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How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business
- webel0 2y agoWaymo is currently under investigation for multiple incidents, not all of which it had previously disclosed to the NHTSA [0]. The recent light pole incident also doesn't help [1]. If they are doing 50k rides a day, then they would appear to have a remarkable safety record. It will be interesting to see if these investigations lead to a repeat of the Cruise debacle or if this will become the price of doing business. [0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-safety-probe-into-waymo-self-driving-vehicles-finds-more-incidents-2024-05-24/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-saf... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAZP-RNSr0s
- jseliger 2y agoThe overall safety record is amazingly good: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-lot-more-than-waymos-software-data-shows/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/human-drivers-crash-a-l...
- dexwiz 2y agoAnecdata, but watching the Waymo cars compared to Cruise (preban) was night and day. Before Cruise was banned in SF, I would often see them violate traffic laws and fail to navigate basic intersections. Waymo isn't perfect, but its better than Cruise and the average SF driver, which is good enough for me.
- not-my-account 2y agoAnecdata 2, I bike through SF almost daily, and much prefer a Waymo driving near me as opposed to your average SF driver.
- 1oooqooq 2y agothat's cool. until it's not. it's very easy to release an upgrade of stopping less on stop signs and see data increasing profit and not increasing accidents. same with code updates that will make cyclist life worse, unless there's actual change in a kpi they track. you're not really their main concern, specially after they ipo and get acquired by Apollo or billionaire du jour
- threeseed 2y agoWaymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet. And not sure why you think running stop signs or any anti safety measures would increase profits.
- bigfudge 2y agoBecause once the current safety scrutiny has passed you might get more trips done by setting the ai to be more aggressive in traffic. Then you are into VW style software updates with a profit motive and no mechanism to hold them accountable?
- krisoft 2y ago> no mechanism to hold them accountable Like banning them altogether following a public outcry? That is the mechanism to hold them accountable. Also in individual cases it will be very easy to sue them for accidents they caused or contributed to. Already is. Where does this “no mechanism to hold them accountable” comes from?
- simion314 2y ago>And not sure why you think running stop signs or any anti safety measures would increase profits. Because this big companies like Google are actually evil. As an example the mobile YouTube app does not let you use it if you turn off the screen. So Google decided that wasting energy and killing batteries is an acceptable thing to do, this is pure evil - I would accept they adding more advertising or whatever but killing the life span of a device and wasting energy is truly evil shit.
- choppaface 2y agoWaymo has notably escaped any investigation of the "Prius vs Camry" crash induced during unsafe testing done in pursuit of a demo https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal-googles-intellectual-property https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal... > The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries. > Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident. > According to former Google executives, in Project Chauffeur’s early years there were more than a dozen accidents, at least three of which were serious. One of Google’s first test cars, nicknamed kitt, was rear-ended by a pickup truck after it braked suddenly, because it couldn’t distinguish between a yellow and a red traffic light. Two of the Google employees who were in the car later sought medical treatment. It was a long time ago, but Larry Page was well aware of it, and imagine if that incident received fair coverage and investigation.
- jeffbee 2y agoI am having trouble imagining this scenario in a way that makes Waymo look as bad as you imply. It sounds like the human-driven vehicle if it was "boxed in" on an on-ramp needed to slow and merge, rather than racing to pass on the right, running off the road, and causing a spectacular single-vehicle wreck. The way it's described in that paragraph seems to be ironclad proof of the need to promptly relieve humans of driving tasks.
- drdec 2y ago
- jseliger 2y agoI just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-really-bad-but-theyre-normal-so-we-dont-pay-attention-to-how-bad/ https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall... Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
- titanomachy 2y agoIn the same vein, I don't ride uber often but when I do I often find that drivers leave their windows closed and car's air circulation turned off completely. When I ask for "a bit of airflow" they apparently hear it as "I'm too hot", so they turn AC to maximum power. I'm not sure whether this reflects their own preferences, what they think customers want, or if they are just completely oblivious.
- okdood64 2y agoI have never had trouble cracking open the window on my own. Do you not try?
