Shrivastava: Waymo slows down on steep San Francisco hills for comfort
Shweta Shrivastava · Product lessons from Waymo | Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco) · Apr 9, 2023 · at 15:05
Shweta Shrivastava, Senior Director of Product Management at Waymo, discusses tuning autonomous driving behaviors to improve rider trust and comfort.
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“We realized that for driving in the, in sort of the slopes or the gradients you know, the street with inclines in, in San Francisco, there are many of those, right? The human brain is trained to, or the human drivers are sort of, you know, subconsciously, they slow down when they go downhill on those slopes, right? The autonomous vehicle doesn't necessarily have to do that, right? If it's safe and if it's staying below the speed limit, but we learned that this is the, this is a more natural driving experience, right? And this is what our riders would also expect in terms of the experience. So that's something that, that we then, you know, modified the behavior on.”
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