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Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo i

Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already. Honestly, at this point I am more interested in whether they can operate their service profitably and affordably, because they are clearly nailing the technical side. For example data from a 100 driver study, see table 2.11, p. 29. https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/37370 https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/37370 Roughly the same number of drivers had 0 or 1 near-crashes as had 13-50+. One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles! So the average isn't that helpful here.

dangus 1y ago
I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber while having a longer wait time for a car. It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double. One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. It’s not like Uber drivers make a ton of money. Uber drivers often have zero capital expense since they are driving vehicles they already own. Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees and have them drive them home and to the grocery store. I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service. Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Last number I found on that was over one person per vehicle but I’m not sure if anyone knows for sure.
- homefree 1y ago
  The wait times have gotten better, they're getting freeway approval shortly which will be nice, the price is still at a premium (but worth it imo). I only take Waymo in SF now. The only time I take Uber in the bay area is to the airport (and when they approve Waymo for SFO I won't take Uber then either).
  - BurritoAlPastor 1y ago
    I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip. I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.
    - homefree 1y ago
      Ah I guess I almost never tip uber (unless something exceptional happens) - holdover from the Travis era.
    - gambiting 1y ago
      >>Uber/Lyft including tip. The real question is why tip on either of those? You pay through the app, the driver is compensated for their time, why tip extra? If you feel that Uber/Lyft are mistreating their drivers, stop using their service, not pay them on the side?
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
- orangecat 1y ago
  I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber, had a longer wait time for a car, and cost about double. That's literally an edge case. For shorter trips, I've found it to be slightly cheaper (especially factoring in the lack of tips) with maybe a slightly longer wait.
  - fallinghawks 1y ago
    I've taken Waymo only twice (I try to avoid SF), from the ferry building to Chinatown, then back. Both times it was more expensive than Lyft with tip, but only by $2-3. It's good to know it can be cheaper.
    - brokensegue 1y ago
      lyft charges more for nicer cars so a fair comparison might be to lyft's more premium service
      - dangus 1y ago
        This comparison doesn’t work. Not all Waymo riders actually want the premium cars and we can’t assume that’s why they are choosing Waymo. We have to assume that some and perhaps most riders would prefer to pay less to ride in a cheaper car but are mainly choosing Waymo because its autonomous (cool factor, the no-human factor). Also, California mandates autonomous vehicles be fully electric by 2030. So Waymo literally has to be driving some kind of EV to comply very soon. Jaguar’s I-pace was a poor-selling EV SUV from a struggling company with a lot of leftover inventory, so it’s almost a guarantee that Waymo got a great fleet deal on them.
        seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        The cars are comfortable, even if they aren’t popular. If I had to choose between a beat up Prius uber-X or a Jaguar for a few dollars more, I’m definitely choosing the latter. I had a Mercedes (older cheaper model with mechanical issues) Uber-X fall apart on my ride in Orange County last month (my son and I were dumped near a nice mall at least), also I bet the Waymo doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
- agildehaus 1y ago
  Both the longer wait time and the double price can likely be explained by the lack of highway. Highway is coming. And scale will make it cheaper. It's only cheaper than Uber sometimes currently. That will change.
  - dangus 1y ago
    Will it change? Uber drivers are already paid low wages and any price competition can lower their wages further. Waymo has to pay for things that “come with” uber drivers: the cars, storage for the cars, employees to clean and maintain the cars, extra infrastructure to support the self driving cars like cellular data for each car, data centers, engineers, customer service to interact with police and resolve edge cases (will never go away). Waymo also has to pay all these people healthcare benefits and pay W2 payroll, not a thing for Uber. Waymo is like a professional moving company competing on price with an army of lowest bidder independent contractors who already have a beat up graffiti van.
- VirusNewbie 1y ago
  In LA, wait times were the same as Uber and the price was the same as well (for a nicer car some of the time).
  - ajmurmann 1y ago
    I've used Waymo in both LA and SF and lived it. However, wait times in LA varied hugely. Downtown LA one evening was over twenty minutes and a few hours later less than five. I wonder if they just don't have enough vehicles there and because it's such sprawl it can easily happen that no car is nearby.
- whyenot 1y ago
  My experience using Waymos in SF is that they are a little less expensive than an Uber. The other advantage is that you aren't stuck with a driver who hits on you or wants to share his opinions on the best way to slaughter goats.
  - muchosandwich 1y ago
    I've also had an Uber driver talking about butchering various farm animals. I vastly prefer Waymo because it's a much calmer experience.
    - Mistletoe 1y ago
      Hopefully you guys are giving bad ratings to these insane people that think talking about slaughtering methods is appropriate cabbie talk?
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      I had an Uber driver fall asleep on me while driving. I can’t wait for Waymo to come to Seattle.
  - acchow 1y ago
    Waymo is significantly more expensive than UberX nowadays. People are happily willing to pay for the better experience (and tourists probably the novelty)
  - dangus 1y ago
    And uber is profitable. Waymo burns $2 billion a year.
