I didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently.
I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.
> then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes,
This is such a common problem in SF (esp in odd times / from the airport). Waymo has been a lifesaver in these situations.
Used to happen to me constantly trying to go across the bay bridge in either direction when I lived in Oakland. I didn’t even mind the cancelations so much but the worst was when they would try and hide around the block, close enough to say they’ve “arrived” to try to get me marked as a no show and pocket the fee.
They have a cancellation rate metric on their end that they are trying to avoid.
I have similar problems when I dated someone across the bridge.
They also lose a ton of money leaving SF at prime time / etc.
I don't know what it is but in basically every major airport I have struggled to get an uber/lyft. I expect at minimum one cancellation...
In many cities this is solved with the "Uber rank" system, where you simply get in the first car in line, give the driver a code, and then it loads up your journey. Fast and avoids any hassles with drivers rejecting your destination.
Oh they reinvented taxi stands. The code for a pre programmed destination in the app is actually a nice touch.
Wait, shit, that's amazing. How did they do that? I mean, not how did they write the code to match when given the code (obviously the driver should scan the rider's QR code), but how did Uber get laws changed to allow them to do this obvious reimplementation of a taxi stand when it's technically illegal under taxi laws.
Trying to find a specific ride hail driver at the airport seems like a huge waste of time. Just go to the taxi stand.
True, but then you'll be in a taxi.
Same. I assume it depends on the destination
Person wants to go somewhat far from airport? That's more time on this single ride and less time pocketing peak demand money
I once got stuck at the vista point at the north end of Golden Gate, because it turns out it's nearly impossible to approach from the Marin side even though that's closer. So like ~4 drivers in a row tried, got lost on the way and canceled.
Ironically it is the very problem taxis had that allowed Uber and Lyft to grow in popularity. Funny how that works!
Yeah, drivers want to maximize their hourly revenue, and this is frequently at odds with the wants of passengers. For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow, but that's all over now that they're public, and the classic misaligned incentives between drivers and passengers are back in play.
The cars are increasingly beat-up too, another thing we incorrectly believed was Uber being fundamentally different from and better than yellow cabs.
> For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow
You must have very rosy glasses because calling a tired/rude Taxi operator at 1am and not knowing whether your cab was coming in 5 or 20min was a major drag, so you always had to plan for 20min+ and sit patiently without social media to fill the void.
Having 2 ubers cancel before you get a 3rd commitment, within a short time frame, and only at the airport or a busy concert isn't that bad at all. Modern entitlement IMO
> The cars are increasingly beat-up too
Regular taxis never had an anonymous review system and they often just bought old police cars, used by 2 drivers across 2 day/night shifts . Good chance the night driver drank on the job too
Uber requires them to have a newish car which in my experience is usually a decent hybrid. A big improvement IMO (although I do love old crown Vic's from back in the pre Uber days).
If anything the biggest issue is Uber not strictly enforcing reuse of other authorized drivers accounts, usually by immigrants without official company clearance
I frequently have to wait 20-30 minutes for an Uber or Lyft pickup at my apartment in south Brooklyn. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm usually going somewhere like Bay Ridge if I'm ordering an Uber and not somewhere popular. If it's after 1am I just open both Lyft and Uber and book both because at least one of them will just park the car and not come and wait out the timer before it assigns a new driver. I wish the situation is them just canceling, but drivers get penalized for that but apparently don't get penalized for parking at a gas station waiting for you to cancel and pay the fee or sit out the 10 minutes.
One time the guy was just 3 blocks away so I walked to where his icon was, found the car, and banged on his window.
During a weekend trip to Orlando trying to get from our hotel to Disney it took 6 drivers until someone finally came to pick us up.
At least the price is given ahead of time and paid through the app. I once had a cab driver charge my card for $300 when I was borderline blackout drunk in Miami Beach trying to get back to mainland Miami. Didn't use the card reader in the cab either, he used something like a Square reader on his phone. Not exactly sure which one, I didn't piece together what he was doing was fishy until the next afternoon when some blurry memories started coming back and I called my bank.
