Miami: 57 in. (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset...
SF: 25 in. (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset...)
Phoenix: 7 in. (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset...)
As in, zero visibility for 15-30 minutes, then it's past.
So if it can handle Miami tropical rain, it should be okay with all sorts of normal rain.
Out of curiosity, what's Waymo's current production sensor suite mix? I'd assume lidar and radar would also be very unhappy with the surrounding space suddenly being ~10%(?) liquid water droplets.
I reckon it’d feel quite heavy.
Which seems oddly close (in magnitude) to Earth gravitational acceleration (9.8 m/s^2).
Weird!
[1] https://ouster.com/insights/blog/lidar-vs-camera-comparison-...
I feel like a lot of "How well does it handle rain?" comes down to how the roads are built and maintained (Huge puddles, proper drainage, etc) rather than about the car itself, as the car you could test by blasting it with water from different directions and amounts.
I wonder whether, like many human drivers, Waymos might be wont to pull over and wait out the short-but-extreme Miami squalls.
From their August 2023 blog post:
> During this past winter season in California with its record rain, high winds, and thunderstorms, we were able to maintain 99.4% fleet uptime
It happens rarely. When it does, more cautious drivers give up and pull over, even if they are on the freeway. That makes travelling at high speed down on freeway at high speed in those conditions near suicidal.
It only lasts a few minutes. I expect Waymo would handle like any human. Stop, or just creep forward.
A machine driver should not accept these conditions.
So if it's too dangerous for people, it's also too dangerous for computers.
What happens if there's an event that requires a mass evacuation such as a Category 5 hurricane and the major self driving car companies deem it too risky to drive in the conditions that precede the storm?
The jaguar i-pace does this independent of the waymo use case.
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/6biyr8/way...
We have very different thresholds for what's interesting.
The platform provides this feature out of the box, why would waymo go out of their way to disable it. Obviously potential occupants would appreciate seeing out the windshield if it's raining, why that is interesting escapes me.
Have they changed this?
I suspect this might be something that is human-added from data collected in past trips.
>It currently operates fleets of driverless cars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Phoenix. It also plans to launch a robotaxi service in Atlanta in an exclusive partnership with Uber.[1]
[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partner...
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313346/waymo-miami-robo...
On the less challenging side, the city has zero snow, no road ice to worry about.
Waymo definitely wants to outsource the areas where they don't have special expertise (i.e. Waymo is 100x better at driving, but not 100x better at washing and vacuuming cars). I'm not sure how capital-intensive regional operations are. The vehicles are definitely the largest capital expense. This is more like an AirBnB property owner hiring a cleaning service.
When the actual labor is done by part-timers with no health insurance making not much over minimum wage.
Chick-fil-A grew into a pretty big business by vertically integrating outside of just selling sandwiches to Waffle House.
So sometimes it's worth owning sauce distribution too. ;)
Mother nature OS is by far the worst to develop for.
I design motherboards for industrial computers for living. Last gem: radio module draws 5 amps while transmitting instead of specified 2 amps. Trust nobody!
I'm not sure about other car share services work, but in the case of Evo they have existing relationships with the cities that make up Metro Vancouver. I wonder if this would ease rollout as you'd already know all the required people to talk to within municipal government?
I have no doubt that BC may be a nice place to live for a variety of reasons, but it will be the last place to have autonomous vehicles.
our service – which already provides over 150,000
trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San
Francisco, and Austin
I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast.
I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B?
If they at some point make $10 per ride, they would only need something like 50 million rides per year to justify that investment with a p/e ratio of 20.
To go from 8M rides to 50M in 5 years they would have to increase their capacity by 50% per year. Might be possible?
Their internal business case probably has them targeting not 50 million rides per year, but per week… at an absolute minimum
Regardless; at some point specialised vehicles will be developed which are ultra small and lightweight - less than $1,000 to produce - to take care of short downtown rides, for example.
It’s going to be a wild world.
Plus I guess they need high resolution maps? Not sure if that is a significant cost factor.