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoThe child safety disable is often turned on for backseat windows.
- nullc 2y agoDon't be too timid to tell them what you want. If they turn out the AC to max instead, just say "Sorry, I'm not hot I just want some fresh air."
- harmmonica 2y agoI've said this on HN before as well, but I've turned into a full-on Waymo evangelist (Los Angeles user here). Couple of things to add to Jake's comment... The driving experience itself is on par with the "best" drivers I've ever ridden with (things like stopping at actual stop signs, for instance, and not racing from one traffic light to the next, and being courteous to bikes and pedestrians), not to mention just the peace and tranquility of being in a car solo when you're not having to drive (I know, I know, mass transit is better for countless reasons and this is actually doubling down on human isolation which is probably not great long term). Anyway, I have zero interest in getting into an Uber at this point. I'd wait longer and pay more for a Waymo if given the choice. And I'm fully aware people will, if this works more broadly, lose jobs bc of it. I'm not insensitive to that, but I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle barring catastrophic incidents by Waymo et al that cause regulators to kill self-driving cars altogether. Note that I did witness an incident where on a road with no lane markings the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane. It's an intersection I transit often and normal drivers have great trouble with and frankly makes me uneasy every time I turn left there as well. The Waymo was definitely perplexed by it. For those who talk about how Phoenix's roads are straight and wide... This is not true in Los Angeles (nor in SF though SF is more of a compact grid than LA). For those of you unfamiliar, a lot of the streets in LA where Waymo operates today are very narrow, with cars parked on both sides and so there's inadequate room for two cars to go down them without waiting for another car to pass. These same streets have zero lane markings on them. I've experienced this several times in Waymo to date where the car just "gets it," though it's almost too cautious when it needs to get over to let another car pass when there's not enough space for both. And if you read all of that and say "what about the weather?" It's obviously an issue and I fully agree it will delay the rollout "everywhere." All that said, I cannot wait until I can jump in one of these things, from Waymo or any other company, and safely go up to the mountains or some other road-trip destination. The economics of longer trips, particularly to rural areas, are likely tricky bc of the inability to count on a return fare, but, man, I do think self-driving cars are a radically important technology that will vastly change how we transit and, really, how we live. That is, if they don't fuck up too much en route to getting there.
- notum 2y agoFull article: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529210213/https://fortune.com/2024/05/29/waymo-self-driving-robo-taxi-uber-tesla-alphabet/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240529210213/https://fortune.c...
- ripe 2y agoRobotaxis are "a real business"? Maybe in the future, but not yet. From the article: > But even the most bullish believers in autonomous transportation acknowledge the tech still has a ways to go before it’s reliable enough for widespread deployment on U.S. roads.
- xvedejas 2y agoThey're the present here in SF, driving every day and more safely than the humans do. And as a human driver, I can testify that these streets are not particularly easy to drive on.
- robotnikman 2y agoThey are here in the Phoenix area too and I have not seen and issues with them. However, we are blessed by sunny weather 99% of the time. I think the biggest challenges will be having them drive in adverse weather conditions present throughout the rest of the country, such as blizzards, hail, torrential rain, dense fog.
- hnburnsy 2y agoNot just sunny weather, but straight streets laid out in a N/S and E/W pattern, very little grade, and consistent numbering\naming across cities.
- arebop 2y agoWe have abundant fog and seasonal rain in SF, but not much hail or snow. That's why they've done winter testing in Tahoe (since 2017) and Buffalo NY (last winter).
- jeffbee 2y agoWaymo is likely already better than a upper-quartile meat module under those conditions. https://x.com/Boenau/status/1795495310170685915 https://x.com/Boenau/status/1795495310170685915
- chpatrick 2y ago
- pasttense01 2y agoIt's only going to be a real business when they approach profitability--now they have massive losses.
- greenthrow 2y agoWaymos are not full robotaxis. It's an illusion provided by having the humans responsible for the cars in a remote location. We don't have transparency on how that system runs and how often the humans intervene. We also sweep under the rug many, many non-crash traffic incidents. Watch videos on Youtube of peoplr taking Waymos and you will see the cars do lots of dumb stuff. If there were lots more of them it would make traffic even more of a problem than it is today.