Book Uber Black and 99% of those issues go away. Have taken more Ubers than I'd like to admit, so I'm comfortable calling this a large enough sample size to qualify as anecdata.
Remember back when Uber was basically 100% Uber Black? That was nice.
Yep, I used it back when it first rolled out in SF in 2010 or 2011. All black crown vics.
Expecting a taxi you've booked to actually pick you up is entitlement?
What kind of terrible service do you put up with for this to seem reasonable to you?
Not sure how old you are but I spent half my adult life dealing with a government regulated Taxi medallion system and the other half using Uber in multiple countries and I’d 100% take “post-VC” Uber over old taxis every single time.
FWIW they both still exist so you’re free to choose, which is the nice thing about competition.
Pre booked airport black car taxis have always been a niche within the wider system for a good reason. Uber’s fluid system is not perfect at every scenario.
53, and I live in Edinburgh, where the taxis are well regulated and if one takes a rider then they have to fulfil it.
Curious why didn't you try Waymo until then? Was it just that it never had a reason to, or was something holding you back?
From my experience, lot of people actively seek out Waymo if it is available.
I don’t live in SF, or any place with Waymo. So I really just hadn’t downloaded the app yet
I took one in SF on a rainy, dark night when I was visiting a year ago. I was pretty impressed. That's not an easy city to navigate even on a sunny day and it did fine.
Uber has over time had to relax a lot of the marketplace management practices that reduce the incidence of experiences like this. Can’t penalize drivers for cancelling / ignoring requests because it starts to erode their argument around drivers being independent contractors. So of course the quality of the product degrades to the point where now it’s going to accelerate the move away from human drivers.
This is what radicalized me. “Uber is 4 minutes away” so I call them, and it tells me it’s trying to find drivers for the next 6-8 minutes, then a driver is selected and they are 11 minutes away, then they sit at their location for 4-5 minutes, then they start moving toward me, then they’re 5 minutes away and cancel and uber changes to finding me a ride. Infuriating.
And that happens everywhere and with every ride app. Here in Mexico we have DiDi and Uber and we have the same crap. It's human nature.
That's why taking a Waymo in LA left me without words... like traveling 10 years in the future. And you dont have to deal with all that crap.
I hope Waymo squashes all the competition.
BTW after getting back from LA I increased my GOOG position. Waymo is so groundbreaking and it is THERE.
Same here. This is the exact reason why I will use Waymo before Uber now. I wanted to support human drivers but they let me down too often. I pick robots now.
I once had a Waymo cancel on me too! I was pretty bummed: dang, let down by a robotaxi too?!?!? To be fair, it has happened only once.
Maybe the last rider puked in it or something?
Seeing a lot of people confused on why drivers do this. What I was told after it happened to me is that I was getting an Uber at the busiest time of the week (Friday afternoon) and going a few miles (I lived near an airport at the time). Others were going much further, so drivers wanted those. But they can't deny the ride, that dings their account. So they do that garbage to annoy everybody instead. Meaning, maybe, your ride just wasn't worth it for them. Robots don't have salaries but also Waymo I guess has no systematic issue that causes such a mess in the first place
If you're playing it via Spotify, it's not your music, it's Spotify's. Waymo is cool technology but I am disappointed at how the app requires a Google account plus access to google play services on an Android phone, and how the streaming music feature requires some kind of protocol that only Spotify and some proprietary Google music app support. All of my music is stored on a personal server that I stream to my phone via Jellyfin, and this does not work in a Waymo.
Yeah it was a little odd how I had to connect things, like I definitely would have preferred a simple Bluetooth connection so I could just play truly whatever is on my phone.
It's not your music unless you own the copyright, even if its on a disc or drive.
The same exact thing happened to me last time I was in San Fran. I wanted uber because it was cheaper. Ended up taking a Waymo for more because no one else would take me.
Not saying this HAS to happen. But I remember when Ubers were clean, quiet, cheap too. I think you are just looking at a product before the enshittification, when they still have to pretend they care about your comfort.
