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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

#111

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jessriedel wrote: post #109
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

> I think freeway driving is still only available to employees or maybe some special customers

Not a special customer, can't even get access in LA. Waymo took the freeway in Phoenix in March.

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

#112

Post by labrador »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #106
TulliusCicero wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I really don't understand why they aren't transparent about this, but judging by the downvotes I'm getting it seems people really, really want to believe they are intelligent and independent self-driving machines. It's so much more futuristic with a "wow" factor that attracts press attention and future investement.

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

#113

Post by schoen »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #108
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.

Would you accept any historical development that reduced demand for some kind of labor (or human interaction) as potentially positive? There are a lot of those.

(I'm happy to hear if the answer is "yes".)

For example, most kinds of shops were (like jewelry stores today) apparently historically not self-service, so you had to ask the shopkeeper for every item individually, and the shopkeeper would have to retrieve it for you.

Maybe a more direct analogy is that you once had to ask human operators to complete telephone calls for you, and gradually this was replaced with automated switches and direct-dial systems. That has benefits and drawbacks, but I think I appreciate it quite a bit. Do you think it would be better if that change hadn't happened?

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

#114

Post by williamcotton »

akira2501 wrote: post #79
dventimi wrote: post #73

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.

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.

That assumes a specific low budget market and does not apply to all segments.

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

#115

Post by cyberax »

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.

Cruise is still here, they just stopped their unattened car testing.

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

#116

Post by labrador »

s09dfhks wrote: post #101
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

That's reassuring to me. I don't know why Waymo doesn't reassure safety conscious people like me by being explicit about this. As it stands, as a computer programmer and professional driver at different times in my career, whose seen a lot of unforeseen bugs and weird driving situations, I'm not putting my life in the hands of this software.

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

#117

Post by quectophoton »

firloop wrote: post #18
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…

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.

> Anecdotally they can be 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic

I don't know anything about USA, but my understanding of other humans tells me that "Waymo is 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic" actually means "Waymo drives at the legal speed limit for that location, without surpassing it".

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

#118

Post by labrador »

akira2501 wrote: post #74
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…

Wouldn't the fear just become that not enough safety drivers will always be available or that the internet connection they use to "drive" the car remotely would fail? It's a taxi that you don't have to risk having a conversation with a stranger in. Outside of that it seems that all other benefits are marginal or well crafted illusions. Anyways, I'm sure I'm just being a pessimist, it's not as if large monopolistic co…

If it loses remote monitoring I'd rather it would pull over and park rather than barelling down the steep hills of San Francisco without a safety monitor.

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

#119

Post by cyberax »

Alupis wrote: post #85
dventimi wrote: post #73

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.

By this logic public transportation should be the cleanest of them all. But, it is unfortunately far from that.

Public transit is actually pretty clean. The main problem is that they can't refuse to board disruptive passengers, who just trash everything around them. Waymo has cameras inside, so they can fine/ban you if you litter.

The driverless cars can also, well, drive themselves to a cleaning center during the night-time when it won't affect the income generation.

Another interesting possible feature is to redesign cars to be more easily cleanable. Driverless cars can dispense with the central console, steering wheel and pedals, with simple hard plastic covered in detachable covering. Even the seats can be made detachable.

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

#120

Post by lern_too_spel »

mechagodzilla wrote: post #105
lern_too_spel wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They have a big upfront cost to add a new city, but once they add it, their marginal revenue per car will be higher there (partly because they can be sure to keep those cars busy and partly because they can charge a higher premium).

They have to prepare the infrastructure anyway in all the cities to get to the scale they want to get to, but each new car built is going to be sent to the least scaled city so far.

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