For the high resolution maps, that cost is fixed per market area. It could limit a rollout to new markets by driving area.
Plus, at least some of the Waymos are super-fancy Jaguars -- tho it looks like roughly 20K Jaguars to 65K Chrysler minivans, according to Wikipedia. Still, they're all brand new vehicles; even with bulk discount, that can't be cheap.
Pretty effective press release! Nothing in it is untrue, but it's obviously misleading even to careful readers.
It's also worth remembering that Zoox exists (Amazon's more futuristic self-driving car play, no steering wheel at all), and has not at all gone the way of Alexa/the Dodo bird (yet). I expect them to make a big splash sometime in the coming decade, personally.
That is, of course, assuming they survive regulatory capture by Tesla, which would need a miracle or an unfair advantage to beat these two at this point, even if they finally follow the science on the need for LiDAR. Another big unknown is how the electorate will react to self-driving cars becoming more than a novelty; Elon Musk is absolutely correct that a backlash of some kind is inevitable even if the safety stats pencil out, IMHO. Trusting a machine is kind of inherently creepy - see Prof. Weinersmith's lectures on the topic:
- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/decisions
- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fsd
- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-driving-car-ethics
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsilver/2020/06/29/waymo-an...
Once they can do that -- and (I guess) can prove profitable -- they could expand non-stop across the country.
Removing the driver from a taxi doesn’t bring down costs that much. Self driving cars aren’t going to change the uber/taxi model at a fundamental level.
They have a finite fleet that they need to deploy. Urban centers mean that fleet utilization is high, and relatively less time and miles are spent driving with no one on board. In rural areas with little demand they will sit empty or have to drive empty for many more miles to their pickups. It just isn’t profitable to use your fleet that way no matter what you do.
That being said, there is still the cost of maintenance and cleanup, but that can be mitigated (the taxis for five towns could drive to one centralised depot, maintenance can be scheduled to maximise operational time, and eventually all of this can be automated, too)
I don't know if that's how things will work out just yet, but it seems like a possible future based on Waymo's current operational strategy.
I think you’re dramatically overestimating how much of a barrier obtaining a driver is here. The primary cost is opportunity cost of the capital that isn’t being utilized. Not having to have a driver doesn’t somehow make it so you can infinitely provision a fleet.
How much this matters depends on the price of the car. We don’t know how much a Waymo costs, but they’re probably not cheap.
To be profitable with lower utilization, they’ll need to work on reducing how much each car costs somehow.
Definitely. Their custom vehicle had optimizations for cost, but seems to be on hold due to tariffs.
Waymo also has the option to drop prices lower than Uber/Lyft when vehicles are unutilized, though they still need to stay above their per-mile depreciation and operating costs.
I think that’s an unproven assumption.
There’s certainly reason to believe it to be true of course, but uber and Lyft are already capturing upwards of 50% of the fares for each ride, and that’s without the capital costs on their books. Removing the driver from the equation can’t lead to much more than that 50% (realistically much less) margin.
Going from charging $10 to $5 isn’t going to make rides suddenly materialize. Especially in rural areas there are just times that people aren’t going to be looking to go anywhere, and wait time becomes far more of a factor that raw costs.
That's not true. If you check Uber's Q3 financials, gross bookings for "Mobility" were $21B while revenue was $6.5B. That's way lower than 50%.
I'm not sure if that's an accurate number, but I have seen a lot of complaints from drivers that they're getting a far lower share of the trip revenue than they used to. It's pretty remarkable that in a competitive market where Uber and Lyft are almost perfect substitutes for each other and charge almost exactly the same prices, that they're able to maintain these gross margins.
The average pay for a gig driver $18/hr. So for your typical 15-minute ride, that adds $4.50 to it.
Let's say that 15 minute ride is 10 miles. Average. Uber rates are about $1.50 a mile, so that ride is $15.
Therefore, the driver costs almost a third of the cost of the fare.
Waymo's operational cost per mile, however, should be much lower than a regular driver because they will pay lower bulk rates for energy (already much cheaper because it's mostly off peak electricity instead of gasoline) and maintenance (standardized vehicles with highly controlled driving patterns and pre-negotiated repair contracts).
