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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

#301

Post by hot_gril »

itsoktocry wrote: post #215
prasoonds wrote: post #14

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…

I love how we've gone from "Taxis are gross and dirty, that's why I love Uber!" to "Ubers are gross and dirty, that's why I love Waymo!" in the span of 5 years. What do you think comes next? These cars are literally unsupervised.

Regardless of whether the Waymo is supervised, they're brand-new cars, of course they'll be cleaner.

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

#302

Post by ra7 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #300
ra7 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo hasn’t required an NDA for at least a couple of years now. They only had a waitlist for access, you could share anything you want publicly.

There were various stages of rollout. The earlier stages required an NDA, the later ones did not. Meanwhile Tesla hasn't required NDA's except for employees running internal builds.

Those NDAs ended a long time ago. Waymo has given close to 2 million rides since then. Everything’s out in the open.

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

#303

Post by diebeforei485 »

FireBeyond wrote: post #293
diebeforei485 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's? Tesla has much lower costs. If they can beat Waymo on customer experience (better driving primarily, but also better in-car entertainment, better mobile app, and match Waymo's pricing) they'll win. Waymo might have a regulatory advantage since a lot of politians don't like Musk.

Waymo doesn't have to convince its vehicle owners to let strangers ride in their car unsupervised. Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.

Tesla is rather good at mass producing their own vehicles so they are not reliant on existing Tesla owners providing their vehicles for the fleet. If the rumor mill is to be believed, they will also be making a dedicated robotaxi vehicle with no steering wheel so there isn't a wasted empty driver seat.

> Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.

Plenty of Tesla owners (and owners of all sorts of other vehicles including high-end sports cars and luxury vehicles) already rent out their vehicles to strangers on Turo. Listing them on Tesla's platform instead won't be a large change. A lot of owners might actually prefer it if it allows more fine-grained options (eg. no rides past 9pm, no rides more than 50 miles from home) instead of renting it out for 24 hour periods.

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

#304

Post by [deleted] »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #287
Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.

I imagine the cars all head to some centralized location for cleaning and whatever other maintenance. That probably makes cleaning a very economic, factory-like procedure. Beats something like Uber where drivers have to bring their cars to a car wash or whatever (although presumably the Uber drivers aren't being paid to wash the cars because they aren't employees, so the unpaid labor there gives Uber an advantage).

[deleted]

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

#305

Post by majormajor »

Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #261
prasoonds wrote: post #14

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious. The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly l…

I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.

The biggest problem with cleaning is that compared to Uber where there's a human driver, the autonomy factor will almost certainly lead to more people fucking shit up simply because they can. Look at anything else that goes unattended in the public way: ebikes, delivery bot things, scooters... nasty combo of "I want to fuck with The Man" and "haha nobody is here watching I don't need to be as careful with my messy sandwich"

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

#307

Post by Rebelgecko »

majormajor wrote: post #305
Dr_Birdbrain wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.

The biggest problem with cleaning is that compared to Uber where there's a human driver, the autonomy factor will almost certainly lead to more people fucking shit up simply because they can. Look at anything else that goes unattended in the public way: ebikes, delivery bot things, scooters... nasty combo of "I want to fuck with The Man" and "haha nobody is here watching I don't need to be as careful with my messy sa…

Waymos do have interior cameras, so if you puke in the backseat you can't blame it on the previous rider

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

#308

Post by diebeforei485 »

ra7 wrote: post #302
diebeforei485 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were various stages of rollout. The earlier stages required an NDA, the later ones did not. Meanwhile Tesla hasn't required NDA's except for employees running internal builds.

Those NDAs ended a long time ago. Waymo has given close to 2 million rides since then. Everything’s out in the open.

The NDA's ended when they were confident enough in their system that the good press would outweigh the bad.

So essentially we're comparing footage from Waymo when it was at the end stages of its development to footage from Tesla at the early stages of its development.

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

#309

Post by georgeecollins »

lopkeny12ko wrote: post #270
georgeecollins wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear of what? I am not disagreeing with you, I just don't know what is happening at Tesla that you are referring to.

"Tesla Robotaxi unveil on 8/8" https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1776351450542768368

Thank you. I didn't know about that. That's a little vague, is there any more information? Like is this a special model of Tesla or a technology or software package for an existing model? Just wondering because I bet there are people here who have insight.

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

#310

Post by hot_gril »

renewiltord wrote: post #201
yunwal wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People already have gone around putting traffic cones over the car sensors. https://www.npr.org/2023/08/28/1196487085/anonymous-protesto... .

Just as a comparison, the people who did that also do highway protests. There's a video if you'll scroll down a little https://sfstandard.com/2023/06/08/activists-block-san-franci...

I don't agree with this, but gotta hand it to them, the WWE thing is funny and well-done.
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