- jonathantf2 1y ago
  Miles?
- radpanda 1y ago
  Waymo rides are also potentially slower because they strictly follow speed limits. Not really problematic in downtown SF but it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be received by riders when they expand to highway driving where most people generally expect to drive over the speed limit.
  - thot_experiment 1y ago
    On most trips people do speeding saves an irrelevant amount of time. If somehow you encounter zero traffic from Palo Alto to SF and you go 15mph over the limit the whole way it makes the trip about 5 minutes shorter. You have about 50% more KE at 80mph as you do at 65mph btw, if you find yourself needing to dissipate that energy rapidly.
    - radpanda 1y ago
      Sure, there’s the math, but there’s also the human nature part of it. If you’re sitting in the right lane doing the speed limit, watching dozens of cars consistently zip past, it feels like you’re “falling behind” all of that traffic. I wonder how that will be received by the riding public.
      - potato3732842 1y ago
        When I'm traveling substantially below traffic speed I'm also decently concerned about becoming the scene of the accident. Sure it won't be me paying for the accident but I'd just rather not risk it.
        riskassessment 1y ago
        This is often repeated, yet despite the studies on speed differentials being dangerous I am still skeptical of the more specific claim that driving the speed limit specifically when others are speeding increases your risk of getting in an accident.
        1y ago
- TulliusCicero 1y ago
  I mean yeah, right now they've hit the point of being quite safe, but they're not necessarily as fast as human drivers. They'll keep making incremental progress and will get there eventually, probably. So far, every time there's been self driving car progress, someone's been like, "okay yeah, but can they do <the next thing they're working on> yet??" like some weird gotcha. Tech progress is incremental, shocking I know.
- Ferret7446 1y ago
  > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are That's such a silly statement. One shouldn’t underestimate how UNeconomical real humans are. In the past 12,000 years, human efficiency has improved, maybe, 10x. In the past 100 years, technological efficiency has improved, maybe, 1,000,000x. Any tiny technological improvement can be instantly replicated and scaled. Meanwhile, every individual human needs to be re-trained and re-grown. They're extremely temperamental, with expensive upkeep, very short lifespans and even shorter productive lifespans. In fact, humans have improved so little, that every time, they scoff at the new technology and say it will never take off, and they're still doing it 12,000 years later, right now, right above this post.
  - consteval 1y ago
    The misconception here is that technology just magically runs on its own. No, it’s created by and maintained by humans. You’re shifting the cost of a driver to software engineers, data analysis, people mapping out roads, etc. This is why Uber doesn’t make any money, despite being more expensive for the customer as compared to traditional taxi services. Coordinating Ubers across the country costs a lot of servers and a lot of engineers. Sure, the system is automatic - maintaining it isn’t. So you end up with a lose-lose-lose scenario. The ride is more expensive for the customer. The driver makes less money. And Uber bleeds hundreds of millions a year. Technology is neat, yes, but often we don’t stop and think “wait… does this make sense?” We don’t know if autonomous cars make any economic sense. They could end up not. It doesn’t help that 99% of tech companies in the transportation space are just making trains with extra steps. Like, guys - have we even done feasibility analysis?
- Mawr 1y ago
  Fascinatingly, every argument you make is wrong. > it cost twice as much as an Uber Surely incidental since the typical price per ride is about the same. Generally though, the relationship between the cost to operate a service profitably and the price presented to the user is very complex, so just because the price happens to be x right now doesn't tell you much. For example, something like 30% of the price of an iPhone is markup. > while having a longer wait time for a car Obviously incidental? > It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double. Obviously easily fixable? > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do. It doesn't matter how little humans cost, they are competing with software that can be copied for free. > Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees They can share parking space, cleaning services, maintenance, parts for repair, etc. > I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. Obviously, they're in the development phase. None of this matters long term. > They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service. "The stock market went up 2% yesterday so it will go up 2% today too and every day after that." > Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Said operators are shared between all vehicles and their number will go down over time as the driving software improves. --- To sum up, every single part of what Waymo is trying to do scales. Every problem you've mentioned is either incidental or a one-off cost long term.
  - dangus 1y ago
    The number one tech bro blind spot is the assumption that everything in the physical world scales with software and that every business and type of cost benefits greatly from economies of scale and the removal of human labor. There are a great number of examples where that’s not true. Cookie store chains like Crumbl are a really good example. All the economies of scale stuff with them backfires. The product is too low price and too simple to make in batches, so the businesses with the best margins are ones that avoid traditional brick and mortar rent and don’t hire employees. In the same way, an uber or taxi’s labor cost seems like it’s a huge scaling problem that needs to be resolved but really think about the costs involved with creating that scale to replace them. Let’s not forget that at Waymo they still need a human to clean, fix, and charge/gas up, interact with customers and police, resolve driving edge cases, etc, all costs that a human driver essentially includes with their pay and does for “free.” Then you’ve got car storage and the capital expense of the vehicle that the uber driver heavily subsidizes and splits between business and personal use. Basically, Waymo is looking to compete using their very complex and sophisticated solution in a market where its competitors are hiring lowest bidder temporary contractors.
michaelmrose 1y ago
What about the benefit to the 80% if the 20% were obligated to use software instead of their own wetware in a hypothetical world where this was feasible in all respects. Imagine if you transitioned to most new drivers for instance being issued only permits to use self driving vehicles and older drivers being obligated to switch at 65.
- threatofrain 1y ago
  Perhaps drunk drivers should be obligated to use automatic cars for some duration.
  - shadowgovt 1y ago
    The main reason we don't revoke licenses more aggressively right now is that America's infrastructure is so car-oriented that forcing people to never drive again can be a disruption on-par with being added to the sex-offender registry (1). If self-driving cars became prevalent, I can absolutely see it leading to an increase in license revocation as a punishment for unsafe driving. (1) Setting aside one's personal opinion on which is more dangerous to society: people on the sex-offender registry or drunk drivers.
    - Scoundreller 1y ago
      Iunno, doesn’t stop Canada from issuing 1yr driving bans for 1st offence DUI, and that starts at 0.08 (And a lot of provinces do bans measured in days if you hit 0.05)
      - Zigurd 1y ago
        America is different and becoming more so.
- tim333 1y ago
  As someone getting on towards 65 I have to point out that insurance rates are less for the 65-70s than for any group younger that 55, and claim rates are lower than for any of the under 65s. My relatives didn't really start crashing into stuff till they got to about 90. And then it was kind of slow motion. (for this data https://www.abi.org.uk/products-and-issues/choosing-the-right-insurance/motor-insurance/age-and-motor-insurance/ https://www.abi.org.uk/products-and-issues/choosing-the-righ...)
nickvec 1y ago
Interesting. Pareto principle in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
Terr_ 1y ago
Hmmm, perhaps a more-valuable representation would be how the average Waymo vehicle would place as a percentile ranking among human drivers, in accidents-per-mile. Ex: "X% of humans do better than Waymo does in accidents per mile." That would give us an intuition for what portion of humans ought to let the machine do the work. P.S.: On the flip-side, it would not tell us how often those people drove. For example, if the Y% of worse-drivers happen to be people who barely ever drive in the first place, then helping automate that away wouldn't be as valuable. In contrast, if they were the ones who did the most driving...
- chii 1y ago
  the nature of the accidents also makes a difference tho. A small fender bender is common in human drivers. A catastrophic crash (like t-boning into a bus) is rare (it'd make the news for example). Autodriving, on the other hand, almost never makes fender benders. But they do t-bone into busses in rare occasions - which also makes the news.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    If only it were easier to get the stats in the form of "damage in property/lives in the form of dollars per mile driven", that would let us kinda-combine both big tragic events with fender-benders. (Yeah, I know it means putting an actuarial cost on a human life, but statistics means mathing things up.)
    - Panzer04 1y ago
      You could just keep life and money separate, it's technically possible for the ratios to be different.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      Perhaps the best way to address this would be to look at property damage for car-car or cat-object collisions, and a separate stat for car-pedestrian accidents. In collisions that don't involve pedestrians, the damage to the car/object is generally proportional to the chance that someone was badly injured or killed in those cases - the only thing you get by adding human life costs is to take into account the quality of the safety features of the cars being driven, which should be irrelevant for nay comparison with automated driving. In collisions that do involve pedestrians, this breaks down, since you can easily kill someone with almost 0 damage to the car. So having these two stats per mile driven to compare would probably give you the best chance of a less biased comparison.
londons_explore 1y ago
> One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles! There would be a strong argument to simply banning the worst 1% of drivers from driving, and maybe even compensating them with lifetime free taxi rides, on the taxpayers dime.
- eptcyka 1y ago
  Perverse incentives will just balloon the bad driver population. Funny, since the brits have a history with these kinds of things.
  - allan_s 1y ago
    Yes something like free bus card and N kilometers of taxi fares per month, so that : 1. People who normally take the bus are not incentivise to get their driving license /make a big accident 2. People already driving are still blt rewarded ,just not blocked 3. One may argue that if some of the borderline "not that dangerous but still..." driver do it on purpose to cross the line it still may benefits soxiety economically wise
  - n4r9 1y ago
    Hang on, why are brits suddenly being mentioned?
    - eptcyka 1y ago
      I am making rather overextended assumptions as to the ethnicity/nationality of the original poster based on their username.
      - n4r9 1y ago
        Aahh. I think your extrapolation is indeed correct.
- jillesvangurp 1y ago
  Nah, just revoke their licenses and make it much harder to get one to begin with. Autonomous driving removes the economic necessity of having one. Just get a proper car that can drive you to work. No need for you to do anything. Catch up on lost sleep (a common cause of accidents is people being to tired to drive) or whatever. Expect to pay for the privilege of driving yourself and putting others at risk. If you really want to drive yourself, you'll just have to skill up to get a license and proper training, get extra insurance for the increased liability, etc. And then if you prove to be unworthy of having a license after all, it will be taken away. Because it's a privilege and not a right to have one and others on the road will insist that you are competent to drive. And with all the autonomous and camera equipped cars, incompetent drivers will be really easy to spot and police. It will take a while before we get there; this won't happen overnight. But that's where it's going. Most people will choose not to drive most of the time for financial reasons. Driving manually then becomes a luxury. Getting a license becomes optional, not a rite of passage that every teenager takes. Eventually, owning cars that enable manual driving will become more expensive or may not even be road legal in certain areas. Etc.
motorest 1y ago
> Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already. I would wager that those 20% of drivers also are disproportionally under the influence of drugs, impaired in any way (i.e., stroke, heart attack, etc), or experiencing sudden unexpected events such as equipment malfunction. Defensive driving is risk mitigation.
- MichaelRo 1y ago
  You forgot "being an idiot" and it's strange, because the vast majority of the accidents are caused by that. Have you never watched "idiots driving" videos on YouTube?
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - aziaziazi 1y ago
    Stupid behavior is not exclusive to being on drugs, heart attack or equipment malfunction though. While I like watching those videos I suspect a fair share of them has a deeper explanation than "being an idiot”. But it’s a lot less fun to watch when you imagine the guy driving may be in a desperate position. Btw the meaning of idiot is “someone ignorant". As contextless external watchers of a crash, the real idiots are probably you and me, the YouTube watchers.
- timewizard 1y ago
  You'd be correct. At least as far as fatalities are concerned. 50% of all fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. Around 50% of all fatalities are single vehicle accidents though. 15% are motorcycles. 15% are pedestrians. And of course around 80% involve youth, testosterone and horsepower in some combination. The rest are almost always weather or terrain related in some way. Massive pileups on the highway in the winter and upside down vehicles on waterways in the summer. Very rarely does a fatal accident happen without several factors being present.
jonplackett 1y ago
Is Waymo doing ‘easier’ miles than an average human in any way? How limited is their range and types of roads they’ll use?
- danaris 1y ago
  Yes, vastly easier. As I understand it, they limit their range to a few cities in the American Southwest and West Coast, and don't operate in bad weather.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    Waymo claims to operate in fog and rain since 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog
  - mdeeks 1y ago
    Waymo definitely operates on bad weather. In fact, that is when I use it most since I don't want to walk or bike in the city when its pouring. The wait times are longer on those days. City driving is very chaotic. Though speeds tend to be lower so likely accidents would be just fender benders. They don't operate on freeways.
Zigurd 1y ago
That's the correct indicator to look for: the number of Waymos on the road is still very small compared to the number of other vehicles. Alphabet wouldn't risk the cost of expanding to the current number of cities without very strong confidence that they're not going to lose their shirt doing it. The evidence so far is that they are throttling demand by keeping the prices above that of an Uber. It's definitely still an experiment. If the experiment is successful, expect to see more cities and more vehicles in each city in expanding service areas. There are step changes that have to be made to keep waymo expanding. The tariff situation is blocking plans to have dedicated vehicles from China. That has to get sorted out. The exact shape of the business model is still experimental. Of course it's got to be safe. But there are dozens of dull details that all have to work between now and having a profitable business. The best indicator of a plausible success is that Waymo appears to be competent at managing these details. So far anyway.
- happyopossum 1y ago
  > The evidence so far is that they are throttling demand by keeping the prices above that of an Uber. I've only been in a handful of Waymo rides, but in each case it's been about half the price of an Uber.
  - asielen 1y ago
    This has been my experience also, especially considering no tipping.
  - Zigurd 1y ago
    Having taken a closer look, it's at least a mixed bag. There doesn't seem to be a definitive policy to manage demand by keeping the price high.
pc86 1y ago
> 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles Sorry if you're having a car crash every 6 months or less, you shouldn't have a license. Driving a car is privilege granted to you by your state, and this state is negligent in its protection of everyone else by letting this idiot continue to drive. Sell your car, take the bus, move closer to work, I don't care. More than 3 at-fault crashes in a year or more than 10 at-fault crashes ever and you should permanently lose your license forever. That seems more than generous enough.
- potato3732842 1y ago
  It's probably some old "bingo and church" driver who has a 50-50 shot of winding up in the ditch if it snows during Bingo and that "20k" is actually "8yr", the kind of thing insurance would never know about if you're not getting towing coverage through them.
- derf_ 1y ago
  > Sorry if you're having a car crash every 6 months or less, you shouldn't have a license. Actual traffic enforcement does not seem to produce this result. This woman is fairly famous on Reddit for her erratic driving, and was reported in 2019 as having been involved in 31 crashes since 2000: https://www.wral.com/story/lawyer-stayumbl-driver-a-victim-of-social-media-frenzy/18408573/ https://www.wral.com/story/lawyer-stayumbl-driver-a-victim-o... She is still driving (with a new license plate after 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/bullcity/comments/1ji3y82/jesusdos_is_at_it_again/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bullcity/comments/1ji3y82/jesusdos_...
- eightysixfour 1y ago
  There is already a mechanism for this that the government doesn’t even have to be directly involved in - insurance. At some point you become prohibitively expensive to insure. However, the government still has to do its part and actually enforce insurance requirements. My pet hypothesis is that there is a tipping point where the feedback loop between driver safety, ai advancements, and insurance costs will doom manually driven cars faster than most people think.
  - 1y ago
sharken 1y ago
I think that no matter how good Waymo is doing, there is still the problem of who is responsible when a self driving is involved in a serious accident. The only solution to that is probably to only let self driving cars onto the road, in an all-or-nothing solution.