A driver's salary costs as much as a new car. Every year.
An average per-trip reduction of ~50% changes the economics entirely.
It will be interesting to see how things develop once the driver is no longer required and cost is the most important factor (after safety). Exciting times!
Logistically you need the flexibility of having more seats available. If you’re in a rural area and need to transport a family are you going to send 4 vehicles separately?
Ironically it’s probably urban areas where single occupancy vehicles make the most sense, given that there’s always going to be sufficient demand to allow for more specialization in vehicles for different use cases.
Probably still years off, but Waymo will probably have a library of vehicles ranging from 2 seats to 20.
1. Reduced curb space dedicated to parking. If you don't need to come back to the same vehicle you only need space to be picked up/dropped off, reducing the amount of parking spaces needed. This space could be used for separated bike lanes. 2. Safer - This is still an unknown but data looks good atm [1]. It would be even better if AVs could be design to prevent cyclists being doored that would be amazing.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-l...
Self-driving cars will eventually lower the total cost of driving and it will allow for longer commutes as people will be able to either sleep or do some work while in the vehicle.
The inevitable consequence of that is an increase of car traffic, which means more congestion, noise and air pollution (tires and brake pads). We can't know whether the theoretically lower collisions per distance traveled will translate into lower actual injuries until we know how much the distance traveled will increase.
Most importantly, the more people rely on a particular form of transport, the more they will vote to facilitate it, via more lanes, more highways, more forgiving legislation, etc.
I would rather see more active transportation and more efficient forms of transportation. Four-wheel single occupancy vehicles are just about the worst option of all.
The driver is THE overwhelming cost of a taxi/uber. What are you talking about?
Your problem is you’re not seeing past the costs of a Waymo vehicle with all its sensors and LiDAR, plus all the costs of keeping high definition maps updated, and having teleoperaters on hand.
Tesla doesn’t have those costs. Their FSD version 13 already drives close to a Waymo of not better in some circumstances. its a done deal, Tesla has won this game
One interesting thing today is that CoL can be as high in rural areas as urban areas in the same state, partly because the additional costs of things that don't scale (mostly transportation and healthcare). But we've given up on government helping people, apparently.
The deal has always been and will always be the same for the rural people: more freedom for less things to do.
It's not unreasonable to me that they would subsidize robo-taxis for those services since they are already funding services that are expensive or inadequate. Especially if there is some give and take to be had with regulatory overhead for the taxi service.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is. Are you disagreeing that SF is very easy driving? There's very little traffic. The roads are a perfect grid. Nothing ever blocks the lanes. The roads are all very wide so finding a place to stop is easy. Etc. etc.
Most driving in the world is not like that.
Double parked vehicles are also a regular occurrence in SF, and even triple parked vehicles happen frequently enough to be a problem at fleet scale.
I just went to a random location - I promise it's not cherry picked - on streetview:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/5u8BGVgYSnLz9kj39?g_st=ac
How easy is that? I have absolutely no idea how it's going to deal with actual parking on the street like this
https://maps.app.goo.gl/UMwkJau85gMG4txG9?g_st=ac
That's a 2-way road. Quite annoying but pretty common in the UK.
Don't get me wrong - they've absolutely done the right thing by starting in the easiest possible places (Tesla's plan is ridiculous in comparison). I just think it will still be at least another decade before they come to more difficult driving locations.
Massive kudos to them if they are able to do all this without things being aflame on the inside...
This is actually a scale up to five cities across four states:
> ...which already provides over 150,000 trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin
Which of course only adds to your point!
And it's just a matter of the cars driving through each of the streets and working with local authorities.
What is “your understanding” based on?
