u/diplomat33

Highlights

• Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa and Wayve co-founder and CEO Alex Kendall will discuss how artificial intelligence can make mobility safer, simpler and more intuitive
• Visitors can experience hands-free, door-to-door supervised automated driving (Level 2++) in Fiat 500e and Maserati Grecale development vehicles
• The Wayve AI Driver integrated with STLA AutoDrive demonstrates how one AI driving foundation can scale across multiple Stellantis vehicles, platforms and configurations — from the Jeep® Grand Cherokee shown at Stellantis Investor Day to the Fiat 500e and Maserati Grecale

• Hyundai Motor Co. will start delivering electric Ioniq 5 SUVs to Waymo to serve as robotaxis on the company’s ride-hailing platform, the automaker announced at its Aug. 26 investor day event.
• The vehicles will enable the international expansion of robotaxi services as early as 2027 and will be built at the Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America in Georgia using a local supply chain. The Waymo robotaxis will leverage the automaker’s expertise in manufacturing, design, software and finance, per the release. 
• Hyundai will also make use of robotaxi-ready Ioniq 5 SUVs as part of its Motional joint venture, which plans to deploy the vehicles later this year as fully driverless.

OpenAI VP Peter Welinder posted this on X: "Affordable Level 5 self-driving requires AGI and is still at least 5-10 years away. First you need multimodal multiplexed AGI, then you need real-time inference, then on an energy-efficient, low-cost edge chip. Many steps left."

Source: https://x.com/npew/status/2093716574922535092

Personally, I don't agree that you need AGI for L5. But I guess it depends how you define AGI. World models, like what Waymo uses, trained on tons of driving data, are getting better and better every year and showing good signs of eventually getting to L5 imo. I don't consider these world models to be AGI but maybe he does.

He does condition his statement by saying "affordable" L5. So he is not just talking about AI capable of driving everywhere, but also hardware that is energy efficient and low cost. I would agree that we still have some ways to go before AVs are not just capable of driving everywhere but also energy efficient and affordable. But costs are coming down and chips are becoming more powerful and more efficient every year. So I do think we will eventually get to world models big enough and trained well enough that they can handle all driving safely (functionally L5) and be cheap and powerful enough. How many years it will take is hard to say. These types of predictions are always wrong.

1. Multimodal sensors are indispensable

2. HD maps are a powerful "prior"

3. Fewer, larger models are better

4. You can't build trust with a "black box"

5. Closed-loop simulation reveals more edge cases

6. Every great Driver needs a great Critic

7. Vision language Models improve scene reasoning

8. Our holistic approach shows AI is only as effective as the governance that evaluates it

9. A data flywheel enables continuous improvement

10. There is no substitute for fully autonomous experience

"Today, we are excited to announce that Waymo is laying the groundwork for our fully autonomous ride hailing service in Munich, Germany.

In the coming weeks, you’ll start to see Waymo vehicles on the streets of Munich where we’ll begin driving manually across the city. We are taking a rigorous, phased approach that starts with high-definition mapping of local street networks and testing with trained autonomous specialists behind the wheel. This validation period will ensure the Waymo Driver adapts seamlessly to Munich’s distinct driving conditions before we aim to open commercial ride-hailing to the public towards the end of 2027."

Gemini in Waymo is now available to all riders in the Ojai.

Engage with Google Gemini to:

Adjust the AC, seatsand cabin lights

Skip the song you’re listening to or turn up the volume A

sk about the city you’re traveling through

See trip information including destination and ETA

"Uber, Verne and Pony AI today announced the launch of autonomous rides on the Uber app in Zagreb, marking the first time riders in Europe can book an AV with Uber.

From today, riders can book an autonomous ride within key areas of Zagreb, including the city centre, operating between 07:00 and 21:00, with service availability and geographic coverage set to expand over time. At launch, a licensed operator will be on-board monitoring behind the wheel, as part of our phased introduction, before fully driverless operations begin in the future.

The new service brings together Pony.ai’s autonomous driving technology, Verne’s service ecosystem and operational framework, and Uber’s global mobility platform. Under this model, Pony.ai provides its autonomous driving solution; Verne acts as fleet owner and service operator; and Uber integrates the service into its ride-hailing network and delivers the rider experience via its app."

"New look, same Waymo. The Ojai is officially on the road in SF, PHX, and LA for all riders. With tons of legroom and new features to make the space your own, it's like your home away from home."

"Big news for the Golden State — we have received the CPUC’s approval to expand our autonomous ride-hailing service across the SF Bay Area and LA, and bring our service to Sacramento and San Diego.Expansion will be gradual and guided by our safety framework. We look forward to bringing the same mobility and safety benefits millions of Californians already enjoy to more communities, keeping local officials and residents informed every step of the way."

"We are bringing robotaxis to the streets of Japan! By the end of 2026, riders in Tokyo will be able to experience the next generation of mobility right from the Uber app. We’re teaming up with u/TAXI_HINOMARU, u/NissanMotor, and u/wayve_ai to launch our autonomous vehicle pilot. Together, we’re ready to transform how people move around one of the world's most dynamic cities!"

Source: https://x.com/Uber/status/2087919862689792114

Some key parts on how they evaluate safety:

CIF is our primary safety risk metric. Similar to other risk frameworks, Zoox assesses safety risk along two dimensions: severity and likelihood. The severity dimension breaks out into three levels: Collision, Injury (MAIS1+¹), and Fatality. The likelihood dimension (CIF) captures how often events are predicted to occur at each severity level, measured by miles per event (see image below). The CIF metric accounts for harm to any party involved in a collision, including Zoox vehicle occupants, vulnerable road users (VRUs), such as pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists, and the occupants of other vehicles. 

The CIF safety targets are determined by comparison to published human driving collision data (i.e., human benchmark). Zoox sets our safety target to be significantly safer than the human benchmark. This means that our robotaxis need to be significantly safer than human drivers before they are cleared to operate on public roads. This target-setting approach ensures the company's internal safety goals are grounded in real-world human data, customized to the target ODD, and reflect our ambition to be meaningfully safer than human drivers. 

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

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.