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Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

sfchronicle.com

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Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#101

Post by s09dfhks »

labrador wrote: post #71

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…

I had someone remotely intervene on my last ride. A car was trying to parallel park on a narrow street and the waymo stayed put, despite there being plenty of room to go around. I heard a chime and a pop up on the screen said “we’re getting your waymo back on track” and it went around the car, like any sane driver would have done from the get go

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#102

Post by jessriedel »

paxys wrote: post #80
tanvach wrote: post #7

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.

Doesn’t match my experience in SF. I see 10% premium over Uber/Lyft, with Lyft and Waymo displaying wait times that are ~3 slower, but actual wait times are the same. (Uber consistently underestimates in my experience.)

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#103

Post by jessriedel »

acchow wrote: post #90
tanvach wrote: post #7

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…

Does that 10% markup account for the Uber/lyft driver tip?

Uber/Lyft drivers only get tips on 15-30% of rides, so tips are like ~3% of revenue. If you choose to tip, then prices are going to be very similar between Waymo and Uber/Lyft.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#104

Post by ssl-3 »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #39
firloop wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rarely discussed negative to Waymo is that they drive slower than human drivers. Anecdotally they can be 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic, and it's not uncommon to see human drivers do unsafe moves to pass a Waymo.

Honestly as a cyclist who takes Waymo, all the Waymos I've seen are much nicer to cyclists than any human driver. Most human drivers in SF either buzz past the 3 ft legal limit going 15 mph over (good luck when their mirror taps you at 40 mph) to try and overtake the cyclist or they'll just edge the cyclist out any time there's space to merge into the lane. Waymos usually give cyclists the whole lane comfortably and…

I used to work with a guy who liked cycling, and liked doing it light and in open, fairly rural areas near a city.

He didn't carry tools or spare parts. He'd just summon an appropriate Uber to his location and get a ride home home with his bike if he had an issue.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#105

Post by mechagodzilla »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #97
laluser wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This won’t last long. Waymo has a treasure chest waiting to be deployed as soon as they start expanding more.

It will be more profitable for them to deploy cars to new cities at a premium than to deploy them to existing cities to capture more of those cities' markets. We won't see affordable driverless taxi service for many years unless competition appears. After Uber and Cruise imploded, I don't have much hope for that.

Is that true? There's a ton of overhead required to have any presence in a city (all of the fueling/cleaning/repairing/storing/etc depots) that you need to amortize over lots of cars. If they can keep the cars busy, I think they'd much rather have 5,000 cars in one city than 500 cars in 10 cities (with 10x the overhead).

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#106

Post by lopkeny12ko »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #82
labrador wrote: post #71

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…

Waymo has been pretty clear about this: they do have remote navigators/coaches who tell the cars what to do if it gets stuck/confused, but they're not directly driving the car, they're telling it where to go, like a navigator in the front passenger seat. 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 (…

> they do have remote navigators/coaches who tell the cars what to do if it gets stuck/confused, but they're not directly driving the car, they're telling it where to go

That sounds a lot like remote operation.

Waymo is notoriously tight-lipped about this. Look at the number of journalists and reporters who have, over the years, asked very basic questions, like:

1. How often do remote operators intervene?

2. How many miles are driven per intervention? How does this compare to FSD?

3. How much of a typical ride is remotely operated and not actually driven by the car itself?

Waymo never provides answers, and one can only imagine it is because they are not proud of the answers.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#107

Post by mgillett54 »

akira2501 wrote: post #96
alooPotato wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost of cleaning goes way down when you do it in bulk at a service center rather than individual lyft/uber drivers trying to do it. A standardized car also helps.

If you can incorporate the cost of large horizontal demand spikes into the off hours and you can find cheap enough labor to fill it, perhaps. The time spent travelling out of service, in cleaning, and back into service are all lost opportunities. Hopefully you can clean a very large number of cars in a very short period of time. The cars may be standard. The messes, obviously, will not be.

The cars already need to go out of services to recharge, they can just clean the cars while charging

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#108

Post by lopkeny12ko »

tanvach wrote: post #7

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…

Sorry, but any argument that basically boils down to "it's better because I don't have to talk to a driver" is not a real argument. Drivers are people too. Nevermind the fact that you are cheering for people to lose their jobs.

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#109

Post by jessriedel »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67
athoun wrote: post #26

In my experience Waymo has been much worse compared to Lyft/Uber for longer rides. A big problem with Waymo in its current state is how its routes are terribly inefficient. It purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads, opting to take more inefficient routes without regards to the number of stop signs, hills, and other factors which will inevitably lead to a longer travel time. It's almost like it's using a wor…

> purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads When did you take it? They’ve started taking freeways in January, including for intracity trips [1]. [1] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...

They announced that for Phoenix in January, but I think freeway driving is still only available to employees or maybe some special customers.

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/watch-waymos-self-driving...

I tried it in Phoenix in May and it wouldn’t take the freeway. And it’s definitely not generally available in the Bay area. (I take them every week or two.)

Re: Self-driving Waymos secure final clearance for expansion beyond S.F

#110

Post by akira2501 »

mgillett54 wrote: post #107
akira2501 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can incorporate the cost of large horizontal demand spikes into the off hours and you can find cheap enough labor to fill it, perhaps. The time spent travelling out of service, in cleaning, and back into service are all lost opportunities. Hopefully you can clean a very large number of cars in a very short period of time. The cars may be standard. The messes, obviously, will not be.

The cars already need to go out of services to recharge, they can just clean the cars while charging

The have multiple charging centers strategically placed throughout the city. These seem to currently only have security guards there. The logistics of having cleaning staff there and trying to match their schedule to expected charging times is probably not very difficult but also not very reliable either.

The win they do have, that I did not consider is, they have cameras _in_ the car. So visible cleanliness is something they can manually check before and after the rid and schedule for service if required; however, it currently seems that this requires the vehicle to go to the larger centralized maintenance facility, which I guessing takes quit a bit more time than the auxiliary charge only lots.

Not trying to be super pessimistic, but mixing distributed autonomous operations with centralized manual service, especially in an urban environment, seems fraught with novel challenges.

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