Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

Post by Lisdexamfeta » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:05 PM UTC

ajcp wrote: post #151

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…

1: Airport rides are already available in Phoenix between 10PM and 6AM. 2: I have never seen a Waymo on the freeway without someone driving it (not monitored self-driving, but physically driving it). Take this with a grain of sand but it is my understanding that full self-driving on highways is still far away given the limited range of the (relatively) small sensors and the speed of travel required. That is: the sens…

Post by foota » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:10 PM UTC

greenthrow wrote: post #118

irjustin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except that they have remote humans monitoring every vehicle so the whole thing is an illusion I think this argues the opposite of what you think it does. Monitoring != driving and if you had humans pesudo driving, the experience would be insanely bad cuz the human would be interjecting way too much.

We don't know how often the humans interject. That's my whole point. It's an illusion that the car is operating alone. When I drive a Tesla on FSD i only need to interject periodically, but it's enough that the car cannot be called autonomous IMHO. How many remote human supervisors are needed for Waymo vehicles? How often do they interject? Without that data it is absurd to call Waymo autonomous.

Post by greenthrow » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:14 PM UTC

foota wrote: post #164

greenthrow wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't know how often the humans interject. That's my whole point. It's an illusion that the car is operating alone. When I drive a Tesla on FSD i only need to interject periodically, but it's enough that the car cannot be called autonomous IMHO. How many remote human supervisors are needed for Waymo vehicles? How often do they interject? Without that data it is absurd to call Waymo autonomous.

Waymo operators do not ever drive the vehicle. My understanding is that Waymo operators can specify things like "take this path" (e.g., by drawing on a map or something) or "yes that's safe" but this doesn't correspond to the actual driving inputs.

Post by dventimi » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:28 PM UTC

rurp wrote: post #161

dventimi wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would that be any different from Uber? Doesn't Uber also want to cut costs?

Uber doesn't really have a way to increase profit through messier cars. But they can do things like increase prices after taking over a market, which they have not been at all shy about doing.

Post by thegrim33 » Tue, Jun 25, 2024, 8:31 PM UTC

TulliusCicero wrote: post #139

notyourwork wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet is far ahead of Tesla in the category of "deploying a taxi network". No one can dispute that. They also use a different technology. What I don't know today is how fast can Waymo scale to more cities. I assume if Tesla cracks the "taxi network nut" they can scale faster and will catch up to Alphabet.

Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort. Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as mu…