81–90 of 449 posts
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Obviously you do surrender all of your travel privacy to the data broker. That's why they are making self-driving cars in the first place. But you're already doing all of that by carrying an Android phone.
> That's why they are making self-driving cars in the first place It is? I thought they wanted to disrupt transportation.
But other things like making the roads safer is a nice side effect.
Based on anecdotal evidence, I strongly suspect these are remotely driven cars, not completely self-driving, which means there is a remote saftey operator ready to take over if the ride starts to go bad. "Self-driving" sounds sexier and is the ultimate goal, but if it were my company I'd probably lead with "remotely monitored by safety driver" to calm any fears people might have. I'm guessing the percentage of people…
Remote operation is considered dangerous due to possible issues with network connection latency or stability. If it was actually happening, Waymo is big enough now (IIRC they said 50,000 paid rides each week) to where someone would've leaked such a secret.
Cool. Can I take one without my identity and travel patterns being tracked? Like, suppose I want to get picked up from work and dropped off at my girlfriend's house in San Mateo. Something I might not want my soon-to-be-ex's lawyer to be able to subpoena. There's one of those machines onboard that are all over the place in supermarkets where I can feed bills right? Or maybe not. Okay then, Luxor Cab it is. Cheaper, b…
We recently started using Waymo more often: - Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly. - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get. - AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver. - No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby. Negatives: - Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. - Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations…
From my experience prices for Waymo are at least double that of an equivalent Lyft/Uber ride and wait times are usually 20+ minutes. It is a great novelty but nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.
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> - Consistently [...] clean [...] I don't expect this to hold true once Waymo become generally available, alas.
I do. It'll be easier to keep the fleet on a cleaning schedule, and won't be left to the whims of individuals.
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I do. It'll be easier to keep the fleet on a cleaning schedule, and won't be left to the whims of individuals.
The metric will be "cost of time spent cleaning" / "cost of sending out a dirty car." If this ratio is > 1 the "recommended cleaning schedule" will be the lowest priority item in the entire fleet.
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From my experience prices for Waymo are at least double that of an equivalent Lyft/Uber ride and wait times are usually 20+ minutes. It is a great novelty but nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.
This won’t last long. Waymo has a treasure chest waiting to be deployed as soon as they start expanding more.
That's going to be a lot of cars to build.
I really wonder if and when they expand to a lot more car manufacturers and models, just to avoid supply chain issues.
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I do. It'll be easier to keep the fleet on a cleaning schedule, and won't be left to the whims of individuals.
By this logic public transportation should be the cleanest of them all. But, it is unfortunately far from that.
Privately operated public transport (e.g. jitneys and ferries) frequently are when positioned at a premium, as Waymo is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do. It'll be easier to keep the fleet on a cleaning schedule, and won't be left to the whims of individuals.
I have a good friend who's a Lyft driver. According to him, all drivers are rated on cleanliness by passengers; if you're dinged for a weird smell, there are lasting financial consequences (even if it was for reasons outside of your control, e.g. using a Lyft provided rental while repairing from a traffic accident). We'll see how Waymo handles it! It will definitely be Waymo's problem to solve, though.
More cynically, there are simply too many people that won't take care of "public" property. If every 3rd rider (exaggerated for rhetorical purposes) trashes the car, it's gonna be dirty no matter what.
We recently started using Waymo more often: - Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly. - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get. - AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver. - No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby. Negatives: - Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber. - Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations…