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

fortune.com

171–180 of 415 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdata 2, I bike through SF almost daily, and much prefer a Waymo driving near me as opposed to your average SF driver.

that's cool. until it's not. it's very easy to release an upgrade of stopping less on stop signs and see data increasing profit and not increasing accidents. same with code updates that will make cyclist life worse, unless there's actual change in a kpi they track. you're not really their main concern, specially after they ipo and get acquired by Apollo or billionaire du jour

We’ve already seen regulators are willing to take strong actions against dangerous operators.

These regulators should be supported and kept clear of regulatory capture. Other countries can do this, so should the US.

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

#172
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they would. For one thing, a human would just drive away. For another, a mob would have no reason to attack a broke-ass taxi driver, while they have every moral justification to attack a $3T gigacorp built on surveillance capitalism.

Maybe the Tutsis had autonomous vehicles or were tools of surveillance capitalism? You can never be too sure right? After all, their attackers as you make clear must have had "every moral justification" to kill hundreds of thousands of people right ?

Seems pretty weird to compare destruction of insured property to Rwandan genocide, but hey man, you do you

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

#173
post #112
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…

Sounds like Delamain from Cyberpunk.

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

#174
post #170

Isthere a foom full of Waymo employees watching over it all remotely and making the hard decisions?

Disclosure: I work for Waymo.

No, there isn't. We do have a team of folks to support situations where we aren't confident and choose to "phone a friend". This recent blog post covers some of it in more detail:

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

Most importantly: at no point does someone remotely "drive" the vehicle. They can direct it to say "hey make a u-turn and go to this new point", but they aren't remotely driving.

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

#175
post #55
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…

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…

That is because the choice is own car or taxi: the automobile is the *only* supported choice for mobility in much of the United States, to the detriment of any other mode of transport.

People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.

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

#176
post #112
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…

You might enjoy reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_That_Owns_Itself

Sadly its self-ownership is only "according to legend" rather than anything battle-tested.

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

#177
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 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 I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk and I've never even seen a self-driving car. Anywhere. I don't even think such a thing exists on public roads in my country. That Gibson quote about the future not being evenly distributed, etc. Just a da…

Waymo is basically unique in offering Level 4 Self Driving (hence this article) and they only do this in a small number of locations in the US, such as (parts of) Phoenix - so, yes, you're correct that in the UK, or indeed anywhere outside of those few locations, there aren't real "Self Driving" cars.

You won't know if people have Level 3 "Self Driving" cars because unlike Level 4, the Level 3 cars always have a human sat in the driving seat, it's just that maybe the human isn't paying attention and maybe the car is driving anyway. It may be difficult to gauge (beyond guessing) how many people you see are bad drivers and how many aren't actually driving at all under L3...

L1 (the machine does some of the work but a human driver is always doing much of the driving) is certainly something you see and don't even think about. Intelligent Cruise control (ie it won't smack into the car ahead but instead slow down) on a motorway, maybe automatic lane keeping on somebody's fancier or newer car, it's not "Self driving" as you'd understand it, but it's something.

The way these "Levels" work is L3 to L4 is the point where we transition from "The human is legally driving but the machine is offering more and more assistance" to "The machine is legally driving and the human is asked less and less often to do anything at all". As a result a person who is literally blind and thus couldn't possible drive the car or obtain a license to do so - can (and they do) use a Waymo, just like they'd use an Uber, but they cannot do the same with Tesla "Full Self Driving".

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uber sometimes offers a service called UberPool where you share the car with another passenger in order to save money right? Couldn't Waymo do the same?

Didn't Uber start branded as a "ride sharing" app where the app helped you find someone to car pool into work with? I suspect an underlying issue with socialising is faith in humanity. It's hard to have faith in humanity in the modern world when every front appears to be telling you otherwise. If you don't have faith in humanity, then you're limited to only interacting with those: "you have to" and "are vetted".

That was Lyft. Uber started as an easier/cheaper way to call for a ride in a “black car”.

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

#180

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.

People are already arguing against trains and bus lanes since “one day there will be self driving cars”.
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