- Animats 2y agoWaymo says they do not do remote controlled driving. The remote operators can only give hints to the self-driving system, such as "make a U-turn and take a different route". They don't trust the data connection to have good enough latency for remote control. Baidu, which has some self-driving cars in China, reportedly does use remote manual driving when necessary. Probably more than they admit, because it was a big thing that it was available for the 2022 Olympics. BYD recently announced that they will not be using BYD's technology. Not good enough for production cars. Waymo still has rather bulky rotating LIDAR scanners. That technology needs to shrink more before wide deployment. A few years ago, there were lots of LIDAR startups, but few LIDAR buyers, so that industry collapsed.
- Animats 2y agoCorrection: BYD recently announced that they will not be using Baidu's technology.
- ein0p 2y agoWait till activists start setting SDCs on fire before calling it a “real business”.
- NullHypothesist 2y agoNo need to wait... https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless-taxi-fire-vandalized-video-san-francisco-china-town https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless...
- ein0p 2y agoExactly. And there’s no dude there to prevent it.
- fragmede 2y agoA human driver's not going to stop a gang of hooligans from throwing a Molotov their way.
- ein0p 2y agoBut they would. For one thing, a human would just drive away. For another, a mob would have no reason to attack a broke-ass taxi driver, while they have every moral justification to attack a $3T gigacorp built on surveillance capitalism.
- tialaramex 2y agoMaybe the Tutsis had autonomous vehicles or were tools of surveillance capitalism? You can never be too sure right? After all, their attackers as you make clear must have had "every moral justification" to kill hundreds of thousands of people right ?
- ein0p 2y agoSeems pretty weird to compare destruction of insured property to Rwandan genocide, but hey man, you do you
- diebeforei485 2y agoI much prefer Waymos as a pedestrian. They always stop at stop signs.
- akira2501 2y agoThe most common place for pedestrians to die is on the side of low speed highways at night. They're typically struck from behind. The other common mode is secondary to an original crash. Vehicles either are pushed into different roadways, over abutments, or down hills, which causes the vehicle to roll or otherwise crash into pedestrian areas without warning. This is most common in winter conditions.
- diebeforei485 2y agoI don't think deaths are the sole problem, and also I don't think nationwide statistics are appropriate considering that San Francisco (where Waymo's robotaxi service area is) has approximately zero low-speed highways.
- renegade-otter 2y agoNew York City is not going to see robo taxis for a very, very long time. We are just now catching up to the rest of the cities in terms of how garbage is collected, after about a hundred years.
- desert_rue 2y agoPlus subway bits that are from the 1930s
- asah 2y agoSadly I agree: NYC users will trash the cars.
- renegade-otter 2y agoIt's not just that - it's a crazy city and we all jaywalk. No automated vehicle can handle NYC, barring dedicated streets (which I feel like is what will happen).
- asah 2y ago-1: Waymo has proven itself adept at avoiding jaywalkers, bicycles, etc.
- Karrot_Kream 2y agoIs that an issue? It's a dense city which puts the pedestrian on top of the transit hierarchy. There's no need for cars there. Phoenix is car-dependent sprawl and even after removing parking minimums, upzoning, and running BRT or other high LOS transit, you're still looking at large parts of the city where it'll probably take decades to be viable to run transit to and are impossible to walk to. In SF the core is walkable and has great transit but the moment you get to the outer neighborhoods transit LOS decreases significantly and there's large parts unserviced. Waymo makes more sense there. Plus SF is abutted by suburbs with retirement-age-and-above populations who fight densification at every turn where it's impossible to get from city-center to city-center via any form of transit.
- neonate 2y agohttps://archive.ph/WyCfF https://archive.ph/WyCfF
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y ago"made robo-taxis a real business" sounds like a dig at Enron Musk. I believe he first started calling self driving cars that.