1. Literally nobody in Florida can drive. Nobody indicates. People run red lights. They speed on the hard shoulder to overtake someone else who is speeding slightly less;
2. There's a lot of things that come down to timing, like when the bridges are up on the Venetian and over the Miami River. You can also get trains blocking the entire of downtown;
3. It seems like there's constant rerouting for closed roads, typically due to contruction;
4. Inclement weather. High winds and flooding. Biscayne Boulevard is often called Lake Biscayne. 30 minutes can be the difference between Miami Beach being dry and every road being 1 foot deep in water (not an exaggeration); and
5. What will be the covered area? I guess Phoenix and LA sprawl too but what constitutes "Miami" goes south, west and north pretty far. I mean there's no break between Miami, unincorporated Miami-Dade County and Fort Lauterdale.
People here suck at driving.
Not to mention The Ticket Clinic, a private service to pay a small fee to get out of traffic court. I probably had 10 different traffic violations thrown out, for $80 a pop, when I grew up there in the 00's.
I currently live in Miami. I've lived all over the country. I'm from NYC burbs. I thought NYC drivers sucked before I moved here almost a decade ago.
Miami's drivers are horrible, mostly because most of the people here have never been trained to actually drive.
This is exacerbated by the dysfunctional government which is happy to let developers do whatever they want without regard to impact on traffic flow, while doing no investment in infrastructure itself. I'm generally pro-growth, and I think California goes too far with its restrictions, but living in Miami has caused me to gain some appreciation for the reason behind some of what California does.
My experience with Florida driving was not a great experience for the few years I lived there.
If driving is miserable, that means lots of people that dont want to do it. If traffic is chaotic, that means a good place to improve their software.
The _road layout_ is awful, but drivers are pretty cooperative on the whole. Certainly more than my years driving in DC, for instance.
Granted, you need to be commmital here: if you put on your turn signal, drivers will generally make space for you to get in - briefly - but you need to be quick to take advantage of the gap. I could see Waymo being too slow to the draw for this, based on what I've seen online.
One more lane, bro, one more self driving car company, bro... :-)
If there's any stress test for auotmated cars it's driving in Miami
Miami will be comparably far simpler.
Miami seems to share enough similarity in warm weather to SF to be a similar enough use case to expand while providing slightly different driving conditions to be able to dip ones toes in to the driving habits of a different city.
I’ve lived and been driving for nearly 15 years in various large cities (SF, ATL, Seattle, Portland, LA, etc.), both cars and motorcycles, and NYC (where i currently live) is the only place in the US I absolutely refuse to ever drive (or ride) in.
Not just because it isn’t as necessary here due to public transit usefulness (which is also true), but also because driving here feels like entering a warzone. Narrow roads and parking, drivers being extremely on the edge and leaving a few cm distance max between each car in traffic, constant honking, having to make very dangerous maneuvers on the daily just to get somewhere, and just the cutthroatness of the whole thing here.
I genuinely believe that NYC will end up being the final frontier for Waymo, after all the other places in the US (aside from those with extreme snow conditions).
Miami sucks because half the people on the roads here don't actually know how to drive.
They are immigrants that come from countries whose roads are effectively lawless, or come from countries that have a severely underdeveloped automobile infrastructure, or come from countries where all that's needed to get a driver's license is to pay someone.
Streets, alleys, etc. are blocked or are narrowed by vehicles and a myriad of other possible obstructions, all of which could be concealing pedestrians.
The Waymo driver is very passive and defensive so I imagine it will be quite slow compared to an Uber who is willing to fight to make turns etc.
The game is that you start to pull out for a right turn, and then brake unexpectedly and get the person behind you to tap your bumper, while they are looking for oncoming traffic to the left. Then you take your car to a "friendly" repair shop that overcharges for a new bumper (or claims to replace it) and split the payout.
There's nothing illegal about braking suddenly, the collision is always the fault of the person behind you legally, so there's no personal risk.
It would also take decades.
This will be happening next year.
