Level 4 Autonomous Driving Is Going Great
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level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Level 4 Autonomous Driving Is Going Great
@level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
48 followers 15 following 180 posts
Inspired by the amazing @web3isgoinggreat.com, this account will document companies claiming they're achieving level 4 autonomous driving

Urban traffic is a human conversation, not a computer protocol.

The revolution will not be on autopilot.


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level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Waymo hits car in Austin. from reddit.

www.reddit.com/r/Austin/com...
October 28, 2025 at 7:06 AM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
@aniccia.bsky.social Breaking story in LA right now, Waymo
may have driven through a sanctioned street closure for a skateboarding event, prompting the skaters to
decorate it. A skater and a Waymo may have collided.
October 26, 2025 at 2:37 AM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
The ride will cost you.

The vomit is free.

www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/Eg...
First Negative Experience I’ve been trying Waymo and have enjoyed the experience until yesterday. To start it was already a 17 min wait time which was the longest I’ve waited before but I was okay with that. When the Waymo arrived, the doors and inside had vomit on it. I wasn’t irritated and just wanted a replacement vehicle when I contacted support. I was helped and waited another 19 mins just to get the same Waymo with vomit everywhere. I got pissed when I was told the vehicle was already reviewed and deemed good to go.
May 28, 2025 at 5:12 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
LOL
Almost every Waymo I get in these days is dirty I was an early adopter of Waymo and have always chosen it as my preferred ride share option. Recently I’ve found that almost every car I get in is dirty, whether it’s food crumbs, empty packaging, clothing, pills/ candy spilled all over the seat, etc It’s a hassle when I’m going somewhere and don’t want to sit in a pile of trash, so I have to call support and order a new car. Recently I’ve been more likely to order an uber to avoid the issue all together. Not sure what the solution is (maybe higher fines for leaving a car messy?) but wondering if anyone else has been running into this more often recently?
May 16, 2025 at 7:38 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
"Silicon Valley Braces for Chaos" by @matteowong.bsky.social

True believers who think transformer models can leap the barrier of meaning are poised to destroy massive amounts of wealth.
On a wednesday morning last month, I thought, just for a second, that AI was going to kill me. I had hailed a self-driving Waymo to bring me to a hacker house in Nob Hill, San Francisco. Just a few blocks from arrival, the car lurched toward the other lane—which was, thankfully, empty—and immediately jerked back.
May 15, 2025 at 4:07 AM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/Z8...
April 13, 2025 at 6:41 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
No details on costs or profitability of Baidu's robotaxi business. Accident and incident data is hard to
come by.

www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/ne...
Robotaxi arm Apollo Go also hit a new milestone, with the latest autonomous vehicles operating on public roads across multiple cities in China, Li said. Apollo Go provided 988K rides in the quarter, up 20% compared to a year ago, with Baidu noting that its fully driverless vehicles accounted for over 70% of its nationwide total for the three-month period, which increased to 80% in October. For comparison, Google's Waymo is providing 150,000 driverless rides per week, as per its latest update, equivalent to 1.8 million rides for a quarter.
November 21, 2024 at 3:37 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Waymo remote support, again, cannot return items to passenger seconds after robot leaves.

We've seen this with luggage, now with a wallet.

www.reddit.com/r/waymo/s/sn...
Waymo Effectively Stole my Wallet I got a Waymo home Halloween night. I left my wallet in the car and realized it not 30 seconds after I closed the door. I reached for the handle but the car drove away. I immediately called customer support and asked them to turn the car around (I could still see it down the street). He told me the car was "too far" and would have to be returned to dispatch and searched, which should take no more than 20 minutes and they would reach out. Stupidly, I accepted this. Waited by the phone for over an hour and nothing. Sent an email to support, turned off my cards, turned on my phone ringer, and went to bed. I remembered in the morning my wallet had a tracker and checked it. I traced it down to a different side of town and found the tracker discarded on the street, no wallet. I saw the history and that my wallet had been driven all across town before some opportunistic b*stard likely took it. Waymo emailed me TWO FULL DAYS later saying they checked the car and didn't find it (obviously). I emailed them again and explained the situation. I don't know why, maybe hoping for a credit or even just being told they'll do better. They unempathetic sent one sentence telling me I could file a police report. Absolutely atrocious service.
November 3, 2024 at 11:13 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
The revolution will not be on autopilot.
The Tank Man, Tienamen Square, 1989 The Muni Woman, giving the finger to a Waymo blocking the Muni tracks, SF, 2023
November 1, 2024 at 5:31 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
You think Waymos get stuck on Muni doors? Wait until this thing double-parks next to one.
A Tesla robotaxi with two gull-wing doors that seem to make the car much wider than it is long when they are open.
October 11, 2024 at 3:54 AM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Faced with a service that eats cash and has yet to be profitable, Chinese robotaxi companies look to Middle East money to stay afloat by expanding overseas

techcrunch.com/2024/10/09/b...
Chinese AV companies have dealt with roadblocks domestically – they’re facing the perfect storm of a high capital expenditure business model with too much competition and dwindling foreign investment. Countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with their endless oil money and smart city goals, have already been the target of Baidu competitors Pony.ai and WeRide.
October 9, 2024 at 5:38 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
On a sweltering SF night, entire crowd becomes unpaid Waymo support as remotely-operated Waymo gets stuck on a Muni bus door.

