Live data from Hacker News

Waymo in Dallas

waymo.com

461–470 of 754 posts

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#461

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.

I have written about this before in similar discussions. I think men just cannot comprehend how much women are willing to pay to guarantee that they can avoid a scary situation in a car with a stranger driver. Ask any woman: Have you ever had a scary experince in a car with a stranger driver? Probably 100% will say yes. I would say Waymo's primary customer will be middle to high income women in urban environments.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#462
post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want trains.

I think you'd want them a lot less if you had to pay the full price in fare (often $30+/ride)

Do you think roads are free? Maintaining them? Parking lots? Gasoline / electricity? Required emergency services due to regular catastrophic failures?

Cars are way more expensive if we're talking "full prices".

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I don't have to listen to the driver argue with his girlfriend across the entire span of the bay bridge, I don't have to worry the uber reeks of week (or worse, cigarette) smell on the way to an interview etc etc. Given the choice I will choose driverless every time.

Do you report these complaints using the Uber app? To be clear: I have no experience riding with Uber.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#464
post #337
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, self driving buses on fixed routes. Likely 10-1000x cheaper to implement than fully autonomous cars.

Google only spent $1.1B for the first six years of Waymo. At 1/1000 the price you’re spending about $1.1M over that period or about $200k/year. That’s cheap enough that you should just do it.

LOL. Why would you only count the first 6 years? Be intellectually honest and count the total funding so far, about $30bn.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#465

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…

Waymo cannot ever be fully sustainable because cars are subject to variable and constantly increasing size. As more individuals own cars the throughput of a transit network relying on ride-sharing or autonomous cars gets less and less efficient.

It's far easier to add additional capacity to other forms of transit. But the end result of Waymo is that it will just converge into being a bus network that took decades to get to.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#466
post #358
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Self driving cars are public transportation and make areas much more walkable and bikeable.

> Self driving cars are public transportation

Waymo is literally a private company.

> make areas much more walkable and bikeable.

How so? Autonomous car companies have every incentive to continue lobbying for car only infrastructure? Why would they want infrastructure that increases competition?

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#467

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…

With respect to you as a person and your ideas presented, this is one of the most car-brained posts I've ever read. > it's way more efficient than building $100 billion in transit that will take 200 years to build. What is efficient about a $13 highway widening project in Houston or the $24 billion (inflation-adjusted) and 15 years it cost to bury a highway in Boston? (It's not even much of a new highway, it's just u…

I agree with you and hate car centric development, and yet, if this idea gets low or no parking housing built, it could be worth considering.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Drives better, isn't distracted, doesn't get lost, care are always clean, will always take you where you want to go day or night, and yeah, no human.

"Doesn't get lost" is generous. they always cause so much caos in SF

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#469
post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting around Boston is very easy. Flooding the streets with more cars won't make it easier. A government that listens to the people it governs is a good government.

Eh, the impression I got from this podcast ( https://www.searchengine.show/the-trial-of-the-driverless-ca... ) was that unions and other special interests were blocking something that the broader population would be interested in.

Ok. As someone who lives there, I get the impression that the broader population is not interested in more cars on the streets.

Re: Waymo in Dallas

#470

I was talking with someone visiting from Florida the other day and they were talking about how Waymo is slurping money that would have otherwise stayed in the local economy. E.g. you pay an uber driver, the uber driver pays the grocery store, etc. This is something that had never occurred to me since I love taking Waymos here in the bay area. I guess Waymos operating in Florida need local labor to maintain and clean…

The Uber driver likely gets a different job, probably something a little less stressful and low paying (and frankly dangerous) than Uber.
Post reply on HN