- inamberclad 2y agoHorses all retired. They successfully automated their jobs and now live in a post-scarcity Horseconomy
- nevertoolate 2y agoThey have a fairly big weakness. If someone takes over their control these taxis are basically weapons. You have to admit that the question is not if this is possible but how will it pan out.
- huygens6363 2y agoI agree, but that’s an argument against cars in general. Turns out cars are a bit too bulky and pricey to repurpose as shanks.
- nmca 2y agoThis is already true of many consumer vehicles and thus less exacerbated by Waymo than you imply
- greiskul 2y agoPeople can literally just go to a car rental service right now and do that as well. Or use a car service app. Or rob someone elses car. Most people in society don't really have a desire to run amok.
- fire_lake 2y agoI think OP means remotely control the car.
- tialaramex 2y agoThe problem is that you can't "remotely control the car". If you have the same level of access as Waymo's actual humans you can suggest to a Waymo driver (ie the machine) hey, the way to resolve this situation you are in might be to inch forward into this position - and maybe in some cases you can trick it into causing harm this way. However I'd guess in the vast majority of cases all you do is trap it so that it gets into a situation where it can't see any action it's allowed to take which gets closer to its goals - so it gives up and just sits there. The most crucial insight for Self Driving Cars is that this is not the trolley problem. "I give up, stop where I am" is a valid answer. We actually have built automation where "just give up" isn't a valid answer. CAT IIIc autoland (on a jet liner) has "Fail Active" scenarios where the machine concludes just before touch down that it no longer has confidence in its position due to one or more sudden sensor failures but the human pilots can't possibly intercede quickly enough to be safe and under IIIc conditiosn they can't see anything anyway, so, although the aeroplane will tell the human pilots that a failure occurred, it will nevertheless attempt to continue the now unsafe landing in this edge case. Most likely despite the reduced sensor validity, this is successful and everybody lives, and if not it's not as though the humans could have reacted in time anyway. But self driving isn't like that, the plane is flying, if it were to just stop flying everybody dies. In contrast a car can just stop and it's merely annoying.
- vincnetas 2y agoAs a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.
- baron816 2y agoI'm sorry but good public transit in the US isn't going to happen. Passenger rail has never been profitable anywhere since its very inception. With the rise of remote work, and declining ratios of working-age populations putting increasing pressure on public finances, we're just never going to see a widespread expansion of public transit. AVs give us a path toward a world where very few people need to own their own car. We can put all those parking spaces to better use. We can improve equity by giving more people access to safe, reliable, affordable, and convenient point-to-point transportation. Being able to consistently get a ride to where you need to go is something we consistently under-appreciate. It means being able to get a better paying job on the other side of town. Or not having to worry about missing a dialysis appointment, or a meeting with your parole officer or therapist. When the marginal cost of a robotaxi/robobus ride is close to zero is when the AI economic boom will really begin.
- skywhopper 2y agoHow exactly will a robotaxi ride ever reach zero marginal cost?
- baron816 2y agoWith competition. The marginal cost for each ride is just cheap, abundant energy from renewables, and maintenance.
- c-cube 2y agoAnd the day the Google bot decides to close your account for obscure reasons, with no recourse, all you can do is stay in bed and starve cause all these things are now inaccessible to you ? Even if self driving actually happens, it'll be the ultimate surveillance-ridden, enshitiffied service that will ruin not just the internet but our whole lives and cities.
- thih9 2y agoAre multi passenger trips the next step? That is, driverless buses? And ones solving the traveling salesman problem with each new stop? If yes, perhaps cities with fewer cars can skip the taxi step and go straight to smart buses.
- drozycki 2y agoI've long hoped for Uber to roll out on-demand door-to-door UberPool with 14 passenger vans. They could match riders to drivers and find the optimal route in real time, with pricing and travel time falling between public transit and UberX, all in the footprint of a F-150. No need to wait for autonomy. They have (had?) such a service in Cairo, but unlicensed jitney vans were already common there. They never launched it elsewhere.
- influx_redux 2y agoI can!t overstate how depressing it is we managed to figure out private self driving car fleets before we figured out modern public transit funding.
