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Next stop: Miami

waymo.com

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Re: Next stop: Miami

#251

Post by tuna74 »

entropi wrote: post #60

I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing. I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here? I don't mean "problem" like "solving the technical problem of making a car move autonomously in a chaotic city" sense. I mean what is the need that's being addressed here, exactly? Ride-hai…

"I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing."

The goal is to make money for the owners and managers of those companies.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#252

Post by rjrdi38dbbdb »

allturtles wrote: post #226
ndileas wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is indeed one solution to this "problem". However, maybe people who live in the sticks should just accept the tradeoffs that come with rural life? If you want next day delivery and taxi service maybe you should live in a place that has those? Not every service has to serve all people in all places and times equally. The government should absolutely not be mandating service levels across the whole US.

Some people need to live in "the sticks" to produce the resources (food, ores, oil, timber) that the rest of society relies on. Subsidizing the availability of services for those people doesn't seem unreasonable, and it is certainly something the federal government has historically taken responsibility for (for mail, electricity, telephone).

Why not just let the market find its own equilibrium? If people need to live there to produce valuable resources, then the cost of those resources will naturally rise to cover the expenses of those employed in those industries.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#253

Post by NickC25 »

itchyouch wrote: post #9
seeingfurther wrote: post #5

Miami probably has some of the worst, most lawless drivers in the country — it's like a free-for-all out there. Makes me wonder if Waymo picked Miami as a kind of stress test for their self-driving tech. If they can handle the chaos there, they can probably handle just about anything.

I'd imagine NYC to be worse than Miami. Miami seems to share enough similarity in warm weather to SF to be a similar enough use case to expand while providing slightly different driving conditions to be able to dip ones toes in to the driving habits of a different city.

NYC is far better than Miami.

Miami sucks because half the people on the roads here don't actually know how to drive.

They are immigrants that come from countries whose roads are effectively lawless, or come from countries that have a severely underdeveloped automobile infrastructure, or come from countries where all that's needed to get a driver's license is to pay someone.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#254

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

jeffbee wrote: post #32
lopkeny12ko wrote: post #10

Jaguar discontinued the I-PACE and presumably does not manufacture them anymore. It must be the case that Waymo is cannibalizing their fleet capacity from other markets for every new city launch.

Jaguar did not manufacture the I-Pace at all. It was made by Steyr, who also built a ton of them for Waymo.

TIL Magna Steyr is the largest contract manufacturer of automobiles worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Steyr)

Re: Next stop: Miami

#255

Post by cameldrv »

comte7092 wrote: post #125
xnx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be profitable with lower utilization, they’ll need to work on reducing how much each car costs somehow. Definitely. Their custom vehicle had optimizations for cost, but seems to be on hold due to tariffs. Waymo also has the option to drop prices lower than Uber/Lyft when vehicles are unutilized, though they still need to stay above their per-mile depreciation and operating costs.

> Waymo also has the option to drop prices lower than Uber/Lyft when vehicles are unutilized I think that’s an unproven assumption. There’s certainly reason to believe it to be true of course, but uber and Lyft are already capturing upwards of 50% of the fares for each ride, and that’s without the capital costs on their books. Removing the driver from the equation can’t lead to much more than that 50% (realistically…

> but uber and Lyft are already capturing upwards of 50% of the fares for each ride

I'm not sure if that's an accurate number, but I have seen a lot of complaints from drivers that they're getting a far lower share of the trip revenue than they used to. It's pretty remarkable that in a competitive market where Uber and Lyft are almost perfect substitutes for each other and charge almost exactly the same prices, that they're able to maintain these gross margins.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#256

Post by ricardobeat »

naming_the_user wrote: post #174
nilstycho wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Far less than 10%. During a heavy downpour, by volume, about one part in a million is liquid. In a cubic meter of heavily rain, there are only a few tens of raindrops.

Imagine if it were 10%, though. During the time it took for a droplet to fall 1 metre, you’d have 10cm of water on the floor. I reckon it’d feel quite heavy.

Rain falls at 9m/s, so in a second you'd almost completely fill that space with 900 liters. For the immediate area around you, imagine an olympic pool of water falling roughly every second.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#258

Post by fragmede »

entropi wrote: post #60

I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing. I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here? I don't mean "problem" like "solving the technical problem of making a car move autonomously in a chaotic city" sense. I mean what is the need that's being addressed here, exactly? Ride-hai…

The grand vision, the problem being solved, is that humans suck at driving, especially when drunk and texting. If no human ever drove drunk again, it would literally save lives. You can be cynical about the profit motive, because there is one, but fundamentally, reducing traffic fatalities, which is over a million a year, was Sebastian Thrun, one of the original researcher's, stated goal. That it changes the rest of society and makes him a ton of money along the way is just a nice side benefit.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#259

Post by fragmede »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #229
bluGill wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed. I've seen claims like that, but none of them from a source that stands up to scrutiny. Most such claims come from the people promoting self driving cars and so they have reason to "lie with statistics". Those who have unbiased data (ie governments) are not talking about it from what I can see. I personally am significnatly safer than the average driver. This comes solely down to me not drinking alcoh…

Most people are safer than average most of the time. Risk is a heavily bimodal. The issue is that people keep driving even when it's risky. Maybe they have to get to work even though they didn't sleep much, or they need to get home from the bar, or they're road raging, or they don't have someone with them to drive instead.

People driving home from bars is the biggest issue of the ones you mentioned. People drink alcohol at bars, which impairs their judgement, and they then use this impaired judgement to then decide that it's a good idea to get behind the wheel.

Re: Next stop: Miami

#260

Post by fragmede »

mg wrote: post #23

our service – which already provides over 150,000 trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin Interesting. That's about 8 million rides per year. I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast. I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B? If they at some point…

Assuming they don't license the technology to everybody else and keep running their own cars. How much is this technology worth to every taxi company, every car manufacturer, every fleet operator in the world?
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