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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#151

Post by ajcp »

ra7 wrote: post #11

Add freeways and airport rides, both of which they are very close to doing, Waymo will become much more of a complete service and a true Uber/Lyft replacement. In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US governmen…

1: Airport rides are already available in Phoenix between 10PM and 6AM.

2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed of travel required. That is: the sensors cannot see far enough ahead to react comfortably when going above N miles-per-hour. That might be a dated understanding of the issue though...

Source: I've been riding Weymo since 2019 when it first went public beta (NDA-restricted use). Rode one last night coming home from the airport!

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#152

Post by rootusrootus »

RankingMember wrote: post #146
bangaladore wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5. Dogs jump…

> if the bar is human level IMO the bar is well above human-level if you actually want to attain the level of trust necessary to remove the steering wheel from a car.

Agree 100%. And IMO it is worth remembering that a really significant share of collisions are caused by well known risk factors. For those of us who avoid being in those situations to begin with, the robotaxi would need to be a good bit safer than our average.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#153

Post by rurp »

bangaladore wrote: post #133
kajecounterhack wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads.…

> That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. IR and thermal sensing are unnecessary if the bar is human level and neither is the lidar. The point is overused, but humans rely on two eyes in the driver seat. I don't see any evidence to suggest the modern model that Tesla has developed for their vision system is their limiting factor in the slightest to reach L4/L5. Dogs jump…

That vision-only argument is marketing spin from Tesla. The biggest thing it leaves out is that humans process their vision input with a human brain, which Tesla vehicles very much do not have. If and when we create true AGI they will have a good argument, but a world where that exists will be wildly different from our current one and who knows if Tesla's tech will even be relevent anymore.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#154

Post by llamaimperative »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #126
jessriedel wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist. It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out…

It will get faster definitely, but how much faster is the question. We've only seen full rollout to two cities so far, so hard to extrapolate.

Well you can definitely bet it will be faster not slower than the first two, especially given the basic (i.e. shared/city-agnostic) engineering required and the policy component, which will get easier and easier with each city as risk aversion turns to FOMO.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#155

Post by Swizec »

pengaru wrote: post #63
prasoonds wrote: post #14

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…

So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of stopping abruptly. source: I commute by skateboard in SF daily. Just yesterday an empty Waymo cruised straight through a fresh red, narrowly missing my entry into the crosswalk. But don't get me started on what I've seen human drivers do on the same streets. Just annoyed that Waymo's aren't better.

Competing anecdata: Yesterday I was running downtown and a Waymo stopped for me at a green light because it wasn't sure if I was gonna jaywalk (jayrun?). Only once I stood still for a few seconds did it continue to make its turn.

This was in a turn-left-only intersection with a separate pedestrian light. Maybe the Waymo got confused and thought I also had green.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#156

Post by jrflowers »

aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

This is a good question. Will the robot taxi company beat the company that hasn’t made a single autonomous vehicle in the robot taxi business? It is hard to say

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#157

Post by [deleted] »

slibhb wrote: post #127
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

Many people predict that AI is going to explode, and afterward nothing will be the same. If that happens, Telsa is in a better position than anyone else to simply update their software and deliver self driving cars. Whether that happens remains to be seen.

[deleted]

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#158

Post by bragr »

prasoonds wrote: post #14

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…

I got access to Waymo in LA a few weeks ago and have taken it 4 times. It's capabilities are impressive for sure, but I'm not sure I'd go as far as "smooth and sure ride". The car's skills seems to vary between impressive and "nervous new driver". It drives like someone that got randomly stuck into a much bigger car than they are used to.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#159

Post by rurp »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #33
tapoxi wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the Ubers potentially be cleaner? Who's cleaning the Waymo between rides?

Potentially. But, with each driver exercising quality control over their own vehicles, the actual result will likely vary from hitting as good or better a standard to being worse. The Waymo standards, thus far, are pretty high, so I would expect on average Uber/Lyft/Etc. would fair worse on average.

I would be surprised if the Waymp cars weren't exceptionally nice in this phase, while they're trying hard to gain market share and trust. Google Search was a clean and delightful experience once upon a time. The aspect I'm more interested in is what the experience will be like if they ever become a dominant transport option.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#160

Post by c22 »

singleshot_ wrote: post #150
TulliusCicero wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious thing to do is to just have every Waymo robotaxi or car with licensed Waymo tech report in its daily mapping/obstacle data to the mothership, so you can get new changes almost immediately. I dunno if said data would be as high quality as dedicated HD mapping cars, but it's probably at least decent, given the variety of cameras and lidars every Waymo car has.

Further, it seems to me that if you brake hard to avoid a dog, your car should warn me as I’m approaching. I’m not sure why we are trying to teach each car to drive when we could be teaching all the cars and the road to drive.

This is a good point. Do Waymo cars ever use their horn?
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