dangus 1y ago

I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber while having a longer wait time for a car. It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double. One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. It’s not like Uber drivers make a ton of money. Uber drivers often have zero capital expense since they are driving vehicles they already own. Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees and have them drive them home and to the grocery store. I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service. Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Last number I found on that was over one person per vehicle but I’m not sure if anyone knows for sure.

homefree 1y ago
The wait times have gotten better, they're getting freeway approval shortly which will be nice, the price is still at a premium (but worth it imo). I only take Waymo in SF now. The only time I take Uber in the bay area is to the airport (and when they approve Waymo for SFO I won't take Uber then either).
- BurritoAlPastor 1y ago
  I generally find that Waymos are cheaper than Uber/Lyft including tip. I’ve also seen that, although Uber and Lyft peak times seem correlated to each other, they seem uncorrelated to Waymo peak activity. But this might be stabilizing as Waymo ridership increases.
  - homefree 1y ago
    Ah I guess I almost never tip uber (unless something exceptional happens) - holdover from the Travis era.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    >>Uber/Lyft including tip. The real question is why tip on either of those? You pay through the app, the driver is compensated for their time, why tip extra? If you feel that Uber/Lyft are mistreating their drivers, stop using their service, not pay them on the side?
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
orangecat 1y ago
I saw a transit enthusiast YouTube video try out Waymo from the most distant part of the network to fisherman’s wharf in SF and it cost twice as much as an Uber, had a longer wait time for a car, and cost about double. That's literally an edge case. For shorter trips, I've found it to be slightly cheaper (especially factoring in the lack of tips) with maybe a slightly longer wait.
- fallinghawks 1y ago
  I've taken Waymo only twice (I try to avoid SF), from the ferry building to Chinatown, then back. Both times it was more expensive than Lyft with tip, but only by $2-3. It's good to know it can be cheaper.
  - brokensegue 1y ago
    lyft charges more for nicer cars so a fair comparison might be to lyft's more premium service
    - dangus 1y ago
      This comparison doesn’t work. Not all Waymo riders actually want the premium cars and we can’t assume that’s why they are choosing Waymo. We have to assume that some and perhaps most riders would prefer to pay less to ride in a cheaper car but are mainly choosing Waymo because its autonomous (cool factor, the no-human factor). Also, California mandates autonomous vehicles be fully electric by 2030. So Waymo literally has to be driving some kind of EV to comply very soon. Jaguar’s I-pace was a poor-selling EV SUV from a struggling company with a lot of leftover inventory, so it’s almost a guarantee that Waymo got a great fleet deal on them.
      - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
        The cars are comfortable, even if they aren’t popular. If I had to choose between a beat up Prius uber-X or a Jaguar for a few dollars more, I’m definitely choosing the latter. I had a Mercedes (older cheaper model with mechanical issues) Uber-X fall apart on my ride in Orange County last month (my son and I were dumped near a nice mall at least), also I bet the Waymo doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke.
agildehaus 1y ago
Both the longer wait time and the double price can likely be explained by the lack of highway. Highway is coming. And scale will make it cheaper. It's only cheaper than Uber sometimes currently. That will change.
- dangus 1y ago
  Will it change? Uber drivers are already paid low wages and any price competition can lower their wages further. Waymo has to pay for things that “come with” uber drivers: the cars, storage for the cars, employees to clean and maintain the cars, extra infrastructure to support the self driving cars like cellular data for each car, data centers, engineers, customer service to interact with police and resolve edge cases (will never go away). Waymo also has to pay all these people healthcare benefits and pay W2 payroll, not a thing for Uber. Waymo is like a professional moving company competing on price with an army of lowest bidder independent contractors who already have a beat up graffiti van.
VirusNewbie 1y ago
In LA, wait times were the same as Uber and the price was the same as well (for a nicer car some of the time).
- ajmurmann 1y ago
  I've used Waymo in both LA and SF and lived it. However, wait times in LA varied hugely. Downtown LA one evening was over twenty minutes and a few hours later less than five. I wonder if they just don't have enough vehicles there and because it's such sprawl it can easily happen that no car is nearby.
whyenot 1y ago
My experience using Waymos in SF is that they are a little less expensive than an Uber. The other advantage is that you aren't stuck with a driver who hits on you or wants to share his opinions on the best way to slaughter goats.
- muchosandwich 1y ago
  I've also had an Uber driver talking about butchering various farm animals. I vastly prefer Waymo because it's a much calmer experience.
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    Hopefully you guys are giving bad ratings to these insane people that think talking about slaughtering methods is appropriate cabbie talk?
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    I had an Uber driver fall asleep on me while driving. I can’t wait for Waymo to come to Seattle.
- acchow 1y ago
  Waymo is significantly more expensive than UberX nowadays. People are happily willing to pay for the better experience (and tourists probably the novelty)
- dangus 1y ago
  And uber is profitable. Waymo burns $2 billion a year.
jonathantf2 1y ago
Miles?
radpanda 1y ago
Waymo rides are also potentially slower because they strictly follow speed limits. Not really problematic in downtown SF but it’ll be interesting to see how it’ll be received by riders when they expand to highway driving where most people generally expect to drive over the speed limit.
- thot_experiment 1y ago
