alt Hacker NewsThey’re not “no human in the loop” driverless. They’re just on autopilot, same as any airliner. We don’t call planes that takeoff and land themselves “pilotless”, because there’s humans in the loop. Waymo must be rather defensive about being called out for merely having autopilot cars, which is weird because that’s rather miraculous in historical terms — but certainly the generic term “autopilot” is a much less distinctive claim to success than “driverless”.
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Autopilot in planes is much closer to cruise control than it is to a Waymo. This is of course the purported rationale behind Tesla's use of the name for their L2 feature. Both require a human operator available and monitoring at all times.
The aeronautic equivalent of Waymo is a fully autonomous UAV. A human might be needed to set high-level goals, but all of the actual flying/driving is done by the machine.
Autopilot in planes does not handle takeoff. Pilots still do that. Traditional autopilot was mostly just to keep the plane flying straight. Capabilities have improved over time, but it still doesn't fly the plane the way Waymo drives itself.
Pilots in a plane on autopilot are never out of the control authority of the plane (by which I mean: "ready to take over at a moment's notice"). Driverless AVs do drive without perpetual eyes-on oversight. The FAA would never allow that for commercial planes.
They are actually "no human in the loop" driverless most of the time.
If an airplane did not have a human inside the airplane and they only "dialed in" for extraordinary events, then yes I do think we'd call them pilotless.
Anyway Waymo, to my knowledge, doesn't use the terms "driverless" nor "autopilot." They claim that they are creating an artificial driver or that their cars are autonomous. There's something driving the car, it's just not a human driver, ergo it's not "driverless."