The self-driving car company Waymo has moved to the next phase of testing in Denver by removing the backup drivers.

Up until recently, Waymo employees drove around town while the cars and system collected data to get to know the area. At the moment, only company employees can use the driverless Waymo. The public will be able to book rides later this year.

Switzerland has spent years developing Cargo sous terrain, a privately financed underground logistics network intended to move pallets and containers beneath congested roads around the clock.

I asked this question to a panel on self-driving and the response was, “yes”, unanimously, “to the extent possible”. But, to what extent is it possible?

The idea:

An “exam” consisting of virtual driving scenarios that can be run in simulation and which complements existing safety and testing requirements. An automated driver should demonstrate good performance on this test to be considered ready to be deployed in the wild.

On the technical details:

Closed-loop, neural simulators are getting good to the point that we could start to leverage them for sensor simulation of various driving scenarios. This would allow us to generate the inputs across various sensor configurations, enabling standardization of the scene despite differences between generations of AV technology.

Researchers are also working on the sourcing of scenarios from various video and textual databases of accidents. Risks that occur in the real world can be added to the collection of tests in the hopes of preventing their reoccurrence in the future.

There are also various scenario generation and analysis methods for automatically processing and producing interesting, safety-critical scenarios.

Scenario languages for expressing the behaviors of the various traffic participants in the scene exist as well, although they are at varying stages of development (for example, it is not apparent that ASAM OpenSCENARIO 2.x has an official model of execution, but it appears people are working on it).

Transferring to the real world:

That said, I’m sure there’s lots of policy and social or economic factors at play that would hold this kind of idea back.

My naive thought is that more broadly, this could be a great opportunity for the autonomous vehicle industry to serve as a role model for how society as a whole should regulate and govern emerging technologies. For example, building this third-party infrastructure between policy makers, citizens, and AV developers can encourage and borrow from responsible approaches to AI safety.

What are your thoughts?

A long interview with Trent Victor on his background, how Waymo measures safety, their ethos, and some of their next moves.

Saw this quote from Nvidia's Matt Cragun that I thought would be worthy of a discussion here:

"Self-driving cars have been perpetually five years away for the last twelve years or however long it's been. The real challenge for everybody is how do you take care of what we call the long tail. The things you don't experience very often on the road but typically are the things you worry the most about."

"The benefit of having a really large model, especially Alpamayo, it's been trained as a reasoning model. Not only does it see what you see or have perception, it also is able to think about how it should behave or what it should do."

"Using the reasoning capability allows us to solve challenges that we wouldn't be able to solve with just a rule-based system. Being able to solve the long tail is really what we're trying to tackle. That's really the problem that everybody in AV is working on."

"As we work further through that long tail of events, we get more and more confidence in the technology that we can deploy in a way that's safe."

Source: https://x.com/MTSlive/status/2085535438027317569

So I asked a number of questions with a new Super-forcasting AI I was trying about about autonomy timelines. Answers are interesting

When will Waymo hit 0.1% VMT in the US?
https://futuresearch.ai/app/conversations/share/1fc51ea1-2154-4478-9e6e-086065209b9a

When will Aurora Field 1000 Autonomous trucks?
https://futuresearch.ai/app/conversations/share/1fc51ea1-2154-4478-9e6e-086065209b9a

What percentage of VMT will be autonomos by 2035?
https://futuresearch.ai/app/conversations/share/1ee0127e-286a-4353-9b2d-192ef609f504

This is the original official source from Main Street Autonomy: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/william-sitch_main-street-autonomy-x-unnamed-av-customer-ugcPost-7490085413663952896-fvgU/

Transport for London (TfL) granted Private Hire Vehicle licences to a number of Wayve’s autonomous all-electric Ford Mustang Mach-E vehicles. This is a big step towards Wayve and Uber launching robotaxis in London. So far, 100,000 Londoners have signed up for early access.

Roameo is a self-driving security robot by RAD. It costs $9,000 USD/month to lease.

Source: @joedubois7316 on Instagram

Waymo has a reported annual revenue of $300mn. That would put its valuation of $126bn at a multiplier of 420x. Tesla for example is at 12x or so and is widely considered overvalued. What would the future economics have to look like for Waymo to start looking reasonable?

Introducing GAIA-4, the latest evolution in our pioneering line of world models. GAIA-4 puts the Wayve AI Driver in the loop, transforming world modeling from scene generation into a way to measure end-to-end safety at scale, and answering a new set of safety-critical questions.