  On most trips people do speeding saves an irrelevant amount of time. If somehow you encounter zero traffic from Palo Alto to SF and you go 15mph over the limit the whole way it makes the trip about 5 minutes shorter. You have about 50% more KE at 80mph as you do at 65mph btw, if you find yourself needing to dissipate that energy rapidly.
  - radpanda 1y ago
    Sure, there’s the math, but there’s also the human nature part of it. If you’re sitting in the right lane doing the speed limit, watching dozens of cars consistently zip past, it feels like you’re “falling behind” all of that traffic. I wonder how that will be received by the riding public.
    - potato3732842 1y ago
      When I'm traveling substantially below traffic speed I'm also decently concerned about becoming the scene of the accident. Sure it won't be me paying for the accident but I'd just rather not risk it.
      - riskassessment 1y ago
        This is often repeated, yet despite the studies on speed differentials being dangerous I am still skeptical of the more specific claim that driving the speed limit specifically when others are speeding increases your risk of getting in an accident.
        1y ago
TulliusCicero 1y ago
I mean yeah, right now they've hit the point of being quite safe, but they're not necessarily as fast as human drivers. They'll keep making incremental progress and will get there eventually, probably. So far, every time there's been self driving car progress, someone's been like, "okay yeah, but can they do <the next thing they're working on> yet??" like some weird gotcha. Tech progress is incremental, shocking I know.
Ferret7446 1y ago
> One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are That's such a silly statement. One shouldn’t underestimate how UNeconomical real humans are. In the past 12,000 years, human efficiency has improved, maybe, 10x. In the past 100 years, technological efficiency has improved, maybe, 1,000,000x. Any tiny technological improvement can be instantly replicated and scaled. Meanwhile, every individual human needs to be re-trained and re-grown. They're extremely temperamental, with expensive upkeep, very short lifespans and even shorter productive lifespans. In fact, humans have improved so little, that every time, they scoff at the new technology and say it will never take off, and they're still doing it 12,000 years later, right now, right above this post.
- consteval 1y ago
  The misconception here is that technology just magically runs on its own. No, it’s created by and maintained by humans. You’re shifting the cost of a driver to software engineers, data analysis, people mapping out roads, etc. This is why Uber doesn’t make any money, despite being more expensive for the customer as compared to traditional taxi services. Coordinating Ubers across the country costs a lot of servers and a lot of engineers. Sure, the system is automatic - maintaining it isn’t. So you end up with a lose-lose-lose scenario. The ride is more expensive for the customer. The driver makes less money. And Uber bleeds hundreds of millions a year. Technology is neat, yes, but often we don’t stop and think “wait… does this make sense?” We don’t know if autonomous cars make any economic sense. They could end up not. It doesn’t help that 99% of tech companies in the transportation space are just making trains with extra steps. Like, guys - have we even done feasibility analysis?
Mawr 1y ago
Fascinatingly, every argument you make is wrong. > it cost twice as much as an Uber Surely incidental since the typical price per ride is about the same. Generally though, the relationship between the cost to operate a service profitably and the price presented to the user is very complex, so just because the price happens to be x right now doesn't tell you much. For example, something like 30% of the price of an iPhone is markup. > while having a longer wait time for a car Obviously incidental? > It also couldn’t operate on the highway so the transit time was nearly double. Obviously easily fixable? > One shouldn’t underestimate how economical real human operators are. There's nothing to underestimate, human drivers don't scale the way software drivers do. It doesn't matter how little humans cost, they are competing with software that can be copied for free. > Waymo can’t share the business expense of their vehicles with their employees They can share parking space, cleaning services, maintenance, parts for repair, etc. > I’m sure it’ll improve but this tells me that Waymo’s price per vehicle including all the R&D expenses must be astronomical. Obviously, they're in the development phase. None of this matters long term. > They are burning $2 billion a year at the current rate even though they have revenue service. "The stock market went up 2% yesterday so it will go up 2% today too and every day after that." > Plus, they actually have a lot of human operators to correct issues and talk to police and things like that. Said operators are shared between all vehicles and their number will go down over time as the driving software improves. --- To sum up, every single part of what Waymo is trying to do scales. Every problem you've mentioned is either incidental or a one-off cost long term.
- dangus 1y ago
  The number one tech bro blind spot is the assumption that everything in the physical world scales with software and that every business and type of cost benefits greatly from economies of scale and the removal of human labor. There are a great number of examples where that’s not true. Cookie store chains like Crumbl are a really good example. All the economies of scale stuff with them backfires. The product is too low price and too simple to make in batches, so the businesses with the best margins are ones that avoid traditional brick and mortar rent and don’t hire employees. In the same way, an uber or taxi’s labor cost seems like it’s a huge scaling problem that needs to be resolved but really think about the costs involved with creating that scale to replace them. Let’s not forget that at Waymo they still need a human to clean, fix, and charge/gas up, interact with customers and police, resolve driving edge cases, etc, all costs that a human driver essentially includes with their pay and does for “free.” Then you’ve got car storage and the capital expense of the vehicle that the uber driver heavily subsidizes and splits between business and personal use. Basically, Waymo is looking to compete using their very complex and sophisticated solution in a market where its competitors are hiring lowest bidder temporary contractors.

