my friend bought a ride from a waymo for shits and giggles. i was actually intrigued about how the car made decisions on its own and sorta nerd sniped me to learn more about machine learning (not llms).
there’s probably some evil thing the self driving car companies are doing that im not aware of, but I was just interested in the ML aspect.
Ooh, I get to geek out for a bit!
I helped a friend get into waymo as an employee when it was still staff-only/non-public, and later got to attend a private event where I could explore the regional hq building freely, view the cars, the hardware that makes them go, the nav system of all the cars in the region in real-time, see video feeds and diagnostics in real-time, ride in a ‘beta’ style vehicle with wires and sensors very much visible, ask questions directly to technicians regarding details about the software, cameras, lidar, emergency situations… The whole nine yards. I have also been in a public vehicle that was able to override the geofencing and ‘guardrails’ for a couple trips as well, and see how that works, how the car communicates with hq when that happens (‘why are you doing this, is everything okay, etc’). Except for someone currently or formerly employed by waymo, I am possibly one of the most informed people about how it all works. Especially the Lexus and Chrysler vehicles, since I got special access to those.
That out of the way, you are correct. They run the cars with a safety driver while training/feeding data back to the regional hq while in a new area, so you might see cars with a person at the wheel (and possibly a passenger, sometimes with a laptop) while the car drives around, not stopping for passengers. They note issues and areas for potential problems, log many miles along the same roads at different times of day for an entire area, and will do this with multiple vehicles for 6-12 months, before having enough data, runs, low incident occurance, and high confidence before allowing testers to ride; my last information was that they still retain the safety drivers for several additional months, before letting the cars go ‘solo’ and open the area to the public.
The friend has moved to greener pastures but this data is between '15 and '23, I believe. I am signed up for the tester program but the service is not yet in my home area; I’m a few miles outside their current zone for my region. I’ll be in the service area this winter though, and am planning on taking a couple rides and refreshing myself on the current situation for the general public.