Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022

Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022

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Friday, March 03, 2023

8th edition of the 11th year of SmartDrivingCars eLetter

First Million Rider-Only Miles: How the Waymo Driver is Improving Road Safety

The Waymo team, Feb 28, “Waymo has achieved many global industry firsts. Each time we delight our riders and deliver on our mission safely, we are proudest. In January, we accomplished another first: we exceeded one million miles on public roads with no human behind the wheel.

To provide a more in-depth look into the performance of the Waymo Driver and where it stands compared to human driving, we’ve published a research paper that summarizes the contact events that we experienced during the first one million miles of our rider-only operations.

T. Victor, et al. “Safety Performance of the Waymo Rider-Only Automated Driving System at One Million Miles”

ABSTRACT: This paper examines the safety performance of the Waymo Driver™, Waymo’s Automated Driving System (ADS). It analyzes one million miles of driving on public roads in parts of California and Arizona with no human behind the wheel– what we call rider-only (RO) operations. There were no reported injuries, and only two collisions that were comparable to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Crash Investigation Sampling System (“CISS”), a nationally representative collision database of collisions that were police reported and in which at least one vehicle was towed. There were an additional 18 minor-contact events that were too minor to meet the tow-away and police-report criteria for CISS, where nine of these 20 contact events had no damage.

The first event that occurred had the highest severity of the 20 contact events: In this event, the Waymo vehicle was struck in the rear while slowing for a red light by a car driven by a teenage driver. Rearward facing video recorded by the ADS suggests the driver of the other vehicle was looking at a cell phone held near the steering wheel immediately prior to the collision.

Read more Hmmmm….. The entire paper is worth a very careful read. Performance during this first million miles is very impressive. While in the scope of things it is not very many miles, the first of anything is never very many and often it is when bad things happen. Look at what happened to Uber in the beginning.

Enormous kudos to Waymo (and Cruise). They have, in my opinion, demonstrated that they can move people safely in an ODD. Hopefully, they’ll now look for an ODD where they can safely provide mobility most of the time (NOT necessarily every day, but are confident that they can do it, say, 350 days a year) and certainly NOT everywhere in the ODD (instead find the safest set of streets and intersections that allows them to deliver interconnected on-demand mobility requiring only a short walk (~less than 5 minutes) between most of the locations within that ODD/community). They then can build an affordable, equitable high-quality mobility system for the residents of that/those ODD(s)

There are many such communities throughout the country, many of which are communities where auto ownership is low, transit service is, at best, poor and the mobility offered would substantially improve the quality of life of many.

Waymo’s (or Cruise’s) provision of safe, affordable, on-demand mobility would be an enormous public service as well as providing a basis from which to scale to meet their due diligence obligation to deliver substantial return on investment to Alphabet (and GM). Alain

SmartDrivingCars ZoomCast 306 / PodCast 306

F. Fishkin, March 3, “Waymo passes a million miles with Waymo Driver and issues a safety report. Tesla addresses investors and the future, Ford creates Latitude AI and more. Join Princeton’s Alain Kornhauser and co-host Fred Fishkin for episode 306 of Smart Driving Cars.”

  • 0:00 open
  • 0:44 Waymo Driver performance report
  • 14:15 More layoffs at Waymo
  • 15:00 Tesla Investor Day-what we learned
  • 16:18 Adam Jonas at Morgan Stanley impressed with Tesla Investor Day
  • 23:05 Ford creates Latitude AI after demise of Argo AI
  • 29:40 Guidehouse Insights research report
  • 34:35 Autonomous Vehicle Industry Association seeks modernization of vehicle exemption process
  • 39:05 Diane Gutierrez Scaccetti to chair Transportation Research Board Executive Committee
  • 0:00:00 E. Musk, Mar. 1, “- Preshow
  • 0:29:09 - Intro Part 1 Master Plan 3
  • 0:31:24 - Master Plan 3 Part 2 Executing Master Plan 3
  • 0:58:21 - Vehicle Design with Franz Von Holzhausen & Lars Moravy
  • 1:10:43 - Powertrain with Colin Campbell
  • 1:19:17 - Electronic Architecture with Pete Bannon
  • 1:27:53 - Software with David Lau
  • 1:38:20 - Full Self-Driving with Ashok Elluswamy
  • 1:48:12 - Bot Update with Elon Musk and Ashok Elluswamy
  • 1:53:41 - Charging with Rebecca Tinucci
  • 2:02:04 - Supply Chain with Karn Budhiraj & Roshan Thomas
  • 2:23:07 - Manufacturing with Tom Zhu & Drew Baglino
  • 2:36:15 - Energy with Drew Baglino & Mike Snyder Part 3 Impact at Tesla
  • 2:49:06 - Impact with Laurie Shelby and Brandon Ehrheart
  • 2:55:42 - Financials with Zach Kirkhorn Q&A
  • 3:21:24 - New Gigafactory Location Announcement
  • 3:23:20 - Q&A
  • 0:00 Overall thoughts
  • 1:41 #1
  • 3:29 #2
  • 7:30 #3
  • 9:14 #4
  • 9:37 #5
  • 10:46 #6 Tesla van?? Tesla H-vator???
  • 11:03 #7 Bot &
  • 12:11 #8

