by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-02-13 15:06:07+00:00
Who said Waymo Driver is "99% autonomous"? You did. I didn't. If I thought it is, I wouldn't mind calling it "fuly autonomous". But I don't think it's "99% autonomous", otherwise it wouldn't need remote safety drivers.

To clarify, how Waymo's remote safety drivers operate is that they are called to make decisions that the Waymo Driver can't make, when it gets in situations that are not covered by its training. Here's the relevant text from further down the Waymo blog post:

In the most ambiguous situations, the Waymo Driver takes the lead, initiating requests through fleet response to optimize the driving path. Fleet response can influence the Waymo Driver's path, whether indirectly through indicating lane closures, explicitly requesting the AV use a particular lane, or, in the most complex scenarios, explicitly proposing a path for the vehicle to consider. The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving. This collaboration enhances the rider experience by efficiently guiding them to their destinations.

Note the wording "The Waymo Driver ... remains in control of driving". That has a very precise meaning.

In plain English, the Waymo Driver asks a human to choose a destination for it and then it autonomously follows a path to that destination. That's autonomous path planning, but not autonomous navigation. Path planning is common as sparrows [1] and it's certainly not enough to qualify a system as "fully autonomous", despite Waymo's marketing copy to the contrary.

If Waymo Driver was "fully autonomous" even to the "99%" extent you say I'm quibbling about (I'm not) then it would be capable of autonomous navigation without any support from humans. If it didn't manage to do it right all the time we'd say it has some error, not that it's not fully autonomous. Like when a blender fails to blend my bastard sword, I won't say the blander can't blend, I'll just say it can't blend my bastard sword.

Btw I deliberately left the first sentence in the quote above where Waymo says "the Waymo Driver takes the lead" just in case leaving it out created the impression I'm trying to downplay the system's capabilities. It's rather the other way around. "Takes the lead" is a completely useless anthropomorphizing of an automated system made in order to create an impression of capabilities that the system doesn't have. Most likely the procedure that "takes the lead" is a hand-coded routine that calls home when some set of variables crosses a threshold. More like a tripwire than "takes the lead".

The Waymo Driver is not "fully autonomous". It's an impressively well-functioning and safe system, to the extent we can trust the scant data shared by Waymo, which we can't totally because that data is itself only shared for the purpose of marketing, but nobody needs to accept Waymo's press releases as reality.

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[1] Really. There's dozens upon dozens of different approaches. I'm on my other computer and I don't have access to my papers-to-read folder but there's just one survey I often quote that lists three different categories each with many sub-categories. It's not so much an open problem as one where it's difficult to choose a solution, just because there are so many around. One way or another, no system is "fully autonomous" just because it can autonomously follow a path between points A and B, while avoiding obstacles. I even worked on one myself.