Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

blog.waymo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 216 posts

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#141

Post by colejohnson66 »

bsder wrote: post #131
lhorie wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they might have a "lead" in the sense that they have technology to avoid having a driver, but there's still chicken-and-egg problems like demand vs availability and wait times (two of the criticisms lashed out at taxis, in comparison to Uber). I'm also curious about how driverless plays out in the real world (e.g. is there an equivalent of "oh shoot, I accidentally put the wrong address, can you drop me off ove…

> problems like demand vs availability and wait times (two of the criticisms lashed out at taxis, in comparison to Uber). These were never my problems with taxi service. Tracking is the thing that makes the rideshare services better--and taxis could apply that, if they wanted to. Tracking solves most bad things about taxis. "Is it actually coming? How long until it gets here? Did they hit something unexpected? etc."

> Tracking is the thing that makes the rideshare services better--and taxis could apply that, if they wanted to.

Don’t forget: upfront pricing. Most taxis won’t tell you the price until you get to your destination. And how do you know they took the quickest route?

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#142

Post by colejohnson66 »

olyjohn wrote: post #107
jrockway wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they have the lead in the sense that you can drive to a Tesla dealership today and buy a car that will kind of sort of drive you home. That's something!

Big deal. You can do this in a Honda Fit for crying out loud.

You can, yes, but marketing is very much a thing. The average person knows Tesla has self driving (to whatever extent), but not everyone knows a Honda Fit can drive itself. I sure didn’t.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#143

Post by ra7 »

jfoster wrote: post #130
scotth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so in what way do they have the lead?

I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill? Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually le…

> Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road.

Waymo can just license the tech and sensor suite to manufacturers and make money off that. They don't need to actually build and sell a million Waymo vehicles.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#144

Post by sidibe »

jfoster wrote: post #130
scotth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so in what way do they have the lead?

I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill? Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually le…

Waymo is part of a company that is sitting on $100B+, if they thought rolling out their own cars everywhere was worth it they could afford it easier than Tesla, but also they don't need to do it in a capital intensive way, they can partner with car manufacturers or ride hailing businesses and just be responsible for the driver.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#145

Post by mav3rick »

bsaul wrote: post #115
jeffbee wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HN discussion around Waymo is always overwhelmingly negative because Waymo doesn't fit into the HN cosmology of innovation. Self-driving will come to pass when we force an AI to watch us play Pole Position for a million years, is the HN timeline. HN is comfortable with this Tesla narrative. Less comfortable is the idea that self-driving will be brought to market by lots of control theory PhDs and a really large n…

You seem to know a lot about the difference of approach between waymo and tesla. Do you have any links that would give more on that ?

LOL LIDAR vs non-LIDAR

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#146

Post by fullshark »

ra7 wrote: post #143
jfoster wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill? Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually le…

> Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. Waymo can just license the tech and sensor suite to manufacturers and make money off that. They don't need to actually build and sell a million Waymo vehicles.

Yeah this is ultimately the case Waymo are in the lead, if you imagine the only way this happens is if eventually one organization gets the hardware/software/dataset/patents that makes full self-driving possible and they will license it to everyone else, then Waymo is the most likely candidate.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#147

Post by fullshark »

olyjohn wrote: post #107
jrockway wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess they have the lead in the sense that you can drive to a Tesla dealership today and buy a car that will kind of sort of drive you home. That's something!

Big deal. You can do this in a Honda Fit for crying out loud.

They are in 2nd.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#148

Post by vkou »

toast0 wrote: post #69
vkou wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really care about the longevity of the taxi company whose cars you are riding in? Half the time, I don't even know which company that is. Or the longevity of the particular farm from which your grocery's tomatoes have been sourced from? This isn't e-mail. The cost and hassle of switching to a competing service is nearly zero.

> Do you really care about the longevity of the taxi company whose cars you are riding in? Not that particular company no, but the longevity of taxi service in general, yes. Although, it depends on why I'm riding in a taxi. If it's an occasional ride, it's not a big deal if taxi service disappears, I can pay for long term parking at the airport, or call a friend, or something. If it's an everyday ride, loss of servic…

If all current taxi, and taxi-like services died overnight, the barrier to entry into the industry would be a guy with a high school degree, a cellphone, a driver's license, a beat-up Prius, and a yellow paintjob for it.

Your cited risk is not realistic.

> The obvious part is, you might get used to it, only for it to be dropped.

> But also, they may run competitors out of business before dropping it, leaving you without any options.

It's a taxi. You call a number, or click a button on an app. A car arrives and drives you somewhere. The value delivered by the guy in the beat-up Prius, to me, is the exact same as Waymo. It's the most homogenized, commoditized industry in the world. Waymo could corner the entire market, and then go out of business, and the very next day, the streets would be full of independent taxis picking up passengers.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#149

Post by tylerhou »

nickik wrote: post #84
dbt00 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I own a Tesla model 3 with the V3 hardware and FSD package. They are not even close to being able to do what Waymo does.

And Waymo is not close to what Tesla does. Different strategy coming at it from different sides. The question is not, who has the first taxi on any public road anywhere, but who first can launch 10000 of autonomous taxis and make money. Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waym…

> I would put my money on Tesla

I'll bet you $1000 Tesla won't be the first to develop self-driving that is at least as good as humans (wrt. accident rate) in all weather and terrain conditions. Hell, I don't even think they'll be the third.

Re: Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix

#150

Post by reitzensteinm »

jfoster wrote: post #130
scotth wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...so in what way do they have the lead?

I would argue that the most significant way in which Tesla have the lead is simple but a bit unintuitive. It's that their customers pay for the cars. Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill? Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually le…

Once it's confident in the technology and business model, Google can absolutely afford the capex of putting a million Waymo cars on the road. They'd probably take out a massive loan, and the worst case is having to ditch the lidar gear and sell the fleet on the second hand market. But it's doable.

But where did you get a million cars from? To equal Tesla's existing fleet?

Uber has 3 million active drivers globally. If you assume that they're working in 8 hour shifts, 1 million Waymo cars is a rollout sized to replace Uber.

Coming at the math from another direction, Uber does 1.6 billion rides a quarter. A million cars would mean 18 rides per car per day. Totally doable.

But Waymo would surely focus on countries with high wages - US, Canada, UK, Australia, most of Western Europe. Replacing Uber in only those countries would only need perhaps 500,000 cars.

Of course they're going to ramp up towards those numbers, but once the tech works and it's just a matter of cash, it's going to happen very quickly.

Post reply on HN