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Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

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Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#121

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ra7 wrote: post #11

Add freeways and airport rides, both of which they are very close to doing, Waymo will become much more of a complete service and a true Uber/Lyft replacement. In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US governmen…

> 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities)

If I had to guess, I'd say Atlanta, San Diego, Houston and Miami.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#122

Post by __loam »

Abroszka wrote: post #20
taylorlapeyre wrote: post #3

Living here for the last 10 years, it's been jarring how just in the last few years, driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this the default now?" The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking them every time.

> driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this the default now?" That's still far away, these are not driverless cars, there is always a driver monitoring, but they monitor not one but many cars, ready to take over.

The waymo I took on Sunday didn't have a driver.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#123

Post by 999900000999 »

dventimi wrote: post #66
999900000999 wrote: post #61

This is both amazing and horrifying. I'm actually confident this automation will save lives. Well of course any system can fail, Uber drivers are often distracted by 30 things, they're fiddling with the app, on personal calls, while navigating tricky traffic situations. However I predict within a decade or so we're going to get to a point where gig work is no longer feasible. It'll take a bit of trickery, but I'm sur…

If gig work is such a good job perhaps you should consider doing it.

A lot of people depend on those job to survive. We need some type of off-ramp if we're going to just wipe out a large section of the economy .

I've worked horrible jobs before, and I needed the money to survive. Not everyone can write Ruby code and make 300k a year.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#124

Post by jessriedel »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #108
aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment: Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passeng…

> They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.

It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#125

Post by jeffbee »

999900000999 wrote: post #61

This is both amazing and horrifying. I'm actually confident this automation will save lives. Well of course any system can fail, Uber drivers are often distracted by 30 things, they're fiddling with the app, on personal calls, while navigating tricky traffic situations. However I predict within a decade or so we're going to get to a point where gig work is no longer feasible. It'll take a bit of trickery, but I'm sur…

Gig work is already not feasible. The only reason anyone undertakes it is financial illiteracy. Uber is largely funded by the irrational sacrifice of numerous individuals of the residual value of their own cars.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#126

Post by TulliusCicero »

jessriedel wrote: post #124
TulliusCicero wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment: Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passeng…

> They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist. It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out…

It will get faster definitely, but how much faster is the question. We've only seen full rollout to two cities so far, so hard to extrapolate.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#127

Post by slibhb »

aresant wrote: post #91

Genuine question -> - Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years - Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business. Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their…

Many people predict that AI is going to explode, and afterward nothing will be the same. If that happens, Telsa is in a better position than anyone else to simply update their software and deliver self driving cars.

Whether that happens remains to be seen.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#128

Post by bangaladore »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #120
kajecounterhack wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale. If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost. I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads.…

Google already has a fleet of vehicles driving around continuously taking new street view photos.

Google Maps seems to update at a frequency of 2-8 years. Maybe longer in some areas and we don't know what they do other than stitch it together.

HD mapping, on the other hand, likely needs to be updated frequently and immediately when any construction occurs.

It seems pretty clear that what they are doing today is nowhere near what they need to do. And again, I don't think that is possible.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#129

Post by jeffbee »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #42
kelsey98765431 wrote: post #19

I remember almost 10 years ago, maybe 8 i first saw one of these up in the city. It was parked and the technician was outside of it with an ipad, and i happened to strike up a conversation with the gentleman. I was just curious and at first he was remarkably cagey, i was quite confused and just continued to be friendly and express hope for the projects success and for automation in general. I got the feeling that man…

In the future, when you're old and quite possibly disabled, you might rethink the whole "walkable cities" thing. I mean, it's easy to say "just walk (or ride a bike)" when you're 22 years old and in prime health, but the population in most First World countries is rapidly aging.

Many more disabled people are disabled in a way that prevents them from driving a car than in ways that prevent them from walking. There is also a huge class of people who are physically capable of driving but legally barred from it.

Re: Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

#130

Post by TulliusCicero »

dyauspitr wrote: post #117
TulliusCicero wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm typically very skeptical of Tesla's strategy here, but to play devil's advocate for a moment: Waymo has shown they can make robotaxis work, but the big catch so far is that it takes them a long time to open in a new city. They have several phases before they open fully, from what I've seen it seems to be: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passeng…

I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.

Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're aiming for, and I hope it works out.
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