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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

#251

Post by Aerbil313 »

tmpz22 wrote: post #244
itsoktocry wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love how we've gone from "Taxis are gross and dirty, that's why I love Uber!" to "Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why I love Waymo!" in the span of 5 years. What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.

> These cars are literally unsupervised. Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car. I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.

I think GP meant unsupervised during the ride by a remote human driver.

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

#252

Post by Schiendelman »

gst wrote: post #46
ducttapecrown wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll hazard a guess: because Uber drivers are sometimes willing to stop for a minute in an illegal spot to park to do a quick pick up or drop off, and Waymos are never willing to do that (presumably).

During one of my last Waymo rides the car stopped on Powell between Bush and Sutter (facing South stopping on the regular lane a bit before the Powell/Sutter crossing). This caused other drivers to drive on the cable car tracks to go around the Waymo (which are separated from the driving lane with a double yellow line) and it caused a truck to do a right turn directly from the cable car tracks (as there wasn't enough…

Honestly, it’s almost always legal to stop in a lane. Regardless of the fact that other drivers had bad behavior, that was the right thing to do. Some of the future of all this is that we will need to install curbs in places we don’t have them now to prevent bad human behavior.

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

#253

Post by dventimi »

fragmede wrote: post #225
dventimi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by the type of people who will be riding in them?

That's a loaded question, but sure, let's go there. The problem with public transportation is that the public is allowed to use them, and the rules, legal and social, are not well defined or enforced. Assaulting other passengers is generally tolerated by the system, depending on the type of assault. Physical assault is considered too far and doesn't go unnoticed, but chemical and audio assault on fellow passengers us…

> That's a loaded question

It's not a loaded question to ask what a person means when they introduce a term.

> The types of people are those who would assault others on some fashion.

That's a tautology. Nobody knows if a person fits the type of person who would assault someone, until after they've gone and assaulted someone.

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

#254

Post by diebeforei485 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #139
notyourwork wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.

Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort. Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as mu…

I'm not sure how true this is anymore. FSD has improved significantly this year that they're on their new NN architecture.

It's worth remembering that Waymo required their users to sign NDA's during beta, while the Tesla FSD beta was open to everyone with no NDA. So there was a lot more Tesla content being posted and going viral.

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

#255

Post by Schiendelman »

archagon wrote: post #143
jeffbee wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you can tell that a mode of transport is very safe is there are tons of people online whining that they almost got killed by it.

No. It means it’s only a matter of time before this technology breaks the law and kills someone.

Or people are sensitive to it and the rate at which it kills people will be lower than humans, or probably already is!

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

#256

Post by dventimi »

darth_avocado wrote: post #243
dventimi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by the type of people who will be riding in them?

Drunk party goers on a Friday night, people smoking in the car on their way to Dolores, petulant teenagers…

I've been riding MUNI for 25 years. The only assault I saw was a drunk office worker on his way home on the 31AX.

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

#257

Post by diebeforei485 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #193
thegrim33 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW a quick google search turns up Waymo reporting they have 0.41 incidents with injuries per million miles driven [0], whereas Tesla vehicles using autopilot had 0.152 incidents with or without injuries, per million miles driven [1]. So Waymo has 2.7 times more incidents with injuries then Teslas using autopilot have incidents, with or without injuries. Maybe if I checked more sites they'd give different numbers, b…

This is an extraordinarily disingenuous comparison. A big reason why Tesla superfans have such a poor reputation is because of bad faith arguments like this that frequently pop up in these discussions. Tesla cars with FSD have a driver behind the wheel who can instantly take over if the car is about to crash into a stationary object. Any time a Tesla would've crashed into something an object but its human driver save…

> Many Tesla owners have reported that they have to regularly disengage FSD because it's trying to do something dangerous or looks like it's headed for a crash.

With Tesla the responsibility is on the person in the driver's seat, so there is a (rightfully!) a bias for overreaction on the part of the driver. We will never know many of these disengagements were necessary.

The only way to get a true comparison of data is to compare robotaxis with robotaxis.

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

#258

Post by burnished »

Fatnino wrote: post #241
aetherson wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are freeways within the geofence in SF. My understanding is that Waymos will not drive on those freeways without a safety driver for now.

Freeway driving is easier than surface streets. Maybe merging in is the hard part.

Fuckups are substantially worse though

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

#259

Post by alexambarch »

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…

If these vehicles tackle the roads of Boston, there will be no stopping this company. That place has one of the most confusing road networks I’ve ever seen in addition to some of the most confused drivers.

NYC is another obvious challenge but Boston seems like a challenging middle ground.

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

#260

Post by lopkeny12ko »

You can definitely feel the fear from Tesla's competition recently, just ahead of Tesla's robotaxi unveil on 8/8 :)

* Uber CEO dumps $70 million of shares this week

* Google tries to steal the Tesla's media thunder by opening Waymo to everyone

* GM brings in new leadership to revitalize Cruise

* Rivian gets a huge cash injection

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