- theyinwhy 2y agoHas been figured out a long time ago, see other countries. It doesn't even need to be state owned, see Japan.
- zellyn 2y agoThis seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into autonomous driving (car manufacturers). That’s why it’s working for them. (IIUC, Cruise has pretty much also always been legit?) Don’t even get me started on the “didn’t take psych 102: Attention and Memory”-level cluelessness required to believe a human can safely pay attention well enough in a vehicle that reliably tricks you into believing it’s autonomous to take over in the split seconds before a disaster… I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. I mean, what are they going to say? “It’s too hard so we’re just waiting for Waymo or Cruise to license their tech once it works”? I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…
- zellyn 2y agoWhat I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment worthwhile… it would be glorious! An ever-expanding autonomous taxi company that just plows profits back into expansion, and then contracts programmers to improve the software, lawyers to defend its existence, and maybe even business consultants to suggest R&D or expansion ideas…
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- krisoft 2y ago> at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?
- Havoc 2y agoTurns out infinite money, lawyers, lobbyists and engineering time gets you pretty far
- amelius 2y agoSide question: when Tesla finally gets FSD working, will I be able to use my Tesla to make money by using it as a taxi? Or will there be licensing issues? In other words, will I own it or not?
- skywhopper 2y agoNo need to worry about something that will never happen.
- pquki4 2y agoI would be more worried about liability issues before anything else. Also, I doubt there is a point in you "renting" your Tesla. Tesla the company has enough money to flood the road with their vehicles, and your vehicle is irrelevant. Have you heard any individual renting their personal Camry to a taxi company or a Uber driver?
- wrboyce 2y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20161129012459/https://www.tesla.com/autopilot https://web.archive.org/web/20161129012459/https://www.tesla... > Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year. Of course that was in 2016 and as far as I’m aware we are still awaiting those details.
- worik 2y agoIsthere a foom full of Waymo employees watching over it all remotely and making the hard decisions?
- boulos 2y agoDisclosure: I work for Waymo. No, there isn't. We do have a team of folks to support situations where we aren't confident and choose to "phone a friend". This recent blog post covers some of it in more detail: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/ Most importantly: at no point does someone remotely "drive" the vehicle. They can direct it to say "hey make a u-turn and go to this new point", but they aren't remotely driving.
- flutas 2y ago> Most importantly: at no point does someone remotely "drive" the vehicle. They can direct it to say "hey make a u-turn and go to this new point", but they aren't remotely driving. This doesn't line up with other statements made by Waymo though. That blog post as an example: > The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it receives from the fleet response agent and it is in control of the vehicle at all times. Yet in an incident in January when a Waymo ran a red light and caused a moped to crash the narrative is > In January, an incident took place where a Waymo robotaxi incorrectly went through a red light due to an incorrect command from a remote operator, as reported by Waymo. So I'm curious, is it a case of "The Waymo Driver doesn't always follow road rules itself." or "Remote Ops can make a car run a red light against the Waymo Driver's programming." [0]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/03/26/waymo-runs-a-red-light-and-the-difference-between-humans-and-robots/?sh=1ea888823f34 https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2024/03/26/waymo-...
- tialaramex 2y agoJudging from the red light incident, the Waymo Driver does not consider passing a red light to be a Never event, in the same way that say, hitting a pedestrian would be a Never event. So it's OK with being advised by a human that it needn't obey the red light whereas it wouldn't be OK with being told to just drive through cyclists. That makes a kind of sense, a human shouldn't need to run red lights but they do it more often than you'd like, whereas they mustn't hit pedestrians (although sadly they sometimes do). Just the other day I was watching video of a failed London Underground signal which is stuck at red, the driver knows this, and the signaller knows this, and nevertheless the signaller (who is in a position to know as they've got a board full of position data for trains in their sector) has verified that crossing this signal despite the danger aspect is safe. This happens so often (ie sometimes) that TFL has a recorded announcement to play to passengers when, as the driver, you're about to do this. The train, you see, doesn't know that what you're about to do is fine, so it's going to stop you. So as the announcement explains, the train will move forwards slowly, brake suddenly to a halt, and then after a moment proceed slowly again. The announcement suggests that passengers should sit down if able to do so. The driver having secured permissions from the signaller will drive forward ("at caution" ie slowly enough to stop short of any obstacle discovered), then the safety systems will detect the danger signal, braking the train to a halt, then the driver proceeds to drive slowly again because they already know why it stopped.