sfstandard.com/2024/10/06/s...
People try to help a Muni bus close its doors, which got stuck on a Waymo robotaxi wending its way through the crowds on Divisadero Street. | Source:Jason Henry for The Standard https://sfstandard.com/2024/10/06/san-francisco-heatwave-turns-into-steamy-night-in-the-city/
October 7, 2024 at 2:05 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
The models driving robotaxis are hardcoded rules plus neural nets for recognizing features in the world. They don't understand meaning. So, if a robotaxi's software encounters something it's never seen, it can't fall back on a shared world model with other people.

www.tiktok.com/@ilmirnasret...
Waymo taxi at a T intersection encounters traffic backed up in a turning lane in front of it and turns left, into traffic, in the right lane.
August 11, 2024 at 11:11 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
This is what we mean when we say traffic is a conversation, not a protocol.

If a human driver encounters yellow emergency tape, and they've never seen it, they understand the intended meaning.

Waymo does not.

A safety officer cannot interact with the vehicle.

www.tiktok.com/@chach_626/v...
A public safety officer who doesn't know how to handle a Waymo robotaxi that has crashed through yellow caution tape.
August 11, 2024 at 10:51 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
A tweet from Brian Wilt with a photo of a dozens and a half temporary street signs, including stop here signs, no turn signs, lane ends signs, and others, stored in front of a Jersey barrier in the breakdown lane. The Waymo was approaching this random collection of signs. Tweet reads, "The Waymo got a little confused driving by this today lol"
July 23, 2024 at 4:32 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
NTV says the quiet part out loud: Level 4 is a remote-operation technology, not autonomous operation technology.

www.ntv.co.jp/englishnews/...
For the time being, staff will be aboard the bus in case of emergencies. Operators intend to transition to remote support where one staff member will be able to monitor multiple self-driving vehicles.
July 19, 2024 at 6:10 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
"Having a passenger present could improve safety for drivers in semi-autonomous cars"

Well, you'll need the gig to make car payments, I suppose?

www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/racf-pa...
A simulator study shows the presence of a passenger can improve drivers’ focus on the road and help them to decide when manual control is needed in self-driving vehicles, but taking back control is still difficult.
July 13, 2024 at 2:19 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Gatik announces Level 4 deal with Isuzu.

Can you call it Level 4 when Gatik's trucks do this?

www.electronicdesign.com/markets/auto...
Given that Gatik vehicles carry goods, and not people, the company is able to optimize the route for safety while balancing the efficiency needed to reliably deliver on-time for its customers. The company avoids school zones and other areas of high pedestrian traffic such as hospitals or mid-block crossing locations. It can make time-of-day adjustments, when necessary, to the routes where there are known peaks in pedestrian/bicyclist/other vulnerable roadway user activity. It’s also able to avoid areas containing emergency services, like police and fire stations, and tailor these decisions to local data as observed in real-time.
July 12, 2024 at 6:41 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Brad Templeton is right about Tesla FSD's readiness. He overstates the importance of safety drivers at Waymo and others; they've probably just made the safety drivers remote operators, like Cruise did.

All these services must publish auditable numbers on remote support, including remote driving.
Tesla can produce a new hardware platform quickly, perhaps better than any car company because of their advanced software and hardware processes. What they don’t have, however, is robotaxi software that’s remotely close to being released in production. Today they offer a package known as “Supervised Full Self Driving” which is much more supervised than it is self-driving, and they’ve been subject to lawsuits and investigations over the use of self-driving in the name. (In reality, if you bought the system, as I did, it was made quite clear you were paying to get a self-driving system someday in the future, and a chance to try out the early prototype version under supervision, but the rhetoric of Tesla’s CEO and other factors led some members of the public to think otherwise.) In 2019, Waymo first deployed their robotaxis with no safety driver inside. They had reached that bet-your-life reliability level on the easy streets of Chandler, AZ. It’s 5 years later and they still aren’t in production, though. They did take a big step earlier this month by opening up their San Francisco service to the general public. But it’s still a pilot project, not ready to be a business, not ready to take over the business from companies like Uber, which is a commonly expected first step. This suggests that even when Tesla does reach “bet your life” level safety, they still are at least 5 years, if not more, from going into production, unless they’re a lot smarter than Waymo and the others. It is true that the second mover can often go faster, but there’s still years of work to be done.
July 12, 2024 at 5:42 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
shot, chaser

