271–280 of 424 posts
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How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It's going to be overcapacity too.
> How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It will commit to the ride and not cancel.
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Uber didn't originally have tips but the US Uber drivers wanted tips and pushed to implement it.
How many of them really wanted it? To me when Uber added tipping it seemed to come out of the blue. (And it was stupid and bad for everyone except possibly Uber, because the equilibrium total fare in a marketplace with reputation tracking is not going to be raised by turning part of it into a tip, it just adds uncertainty and friction.)
> Uber might finally be forced to change its tune after New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission introduced a proposal this week that would require ride-hailing companies operating in the city to allow riders to tip their drivers. The need to follow a rule like that in one of Uber's biggest and most important markets could force the company to allow tipping across the country or around the world.
> The Independent Drivers Guild lobbied for the New York proposal, which it estimates will lead to over $300 million per year in tips for New York drivers.
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> people underestimate how much of a quality of life improvement these are for people even when compared to Uber/Lyft I do underestimate it. What are quality of life improvements? Seems to be the same thing from a customer perspective. I guess if you are concerned for your safety from the uber driver it is an improvement but it is the only one that comes to mind.
For now they are still just cars with no driver. Once they are fully trustworthy though, the interior of the car could be repurposed in some interesting ways. Take out all the driving controls, add a desk, move the climate/radio control to a central console, captains chairs. The possibilities are endless.
Though I'm not sure if we'll ever fully get to such a state. I can see driver's seats still being mandated in case of failure and a need to revert to manual driving.
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> Stuff where I want to be surrounded by robots all my life. I mean, if a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound? Even if yes, does it matter? If we're just going to let the robots be the only thing we see all day long, why not just call it - hang up the hats build full AGI and blow up the humans.
> we're just going to let the robots be the only thing we see all day long This is an uncharitable reading of someone wanting peace and quiet from time to time.
But yeah, taxis and Ubers can suck sometimes.
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That's because the cars are all brand new Jaguars that are impeccably maintained. If Waymo succeeds in becoming a widely used service that is price competitive with Uber, the experience won't be this good forever.
This fancy a vehicle? Maybe not, though I don't see why they wouldn't maintain a premium brand of some sort. More importantly: the fleet is owned and maintained by Waymo. So they can achieve a higher degree of consistency. It is not the fanciness I value, it is the consistency. Put another way: I can get a fancy car and a good driver with Uber Black. I would rate my waymo experience slightly above Uber Black.
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I don't know about bringing down costs. The amount of money that's been invested in this wants to get paid back, so they're gonna be charging as money they can for this to be worth it.
As long as there is competition the prices will be low (eventually). Labor is almost always the most expensive part of any service and these technologies reduce the need for labor considerably.
The City (SF) has a fleet of transport vehicles that transport Seniors (old folks) around town. It would be much more cost effective to just have a bunch of Waymos available to Seniors.
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> How will waymo help with something like the super bowl? It's going to be overcapacity too. Ability to scale the amount of Waymo cars to an area is immensely easier than scaling the amount of Uber/Lyft drivers available and willing to go to said area.
Nope. Cars are expensive. Waymo won't keep a bunch of extras sitting around just so that they have reserve capacity to scale up service during unusually busy events. It's more profitable just to make customers wait, or ask them to pay a higher fare for priority service.
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While autonomous driving helps a bit on safety, that's just one of the many issues with the car dependence in our society. It might even expand the issues, if it ends up with less people using public transport and relying on these kinds of things.
Waymo is public transport, but you mean mass transit. People don't use mass transit because it sucks, blaming other modes of public transit doesn't cut it. The design and implementation of it is what keeps people from using it. The good news is automated vehicles will add flexible options for new types of public transport that are between single-trip taxies and mass transit and will lower costs to all kinds of public…
I speak to VCs quite a bit and recently I was hanging around with a bunch of them, they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever. But to me it's strange, if you go to San Francisco today you can see cars driving around with nobody inside. They drive around, they pick people up, they mostly don't crash into shit. There's nobody behind the wheel. I know that…
> I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second. They're victim of the s…
It does at least rain in San Francisco, and I've taken Waymo in the rain. It did more than fine. Plus, you know, night time.