michaelmrose 1y ago

What about the benefit to the 80% if the 20% were obligated to use software instead of their own wetware in a hypothetical world where this was feasible in all respects. Imagine if you transitioned to most new drivers for instance being issued only permits to use self driving vehicles and older drivers being obligated to switch at 65.

threatofrain 1y ago
Perhaps drunk drivers should be obligated to use automatic cars for some duration.
- shadowgovt 1y ago
  The main reason we don't revoke licenses more aggressively right now is that America's infrastructure is so car-oriented that forcing people to never drive again can be a disruption on-par with being added to the sex-offender registry (1). If self-driving cars became prevalent, I can absolutely see it leading to an increase in license revocation as a punishment for unsafe driving. (1) Setting aside one's personal opinion on which is more dangerous to society: people on the sex-offender registry or drunk drivers.
  - Scoundreller 1y ago
    Iunno, doesn’t stop Canada from issuing 1yr driving bans for 1st offence DUI, and that starts at 0.08 (And a lot of provinces do bans measured in days if you hit 0.05)
    - Zigurd 1y ago
      America is different and becoming more so.
tim333 1y ago
As someone getting on towards 65 I have to point out that insurance rates are less for the 65-70s than for any group younger that 55, and claim rates are lower than for any of the under 65s. My relatives didn't really start crashing into stuff till they got to about 90. And then it was kind of slow motion. (for this data https://www.abi.org.uk/products-and-issues/choosing-the-right-insurance/motor-insurance/age-and-motor-insurance/ https://www.abi.org.uk/products-and-issues/choosing-the-righ...)

nickvec 1y ago

Interesting. Pareto principle in action. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Terr_ 1y ago

Hmmm, perhaps a more-valuable representation would be how the average Waymo vehicle would place as a percentile ranking among human drivers, in accidents-per-mile. Ex: "X% of humans do better than Waymo does in accidents per mile." That would give us an intuition for what portion of humans ought to let the machine do the work. P.S.: On the flip-side, it would not tell us how often those people drove. For example, if the Y% of worse-drivers happen to be people who barely ever drive in the first place, then helping automate that away wouldn't be as valuable. In contrast, if they were the ones who did the most driving...

chii 1y ago
the nature of the accidents also makes a difference tho. A small fender bender is common in human drivers. A catastrophic crash (like t-boning into a bus) is rare (it'd make the news for example). Autodriving, on the other hand, almost never makes fender benders. But they do t-bone into busses in rare occasions - which also makes the news.
- Terr_ 1y ago
  If only it were easier to get the stats in the form of "damage in property/lives in the form of dollars per mile driven", that would let us kinda-combine both big tragic events with fender-benders. (Yeah, I know it means putting an actuarial cost on a human life, but statistics means mathing things up.)
  - Panzer04 1y ago
    You could just keep life and money separate, it's technically possible for the ratios to be different.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Perhaps the best way to address this would be to look at property damage for car-car or cat-object collisions, and a separate stat for car-pedestrian accidents. In collisions that don't involve pedestrians, the damage to the car/object is generally proportional to the chance that someone was badly injured or killed in those cases - the only thing you get by adding human life costs is to take into account the quality of the safety features of the cars being driven, which should be irrelevant for nay comparison with automated driving. In collisions that do involve pedestrians, this breaks down, since you can easily kill someone with almost 0 damage to the car. So having these two stats per mile driven to compare would probably give you the best chance of a less biased comparison.

londons_explore 1y ago

> One of the drivers had 56 near crashes and 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles! There would be a strong argument to simply banning the worst 1% of drivers from driving, and maybe even compensating them with lifetime free taxi rides, on the taxpayers dime.

eptcyka 1y ago
Perverse incentives will just balloon the bad driver population. Funny, since the brits have a history with these kinds of things.
- allan_s 1y ago
  Yes something like free bus card and N kilometers of taxi fares per month, so that : 1. People who normally take the bus are not incentivise to get their driving license /make a big accident 2. People already driving are still blt rewarded ,just not blocked 3. One may argue that if some of the borderline "not that dangerous but still..." driver do it on purpose to cross the line it still may benefits soxiety economically wise
- n4r9 1y ago
  Hang on, why are brits suddenly being mentioned?
  - eptcyka 1y ago
    I am making rather overextended assumptions as to the ethnicity/nationality of the original poster based on their username.
    - n4r9 1y ago
      Aahh. I think your extrapolation is indeed correct.
jillesvangurp 1y ago
Nah, just revoke their licenses and make it much harder to get one to begin with. Autonomous driving removes the economic necessity of having one. Just get a proper car that can drive you to work. No need for you to do anything. Catch up on lost sleep (a common cause of accidents is people being to tired to drive) or whatever. Expect to pay for the privilege of driving yourself and putting others at risk. If you really want to drive yourself, you'll just have to skill up to get a license and proper training, get extra insurance for the increased liability, etc. And then if you prove to be unworthy of having a license after all, it will be taken away. Because it's a privilege and not a right to have one and others on the road will insist that you are competent to drive. And with all the autonomous and camera equipped cars, incompetent drivers will be really easy to spot and police. It will take a while before we get there; this won't happen overnight. But that's where it's going. Most people will choose not to drive most of the time for financial reasons. Driving manually then becomes a luxury. Getting a license becomes optional, not a rite of passage that every teenager takes. Eventually, owning cars that enable manual driving will become more expensive or may not even be road legal in certain areas. Etc.

motorest 1y ago

> Serious crash rates are a hockey stick pattern. 20% of the drivers cause 80% of the crashes, to a rough approximation. For the worst 20% of drivers, the Waymo is almost certainly better already. I would wager that those 20% of drivers also are disproportionally under the influence of drugs, impaired in any way (i.e., stroke, heart attack, etc), or experiencing sudden unexpected events such as equipment malfunction. Defensive driving is risk mitigation.