If these AI systems are so capable, why this exclusion?

www.autoweek.com/news/a606582...
"AEB systems must be able to detect pedestrians in daylight and in darkness, and apply the brakes automatically at up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected. But the planned rule is silent in regard to detecting bicyclists, for instance, or other objects and vehicles that might not fit into the car or pedestrian category.
July 10, 2024 at 4:43 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Will AI revolutionize the transportation market anytime soon?

No, says MIT Institute Professor of Economics Daron Acemoglu in a recent report from Goldman Sachs, drawing doubt on why we're investing $1Tn in AI.

www.goldmansachs.com/intelligence...
My prior guess, even before looking at the data, was that the number of tasks that AI will impact in the short run would not be massive. Many tasks that humans currently perform, for example in the areas of transportation, manufacturing, mining, etc., are multifaceted and require real-world interaction, which AI won’t be able to materially improve anytime soon. So, the largest impacts of the technology in the coming years will most likely revolve around pure mental tasks, which are non-trivial in number and size but not huge, either.
July 9, 2024 at 7:10 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Your reminder that even robotic vehicles on faraway planets are semi-autonomous.

robotics.jpl.nasa.gov/media/docume...
The MER mission achieves planetary surface exploration using a human-robot system that operates in a semi-autonomous fashion [1-3]. That is, it incorporates remote planning, command sequencing and visualization of rover activity sequences and related data products by an Earth- based science-engineering team, all under extreme time delay with limited, intermittent communication afforded by daily uplink and downlink cycles of deep space networks. As the principal robotic part of this semi-autonomous system, the rovers perform autonomous execution of a daily sequence of commands. Autonomous navigation is commanded by specifying explicit surface coordinates to be reached using onboard sensing, perception, motion planning and execution. Mission operators provide a global path plan in the form of a series of waypoints that is executed and evaluated onboard each rover. Often, the goal waypoint at the furthest extent of a long traverse is beyond the reliable field of view of the rovers’ mast..
July 9, 2024 at 2:39 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition, says interviews with cyclists show underreporting of incidents raises questions about autonomous driving safety

www.yahoo.com/news/cyclist...
Only 17 complaints involved bicyclists or bike lane disruptions. But interviews with cyclists suggest the DMV complaints represent a fraction of bikers’ negative interactions with self-driving vehicles. And while most of the complaints describe relatively minor incidents, they raise questions about corporate boasts that the cars are safer than human drivers, said Christopher White, executive director of the San Francisco Bike Coalition.
July 8, 2024 at 9:34 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
A flat skateboard-like device for towing cars into parking spots is advertised as using Level 4 autonomy. "Parkie" from HL Mando in Korea was the darling of CES 2024 and is now in a trial at Inchon International Airport.

www.newsarticleinsiders.com/news/article...
What looks like a folded folding table on some sort of rollers appears to be pulling a blue auto through a lane in a crowded parking lot. It's a Parkie. Viewed from about 2 o'clock from the Parkie's POV, elevated in line with the top of the car's hood, oriented downward towards the Parkie. Photo from https://www.wardsauto.com/autonomous-adas/autonomous-car-parking-robot-an-early-ces-winner
July 7, 2024 at 5:55 PM
level4isgoinggreat.bsky.social
$100B spent on autonomous vehicle technology, but we still don't know its utility vs current equivalents. Had that $100B have been invested in transportation access, vision zero, increased mass transit, we know the benefits would have been.

www.msn.com/en-us/autos/...
When asked, Dr. Mears questioned the ultimate purpose of autonomous driving technology in a chat with SlashGear. "What problem is being solved by having a car drive itself rather than being guided by a human operator?" Dr. Mears asked. "What benefit does one get from being able to do something else while the car drives her/him somewhere? One more email sent? One more Wordle solved? Does that really create enough of a benefit to offset the billions of dollars of investment that would be required to realize such systems? I am doubtful." Dr. Mears went on to recognize one important possible use of autonomous driving technology but pointed out that it is a need already met by an already-existing service. "Another potential benefit is access to mobility for those that otherwise could not drive somewhere, such as vision-challenged people," Dr. Mears noted. "But now we have ride-share services that can fulfill that need. So again, the main question is: What problem(s) would be solved with full autonomy that can't be solved otherwise?"
July 4, 2024 at 3:44 PM