Live data from Hacker News

Waymo in Dallas

waymo.com

311–320 of 754 posts

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#311
post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm under the impression (worth a check) that we do have verifiable safety statistics and that Waymos are significantly safer than Teslas at this point? That's not to say that Tesla's autopilot isn't safer than the average human driver—it might be—but I thought it was settled territory that Waymos are better on safety.

Not really a fair comparison between Tesla's autopilot and Waymo though. You'd have to compare Tesla's Robotaxi but I believe they have been running for a far shorter period and I'm not sure how much data is out yet or how reliable it would be at this stage. The Robotaxi runs I believe a different version of autopilot meant to not have a human driver and has a lot more work that goes into making sure it's highly test…

I kinda feel like "It's often the fault of the human driver who takes over last second" means it is still Autopilot's fault. It either needed to alert and hand-off control to the user well before the situation got bad- or stick with control. Getting into a bad situation and just handing off control is the worst possible way to do things. The human needs time to update their situational awareness, the Tesla needs to explain what is causing its concern to the human, etc. If it can't do that effectively- and quickly enough in the pre-accident moments- then it needs to not be used at all because it is more dangerous than just a human driving on their own. 20 years ago I did robot-human driving collaboration experiments for the US Army and I can tell you based on our experiments this is a really hard problem, but those experiments are why Tesla's entire approach has seemed suspect to me from the beginning.

It's either functional or not, this sort of half-assed system is the worst of all worlds. And I say this as someone who has routinely trusted his family in a Waymo. But I think that the Tesla approach is much more dangerous.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried "building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods"?

Buyers aren't willing to pay for it. Its not really up to the developers anyways. [Edit] I am serious. Homebuyers dont want to pay US construction prices for a 500sqft walkable Parisin style apartment. Nor do they want a xx billion dollar metro cost tacked onto their property tax.

I can't tell if this person is joking or actual serious. It's sad, because this is exactly the kind of ridiculousness developers experience day to day by the general public.

No, a private citizen does not have the ability to demolish entire neighborhoods to create a new New York City with a beautiful Central Park.

Maybe if they own a home, maybe they'd donate their home to some developer to make a community garden. You and I know, that many people would love to do such a thing. But, 99% of people, would reject doing this or demand an infeasible amount of money for this.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#313

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? Don't they increase it because of empty riders between customers? I'm with you though on getting up parking space in high land value areas

> How do self-driving cars reduce congestion? At what scale? As a non-trivial percentage of road traffic they can reduce congestion in a million different way. For example, predictive and cooperative route planning (you know what the road looks like 0 to N Km ahead and plan accordingly. The other one is one of the most frustrating things humans do while driving: Slow down while going uphill. Where I live, except of a…

The average passenger capacity per mile of a Waymo is 1.

Moving the same number of people with fewer passengers per car increases traffic.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#315
post #269
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America, the place where they will try anything except for building good public transportation, walkable and bikeable neighborhoods.

It's important to understand the history, wherein: There was a time when we had all of those things that you mention. But cars quite clearly won; the others lost. Towns and cities then continued to grow. They did this in car-centric ways because that fit the transportation style of the time. And now, it is stuck this way.

Cars clearly won… or did the car industry use its monopolistic powers to acquire and shut down our train networks while also relentlessly lobbying for more (and permanent) car infrastructure?

Also, just because things are one way today, doesn’t mean they can’t be a different way tomorrow. It’s all a what we we make of it and decide to fight for

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t Waymo prices above Uber’s? That’s what I’ve seen in SF. That is to say that I don’t think the economics work. You’re better off offering free Ubers. And I doubt that will solve many issues.

Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.

What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo charges more than Uber to supply constraints, not bad unit economics. People (like me) are willing to pay extra for the product Waymo offers, and Waymo is itself supply constrained and has no direct competitors offering driverless rides, so they get to do a bit of monopoly pricing.

What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.

No human in the car?

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you going 20 times per month, twice, that's 40 rides. At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.

Aren't you going 20 times per week, twice, that's 40 rides. Work 5 days a week = 10 rides. Plus four rides on the weekend, or not. That's why I used 14. Where do you get 40 rides per week? At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber. Even if someone did 40 rides per week at your posited average of $25/ride, that's $4,000, not $1,000. Are you letting an LLM do math for you?

40 rides a month, not week. I'm not sure you're in a position to accuse folks of not doing math when you don't seem to read very well.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#319
post #313

As someone who works in commercial real estate, involved in about $300M of housing development, some of it affordable, i will say without any doubt that driverless cars are a very effective affordable housing policy that is not being considered or discussed by anyone. Any public dollar that gets contributed to housing, basically adds a 50% cost factor and assume whatever it is used for will take 2-3x as long to deliv…

God, I love how Americans will do anything but build public transport

It's effectively xenophobic to comment such as you did about "Americans" without addressing the points by the author, which deal with real, structural issues.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the product vs an Uber? Genuine question.

No human in the car?

This is only a product for anti-social nerds. Most people will not pay a premium for this (this isn't waymo's product).

Edit: lots of people commenting on here how they're normie and they would still prefer waymo. Read what I wrote again - I didn't say normies wouldn't prefer, I said normies wouldn't pay a premium. So unless waymo is planning on being a luxury car service (which it's not) that can't possibly be their intended product/market.

Post reply on HN