###

MIT Mobility Forum: Spring 2023

1. Fridays 12:00-13:00 Boston Time Open to the public

3. Hosted by Prof. Jinhua Zhao

AGENDA

Feb 17 Alain Kornhauser “Envisioning Profitable Autonomous Transit Networks”

Feb 24 Hani Mahmassani “Telemobility, hybrid work and the next normal”

March 3 Liz Renold and David Mindell “Tectonic shifts in science, technology, and industrial policy: looking ahead”

March 10 Juan de Dios Ortuzar “Modelling Sustainable Options - the importance of habit and perceptions”

March 17 Robin Chase “The case against transportation policy priority one being electrified personal cars”

Save the Date:

6th Annual Princeton SmartDrivingCar Summit:

Monday Evening, May 22 -> Wednesday 5pm, May 24, 2023

TRB Automated Transportation Symposium

San Francisco, CA, July 9-13

Bridging Transportation Researchers (BTR) Conference

Paper Submission deadline: April 30

August 9 & 10

On-line Conference

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Friday, February 3, 2023

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Friday, January 27, 2023

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Tuesday, January 24, 2023

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Friday, January 13, 2023

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Sunday, January 8, 2023

  • SafeDrivingCars: Those in which the automated function are explicitly designed to not only substantially reduce driver misbehavior by constraining the performance characteristic such as incorporating speed governors that only permit excessive speeds in geofenced locations such as Watkins Glen International and stretches of the German Autobahn, but also automatically intervene to prevent crashes; thus, extending what is done today with anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control.

  • SelfDrivingCars: Those which allow the driver for some extended period of time to be “feet-off” the brake & throttle, delivering to the driver substantial comfort & convenience, but also “hands-off” the wheel for shorter periods of time providing a little more comfort & convenience. Absolutely required are “eyes & brain” focused the human task of driving, ready to intervene should the automated driver begin to fail.

  • DriverlessCars: Those which serve only passengers and/or goods from trip start, through finish. Luckily, the notion that individuals might own such vehicles for personal use and/or be able to “AirB&B” them for others to get from A to B is now realized by essentially everyone as exceedingly naïve. The Mercedes booth at this year’s CES showed no sign of its [Mercedes Benz F 015 Luxury in Motion LIVE PREMIERE CES 2015](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eftN0lwNk88). Yea!

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Friday, December 30, 2022

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Sunday, November 6, 2022

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  • Hawkins, Oct. 27, “When Ford announced yesterday that it was pulling its support for Argo AI, the autonomous driving startup it had financed since 2017, it cited as one of its reasons a belief that driver-assist technology will have more near-term payoffs…..” Read more Hmmmm… I agree with Andrew, as I stated above. Alain

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  • These systems outrageously reduce crash probabilities, and/or

  • maybe some, but we’re probably not much luckier.

  • very few of the cars in use during that “10” month period had Level 2 capabilities, and/or

  • unfortunately, the VIN number doesn’t identify these cars and only Tesla announces how many sold (I may have missed the reportings)

  • very few of the drivers of those cars rarely engaged the Level 2 features, and/or

  • likely. Only Tesla releases data on the utilization of its level 2 features but does so only in aggregate terms that don’t allow for correction of sampling bias associated with engagement in “easy” driving conditions versus “challenging” driving conditions.

  • enormous under counting

  • likely, only Tesla has the opportunity to either “know all” or sample effectively because of their OtA monitoring of its vehicles. Everyone else has conveniently kept their heads in the sand. Mercedes didn’t report any; however, during that period I think my Intelligent Cruise Control and Lane Centering were engaged when I hit a deer. Mercedes must not have been watching me, I didn’t report it and I didn’t get the memo that informed me to do anything.

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  • those that don’t already have a stable full of their own personal mobility options.
  • those for which his aTaxi can substantially change their lives for the better.

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PersonTripLength (90%tile): 10 miles

Cost:

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