[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Line_scan_photo_of_S... (If you're confused by that page, then so was I. It contains the full photo but it's so long that it gets compressed into a line a few pixels high.)
Presumably they use the loophole called "paying the tariff".
Plus, all the sensor equipment is made in China anyway. There’s almost certainly no way to have it manufactured in the US.
On top of that, fleet sales don’t have to deal with the antiquated dealer network laws in the US.
And of course American market car manufacturers refuse to produce vehicles that are like this one: space efficient and reasonably sized, instead opting for gigantic bean shaped SUVs with sloping rear roofs that rob you of cargo space while taking up maximum curb real estate.
Ignore the crazy high MSRP, they are selling poorly and you should be able to get one brand new or lightly used one in the 40s.
I think in a short couple of years they could be a steal on the used market.
On the bright side the ID Buzz is deeply discounted, it is really not selling.
The problem is that the Kia EV9 beats it in basically every spec at roughly the same price.
And which number gets you there depends on your lifestyle.
And taking a job without any consideration of pay.
It's the world most complex model railway with cars (not just trains) that go around in predetermined routes, and also go to the charging station when their battery is low. And I guess Waymos are a version of that but with human-scale! (Oh they still need humans to plug the charging cables into them).
I wonder if they park themselves or if the maintenance people park them...
Also, the footage feels like Satellite Reign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFZVXG0g40Q (or the original game, Syndicate Wars)
When most road transport is automated it will seem crazy that everyone had to drive for themselves, or sit in the car with a complete stranger, who may prioritise their comfort over the traveller's with regard to audio, navigation noise, air 'fresheners' / diffusers, temperature. Perhaps analogous to having a flatmate; it's mostly done out of necessity rather than choice.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-bat...
That isn't easy to get right.
If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D
This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge"
And this technology will come on a mass scale, Im pretty sure - there is nothing that can stop this?
How will this affect transportation jobs?
If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.
Lets come back in 10 years! :-)
I ride a motorcycle. Unless you make this illegal, then no, "manual driving" is not over anytime soon. Some people actually _like_ driving, although, none of them appear to frequent hacker news.
> there is nothing that can stop this?
We learned the lesson of over automation in aviation very quickly. The best solution is very often, turn off autopilot and autothrottles, then hand fly the plane. You don't want pilots with their heads down in a computer making changes when they can, and should, just fly the plane. It also tends to reduce over all competence and harms safety particularly during equipment failures.
> and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents
The utility of these statistics are harmed by the fact that "self-driving" does not occur in all the circumstances that "manual driving" does today. They're barely past the foundation stage, in a limited operational scope (cabs), and in a limited operational area (where it never snows).
> Lets come back in 10 years! :-)
I think this technology will eventually be prevalent. I think hacker news constantly gets the time lines wrong. You're going to need 25, minimum, and possibly more like 50.
There is a famous video on youtube, 'Children of the Magenta Line', an extract from an American Airlines course decades ago.
Well worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
And occasionally I switch to manual just because I enjoy it.
So when you talk about limited operational scope, I disagree. It’s being used by many as daily drivers (pun intended), like commutes and soccer practice, and road trips, and it’s here (from Tesla FSD v13 and definitely v14). Not 10 years away.
On the other hand we'll never see a full self driving 911. And I plan to drive one until I can no longer safely drive myself. It's the best therapy I've paid for.
About adoption I want to add that at some point a whole generation will turn 16/18 (legal driving age) and just not do a driver's license anymore because they will buy an autonomous car anyway. And IMO from that point on adoption will be very fast.
Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90% reduction in accidents means 90% reduction in premiums, which means 90% reduction in profits.
Do insurance companies have a history of lobbying for safety regulations?
e.g.: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...
And sure, insurances are fine with making profits, but if they can get less catastrophes, they are fine with that as it reduces overall risk etc.
Feel free to check the corp publishing section on https://www.munichre.com/en/insights.html
But fire insurance is different from auto insurance. Insurance companies want uncorrelated risk. Insurance companies want a high rate of car crashes, but the exact same rate of car crashes each year, because that makes planning easy. If there's a risk that in a some years way more crashes will happen than other years, that's correlated risk and makes planning difficult; they don't want that.
For cars, there's not much correlated risk. For fire insurance, there is correlated risk due to wildfires. So to reduce correlated risk, insurance companies do likely want to reduce wildfires, while still wanting to increase non-wildfire fires.
Self-driving cars will increase correlated risk, because there could be some software update with a bug that's pushed out and causes a ton of crashes. (That risk does also exist with cars today, due to the various software in cars, but self driving increases the risk.)
The 2nd link is an insurance company, but it as well doesn't seem to be advocating for regulation.