I wonder what the non-subsidized price of a Waymo ride would be.
Lower prices for recommended destinations, ads played during trip, LLM engages the customer.
As I understand it, unless the fleet size dramatically increases, the cost of a ride is completely determined by supply/demand.
How long does it take to recoup the cost of the automobile and all the tech stuff they add to it?
As I understand it, whatever it costs, is strictly less than the market dynamics of providing the ride today.
There is probably some market equilibrium where they could reasonably provide <5 minute pickups for waymo users that would both cover the cost of the automobile and still be less than the price of an uber today.
You'd have to account for the billions of dollars has Google spent since the first Darpa Grand Challenge in 2004.
earlier price is steep because they still have huge RnD cost but if we scale that to one planet, it would been cheaper in the long run
You're not allowed to smoke cigarettes in a Waymo, whereas UberX drivers are allowed to, I believe, off the clock.
I do worry in general about what the enshittification of Waymo will look like, though.
It will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.
I can't guarantee that Waymo won't be enshittified, but one fundamental difference with Uber is that Waymo doesn't need to compete in the labor market for drivers. When the low end of the labor market got red hot in 2023-24, that's when Uber prices climbed rapidly because drivers had other options; Waymo won't have this problem. It won't be affected by other things like ever-rising health care costs or local regulations guaranteeing driver wage floors either.
the same exact problems we had with Taxis. Sigh.
Had so many Boston cabs not show up for rides to the airport growing up. Uber was such a breath of fresh air…until it wasn’t anymore.
Uber, when it was launched, was limos only, and would come (with ETA) when cabs would not. It was expensive.
The story they told is that they were unable to get a ride. That’s not enshittification, that’s simply scammers on the platform not doing their job.
That won’t happen with robots.
They might raise the prices, or clean the cars less frequently, but if it shows up and runs the program, it won’t ever get worse than that.
Uber still is like that if you choose that option. It just defaults to UberX because that's cheaper. I dunno, I've never been in a dirty Uber/Lyft.
But yes, I originally switched to them because Bay Area cabs just will not pick you up if they don't feel like it.
In-Ride Ads coming soon to a car ride near you
coming soon? An ipad strapped to the back of the passenger seat headrest is already here for drivers that choose to do that.
"I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot"
I won't be at all surprised when they start calculating their profits in real-time, if they aren't already, and cancelling or delaying trips that are deemed unprofitable in the moment. They are robots after all.
Waymo already does that through its surge pricing mechanism and limited availability of cars at busy times. And if they really don't want to serve you they'd just not let you book.
No 3rd party arbitrage, much reduced pressure to accept fares they don't want (there's probably still some).
The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers.
If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.
Maybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...
I enjoy my trips to Japan as much as the next guy, but the idea that Japan is a model of great governance is at the very best arguable.
Also, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.
Japan Rail is public-private and many of the other train lines are fully private. "Public" is kind of an empty distinction here, Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.
But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc.
(It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)
> Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.
Huh, funny. This model actually explains American behavior to me greatly. Now I understand why the emphasis on transit in the US is primarily on cost and shelter rather than on quality of service. I always thought it seemed odd that they'd emphasize making things that are not useful free rather than making them as costly as is required to make them useful.
But I was modeling 'useful' as optimal transportation across fare-classes. They are modeling 'useful' as 'compassion to the less well-off'. This also explains opposition to HOT lanes and so on.
I checked (asked ChatGPT) and apparently Google Maps does do this now.
Maybe, but Tokyo, despite being literally tokyo with tokyo's politicians and tokyo's transit system has allowed Waymo to come in: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-japan/
So I guess it's still pretty valuable
I don't see any reason that individual Bay Area cities cannot pass laws against Waymo operating there. Why they would do so is a different matter. I'm hopeful though.
I suspect the reason is that California cities do not, in fact, have control over this aspect of regulation. I won't claim to be a policy expert, but the failed SB-915[0] seems to imply that this is the case. SB-915 was a proposed bill to allow cities to permit or regulate AVs. It seems reasonable that if a law was attempted to be passed to permit cities to regulate AVs and the bill fails even after modification that it was the case that cities were previously unable to regulate AVs and cities remain unable to regulate AVs. Absent greater knowledge on the subject, that is.
