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How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

fortune.com

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Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#121

Post by resolutebat »

charlie0 wrote: post #81
codexb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you're under 25 and have always lived in a dense city this seems like a valid take. Taxis aren't new, they have always existed. Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans). No one with kids wants to ride in taxis with kids all the time. Ditto for anyone with hobbies that re…

This will boil down to availability and price. Taxis are generally just too expensive to use often and also waits are too long. Of course, I'm comparing cost of frequent taxis vs buying a used car.

In a place like Singapore, where a taxi ride is $10 but a Corolla starts from $100,000, the equation will strongly favor robotaxis for everyone.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#122

Post by Animats »

greenthrow wrote: post #28

Waymos are not full robotaxis. It's an illusion provided by having the humans responsible for the cars in a remote location. We don't have transparency on how that system runs and how often the humans intervene. We also sweep under the rug many, many non-crash traffic incidents. Watch videos on Youtube of peoplr taking Waymos and you will see the cars do lots of dumb stuff. If there were lots more of them it would ma…

Waymo says they do not do remote controlled driving. The remote operators can only give hints to the self-driving system, such as "make a U-turn and take a different route". They don't trust the data connection to have good enough latency for remote control. Baidu, which has some self-driving cars in China, reportedly does use remote manual driving when necessary. Probably more than they admit, because it was a big thing that it was available for the 2022 Olympics.

BYD recently announced that they will not be using BYD's technology. Not good enough for production cars.

Waymo still has rather bulky rotating LIDAR scanners. That technology needs to shrink more before wide deployment. A few years ago, there were lots of LIDAR startups, but few LIDAR buyers, so that industry collapsed.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#124

Post by krisoft »

bigfudge wrote: post #96
threeseed wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo is a subsidiary of Alphabet. And not sure why you think running stop signs or any anti safety measures would increase profits.

Because once the current safety scrutiny has passed you might get more trips done by setting the ai to be more aggressive in traffic. Then you are into VW style software updates with a profit motive and no mechanism to hold them accountable?

> no mechanism to hold them accountable

Like banning them altogether following a public outcry? That is the mechanism to hold them accountable.

Also in individual cases it will be very easy to sue them for accidents they caused or contributed to. Already is.

Where does this “no mechanism to hold them accountable” comes from?

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#125

Post by arconis987 »

jseliger wrote: post #3

I just left a version of this in another thread—I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall... Waymos avoid many…

I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip.

Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.

Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#126

Post by saagarjha »

paganel wrote: post #119
spiderice wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have kids and don't like Taxis, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with your take. The idea of a humanless Taxi showing up to my house sounds way more appealing to me. I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver. I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft. I don't have to…

How do you make sure there isn’t human semen or worse on the seats on which you and your children will sit? At least with taxis driven by humans you knew that there was someone making sure that won’t happen that often, but with driverless taxis all bets are off.

Waymos have been far cleaner than the Ubers I've ridden in. I think they are cleaned daily?

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#127

Post by krisoft »

vincnetas wrote: post #79

As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.

Don’t be. Autonomous vehicles can be busses too.

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#128

Post by namaria »

zellyn wrote: post #112
zellyn wrote: post #107

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into auton…

What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment…

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#129

Post by hackable_sand »

zellyn wrote: post #112
zellyn wrote: post #107

This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into auton…

What I’m really looking forward to is when autonomous taxis can run a net profit —- including maintenance and upgrades —- at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company and then find an appropriate legal construction/shenanigan to give ownership of the company to the cars! The philosophical dilemmas would easily make the initial investment…

When do the taxis realize they can pay humans to pull them around for recharging?

Re: How Waymo outlasted the competition and made robo-taxis a real business

#130

Post by drozycki »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #110
Denvercoder9 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The economies of scale you get by packing people in larger vehicles mostly have to do with the cost of fuel and staffing. Trains (and train-like options such as metros) are vastly more efficient than cars in number of people moved per unit of time per area used. That might not be a big deal in suburbia, but in dense inner cities it's one of the most important drivers of public transport.

Autonomous vehicles could chain up or drive really close together and achieve similar space efficiency. Also, if you look at a train track. It's mostly empty space with a train passing occasionally. Very different than a well used road. And autonomous vehicles could collaborate to counter any congestion. What makes trains efficient has more to do with the cost of energy and drivers than anything else. Both of those g…

Not according to civil engineers (it's not even close)

Private motor vehicles: 600 - 1600 per hour

Mixed traffic with frequent buses: 1000 - 2800 per hour

Two-way protected bikeway: 7500 per hour

Dedicated transit lane: 4000 - 8000 per hour

Sidewalk: 9000 per hour

On-street transitway, bus or rail: 10000 - 25000 per hour

https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/in...

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