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Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

waymo.com

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Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history. Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.

Every car is more affordable when you don't have to pay a human being to operate it. The difference in labor costs dwarfs the difference in vehicle costs.

Most cars don't have a paid driver. Uber, taxis, and trucking is a tiny minority of drivers.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, why? There's no winner-take-all aspect to shuttling people around. Taxi service is a commodity and taxis-without-drivers will also be a commodity. The switching costs for users are essentially zero. That's how we get Uber, Lyft, DiDi, Grab, Bolt, WeRide, BlackWolf...

I don't know how you can write that list and come to the conclusion that it's not winner-take-all. In their home market (US), Uber is ~75%, Lyft is ~25%, and all other competitors are sub-1% combined. Didi is similarly dominant in China, and so on. "Completely different markets have different winners taking it all" does not counteract the claim of winner-takes-all in any way, nor does listing utterly insignificant pl…

People who drive their own cars are larger than all. You can find single markets where those people are more than all combined world wide.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#153
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Elon, "sensor ambiguity" is a danger to the process [1], and therefore only a single type of sensor is allowed. (Conveniently ignores that there can be ambiguity/disagreement between two instances of the same type of sensor) The fact that people still trust him on literally anything boggles my mind. [1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1959831831668228450

Sensor ambiguity is straight up useful as it can allow you to extract signals that neither sensor can fully capture. This is like... basic stuff too, absolutely wild how he's the richest person in the world and considered this absolute genius

More importantly you can detect a failed sensor.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#154
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congest…

But it makes it worse. Once Waymo cars start clogging streets, cruising around waiting for passengers it will amplify the issue. It will be cheap enough to just have them mill around to be quickly available when requested. In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate inter…

>In time, human driving will be phased out and that will precipitate removal of speed limits and traffic lights as autonomous cars will be able to use vehicle to vehicle messaging to negotiate intersections. Of course pesky pedestrians and cyclists could still be in the way. That's where lobbying comes in to restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space. But since cars require much more space than peeople the result will be more sprawl and less walkable places as it will be people who will get pushed aside.

All the incentives you described exists today. On any given road any space devoted to sidewalks or bike lanes means less space for cars, and you already need separation between car lanes and sidewalks. You also have the same incentive to "restrict the pedestrian areas to pockets where cars and people never share the same space", because any controlled access roadway increases speed and throughput. Finally if you restrict pedestrians to certain areas (we all live in megatowers?), that actually makes taxis (including robotaxis) less attractive relative to public transit, because their whole value proposition is that they take you exactly where you want to go. Therefore it's unclear how automated cars would make things worse.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#155
post #130
post #66

Is this one going to stop parking on the side of city streets with the hazards on the middle of rush hour? For all the impressive technological advances Waymo makes (and don’t get me wrong, they are impressive), their cars are still a constant obnoxious menace to drivers.

You mean double parking waiting for passengers? Its a taxi, so I doubt it. Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?

In some cases, yes. This morning, though, I was stuck behind one that just decided to stop and turn on the hazards in the middle of a two-lane, bidirectional street with no parking. This has happened more than once.

I believe they are waiting for passengers - they usually have some kind of LED display with what looks like initials on the topmost sensor when they're doing this.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#156
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to https://robotaxitracker.com/ there are 7 unsupervised robotaxi in Austin right now.

Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver? https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...

It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?).

However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#157
post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.

Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#158
post #93
post #71

Obviously there is a huge amount of money and effort being spent on automated driving. But I cannot help thinking that this perception technology will prove very useful for robotics in general, factory, home, in space, etc. Car dynamics are fast enough to be useful across a huge number of domains. In some sense, the visionaries in this space are not thinking big enough. I want visions of mobility with a totally diffe…

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it. Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD. Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program…

Tesla has the dumbest (and many of the richest) shareholders in recent history. They absolutely would have funded it. Tesla could probably do an offering tomorrow to raise $100B and the share price would be back to ~$420 in a month.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#159
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or perhaps those who saw this blog post by Waymo itself: Fleet response: Lending a helpful hand to Waymo’s autonomously driven vehicles Much like phone-a-friend, when the Waymo vehicle encounters a particular situation on the road, the autonomous driver can reach out to a human fleet response agent for additional information to contextualize its environment. The Waymo Driver does not rely solely on the inputs it rece…

>They have remote safety drivers. Not fully autonomous. "Fully autonomous" is their aspiration marketing, but not their current reality. 1. They're not "safety drivers" in the sense that most people understand, ie. someone dedicated to watching the car 2. What's with the fixation on defining "fully autonomous" to mean 0% human intervention ever? If a vending machine works 99% of the time, and 1% of the time needs som…

Come on, you know what the fixation is. Nothing riles up the Tesla fanboys like the clear unambiguous fact that Waymo is doing 1000x better at “full self driving” than Tesla ever has.

Re: Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

#160
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are these the cars where the safety driver is in a car tailing the robotaxi, or do they actually run without the need for a safety driver? https://electrek.co/2026/01/22/tesla-didnt-remove-the-robota...

It seems they run without a safety driver or follow car (mostly?). However the area it operates is extremely small, and they are still only allowing Tesla bros to try it.

So in other words, like literally every other word out of Elon’s mouth for a decade now, it’s incredibly dishonest. He lies about everything, all the time, without any acknowledgment. Nothing is ever delivered on time, most of it isn’t delivered at all, and virtually every bit of promised capability is exaggerated.

Why does anyone want to do business with a person or company like that? I genuinely do not understand.

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