0: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
Municipalities are generally preempted from regulating matters of statewide concern. In CA, the state decided to have the CA DMV regulate operational safety and the CPUC regulate the commercial service. Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.
> Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.
It's simpler than that; cities are wholly created and controlled by the State. California could one day decide to close all the cities and centralize and it would be 100% legal. States delegate their authority to cities.
The bar for "statewide concern" is also extremely low. It basically includes whatever the state government choose to pay attention to.
Waymo is testing in Tokyo, so we'll see.
Aren't said fragmented municipalities mostly using CEQA, a state law, to oppose development?
This is super awesome but to set expectations it appears that Waymo is quite limited by fleet capacity in all of its current operating zones, so as a practical matter it may be months or years before it operates in all these areas.
If you're interested in this stuff I highly recommend this podcast, not affiliated with it I genuinely think it's a great source to hear about the behind the scenes of fleet operations to meet demand: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/
(Edit) I prefer using the apple podcast app, here's a direct link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id177...
Their ground ops contractor Transdev has been hiring recently in Sacramento so if any new territory is coming soon, I expect it to be Sacramento.
The bigger blocker isn't the technology or the fleet. It's commercial viability and Luddite and populist politicians.
Looking forward to the highway expansion next. I had to get from mountain view to san francisco yesterday, and waymo was _able_ to do this trip, it was going to take several hours and get routed up el camino real the whole way. Luckily I was standing very close to a caltrain station when I needed the ride, so i just caltrained, and then waymo'd from the SF station to where i needed to be.
BTW, this is the way: Assuming nothing exceptional, with the every-half-hour or better frequency, I use Waymo to get to a Caltrain station, take Caltrain to a nearby stop, and then Waymo from there to destination.
It would be dope if the Waymo app, given that it knows the travel times via Google maps transit and your location, could arrange this for you so you walk right into a waiting Waymo the moment your train arrives, and the whole thing could be routed as one trip in the app.
I love this idea and it’s an environmental win as well.
Highway expansion is already here in many areas! Waymo has been laying the groundwork for this rapid rollout for so many years and it's amazing to see it all come together.
What's the pricing like? Taking an Uber/Lyft all the way from Mountain View to SF is outrageously expensive, I presume Waymo is the same?
Waymo's usually something like 50% more expensive than Lyft in SF, in my experience. But the drivers don't tailgate, have colds, listen to your conversation (AFAIK)...I'll generally opt for Waymo now if I have a choice. The biggest problem I have is that it's usually a longer wait due to the smaller fleet size, but if I'm planning ahead, I'll just book one for a given time, and that takes care of it.
Lyft from MV to SF is like $100 I think? It's definitely not enjoyable but for Bay Area prices it's not ruinously expensive.
You /should/ be able to save by using shared rides, but in practice when I tried the driver was so mad they just dumped me on the side of the road and I had to call and get a refund.
The new Caltrain schedule isn't half bad though, if it came twice as often on the weekends we'd be cooking.
Are you a Waymo tester? I haven't gotten Bay Area access yet despite it being released, and when I checked with support they were just like "oh we lied, it's for trusted testers only."
I dug up my email and found they'd sent me the tester application form like a year ago and I just forgot to fill it out, so maybe they'll let me in sometime.
(Also, the chat claimed the support agent was named Al Pacino. Unless it was a pun on AI and I just couldn't tell with the font.)
My partner downloaded the app and registered last weekend. She already has full peninsula access, but still non-freeway roads.
I'm so excited how much of Southern California is opened - Waymo LAX to SD after midnight (there's no trains or buses from 12 to 6)!!
Dang, is it really worth flying LAX and spending like $600 on round trip car rides, compared to flying non-direct to SAN and having a little layover somewhere?
How do you get home if you do not have transit? What is the typical cost of a cab then?
