From "The Verge": "How Tesla and Waymo are tackling a major problem for self-driving cars: Data" An interesting deep dive into the subject, and some observations on how complex the field is, as well as how difficult it is to say just which company is "ahead". -
The Waymo cars are just the worst. Grandma would drive around them. They're so slow, so cautious, brake at every little thing. I think their motto is 'careful, you may miss the red and hit the light on green'. They're always just in the way, no natural flow to them. It's just like talking to a robot, they can't carry a normal cadence of conversation or driving.
Do you have any GM Cruise or Uber cars driving around in your area as well? If so, how do they perform?
Last time I read up on the subject, Waymo did have more-or-less fully self-driving cars; ones without even a steering wheel. Those were restricted to operating at a maximum speed of 25 MPH, which I guess is what you are complaining about, "Feed The Trees". But I'm pretty sure that's not the only type of vehicle which Waymo has in its experimental fleet. In fact, Waymo is getting very close to deploying a fleet of self-driving taxis in the Phoenix area. Will those be restricted to operating at 25 MPH or slower? I rather doubt it! From ArsTechnia: "Robotaxi permit gets Arizona’s OK; Waymo will start service in 2018" -
I'm looking forward to seeing how these systems do work once they're actually accessible to the public. I imagine it probably will be speed restricted to some degree. But I think that will probably work fine at the start since they'll primarily operate in dense urban areas. But yeah, they'll need to drive a bit faster than 25 mph in order to move fluidly through traffic.
I too am eager to see reports of how well they perform. But they are actually going to be based in several suburbs of Phoenix, not in the dense urban area. However, unless they have an artificial restriction on where the cars are or are not allowed to go, we can be sure that a lot of their trips will be to the denser parts of Phoenix and back. If Waymo restricts their driving to only the suburbs, then I imagine they won't get a high volume of customers. -
Im not too concerned about how they perform in initial tests designed to make them look as stellar as possible in order to appease regulators. I am concerned with how they perform if they were to operate as part of a normal flow.
