I am curious how much support staff this fleet has, and how much work they do. The article mentions nothing about that.
I’d like to see the financial analysis. This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas. When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?
When was the last time you had an Uber driver that actually lived in San Francisco? Most of the drivers I talk to were driving in, from as far away as San Diego.
"Waymo operates about 300 driverless cars in the city, up from the roughly 250 robotaxis it used to start commercial service last August." Sounds like a relatively small increase in actual cars over the last year despite a significant increase in use of those cars.
I regularly walk by one of their parking lots (14th St & Shotwell), which used to be typically relatively full, and now it's generally pretty empty. They're all out and about ... but on the other hand, a significant proportion of the waymo vehicles I see on the street are empty. I would be curious to see the difference in miles driven without a passenger per vehicle relative to Uber/Lyft. Are those empty miles about distance between drop-off and next pick-up? Or are they still doing a lot of extra miles just to collect data (e.g. going down streets that fares typically don't go down)?
I am curious how much support staff this fleet has, and how much work they do. The article mentions nothing about that.
I’d like to see the financial analysis. This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas. When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?
I am curious how much support staff this fleet has, and how much work they do. The article mentions nothing about that.
I’d like to see the financial analysis. This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas. When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?
Waymo pays 3.25% to SF and when the new tax inevitably passes in November it will be 7.75%.
I’d like to see the financial analysis. This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas. When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?
When was the last time you had an Uber driver that actually lived in San Francisco? Most of the drivers I talk to were driving in, from as far away as San Diego.
Doubtful. I've done that car trip multiple times, it's a 7-9 hour drive.
I wonder how far they are from profitability on a cost per ride basis. The biggest long term risk to self driving cars is probably that number being unreachable. The super expensive base vehicles don't help either. They need lidar hats for the Kia Forte or whatever
Replacing ~minimum wage drivers in conventional cars with expensive cars backed by expensive software developers and operations staffs is almost certainly not a business model. There may be (probably will be) a business model behind autonomous driving technology in some undefined future. But there's no guarantee Waymo won't be another killed by Google in the interim. The thought from a decade ago that the average tee…
If there were a fleet of a million Waymo cars, 2,000 support staff, and 2,000 engineers keeping a stable technology running, and vehicle wear and tear was low (possibly lower than a human driver running an ICE car ragged)...it could work. But they're going to be unprofitable for a long, long time.
I am curious how much support staff this fleet has, and how much work they do. The article mentions nothing about that.
I’d like to see the financial analysis. This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas. When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?
This seems strongly to me like a broken window argument. Taken another way, you're paying people that could likely be doing more productive things to sit in a car and burn gasoline.
If money draining out of the economy is a major concern, there could just be a tax on AI rideshares (which given the political environment seems quite likely)
Replacing ~minimum wage drivers in conventional cars with expensive cars backed by expensive software developers and operations staffs is almost certainly not a business model. There may be (probably will be) a business model behind autonomous driving technology in some undefined future. But there's no guarantee Waymo won't be another killed by Google in the interim. The thought from a decade ago that the average tee…
If there were a fleet of a million Waymo cars, 2,000 support staff, and 2,000 engineers keeping a stable technology running, and vehicle wear and tear was low (possibly lower than a human driver running an ICE car ragged)...it could work. But they're going to be unprofitable for a long, long time.
It's hard for me to believe that Alphabet/Google even wants to be this huge robo-taxi service in the long run. I have to believe they want to be a technology supplier. Which means they need to enable robo-taxis-are-us to be a cheaper taxi service than Uber et al.
You have to read carefully the article to extract the information. This is like the opposite of journalism. tldr: * 903,000 vehicle miles traveled during commercial driverless ride-hailing in May (57% increase from April). * Waymo increased from 250 taxis last August to 300 in May. So there's almost no new taxis, the increase comes from an increased utilization of the fleet.
A 2016 Muni analysis said that daily VMT in SF was 6 million and that Uber+Lyft were 570k of that, so given that scale Waymo would be about 5% of TNC traffic and 0.5% of all VMT.