Last time I was in that situation, it was deliberating whether to spend the night in a hotel, the airport, or the train station until 6am when the trains start back up.
I've never been in that boat but if you don't want an exorbitant Uber, it's probably cheapest to either get a hotel and take Amtrak in the morning or just rent a car. LA and SD are close enough that it often won't accrue any "one-way" fees
$150-$200 if you book ahead.
Jeez. How much is a Waymo gonna be?
I only do LAX if it’s cheaper/ faster than SAN. LAX is so much better connected in terms of direct flights because of the competition the cost/time is often worth it. I’d rather sit in a cab than get stuck in ATL/DTW/SLC.
LAX is better for flights to Asia, I don’t want a layover in SF ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was skeptical about Waymo but then I had the opportunity to ride a Waymo and an Uber the same day. The Waymo trip was uneventful but the uber driver drifted into oncoming traffic then jerked the wheel back and said “whoah,” when I alerted him.
It made me realize that even though Waymo is not at level 5 yet, neither are a lot of Uber drivers…
I’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.
How do you know it isn't already at that price?
Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.
Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p...
Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
> Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile
That’s surprising. I’ve been trying to find data on rates and crowd-sourced data and anecdotes seem closer to $6/mile
You get completely different numbers if you go by overall cost / distance vs taxi pricing models. In the latter, you separate out the flag drop fee (~$10 for Waymo) from the mileage and time process. Here's an experimental Waymo price tracker trying to estimate these numbers:
https://waymo-pricing.streamlit.app/
$2 is a good target for the AV mileage rate. It's actually somewhat high if I put my industry hat on for a second. It's not a good estimate for the number you'll get from doing total_price/distance.
> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business.
And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.
> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.
Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
Yeah 1bd condos with parking in my city are easily 20% more expensive. Something like 1.5-2k a year to rent a spot.
Is it clear that they are decommissioning them when they are done depreciating them?
I’ve never seen a Waymo ride be even close to $2/mile
> Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Waymo costs are immaterial right now. Their cars are not production cars, and they have spent billions on R&D that they can't even hope to recoup with the current fleet.
That being said, $2 is super-low. The IRS rate for car depreciation write-off is 71 cents per mile.
> But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
The true cost of a transit ride in NYC or Seattle is around $20-$30 per ride. People don't actually pay that much because it's heavily subsidized.
Once self-driving matures, it'll also be subsidized and it will completely kill off transit. Maaaaaybe excluding subways in some areas.
This gives me hope that once I'm too old to drive, this tech will reach my, very distant from the US west coast, corner of the world.
And if not Waymo and its car, then perhaps autonomous buses. There's already a shortage of bus drivers in my city and it's not getting any smaller.
Waymo has so far been awesome, can't imagine choosing an Uber/Lyft over a Waymo when both are available options. I wonder how much they are bottlenecked by vehicle production though.
There's a huge difference between a robot who accepts all rides, and a two sided market as in the ride hailing apps. Without the factor of drivers picking their rides, the relatively small Waymo fleet has an outsize impact. The whole fleet is available 24/7/365. I would bet that Waymos rule the night.
The map area for the Southern California service area is absolutely massive.
Without traffic, at highway speeds, it would take you almost four hours to travel from the North end to the South end.
So when will they be available for commercial rides? Can't wait to waymo from SF to Berkeley!
I rode in one of these in Phoenix in June, loved the experience! Had to go to a pharmacy so purposely picked one a half hour across the city so I could just watch the car perform. Felt like the future (though it did glitch once). Made a sudden turn off the road into a parking lot, did a lap of the outside of the parking lot, and exited back onto the same road to continue on. Must have thought something was blocking the road and made a detour around it? Other than that it seemed pretty flawless.
My general experience with Waymos and safety is that while they are generally quite safe and communicative drivers (They have a pedestrian yeild indicator that should be required by law) they tend to create safety issues because people drive stupidly around them. A lot of SF drivers seem to see them, think I know better, and then proceed to do something dumb.
I'm not really sure how to fix this problem.
