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Anyone with a credit card
Service area is still miniscule.
Why are the cars so big? Wouldn't it make sense to have a bunch of much smaller, single person vehicles?
Anyone with a credit card
No freeways. But Waymo now is available to all of Dallas? Does that include the suburbs?
looks like Bishop Arts -> Fair Park -> White Rock -> NW Hwy -> Hampton/Inwood, with a weird section jutting out toward Irving along 114 so, no suburbs, only enclaves
It does seem necessary to have cameras inside driverless cars but I don't want to if Google is running the show. Your biometrics will probably be stored for "enforcing Google's policies" at a minimum [1]. And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027861 [2] https://www.404media.co/waymo-cal…
Why are the cars so big? Wouldn't it make sense to have a bunch of much smaller, single person vehicles?
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.