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Waymo in Dallas

waymo.com

331–340 of 751 posts

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No human in the car?

This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product). Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their…

huh, definitely will pay more for not having a driver to be constantly on the phone.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should be the same as for any public transport: it's the service operator's responsibility to run the system. The rider doesn't need insurance. I imagine Google has enough money that they can self-insure. Particularly since it's a very low accident rate.

What about criminal implications? PS: i guess the insurance on self diving cars is a little bit different and the accident rate is only part of the picture. Just an example: humans don't get hacked.

Criminal implications of... what, exactly?

Please state your concerns.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No human in the car?

This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product). Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their…

They absolutely will. I'm a very social person but when I'm going home from a date with my girlfriend I always want a Waymo just because I don't want a 3rd person involved. And sometimes I'm having a bad day and don't want to have to make small talk. And it's nice that I can talk on the phone without disturbing someone.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#334

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

> Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing ... in the US > Building housing with no parking is not feasible for 95% of deals. You simply won't get financing Because of completely broken land use, transportation polices, building regulation in the US, they are very feasible in many other parts of the world. > if you could hand to your investors and lender an agreement which provides a car for every 3 units O…

> if the were competent they could spend 6 month and few 100 million and build absolutely amazing bus transit system

$346 million gets you utility improvements and 2 miles of bus lane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Ness_Bus_Rapid_Transit

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No human in the car?

This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product). Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their…

Safety is normally ok in an uber but in a Waymo it’s much higher. Whether I’m talking about driving safety or personal safety from the/for the driver, you pick. But generally you can charge more for a safer product.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#336
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

Sarcastic and self-satisfied comments like this are uninteresting IMO. The GP comment is talking about reducing parking requirements for new development, and parking requirements are probably some of the least efficient use of land imaginable. But he shouldn't talk about that because it'd be better if every city all across america suddenly had public transit tomorrow? It's like if a city in europe was talking about s…

Many European countries do install AC actually, poor ones at that, so it'd be a valid point because yes, it's that easy.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#337
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much capex

Ok, self driving buses on fixed routes. Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.

Google only spent $1.1B for the first six years of Waymo. At 1/1000 the price you’re spending about $1.1M over that period or about $200k/year. That’s cheap enough that you should just do it.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#338
post #75
post #36

Anyone with a credit card

Debit card works just fine with Waymo, just like with Lyft and Uber.

Is that so?

When all I had was debit cards, I couldn't get any of them to work with Lyft or Uber in 2021.

I had plenty of money. I had nothing better to do than to try to make it work while I sat outside of that airport on a steamy July day in south Florida. I could not make it happen.

There were probably other ways to solve the problem, but I eventually got someone else to send me a car so I could get to where I was going.

(These days, I do have some credit cards. But amusingly, Uber won't let me log in at all unless I verify the number of a debit card that I had in 2021 -- a card that they refused to use, and which was associated with a bank that is itself no longer in business. That card is long gone.)

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#339
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too much capex

Ok, self driving buses on fixed routes. Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.

> Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.

I think self driving buses would be awesome. I can imagine having smaller ones that come more regularly too. Add some amenities like a tracker that tells you exactly when to leave to catch the bus, and exactly when you'll reach your destination, and it would probably be an awesome UX.

But I don't know if I agree that it'd be 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars. And the overhead of a car is huge, you need one driver for a maximum of 4 passengers and probably a mode of 1 passenger. The overhead of a bus is smaller, because one driver can carry 30 or 60 people. Arguably, you'd need less of them because busses carry more people, but for some reason the unit economics often doesn't work out like that IRL. It'd make more sense for a neighborhood to have just one xbox that everyone shares when they need it, rather than everyone having their own xbox that's idle 95% of the time, but that's not how it went. (Same for any other computing device.)

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#340
post #313

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

A network of fully autonomous electric self-driving cars on a developed roadway can only be superseded in efficiency by high speed rail. There is no way that traditional forms of public transit could outclass it. This is Waymo's big moneymaker: public contracts. The bus drivers and taxi drivers unions will fight it, but smaller towns looking to build denser housing and make their public spaces more walkable will happily adopt this as policy, and it will eventually spread to the bigger cities.
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