Also if any Waymo engineers are reading this please make the pedestrian yeild indicator icon visible on the front of the LIDAR. In narrow streets the front is much more visible to pedestrians than the sides as the LIDAR is pretty far back on the car.
Was curious on the Zeekr RT. Interesting to see it’s owned by Geely.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/waymo-zeekr-rt-autonomous-ev...
What is the dark spot on the maps? Was that the current and then the less dark is the expansion?
Correct.
First used Waymo in Phoenix. It was a decent experience. The funny thing was watching it handle parallel parking. I mentioned it to the wife - self driving with parkinsons.
This last weekend, we were in the city (San Francisco) and literally drove by a Waymo trying to park and the wife started laughing - "you are right".
Which is weird because the parallel park on my Audi is smoother and faster than me.
It's been a long time coming, but Waymo is doing it. Waymo is scaleable and on the march! They've been announcing plans to roll out in new cities every month or 2 all year, and by the end of 2026 they'll be testing or offering the public rides over 30 metropolitan areas.
I'm most curious to see how they do in the winter city of Minneapolis over the next several months.
I took my first Waymo in SF this week. As a midwestern, freezing weather was my immediate first thought.
yeah - me too
Competition does encourage action. Glad Tesla started rolling out their robotaxies.
Are you suggesting that Waymo is responding to Tesla? My reading it Waymo was always on a schedule and Tesla wasn't a factor
First slowly and then suddenly.
Tesla is not competition to Waymo.
There are 10 other companies that are currently testing without a driver. Those are competition.
Tesla so far is a gimmick of self-driving with a safety driver that takes over once in a while. That's where Waymo was more than 5 years ago.
The recent version of FSD in my Tesla is pretty amazing. Press "Start FSD" when in my driveway, and 20 minutes later it arrives at my destination and parks, without any input from me the entire time. I was skeptical too about FSD for a while but I'm starting to believe. These days I pretty much only disengage it when I'm impatient that it's being too polite. Unsupervised isn't far off!
You're describing the 99% problem—getting 99% there is relatively easy, but once you do, you find out that you have the remaining 99% of work left to do.
This illusion is partially why Musk has been promising self-driving to be available at the end of $current_year+1 for years.
It's cool your car can drive itself. Now do it again, but fall asleep at the wheel. What's that? You're not willing to? That's exactly the core of the issue—it's not sufficient for the car to be able to drive itself most of the time, it must do so safely every single time, no matter what.
I hope so. Similarly I only disengage when I want to go faster or forget to set the destination.
Too bad the owners of FSD can't decide that they want unsupervised. In an earlier or different world that would be possible.
the issue is that your Tesla cannot be "too far off" as you seem to indicate. it needs to be right absolutely every single time.
One successful ride is easy. 10 successful rides is still easy.
100k successful rides without a serious incident? Way more difficult.
And that's why those anecdotal reports over a couple ride mean absolutely nothing
One successful ride on one route is not dispositive
The dancing robots are going to drive them.
Good idea, robots don’t fall asleep.
Unless Waymo has started offering vaporware, Tesla is not the competition.
This is so cool to see. Saw tons of Waymo in LA/Santa Monica area when I was there in October. Very excited to see them expand basically all through SoCal!
This means longer driving in highways. Not sure if this is safe. have been developing this tech for a long time and highway speeds are dangerous.
Do the driving tests cover what you're supposed to do if you hit a Waymo or one hits you? I assume the cops are instructed just to ignore them?
This is huge. Very curious how this affects wait times. If you're in SF and 10% of the fleet is in Marin, are you waiting longer?
I believe that in 20 years there will be cities (probably not in America) where all cars are autonomous. There will be no red lights, no parking lots, less congestion, fewer accidents.
> There will be no red lights, no parking lots, less congestion, fewer accidents.
In 20 years? Here's a 7 year old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
Also, you forgot to mention the silence, nearly zero cost infrastructure, nearly zero environmental impact, and immense population-wide health benefits—and therefore healthcare cost savings.
why is there an approved map? like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere. Why would one county be allowed waymos but not another.
