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

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

#331

Post by Karrot_Kream »

renegade-otter wrote: post #39

New York City is not going to see robo taxis for a very, very long time. We are just now catching up to the rest of the cities in terms of how garbage is collected, after about a hundred years.

Is that an issue? It's a dense city which puts the pedestrian on top of the transit hierarchy. There's no need for cars there. Phoenix is car-dependent sprawl and even after removing parking minimums, upzoning, and running BRT or other high LOS transit, you're still looking at large parts of the city where it'll probably take decades to be viable to run transit to and are impossible to walk to. In SF the core is walkable and has great transit but the moment you get to the outer neighborhoods transit LOS decreases significantly and there's large parts unserviced. Waymo makes more sense there. Plus SF is abutted by suburbs with retirement-age-and-above populations who fight densification at every turn where it's impossible to get from city-center to city-center via any form of transit.

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

#332

Post by Detrytus »

jonathanberger wrote: post #45
ripe wrote: post #6

Robotaxis are "a real business"? Maybe in the future, but not yet. From the article: > But even the most bullish believers in autonomous transportation acknowledge the tech still has a ways to go before it’s reliable enough for widespread deployment on U.S. roads.

Does a business have to be widely deployed or profitable to be real? The public and private capital markets say "no". If you were to ignore any business that isn't widely available you'd miss the beginning of both Apple and Facebook. Waymo is a real business serving 50,000 rides each week delivering paying customers to their destination. If you haven't tried it yet, the product is amazing. Private, doesn't cancel, sa…

Profitability is my definition of "real business" vs. for example, a lot of SV unicorns: if the business cannot sustain itself financially from its core revenue stream, and needs cash injections from "investors" then it's a pyramid scheme, not a business.

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

#333

Post by martythemaniak »

ra7 wrote: post #291
martythemaniak wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people have uncritically been repeating Waymo's marketing talking points for so long they've started mistaking it for "consensus" or even worse "truth". Waymo's tech is impressive and it works, but that doesn't mean it is the only way to make it work. The Tesla/Waymo approaches are far far more alike than they are different, so the whole debate is about very little. The question of Camera vs LIDAR+Ca…

> Say you're driving down the road and there's a bit of construction, there's a guy holding SLOW/STOP sign directing traffic. LIDAR will tell you it's a hexagonal sign, but it can't tell you what it says, you need a camera to read the sign and tell you what it says. But Waymo never said you don't need cameras. Hell, they have 29 cameras in each vehicle compared to Tesla's 8. Your point about their approaches being mo…

Indeed, cameras are absolutely necessary for self-driving. They're the only ones that can read lane markings, signs, etc. LIDAR alone is not sufficient - you cannot navigate the roads using nothing but an unlabled 3D scene. It simply does not have the necessary information for you to drive ie, is that hexagonal sign a STOP or a GO, pretty important bit of info.

So the question is: is LIDAR also necessary or are cameras sufficient? IE, can cameras+motion give you an accurate-enough 3D scene the way LIDAR can. And that's a narrow technical question, and it isn't even the most question when you consider self-driving as a whole.

"LIDAR is necessary" is not exclusively a Waymo talking point - it is shared by all companies using LIDAR, suppliers of LIDAR etc. But it is just a talking point, there's no reason to think it's actually true.

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

#334

Post by willsmith72 »

doug_durham wrote: post #321
willsmith72 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why are we tipping uber drivers?

Because they are humans who need to eat.

that argument applies to literally every single person to ever exist. do you tip every one you interact with on a daily basis? coffee server, bus driver, lunch server, office cleaner, hairdresser, grocery assistant...

maybe it's a cultural difference

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

#335

Post by hangsi »

netsharc wrote: post #189
zellyn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can LLMs pass the bar yet? Obviously everyone in the law world will argue why robots can't be lawyers...

The argument I can imagine is already around (like for many potential AI applications): even if you know the law, such as if you are a lawyer, you always get representation because judges and jurors are prejudiced to rate self-representing participants worse.

I can easily imagine the same (unprincipled) dynamic applying to an AI lawyer.

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

#336

Post by jrussino »

zellyn wrote: post #112
zellyn wrote: 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…

Thinking about this dispelled my last bit of youthful naivete a few years ago.

Won't it be great once we have fully self-driving cars? Heck, I could buy a car and then rent it out to other people like a taxi when I'm not using it, and it would pay for itself. Maybe I could even make a profit!

...

If I could make more money than the car costs to purchase and maintain, without any additional work on my part, why would the company sell me the car at that price in the first place rather than just running the taxi service themselves and keeping all of that extra profit?

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

#337

Post by gamblor956 »

ddalex wrote: post #163
namaria wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glossing over the part where you try to tell a judge a company should be owned by its assets, why do you think the 'autonomous' in autonomous cars means they would also be able to do hiring, planning, assign work etc?

If companies can do stock buybacks, they theoretically can buy back 100% of the stock, giving ownership of the company to itself, basically its own assets ? I dont see the problem.

A company that buys back all of its stock is treated as liquidating.

Nor is it possible in the West for two companies to own 100% of each other's shares (i.e., circular ownership). In most of the West, a subsidiary acquiring its parent's stock is treated as a redemption of those shares (i.e., as if those shares were returned to the parent), assuming the transaction is even allowed.

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

#338

Post by mike_hearn »

tialaramex wrote: post #203
mike_hearn wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These comparisons are never quite apples-to-apples because the heavy rail line assumes only a few passengers have any luggage and that the entire line is used only for passengers, whereas the capacity rating for a road allows everyone to take large amounts of luggage and freight is always mixed in as well. You also have to take into account all the other factors that make roads preferable, for example, that rail capa…

Where can I buy these roads that don't require maintenance ? Cars that never break down ? Road traffic signals that never fail ? For the first I'm asking for a friend as the road outside her front door is currently torn open for a whole month and it sure seems like "Just magically never do that" would have been a better option if you insist it's so easy. The lines near me have freight on them (I live in a port city,…

Roads can tolerate a lot of damage and be repaired whilst still in use (at less capacity). Capacity might fall but repairs are signalled in advance and people can plan around them, traffic will flow anyway.

In places with big rail networks you're going to hear "I didn't make it into work this morning because of signal failures" really often. And when railways are repaired they will be totally closed for months. They're just way more brittle and unable to degrade gracefully.

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

#339

Post by zellyn »

michaelt wrote: post #176
zellyn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. That tree is an hour a bit away from where I live, in Atlanta Georgia :-)

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

#340

Post by zellyn »

krisoft wrote: post #117
zellyn wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> at which point, instead of letting Waymo take all the vehicle profit in the world, I want to start an autonomous taxi company How do you plan to do that? Will you wrestle the code away from Waymo? Or do you plan to put in the long years of thousands of man hours to develop it and all the costs of the hardware while you do it?

This kills the joke… :-)
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