The ambiguity in the title is going to get a lot of the "skeptics" who have remained in denial about this to assume it's some kind of admission that they haven't been autonomous this whole time.
It's weird how many people there are like that still.
But what they mean is that they are putting the new release into production (without backup drivers). They have been fully autonomous for many years.
Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...
Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself:
Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles
Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. As the Waymo Driver waits for input from fleet response, and even after receiving it, the Waymo Driver continues using available information to inform its decisions. This is important because, given the dynamic conditions on the road, the environment around the car can change, which either remedies the situation or influences how the Waymo Driver should proceed. In fact, the vast majority of such situations are resolved, without assistance, by the Waymo Driver.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
In other words, much like Waymo tries to put a nice spin on it, their cars are not fully autonomous and despite the wording of the article above, they are not "operating a fully autonomous service". Nor can the Waymo Driver "confidently navigate the "long tail" of one-in-a-million events" it "regularly encounter[s] when driving millions of miles a week".
They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality.
1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car
2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs some technician to come to get a drink unstuck does it make sense to get up and arms about how it's not "fully automated" or whatever? In all contexts why people would care (eg. unit economics, safety, customer experience), there's no meaningful difference between 99% autonomous and 100% autonomous.
Come on, you know what the fixation is. Nothing riles up the Tesla fanboys like the clear unambiguous fact that Waymo is doing 1000x better at “full self driving” than Tesla ever has.
They don’t have remote drivers. Your own link says that.
> The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times.
…
> The Waymo Driver evaluates the input from fleet response and independently remains in control of driving.
> one-in-a-million events
So we just made driving a million times more efficient for human labor input
> They have been fully autonomous for many years.
In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?
Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.
They cannot take over. They can give advice in unusual circumstances.
I don't have to argue about Tesla or what other people are saying about Tesla.
These days they can’t take over, but they sure could years back.