I get that they might not be approved in the high sierras but just make that a deny list not allow list. Or even just deny the specific conditions you're worried about (snow).
There's an approved map because the approval process requires the manufacturer to specify both areas and conditions they are applying for, and documents supporting that the vehicle is ready to be operated autonomously in those areas and conditions (which doesn't just include technical readiness, but also administrative readiness in the form of things like a law enforcement interaction plan, etc.)
> like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere.
Because “everywhere” isn't a uniform domain (Waymo is kind of way out in one tail of the distribution in terms of both the geographical range and range of conditions they have applied for and been approved to operate in, other AV manufacturers are in much tinier zones, and narrow road/weather conditions.) And because for some AV manufacturers (if there is one that can demonstrate they don't need this, they'd probably have an easier lift getting broader approvals) part of readiness to deploy (or test) in an area is detailed, manufacturer specific mapping/surveying of the roads.
My question is why they even have to apply for specific areas to begin with? Just approve the manufacturer for certain conditions and let them operate wherever they want.
> administrative readiness in the form of things like a law enforcement interaction plan
I suspect it's limited by what the request was for. Waymo has to create the high res map before they can offer service.
Right but what does that have to do with the DMV. Waymo should apply for certain weather conditions and then the DMV says yes or no, then they stay the hell out of the way. Let waymo operate whereever they want and expand however they see fit and whenever they feel ready.
Like the DMV is actually checking Waymos map of a new area is good to go or not. Its just administrative burden.
I think laypeople vastly overestimate how much the maps are a bottleneck compared to boring things like infrastructure to charge, people to clean the vehicles, integrating with local governments to allow things like disabling Pickup/Dropoff in certain areas at certain times, etc.
Even with local partners that all takes a lot of time.
More of the state is not allowed than is... at least by geography.
Also, there's a practical element. If I have to specify where they can't go, the default position is they can go anywhere... if I inadvertently leave an area out of my black-list where it really ought to exist: the default is "permission granted". With a white-list, the worst case is a forgotten or neglected area can't be operated in as a default and the AV provider will have an interest in correcting.
But also politics. It's a very different message to say we're going to white-list a given AV operator to exist in different areas vs. black-listing them from certain areas.
No santa cruz eh?
It's disappointing that where I live is politically difficult and waymo won't come anytime soon.
Why not say where you are?
Probably one of the political interest group owned cities like nyc
“Map increase?” Is that hackernewsish for “larger area”?
I understand editing for space but some of the edited titles lately have been really confusingly worded.
Whoah, Waymo would be able to take one from Mountain View to Napa. (I get why Cupertino is excluded. But. Oof. Come on.)
why?`
Apple is based in Cupertino. And Apple once had self-driving car ambitions.
Cupertino is in there, no?
It appears not to be. Here are the ones in Santa Clara County:
- Milpitas
- Mountain View
- Palo Alto Santa
- San Jose
- Sunnyvale
- Unincorporated Area (Lexington Hills area, overlapping Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties)
I don't know why it says "Palo Alto Santa"
Edit: I guess it's "Palo Alto Santa" to disambiguate between Palo Alto, which is in Santa Clara County, and East Palo Alto, which is in San Mateo County (BTW the westmost point of East Palo Alto is east of the westmost point of Palo Alto, but the eastmost point of East Palo Alto is not east of the eastmost point of Palo Alto).
It looks like the map includes north of 280, so you can use it to go to Gamba Karaoke and Tea Era. And really, what else could you need from Cupertino?
It might be that you can start a trip in one of the cities, but you can travel out of the city to anywhere in the highlighted area.
Looking at the city limits, I don't understand why East Palo Alto isn't called North Palo Alto instead.
I always assumed it was because San Francisco is "North", and East Palo Alto is on the "East" side of highway 101.
It's more East than North of El Palo Alto - the tree Palo Alto is named after.
Personally, I can’t wait to be killed by a cold, uncaring robot. Let’s goooo
Sounds preferable to being killed by a road raging human driver. To me. Preferences differ, I suppose.