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

fortune.com

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

#351

Post by vincnetas »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #228
slyall wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That "train passing occasionally" holds the equivalent of hundreds of cars. A random crappy light rail line will do the equivalent of 5 lanes of traffic (each direction). A serious subway more like 20. https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/transportation/solu... Even if you run cars with no distance between the bumpers you'll still need room for changing lanes, crossing and the line.

The New York subway moves 3.2 million people per day. Taxis and ride share options are together good for about 1 million. Mostly non autonomous and polluting of course. If you triple that with autonomous vehicles that use the road smarter, it sounds doable to match what the subway is moving around. And of course people would be using these for point to point traffic and cars would be able to re-route based on traffic…

and now compare how much land surface metro needs and how much cars. and are you sure that current streets would fit 3x cars.

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

#352

Post by gretch »

ok_dad wrote: post #106
int0x29 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With tinted windows and glare I already can't see like 75% of drivers. At least driverless cars reliably signal so I don't have to do pose estimation with the front wheels to cross the street. Also they aren't on their phones.

So answer my question, how do I know the Waymo sees me? With a human I can tell 90% of the time where I live (we have tint laws and stuff). I can’t see trusting that a robot sees me, otherwise I guess I’m just giving deference to them now? At least with humans I can see if they are distracted, I can yell at them to get attention, perhaps others. With a robot taxi, I can’t tell anything about it, and I’m a software de…

That’s not all of the possible cases.

“In 2022, 13,524 people died in alcohol-impaired driving traffic deaths.”

Source nhtsa.gov

You’re gonna briefly glimpse a passed out drunk driver before it plows through you at 40 mph

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

#353

Post by SoftTalker »

83 wrote: post #297
SoftTalker wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will happen is that you just won't be able to go anywhere until the roads are cleared. That is probably not a bad thing, it will allow plow trucks to clear the roads more quickly without having to navigate around people driving (or trying to drive) on the uncleared roads, spun out/stuck vehicles, crashes, etc.

We're not really at self driving if the solution for poor conditions is "don't drive". Snow drifts in the wind, side roads don't get regularly plowed, and conditions change rapidly so unless they can handle the majority of the list above then they won't be able to handle winter period.

I'm saying that the limits of self-driving cars will be an excuse to force us to behave the way the authorities want us to behave. For better or worse.

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

#354

Post by NotYourLawyer »

rwmj wrote: post #201
NotYourLawyer wrote: post #192

Real businesses make money. Waymo loses money hand over fist.

Certainly true, but they have very large backers who are willing to pour money in until the technology is perfected. I wonder if there's an internet forum appropriate for discussing such businesses?

https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets

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

#355

Post by JeremyNT »

spiderice wrote: post #71
codexb wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have kids and don't like Taxis, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with your take. The idea of a humanless Taxi showing up to my house sounds way more appealing to me. I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver. I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft. I don't have to…

> Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.

In a world where waymo works as a taxi, it also works to deliver a human-drivable rental car right to your door (and send it on to the next customer when you're done with it).

So now the short term car rental user experience should be dramatically better, even if the robotaxi isn't appropriate for all the tasks.

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

#356

Post by ec109685 »

drozycki wrote: post #130
jillesvangurp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous vehicles could chain up or drive really close together and achieve similar space efficiency. Also, if you look at a train track. It's mostly empty space with a train passing occasionally. Very different than a well used road. And autonomous vehicles could collaborate to counter any congestion. What makes trains efficient has more to do with the cost of energy and drivers than anything else. Both of those g…

Not according to civil engineers (it's not even close) Private motor vehicles: 600 - 1600 per hour Mixed traffic with frequent buses: 1000 - 2800 per hour Two-way protected bikeway: 7500 per hour Dedicated transit lane: 4000 - 8000 per hour Sidewalk: 9000 per hour On-street transitway, bus or rail: 10000 - 25000 per hour https://nacto.org/publication/transit-street-design-guide/in...

That graph those numbers are pulled from should incorporate speed. Otherwise, you could say sidewalks are more efficient than cars.

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

#357

Post by asda_ »

codetrotter wrote: post #76
spiderice wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have kids and don't like Taxis, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with your take. The idea of a humanless Taxi showing up to my house sounds way more appealing to me. I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver. I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft. I don't have to…

> I don't have to worry about tipping I can almost guarantee that if they don’t already, the robo-taxis will eventually start asking for tips. This is already the case at self-checkout in some stores for example. As long as the companies can get away with it, they will tack on any number of extra fees and charges even if those fees and charges really don’t make any sense. Hell, even tipping people does not really mak…

Autonomous systems can ask for tips but humans would feel much more comfortable not tipping.

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

#358

Post by ec109685 »

vincnetas wrote: post #79

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.

Autonomous Trains.

If you are not paying for the conductor, can’t you make trains much more appealing? They could run every five minutes, and last mile can be solved with autonomous car that is waiting for you when you arrive.

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

#359

Post by tialaramex »

grecy wrote: post #316
tialaramex wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Judging from the red light incident, the Waymo Driver does not consider passing a red light to be a Never event, in the same way that say, hitting a pedestrian would be a Never event. So it's OK with being advised by a human that it needn't obey the red light whereas it wouldn't be OK with being told to just drive through cyclists. That makes a kind of sense, a human shouldn't need to run red lights but they do it mo…

I've done it to get out the way of an emergency vehicle coming up behind me with full lights and sirens. It was kind of fun.

I don't know the law where you live, but in the UK this is illegal and the emergency vehicle should have instead silenced sirens (the lights are left running) so as to avoid agitating you since you can't do anything to help while you have no safe route.

The reason is that you may make things worse by running a light, the people driving an emergency vehicle have in some cases trained specifically to run lights (although not all reasons they're driving under lights and sirens would justify doing so) but they aren't trained to make it safe for you to do the same so you should not.

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