MichaelRo 1y ago
You forgot "being an idiot" and it's strange, because the vast majority of the accidents are caused by that. Have you never watched "idiots driving" videos on YouTube?
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- aziaziazi 1y ago
  Stupid behavior is not exclusive to being on drugs, heart attack or equipment malfunction though. While I like watching those videos I suspect a fair share of them has a deeper explanation than "being an idiot”. But it’s a lot less fun to watch when you imagine the guy driving may be in a desperate position. Btw the meaning of idiot is “someone ignorant". As contextless external watchers of a crash, the real idiots are probably you and me, the YouTube watchers.
timewizard 1y ago
You'd be correct. At least as far as fatalities are concerned. 50% of all fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. Around 50% of all fatalities are single vehicle accidents though. 15% are motorcycles. 15% are pedestrians. And of course around 80% involve youth, testosterone and horsepower in some combination. The rest are almost always weather or terrain related in some way. Massive pileups on the highway in the winter and upside down vehicles on waterways in the summer. Very rarely does a fatal accident happen without several factors being present.

jonplackett 1y ago

Is Waymo doing ‘easier’ miles than an average human in any way? How limited is their range and types of roads they’ll use?

danaris 1y ago
Yes, vastly easier. As I understand it, they limit their range to a few cities in the American Southwest and West Coast, and don't operate in bad weather.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Waymo claims to operate in fog and rain since 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog
- mdeeks 1y ago
  Waymo definitely operates on bad weather. In fact, that is when I use it most since I don't want to walk or bike in the city when its pouring. The wait times are longer on those days. City driving is very chaotic. Though speeds tend to be lower so likely accidents would be just fender benders. They don't operate on freeways.

Zigurd 1y ago

That's the correct indicator to look for: the number of Waymos on the road is still very small compared to the number of other vehicles. Alphabet wouldn't risk the cost of expanding to the current number of cities without very strong confidence that they're not going to lose their shirt doing it. The evidence so far is that they are throttling demand by keeping the prices above that of an Uber. It's definitely still an experiment. If the experiment is successful, expect to see more cities and more vehicles in each city in expanding service areas. There are step changes that have to be made to keep waymo expanding. The tariff situation is blocking plans to have dedicated vehicles from China. That has to get sorted out. The exact shape of the business model is still experimental. Of course it's got to be safe. But there are dozens of dull details that all have to work between now and having a profitable business. The best indicator of a plausible success is that Waymo appears to be competent at managing these details. So far anyway.

happyopossum 1y ago
> The evidence so far is that they are throttling demand by keeping the prices above that of an Uber. I've only been in a handful of Waymo rides, but in each case it's been about half the price of an Uber.
- asielen 1y ago
  This has been my experience also, especially considering no tipping.
- Zigurd 1y ago
  Having taken a closer look, it's at least a mixed bag. There doesn't seem to be a definitive policy to manage demand by keeping the price high.

pc86 1y ago

> 4 actual crashes in less than 20K miles Sorry if you're having a car crash every 6 months or less, you shouldn't have a license. Driving a car is privilege granted to you by your state, and this state is negligent in its protection of everyone else by letting this idiot continue to drive. Sell your car, take the bus, move closer to work, I don't care. More than 3 at-fault crashes in a year or more than 10 at-fault crashes ever and you should permanently lose your license forever. That seems more than generous enough.

potato3732842 1y ago
It's probably some old "bingo and church" driver who has a 50-50 shot of winding up in the ditch if it snows during Bingo and that "20k" is actually "8yr", the kind of thing insurance would never know about if you're not getting towing coverage through them.
derf_ 1y ago
> Sorry if you're having a car crash every 6 months or less, you shouldn't have a license. Actual traffic enforcement does not seem to produce this result. This woman is fairly famous on Reddit for her erratic driving, and was reported in 2019 as having been involved in 31 crashes since 2000: https://www.wral.com/story/lawyer-stayumbl-driver-a-victim-of-social-media-frenzy/18408573/ https://www.wral.com/story/lawyer-stayumbl-driver-a-victim-o... She is still driving (with a new license plate after 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/bullcity/comments/1ji3y82/jesusdos_is_at_it_again/ https://old.reddit.com/r/bullcity/comments/1ji3y82/jesusdos_...
eightysixfour 1y ago
There is already a mechanism for this that the government doesn’t even have to be directly involved in - insurance. At some point you become prohibitively expensive to insure. However, the government still has to do its part and actually enforce insurance requirements. My pet hypothesis is that there is a tipping point where the feedback loop between driver safety, ai advancements, and insurance costs will doom manually driven cars faster than most people think.
- 1y ago

sharken 1y ago

I think that no matter how good Waymo is doing, there is still the problem of who is responsible when a self driving is involved in a serious accident. The only solution to that is probably to only let self driving cars onto the road, in an all-or-nothing solution.