Build all the transit you want. You need something for the next 30 years while you're doing that.
trirail frequency increases can be done overnight
a greenway network can also be built quickly and cheaply
metrorail extension would cost more but still less than it costs to build and maintain roads
but they are too busy spending billions building even more car infra which will only make traffic and congestion even worse
Increasing the frequency can't necessarily be done overnight, unless they actually have the spare rolling stock just sitting around along with all the workers needed to operate and maintain the increased usage and the spare budget to cover the increased operations costs. Otherwise, they need to find the money to procure the rolling stock, actually place the order, wait for the rolling stock to be built/delivered, hire the people to operate and maintain it, etc.
in the realm of infrastructure investment, all of that is overnight
vs eg the yet another additional bridge to nowhere they're currently building that is taking decades and costing billions
but tell you and every other frothing at the mouth motorist what, enjoy sitting in traffic
You're being quite rude here about this for no reason and projecting an identity on me that's not warranted. I'm generally pro public transit, but I'm also a realist and not suggesting it takes practically zero time to procure additional rolling stock and hire a lot more people. A lot of people think having a higher level of service is just run the trains/busses more, but chances are they're already running all the stuff they currently have the capacity to own and operate. It's not like most transit orgs have double the current capacity just sitting idle and nobody thought to run them.
It took them three years after finding the funding and getting all the approvals and signing the contracts to add rolling stock last time. So probably more like four or five years at least to add some additional trains. And that was replacing existing trains, not expanding the fleet, so its not like they had to considerably expand their existing workforce. I imagine most people would consider four or five years not "overnight".
The bus service near me is usually every 20 minutes. That's terrible. I'd absolutely love it to cut that in half. It also means it would cost significantly more to operate. Getting everyone to agree to pay that (a massive task at the start), getting all the proposals put together, soliciting bids, signing the contracts, getting the new busses, hiring the new drivers, and actually increasing the service isn't something that is going to happen in 2025. Probably also not 2026.
the current state of things is, roads get all the money and transit and bike infra get scraps and are poorly run (so are FDOT road projects too btw)
no one disputes that?
what is being advocated is increasing trirail frequency, implementing an actual network of segregated greenways and expanding metrorail
you're saying "oh we can't do that"
but like, yes, we can? I promise you, if you send out construction crews to apply green paint and put down curbs for greenways, there's no natural law of the universe that would make the paint not come out
and once it's in place, there's nothing preventing millions of Miami residents from using them the same way they're being used in NYC, Montreal, Barcelona etc etc instead of having to get in the car for literally every single trip and errand
likewise if you procure trains there's no magic wall that prevents them from crossing into the state of Florida etc etc
these things are trivially achievable, but misinformed policymakers and voters alike think adding more roads is somehow not costing any money (it costs way more) and will fix traffic (it won't)
No, the disconnect here is you're being quite rude here about this and projecting an identity on me that's not warranted. And now you're even putting words in my mouth.
> you're saying "oh we can't do that"
I never once made the claim. I just argued it wouldn't be "overnight".
None of my statements were about greenways or even about expanding the Metrorail. Just that adding additional capacity can and often does take a while to be approved, acquired, and put into service. Stating it can be done overnight is ignoring reality just as much as someone arguing the paint somehow wouldn't come out to paint a greenway.
I'm for them adding more trains and expanding the existing lines. I'm for the bus service outside my house being a lot better than it currently is. I'm also looking at the fact the cities around me are talking about slashing the funding instead of increasing it and seeing the people around me cheering for such an idea. Me thinking it can be improved overnight is a delusional thought given the realities of today. Thinking Tri-Rail can just snap their fingers and magically get approvals and sign contracts and get trains delivered overnight is also delusional.
Even if we somehow changed people's minds "overnight" to want to increase train service, it'll still take a few years to actually do all the process for acquiring and implementing the additional capacity. Governments almost always move slowly. Even when talking car infrastructure, something which generally is popular, it takes forever to put together the budget proposals, get the funding approved, get the bids together, purchase the materials, and actually get to work. They're still working on doing projects related to a road bond package in my city passed several years ago, and that's once again ignoring all the planning that went into it just to get the proposal together and get it passed.
None of this happens "overnight". Even just getting everything together to officially change the traffic patterns and put the paint down will take many months at the fastest. And that's assuming it's a popular decision.
Have you ever looked at the local budget of a US transit authority?
They typically lose $2+ per passenger trip, and get bailed out by the federal government.
