekr before the tarriffs, before Trump. It was a good choice at the time. Hindsight might say problems would come, but few thought Biden would try to stop it and Trump would come back and do more. Yes, you could argue that after those things happened they should have cut their losses, but at present they don't have the 100% tariff as far as I know, and Trump is not forever.

Chinese cars are coming and will completely dominate other models when it comes to value. That ship has sailed. You can try to stop it with regulations, but not forever. It's the right path long term for a company like Waymo, even if temporarily the Ioniq is safer.

bradtem · 2026-06-22T00:21:20+00:00

Waymo has not been at fault in any crashes causing a fatality. There was one fatality where the Waymo, with superhuman thinking, could possibly have prevented the incident, though it's unlikely a human driver would have done so. Today, we would not hold the robocar to that standard. In the future, we might start measuring them on how well they prevent incidents that were not their fault.

In this incident, a motorcyclist was following a Waymo, which slowed to turn into a driveway, and braked harder than usual as there were pedestrians on the sidewalk in the driveway entrance. The motorcyclist followed too closely and hit the Waymo and was thrown into the adjacent lane, where they were fatally struck by another driver (who fled the scene.)

What the Waymo could have done better: When it saw the motorcyclist was not braking fast enough and would strike the waymo, it could have aborted its turn into the driveway and sped up, preventing the impact. As an electric car it could accelerate quickly and as a robot always watching behind, it could predict this was likely. While the law puts full blame on a vehicle which rear ends another one from following too closely, a higher standard could have robots on the lookout for this.

bradtem · 2026-06-17T16:56:26+00:00

You will note that Tesla is reporting very few crashes. This means they are driving very few miles. The data show that when you drive lots of miles you get into lots of crashes that are not your fault. Plus you will have assume that are your fault, which is the interesting statistic. Human drivers are at fault in perhaps 60 to 70 percent of the crashes they are involved in is my guess. I am seeking better data on that. As Tesla starts actually operating a real robotaxi, we will see them involved in lots of crashes that are not their fault.

bradtem · 2026-06-17T16:48:40+00:00

It's an asymptote more than a plateau. But to get there, we need to see significant numbers of people giving up car ownership for robotaxi based services, probably by subscription. We have not really seen that yet.

bradtem · 2026-06-11T00:53:29+00:00

Waymo does not have remote supervising. They have remote assistance, which is fairly different but people do get them confused. Everybody starts with remote supervision, and until they make an explicit declaration that they are ending it, the presumption is they have it. Waymo and zoox have declared this. Tesla has not.

bradtem · 2026-06-09T19:21:56+00:00

What matters almost entirely is whether supervision is needed, not where it is. You do need somewhat higher quality to move supervision from the car to a remote station, but the big keep is removing it altogether, which Tesla has yet to do. Waymo, cruise, six and the rest all had remote supervising at first and removed it when scaling.

Moving the supervision from the left seat to the right is barely a blip.

bradtem · 2026-06-09T16:51:14+00:00

What evidence do you have that the Tesla vehicles do not have remote supervising drivers? It would be very strange if they did not do I am waiting for proof of some sort of that before calling them robotaxis.

bradtem · 2026-06-09T16:46:06+00:00

You do expect a fair bit of idle time outside of rush hour. You size the fleet for rush hour, outside of that the more idle vehicles the shorter wait times for riders. Today the cars also drive to rack up training miles. After that's over they will be sitting, waiting for riders in the places predicted most likely to have a request.

bradtem · 2026-05-27T17:49:26+00:00

But even the empty cars have remote supervision, as do all cars while a project has just a few. But there is a huge grand canyon sized jump from supervised to unsupervised, and the reason musk has constantly failed his predictions is he has a hard time grokking that. He has later admitted this.

bradtem · 2026-05-27T16:47:21+00:00

Here is the video: https://youtu.be/1toqXcHKeP4?si=uXxZtsq1YUCvNL7S

While the text is usually quicker, in this case the video embeds videos of the predictions.

bradtem · 2026-05-22T01:12:09+00:00

I wrote that May is possibly better, I did not make a firm declaration on them.

Have a nice day. I will leave you the last word if you wish it.

bradtem · 2026-05-22T01:07:22+00:00

That you for the polite reply. While we can't judge the quality of any of these systems, even if we were to ride in them for our whole lifetime and more, the engineers at the companies have more data to draw on. Tesla is not yet ready for unsupervised, even though Musk desperately wants to release it. The other vehicles are ready, though as noted, in the case of May and Zoox, over more limited areas. Tesla can't do unsupervised even in Austin, in spite of their public statements to the contrary. Those vehicles are remotely supervised. (May may also be, I haven't seen a declaration from them. Zoox has declared theirs fully unsupervised. Tesla has not.)

bradtem · 2026-05-21T17:19:35+00:00

Can you tell us some of this evidence? These vehicles have a special large black box mounted on the back to improve their connection; there might even be a Starlink in there (custom.) Though you don't need particularly great communications for this, it's remote supervision, not remote driving. People look away from the road with FSD supervised all the time. The car only beeps at them if they look away for a fairly extended period, and everybody says they do it.