- boulos 2y agoFor folks that are interested in the business specifically, we have some open roles listed at https://waymo.com/careers/ https://waymo.com/careers/ with the word Commercialization in the titles.
- black_13 2y ago[dead]
- NotYourLawyer 2y agoReal businesses make money. Waymo loses money hand over fist.
- rwmj 2y agoCertainly true, but they have very large backers who are willing to pour money in until the technology is perfected. I wonder if there's an internet forum appropriate for discussing such businesses?
- NotYourLawyer 2y agohttps://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets
- helsinkiandrew 2y ago> ... and made robo-taxis a real business Has it though? They've come an impressively long way to have 50,000 rides a week, but that needs to increase a thousand fold to justify the $6B of venture capital and $30B valuation. That's a lot of cars and a lot more work than it takes Uber to bring on another underpaid owner driver (Uber has 23 million rides per day)
- bitsage 2y agoHow scalable is this technology? From my experience at an AV company, every deployment site had to be mapped, and after deployment, sites still needed remote teleoperators to occasionally adjust waypoints and resolve stops.
- AlotOfReading 2y agoThe word "scalable" tends to be a shibboleth for people with certain unchangeable views on the industry. It's scalable in the sense that you can have vastly more cars than humans and the process to get them operating in a new area is fairly straightforward. It's not scalable in the sense of the company being fully automated so that every step can operate without human intervention, like virtually every other company on Earth.
- webel0 2y agoWaymo's relatively rapid geonet expansion suggests that they have either improved their mapping productivity substantially or gone fully map-less. I can't speak to their RVA operations.
- sowbug 2y agoWaymo was smart to start with taxis. A self-driving car's competition is you, and of course you're an above-average driver. But a taxi's competition is the average Uber driver. People can be more objective about that low bar.
- pipeline_peak 2y agoAnother article praising degenerate AI companies that kill/injure people, yuppie tech bros unite!
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 2y agoFor the last ten years or so, there's been an argument on this forum (and others) about whether cutting safety in the pursuit of an earlier rollout is a good thing. If it's beneficial to humanity, then a few deaths now is massively outweighed by the many deaths avoided by earlier rollout of this tech, or so the argument goes. This seems like a good time to point out that the argument makes too many assumptions to be useful, like that moving fast and breaking things will in fact lead to faster progress overall. In the case of robotaxis, the group moving carefully and deliberately is the clear leader, and many competitors who took the faster/less careful approaches have shuttered along the way. When uber's self-driving division killed someone, for example, it didn't lead to an earlier arrival of self-driving. This is relevant to all sorts of business stuff where we're always asked to move faster than we can reliably move. It's astoundingly easy to forget that sometimes bad rollouts can shutter a project even worse than slow rollouts.
- 1024core 2y agoI wouldn't call it a "real business" just yet. I've heard they do 50,000 rides per week in SF, LA, Phoenix combined. Assuming they make $20/ride, that's still $1M/week, or $52M/year. I'm sure they spend in Billions/year. They would have to scale out to every major city in America and add another 10000 cars before they can turn a profit.
- topher6345 2y agoWaymos also follow traffic laws with regards to loading-unloading zones, which is inconvenient for the passenger. Compare to a rideshare driver that will often drop you off right in front of your destination, even if that is an illegal maneuver.
- fatjokes 2y agoI feel like self driving cars is one area where Google's slow-and-steady culture just works better than the move-fast-and-break things culture, since the things that would break in this case are literal human bodies.
- illiac786 2y agoHow much do the remote safety drivers intervene, is this something we have good sources on?