Pick a source: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+insurance+companies+leav...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1c7lm5b/...
A 90% reduction in accidents is a 90% reduction in _paying out_. That reduces operating costs.
However, how many more miles will they drive? Double? If there's a 90% reduction in accidents as KellyCriterion alluded to, then the total number of accidents will still go down. That means total premiums will go down, and total profit will go down.
Insurance companies don't really care that much if accidents are more or less likely, what they care about is that they can be underwritten effectively.
The most interesting shift here as it pertains to insurance is the fact that losses might be correlated in brand new ways. Today there's no simple way for 100,000 cars to all crash a few minutes apart, worldwide, for the same reason. In the future that may in fact be plausible.
Because they don't need a steering wheel, backseat, and many other things. They can also run close to 24/7.
How "massive" the price drop becomes I don't date to guess though.
In practice, if you provide enough cars to meet the demand to travel from suburbs to city at 7am-9am and back again 8 hours later, I’d expect a large fraction of them to be idle outside of peak hours. And even at peak hours, to be spending half their time empty, as almost all the demand is in one direction.
And if you don’t provide enough capacity to meet rush hour demand? Good luck convincing people to give up their cars.
My best answer is that they can deliver goods/packages in the off hours.
That may even end up being the main business.
The big game changer is that the computer doesn't need sleep!!
Human truck drivers in the US are only legally allowed to drive 10-12 hours per day. Which usually means the truck is parked half the time. With a computer driving, trucks can run non stop 24/7.
This is revolutionary change! Twice the delivery speed at half the cost. Should improve a lot of things across the economy. Unless some luddites find the power to stop it.
> How will this affect transportation jobs?
The human long distance truck driver will fade away as a career. It will probably take a decade or two, so people will have time to adjust.
The transportation industry should end up substantially larger, which normally creates a bunch of new jobs/professions, but I won't pretend to know how that will play out.
This is like saying skydiving is safer than driving because you're looking exclusively at accidents and ignoring the total number of events. There are way more cars than there are skydivers. Now in the realm of autonomous vehicles: there are way more manually driven vehicles than there are autonomous ones, so of course there's going to be significantly more accidents from manually driven vehicles.
Hint: Normies outside the tech world are not hell bent on making themselves unemployed. That phenomenon only exists among software engineers.
If they can't be cheaper, then what's the point?
Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the rider etc. Or driver got lost or stopped for food or gas or something so is late.
It also gets to the destination exactly when it says it will. No weird routes because of the driver's whim or driving too fast or too slow. And no chance of bad music, loud conversation in some foreign language, annoying commentary, etc.
And I want them to be profitable to run too, so they have plenty of incentive to expand the program.
There is nothing in this world that is 100% reliable. The vehicles are new. Wait until they start clocking more miles.
> it will definitely actually show up at X time.
In what city and at what time of day? Waymo is just one vehicle in a sea of them. If traffic starts choking the city I don't see how they're not as vulnerable as every other vehicle.
Ah!
After all, self driving cars have some of the highest positive to negative externality ratio of any modern technology
Regular ICE cars: - air pollution from tire wear and brake dust - air pollution from exhaust - embodied carbon - noise - endangering other road users - traffic congestion - land use (sprawl) - long term health impacts (encouraging sedentary lifestyle)
Switch to all-electric and you lose a bit of noise and all the tailpipe emissions, but gain whatever emissions generated the power (sometimes solar, great, but sometimes lignite, boo), whatever environmental damage resulted from the battery materials, and probably marginal worsening of safety as the same ranger requires a heavier vehicle
Switch to self-driving and you may increase safety (feels like Waymo basically yes, Tesla probably no based on their track record with stat manipulation), but also vastly increase use, worsening congestion and land-use. The others stay the same.
So I don't understand why you're saying the externality ratio is good. From my perspective self-driving cars don't really move the needle.
I also suspect any future congestion and land-use problems will get better after an initial dip. Urban living becomes more desirable as city parking lots disappear.
If roads are used exclusively for self driving cars, this would probably improve traffic flow. Robot cars multiply current highway and city street capacity by coordination. They can smoothen traffic flow due to hard braking, and drive much closer to each other.
It's not like humans are somehow put on this earth only to do certain jobs or the same job forever. Contrary to 100+ plus years of predictions, humans will never become obsolete.
I once toured the one in Hamburg, which is highly recommended if you ever get the chance.
Nothing else has quite given me that feeling of being tiny next to this giant city-scale robot since.
Perhaps we need a euphemism for UBI: Let's call it "level-1 rich".
Waymos are safer - they have Lidar and Radar in addition to vision
Waymos have human fallback to remote operators
Google takes responsibility for Waymos, vs Teslas being privately owned
Google took a more regulator savvy incremental approach