Mass transit is not going to save Miami any money for decades until ridership approaches Hong Kong levels.
Unless you count passing on expenses to the Federal government as savings, and even then, it's still decades out.
And every car off the toad makes driving more pleasant for everyone who stays.
roads cost more than transit - a LOT more, and motorists aren't paying anywhere near the cost of road construction and maintenance, they're (quite literally) free-riding subsidized trips on the taxpayer
traffic also destroys productivity, public health, life expectancy etc etc so costs money in many more ways than motorists not paying for them
So are public transit riders. And to a worse degree. What's your point?
We should magically spawn mass transit systems overnight and force everyone to ride them?
By the way, I'm a fan of mass transit, and live somewhere in the US - specifically - where that's a viable option.
It just isn't a viable option in ~80% of the US, and even if those areas start doing everything right to be mass transit viable (no indication of that), it still takes decades.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
that this is wildly incorrect. roads cost more than transit. a lot more. and road users are wildly more subsidized than transit users.
> We should magically spawn mass transit systems overnight
yes
> and force everyone to ride them?
you won't have to when the choice is between sitting hours in traffic vs a fraction of the time on efficient transit and greenways. people are not stupid.
> It just isn't a viable option in ~80% of the US
this is Miami, not middle of nowhere Iowa
> Rome wasn't built in a day
so it's correct of Miami to continue to "invest" in even more roads to nowhere, like yet another new highway bridge across the bay? that will take decades to complete and cost billions, and cause MORE traffic?
like no lol just build the effing transit and greenways and traffic will go down and the government and people alike will save billions instead (and their time, and lives)
Ironically enough, the county approved and passed a tax back in 2000 to expand the MetroMover. Not a single inch of rail has been built since. Wonder where all the tax revenue went?
instead of transit which saves money
Increase traffic of people successfully getting from point a to point b, that is what induced demand is.
> instead of transit which saves money
Oh yeah, I'm sure saving on that California HSR project that has been in design since 2008.
Some of the rich will chose to use transit though. There is a group of rich people who got that way by being cheap and that group will use transit if possible just because it is cheaper. They don't care about sharing rides with poor people at all.
There is a group of people who appear rich - they live in mansions, drive limos. They are also in dept up to their eyes and one wrong move will put them out on the streets.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
If you have an hour, highly recommended video. A bit too doomerist but the threat is there.
Keep in mind that it's not just about tech (which can be amazing), but also about social aspects, money and politics (which can be atrocious and generally override morality and technology).
I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here? I don't mean "problem" like "solving the technical problem of making a car move autonomously in a chaotic city" sense. I mean what is the need that's being addressed here, exactly?
Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage. They were also handling most of the maintenance and customer relations aspects of the work, for basically free. Are these sexy cutting edge tech firms with eye-watering budgets and even more eye-watering valuations really going after whatever these people were making?
If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city; well to be honest I find this premise a bit ridiculous. Call me a European, but I find the idea that moving 1-2 people in private vehicles on roads being superior than public transit -preferably on rail- simply absurd.
Is the idea of living and moving around in a city full of autonomous vehicles actually appealing to anyone? I personally find the whole idea completely disgusting for a number of reasons.
What is the goal here? Am I missing a grand vision? What is there to get excited for? Sorry if this post has been a rant-y one. I feel like I am really missing the point of most of these things.
Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure.
> Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.
~50% of your fare goes to the driver.
I am not trying to be a contrarian here, but I fail to see how that is an answer. I feel like what you say boils down to "since we are not solving the problem at hand in a good way, we decided to solve it in a worse way".
> ~50% of your fare goes to the driver.
Yet these ride-hailing companies who receive whatever is remaining after the meager pay of the rider and other costs only recently started to make actual profits. And even though it feels like the prices for customers increased a lot over the years, these companies are not exactly printing money.
It's a different "we". Rephrased:
since Houston's government is not solving the problem at hand in a good way, Waymo decided to solve it in a worse way
We live in a super walkable part of Houston and still need cars to go to many places outside of (and even within) the Inner Loop. A 10-min journey in a car takes 45+ mins by bus, and that's assuming peak schedules and buses that arrive on time.