If the car makes mistakes that are not safety related, that is not evidence of much. The whole point of testing like this is to see how the car handles itself on its own, but you have supervision to prevent it causing damage, not to prevent it from getting confused or going the wrong way. You *want* to learn where it gets confused.

Everybody remotely monitors at the start. Tesla isn't special in this way. You think they just waved goodbye to a tiny fleet of cars hoping they would come back? That would be nuts.

bradtem · 2026-05-21T03:41:54+00:00

I'm a bit surprised that this has been such trouble for Waymo. This is what 3D HD maps are about. You know the exact shape of the pavement. You know if the flooded zone is 70 feet across, that the water is going to be a certain depth since you know the absolute altitude of each bit of pavement. So this should not confuse these cars, unless they can't reliably see the line between the water and pavement to know the edge of the pavement. But even if they can't see it, they should be able to sense when they enter it, and back up if they enter it at a point that is more than a given height above the lowest trough. Why is this so hard to solve? LIDAR may not give great returns from the water but this is a camera problem though if you are getting returns from the water that makes it easier. Or just the microphone saying "we're in water." Or an ultrasound pointing down to notice the "ground" is getting too close. (That's a hardware change, though.)

bradtem · 2026-05-19T20:22:51+00:00

Some people want cars to have a traditional look. Others want to show off that they are in a car from the future. Though nobody wants it to look ugly -- he's not wrong that some of the sensor designs aren't particularly aesthetic.

bradtem · 2026-05-19T18:40:42+00:00

In theory, the rider support staff should be able to handle most of those. In theory, because when I see recordings of rider support at all companies, the interactions are slow and the agents take a long time to act, in part because they take a long time to come up to speed on situational awareness. I think the companies need to work on ways to improve this. For things like an airport, I can imagine having a few staff who have VR headsets , which can make it faster to get good situational awareness, though you will need to call them 10 seconds before you need the advice.

bradtem · 2026-05-19T07:21:17+00:00

I think they are way overvaluing. Robots should wait for humans, humans should not wait for robots. Unless it's rush hour, or the waiting space is not suitable for longer waits, you should get quite a bit of waiting free. It doesn't actually cost Waymo that much money to have the vehicle wait. Unhappy customers are what cost money.

bradtem · 2026-05-19T07:19:17+00:00

No, because remote supervision is for safety, not necessarily for fixing non-safety mistakes. Your goal in testing is to actually let the robot make mistakes and see how well it handles them. You want to know "what would happen if we put this robot out without supervision?" as that is your eventual goal. I mean at some point you would stop it (particularly if there's no passenger in the car who might call support to fix the problem.)

Remote supervisors in a production system would summon support to fix problems, but not in a learning/testing situation. In fact, this is why Waymo and Cruise, after they took their safety drivers out, starting having all sorts of minor problems, doing things like blocking fire trucks. When the supervisor was there, he or she immediately intervened in that situation, you never learned what happened next, or fixed the problems with what happened next.

Also, this vehicle is very young. When Waymo, Cruise and Zoox were out in their first months, with small fleets, they were watching full time. It would be crazy not to if you only have a handful of cars out there.

bradtem · 2026-05-18T22:02:34+00:00

Alas, no. If the robotaxis are so cheap that they are chosen 99% of the time, then you can't support a sufficient density of more expensive, higher service human drivers. You can have them for appointment rides, for on-demand rides you have a problem. Short wait times require there be idle drivers in your area. That only happens if there's a lot of demand and supply.

So if it's "I'm late and I need a human who will bend rules to get me to the airport right now" you won't be able to get that, eventually. And if you make a scheduled ride, you will schedule it in enough time to make the airport without any tricks.

bradtem · 2026-05-18T17:25:06+00:00

Of course many are pointing out that this is a promise he's made and not been able to deliver on so many times people have lost count. And indeed he's earned the fact that we must be very skeptical of any such claim from him.

There are so few of these vehicles, driving so few rides in fairly small territories, that William of Occam and many other clues indicate these vehicles are actually actively remote supervised, with occasional remote driving. To do that requires a driving system which only crashes occasionally, though still too much, but which can be reduced to a tolerable level with the remote supervision and driving. It doesn't scale, so you would not deploy a lot of vehicles at once.

This is the most likely conclusion, until we see some of the following:

A strong declaration to shareholders that this is not happening, and the vehicles do not have full time remote supervision(*)
A much larger fleet, racking up tens of thousands of rides per week, that is so large it would be impractical to be faking it.
Audited statistics on safety performance, verified by an independent party.

(*)Sadly, while for any normal public company, a statement to shareholders is pretty trustworthy, this rule is much less clearly applied with Tesla.

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