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Next stop: Miami

waymo.com

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Re: Next stop: Miami

#131

Post by Quinner »

timerol wrote: post #51
deadbabe wrote: post #38

It will be a showdown of man vs machine in the city with the worst drivers in the nation. Interesting times.

Did you know that almost every city believes this about their local drivers? I've gotten it in LA, Boston, NYC, DC, SF, Philly, Atlanta, and Austin. Adding Miami to the list.

LA Drivers aren't that bad, driving just is awful there because the amount of traffic. NYC Driving is an absolute pleasure compared to Miami driving. I have what should be an easy ten minute commute and every day I am avoiding an accident due to a driver doing something crazy you would almost never see in another US city.

This is exacerbated by the dysfunctional government which is happy to let developers do whatever they want without regard to impact on traffic flow, while doing no investment in infrastructure itself. I'm generally pro-growth, and I think California goes too far with its restrictions, but living in Miami has caused me to gain some appreciation for the reason behind some of what California does.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#132

Post by ecocentrik »

ecesena wrote: post #35
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #17

This is important if nothing else because Miami sees much more rain than SF and Phoenix: Miami: 57 in. ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset... SF: 25 in. ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset... ) Phoenix: 7 in. ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset... )

Interesting random fact: when it rains, waymo turns on the windshield wipers

I'm guessing you've never tried driving in a tropical rainstorm. It's as bad a driving in heavy fog. Sometimes you only really have visibility of a few feet.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#133

Post by yellowstuff »

jeffbee wrote: post #50
bbor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, they're Google -- I'm guessing they're pulling out their "pointcloud of the entire world" for this one. The first point is a great one, tho; rideshare companies exist by offloading as much cost as possible onto their employees, and even then barely make it work. Plus, at least some of the Waymos are super-fancy Jaguars -- tho it looks like roughly 20K Jaguars to 65K Chrysler minivans, according to Wikipedia.…

Waymo does not have 85k cars lol. In their latest CPUC report they only have 480 cars in California and that is their biggest market by far. If they had 85k cars and only 175k rides per week that would be the worst business in the history of businessing.

It looks like they contracted to buy "up to" 20,000 Jaguars: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/27/waymo-sel...

Pretty effective press release! Nothing in it is untrue, but it's obviously misleading even to careful readers.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#134

Post by Rebuff5007 »

I'm so curious about how the internal dev teams feeling about all this scaling. Four cities across 3 states -- surely there are differences in road signs, lane markings, emergency procedures, etc. Let alone the sheer volume of data of doing hundreds of thousands of miles ever week!

Massive kudos to them if they are able to do all this without things being aflame on the inside...

Re: Next stop: Miami

#135

Post by oblio »

mg wrote: post #23

our service – which already provides over 150,000 trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin Interesting. That's about 8 million rides per year. I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast. I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B? If they at some point…

Google has invested and also drawn external funding. From what I've seen in the last 15 years since founding the lower bound for their cost seems to be higher than $12bn and I can only imagine expenses will only accelerate.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#136

Post by dannyobrien »

drewg123 wrote: post #109
fngjdflmdflg wrote: post #17

This is important if nothing else because Miami sees much more rain than SF and Phoenix: Miami: 57 in. ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset... SF: 25 in. ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset... ) Phoenix: 7 in. ( https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset... )

When I took Waymo in Phoenix, I booked a ride from a suburban hotel to a restaurant in a strip mall. One of the things I noticed was that I was picked up far away from the entrance of the hotel (eg, not under the overhang that protects from sun and rain, where every Uber has picked me up and dropped me off). I recall thinking that it was good there was no weather in Phoenix b/c I had to walk far enough I'd have gotte…

One thing I've noticed about the SF deployment is that it's slowly gotten better at this. At first it was very cautious about where it would pick you up/drop you off, but now it offers much closer options (from a menu -- a bit like Uber at airports).

I suspect this might be something that is human-added from data collected in past trips.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#137

Post by hwc »

xnx wrote: post #34
simpleintheory wrote: post #4

I think the most interesting part is that the article says that Waymo's handing its operations to Moove. It seems like Waymo's trying to become a software provider while having other companies handle the capital-intensive parts.

> having other companies handle the capital-intensive parts. Waymo definitely wants to outsource the areas where they don't have special expertise (i.e. Waymo is 100x better at driving, but not 100x better at washing and vacuuming cars). I'm not sure how capital-intensive regional operations are. The vehicles are definitely the largest capital expense. This is more like an AirBnB property owner hiring a cleaning serv…

Also, contracting out the menial labor makes Waymo's labor practices look much better. They can tell their engineers that all employees make a living wage and get excellent health insurance.

When the actual labor is done by part-timers with no health insurance making not much over minimum wage.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#138

Post by pengaru »

rdsubhas wrote: post #108
pengaru wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Interesting random fact: when it rains, waymo turns on the windshield wipers The jaguar i-pace does this independent of the waymo use case.

The interesting part here is... the Waymo has no reason to. There is no driver. All cameras and sensors are outside. It's just for not freaking out the passenger :)

> The interesting part here is... the Waymo has no reason to. There is no driver. All cameras and sensors are outside. It's just for not freaking out the passenger :)

We have very different thresholds for what's interesting.

The platform provides this feature out of the box, why would waymo go out of their way to disable it. Obviously potential occupants would appreciate seeing out the windshield if it's raining, why that is interesting escapes me.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#139

Post by kemotep »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #114
bedobi wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no it would save miami and the state and the federal government billions trirail frequency increases can be done overnight a greenway network can also be built quickly and cheaply metrorail extension would cost more but still less than it costs to build and maintain roads but they are too busy spending billions building even more car infra which will only make traffic and congestion even worse

> no it would save miami and the state and the federal government billions Have you ever looked at the local budget of a US transit authority? They typically lose $2+ per passenger trip, and get bailed out by the federal government. Mass transit is not going to save Miami any money for decades until ridership approaches Hong Kong levels. Unless you count passing on expenses to the Federal government as savings, and e…

With car usage on most roads free of charge at use and maintenance also footed largely by the Federal Government, it probably comes out cheaper long term to invest in rail.

And every car off the toad makes driving more pleasant for everyone who stays.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#140

Post by comte7092 »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #72
entropi wrote: post #60

I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing. I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here? I don't mean "problem" like "solving the technical problem of making a car move autonomously in a chaotic city" sense. I mean what is the need that's being addressed here, exactly? Ride-hai…

> If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city; well to be honest I find this premise a bit ridiculous. Call me a European, but I find the idea that moving 1-2 people in private vehicles on roads being superior than public transit -preferably on rail- simply absurd. Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure. > Ride-haili…

*50% of your fare goes to the driver, as well as paying for fuel, vehicle maintenance and depreciation, insurance, etc.

Without a driver those other costs don’t go away.

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