I actually tried to do the no-car thing for a few weeks. It definitely impacted my lifestyle for the worst. The gym I go to is 10 mins away by car. It's a 45 minute journey by bus.
I needed to walk 15 minutes to the nearest bus stop (despite being next to two well-trafficked cross streets). When the bus finally arrived, I needed to pay with cash because METRO didn't have Apple Pay set up at the time (early 2024) and while you could use the Q Ticketing app, it doesn't have a Watch app and I didn't bring my phone.
The bus didn't show on two occasions. The next buses were 45 minutes away.
All of this is, again, in the most walkable, public transit covered part of Houston.
I also lived in NYC for a long time. There, getting anywhere was a 10 min walk to a train station, swiping you MetroCard (Apple Pay these days), taking the train and walking a bit to your destination. The only places that were inconvenient to get to by train alone were deep in Queens, Brooklyn or the Bronx; for those, you'd take the bus, which usually ran every 10 mins.
Without a driver those other costs don’t go away.
That's the problem. People want taxis. Taxi drivers are both underpaid and also expensive. Removing the driver is a very expensive research process, but once you've done it and rolled out the solution nationally, you're saving a lot of money.
And you're also creating a huge moat against competition. Say Google "finishes" self-driving cars, stops needing to spend nearly as much money on researching/developing the software, and mostly has figured out scaling. It's now far cheaper for Google to drive around than Uber. They can easily charge less than basically everyone who isn't willing to spend billions developing self-driving cars.
Who can afford a Waymo ride in that scenario is an open question, but perhaps the tech overlords dream of having a tiny "elite" and a robot army that subjugates the farm workers, in which case Waymo will no longer be required.
2. the biggest cost component is labour. The biggest safety component is labour. The biggest service component is related to labour.
3. if you cut down cost of labour, make it more safe than before, and provide a quiet and private ride allowing private calls, conversations, music, you can beat other market participants
So yes it's commercially interesting and that's all it needs to be.
As for efficient and sustainable transport, there are certainly criticisms to be had. But these must be addressed via regulation, in my view. You can't expect taxi companies to disappear. You can add a tax to fuel to encourage a transition to electric. You can put a tax on noisy cars to encourage silent ones. You can put a tax on size, to encourage 1-person taxi pods for 1 person which will be 80% of the self-driving taxi fleet, and encourage 100% utilisation of self-driving busses for a small portion of the fleet. But you can't expect companies to simply not do business in the taxi industry because cars are imperfect from a sustainability/transport point of view.
I'm not sure what's disgusting to you.
This will all be possible with low cost autonomous transport
- Lower costs in the long-term. In the future it should be cheaper than owning a car.
- Lot of space that is currently being used for parking will be freed up.
- Convenience. It's a better experience than Uber and it will be a better experience than a manually-driven car. One example is when I want to drive to place A, take a 3 hour hike to place B and then drive home.
There are people that will pay you to give them a ride from point A to point B; Google has developed a cheaper and more scalable way to give people a ride from point A to point B.
> Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.
And now Google made them way more productive, what leads to some combination of higher wages, lower prices, and higher profits. The government there has a moderate amount of control over the proportion, it's not clear to me what values it will pick.
> If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city
Nah, it's certainly not. But if you solve that one, Google will be forced to pivot into efficiently moving people into and out of a city, and they can add a lot of value there.
Eliminating the driver opens up so many options:
1. Vehicles designed expressly for 1 or 2 people, so they take up less space 2. Dynamic mini bus routes that can run all hours of the day 3. Dynamic car pooling
Assuming they're safe and cheaper than current Ubers/taxis? Yeah I'd be fairly okay with it. I don't think it's necessarily ideal, but I definitely can't relate with "completely disgusting", personally.
