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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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261–270 of 651 posts

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

#261

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 wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.

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

#262

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.

>What do you think comes next? Public transport, hopefully.

[deleted]

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

#263

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

Fear of what? I am not disagreeing with you, I just don't know what is happening at Tesla that you are referring to.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any kind of limit to them besides the geofence? Can you get a Waymo at night? In the rain? I suppose it never snows there. How about roadworks? How do they react to vehicles with emergency signals? Can they follow directions of a cop in the street?

They are starting to obstruct bike lanes just like Ubers, I’ve seen this happen 3-4 times and it’s documented here: https://sfba.social/@SafeStreetRebel/112634004752866771 Years ago they were very respectful and conservative of basic road markings but clearly they have now ‘expanded capabilities’

California law says vehicles can enter the bike lane whenever they feel it is safe to do so.

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

#265
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.

Boston resident here seconding this.

I am not artificially intelligent and Boston’s streets are a fuckshow.

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

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waymo hasn’t required an NDA for at least a couple of years now. They only had a waitlist for access, you could share anything you want publicly.

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

#267
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere." This is because it only relies on navigation information and what the car can see. Waymo and similar companies all use HD Mapping. Ignoring the specifics, it can be thought of as a centimeter-level perfect reconstruction of the environment, including additional metadata such as slopes, exact lane positions, road markings, barriers, traffic…

> HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities. Waymo have said time and again they don’t rely on maps being 100% accurate to be able to drive. It's one of the key assumptions of the system. They use it as prior knowledge to aid in decision making.…

> They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout changes to the entire fleet.

Which leads to mapping failures being unchecked, as the system that generated the data is the one checking the data by driving it. See bullet point 1 in their recent recall for an example.

> Prior to the Waymo ADS receiving the remedy described in this report, a collision could occur if the Waymo ADS encountered a pole or pole-like permanent object and all of the following were true:

> 1) the object was within the the boundaries of the road and the map did not include a hard road edge between the object and the driveable surface;

> 2) the Waymo ADS’s perception system assigned a low damage score to the object;

> 3) the object was located within the Waymo ADS’s intended path (e.g. when executing a pullover near the object); and

> 4) there were no other objects near the pole that the ADS would react to and avoid.

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

#268
post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah they probably pipe that video to an algorithm that does background subtraction so they're able to assert that the vehicle is clear of foreign objects, but those cameras don't detect smell. If someone defecates and wipes it somewhere the camera doesn't see, then what?

The rider reports an issue and Waymo sends a new car while they send the dirty one back to the depot back to be cleaned? Offending previous rider is charged a fee and then banned for life. Hard for me to imagine this being a widespread problem. Probably about as much problem as there is with something similar happening in the elevator of a private building.

"the algorithm has decided that the subject has likely defecated with 63% probability and will be ejected in t-5 minutes.

Subject has no recourse to appeal and is banned from life including his ancestors and spawns"

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

#269
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a function of the filtered population. The cars are at full capacity day and night so the increased number of users won't affect a single car's cleanliness nearly as much as the type of people that will be riding in them.

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

That new group is people who aren't at the frontier of trying out new tech.

The way this will manifest is the drunk idiot who'll puke all over the car. The bored asshole who carves his initials in the seat. The edgelord who gets their jollies out of destroying other people's stuff.

Good chance you had some in the original group as well, but early adopters are usually mostly people who deeply understand tech. Once that falls away, you have a less thorough understanding of tech, and a very surprised realization that booking something under your name that has cameras all over will likely result in you being held accountable for what you did. But after you did it.

How that'll play out in the long run is anyone's guess. If Waymo maintains rigorous enforcement and the courts actually play along, it might just work out. It's still going to be capital-intensive because we seem to have created a world where being a major asshole in public without consequences is kind of an entitlement people expect to have, and Waymo will need a very strong "yeah, not here" vibe to prevent that. Which requires a number of high-profile incidents.

Yes, the subtext of the question likely was "are you discriminating against the poor!?" If it was indeed, the answer to that question is "no, the ride pricing will do that".

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

#270

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

Fear of what? I am not disagreeing with you, I just don't know what is happening at Tesla that you are referring to.

"Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8"

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1776351450542768368

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