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A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

waymo.com

11–20 of 116 posts

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#11
post #7

Would love to get them in nyc

I thought that was stalled because the mayor didn't like it?[0] Any new developments?

> New York abandoned its proposal to allow self-driving taxis earlier this year. New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has said he would heavily weigh the interests of taxi drivers in deciding on rules for the technology.

0: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/technology/waymo-driverle...

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#12
post #5

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most impor…

Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place?

Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#13
post #5

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most impor…

Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.

Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#14
post #5

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most impor…

Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.

Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.

Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus?

No contest.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#17
post #10

Very cool. To be honest, I'd assumed they were using commodity hardware, but no real reason for that. Cool chip. It is quite interesting that so many large companies have their own chips for these things. I almost managed to get my hands on a couple of accidentally liquidated MTIA chips but I was too slow. I wonder what the chip is like and what the dev experience is writing for it. It would just be cool to see what…

Downside of the MTIA chips is no open backend - so quite a lift to get them working if possible at all :(

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#18
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

No contest when the bus is full, but the overall efficiency (/"greeness") of the system is much less clear considering: buses are rarely full, most buses are diesel, heavy buses tear up the pavement on their routes (especially near stops), and buses don't take riders directly to/from their destinations.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#19
post #16
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".

30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.

Different 30 people in the US. I’d drop my car if Waymo was around and financially made sense. You’ll never catch me wasting my time on a bus though. We’ll never even be close to Europe or elsewhere wrt where public transit was even decades ago in those places.

People here only ride the bus when there’s no other option for them.

Waymo could make a bus too anyway, especially after they’ve been in an area a while and have data about where they’d have the most impact. Internet at large would probably decry it as enshittification.

Re: A look under our trunk: what's in our compute

#20
post #5

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most impor…

I just took a Waymo in San Jose, having taken a few from San Francisco - it dropped me off in a place that would have made sense in SF (across the street from my destination at a light, avoiding a U turn) but was terrible in the suburban streetscape where the road was literally 10 lanes 4 / 4 / 2 turning and no one would ever drop someone off like that instead of U turning so they didn't have to cross scary giant traffic.

So weird little things for scaling, but overall it was a good ride till that point. Also, the dropoff was at a hospital/clinic and Lyft for the return trip had no issue with going into the property to the actual destination.

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