Public transit is nice and all but walking to and then waiting around at bus stops (especially in bad weather), squeezing into a crowded bus or train, stopping at intermediate stops, making transfers... there's definitely downsides. I don't use Uber/Lyft/Waymo often but I have to admit walking outside and having a climate-controlled, comfortable ride right there, which takes you straight to where you're going, is pretty nice. If it cost less and was more eco-friendly I'd probably use it more; we'll see if they can tackle that.
I personally am significnatly safer than the average driver. This comes solely down to me not drinking alcohol and thus I never drive while drunk. The typical driver also isn't under the influence and thus is significantly better than the average. (I also try to follow other safety practices, but I'm not sure if I'm really better - I'm aware of and pay attention to one thing which makes me better - but what am I not aware of that others are doing?)
The goal is to make money for the owners and managers of those companies.
For society, building rail infrastructure in the US is so eye watering expensive and time consuming that transporting everyone by electric AV might actually be an easier way to decarbonize transport.
And they also probably have every little default finding I-PACE vehicles that have gone unsold or are unwanted.
I don’t know how Waymo can possibly compete with that. Their deployment by city is slow, their hardware is expensive, slown to produce, and not purpose built for self driving.
In a way Waymo is behind, they can’t scale fast enough. Their vehicles are far from optimal and expensive. When CyberCab comes around it will blow past Waymo with ease.
Imagine 2 drivers, one does something dangerous every hour, the other every 1000 hours. If you observe them for one hour, they may appear identical to you. Yet, one is 1000x better.
Because you're in the driver's seat supervising at all times? If it worked fully autonomously, you would be in the backseat.
Granted, neither can many humans. But the bar should be many times higher if the operators are relieved of liability.
> In what way is it non working at this point?
It's killing people:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/18/24273418/nhtsa-tesla-ful...
Tesla’s latest FSD beat Waymo by 30 minutes. Same route and same time of day.
Just a small difference: one of them did it without a driver.
Don't fall for the hype.
If nothing changes, when CyberCab comes around Waymo will be screwed.
Waymo is partnering with existing car companies and those have a lot more production capacity than Tesla.
I had also hoped you Teslabros would chill with the Tesla hype when Model 3 was supposed to cost 35k but the cheapest model is about 45k, the cheapest Cybertruck was supposed to also be about 35k but instead it's about 100k, the Semi isn't doing much, the Roadster is still vaporware, FSD is nowhere near FSD...
Unless Waymo is working to design their own car for self driving they’re not going to be able to compete with a much cheaper self driving vehicle. Tesla will flood the market.
Also ‘partnering’ you think legacy auto is going to let a middle man like Waymo ‘use’ their cars once self driving taxi services are here. They will cut out Waymo middle man fast. People will be buying subscriptions to Honda and Ford taxi services, not Waymo.
I think you forgot to factor in 10 years of inflation into your prices. A factory for Semi is being built in Nevada as we speak. And FSD is incredibly good, it can drive today in far more places than a Waymo can. Personally it drives me 90% of the time, and the next update with auto parking support it’ll be up to 99%.
We'll see.
And they make the same number of cars each year that Tesla does.
Also deployment by city exists because each state will have different regulations.
If you need a clue, look at CyberTruck already out producing both Rivian and Lightning in less than a year.
I can’t tell you when it will happen, just that it will happen and when it does Waymo is screwed.
It’s so disappointing that this so-called tech community is so deranged because of their hatred of Musk so much that they’re not willing to look at the facts.
If it was any other company doing what Tesla is doing with their self driving, the comments here would be completely different.
Quite the opposite.
The facts are that Elon Musk is notorious for overselling and missing deadlines.
RoboTaxi has supposed to have come out how long ago? How much did Cybertruck get delayed? Roadster was supposed to be out 4 years ago, and there's now basically not a peep about it. Elon has taken who knows how much money from people for reservations, and 4 years later they've got nothing to show for it.
I would bet my life savings that we will not see RoboTaxi or CyberCab by the end of 2026.
Thankfully I got my bearings right and bought at $250 and still holding.
HN commenters are notorious for being wrong, almost every successful unicorn, if you go look at the early comments about them, HN top comment is usually dead wrong about them