Waymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.

I really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft.

I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.

The city should just start to bill big fleet operators for passenger-less miles.

That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.

By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.

Not the worst idea I’ve heard.

I feel this way about free parking.

Kinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger.

The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.

probably more about stretching their battery than anything else. if it roams around between trips it's going to have fewer customers per charge cycle.

But when roaming around at like 10 mph average round the city, it can presumably do a full 18+ hour day on a single charge. Electric cars are super efficient in urban environments.

I never thought about the charging problem. In SF, where do Waymo cars charge themselves?

They have awaymo garage where a human manually plugs them in to charge.

It probably make sense to pre-position them to the spot most likely to reduce time to pick up the next predicted passenger.

It makes sense to me that people wouldn't want a surveillance machine from a hugely powerful adtech company loitering around their property.

In the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area I see Waymo, Nuro, and unmarked-but-we-all-know-it's-Apple autonomous vehicles quite frequently. A few times a week at least.

Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.

Wait, I thought Apple had given up on it's car project?

Nope

There are some in LA as well, although at a smaller scale.

Why would they keep driving at all times with no passengers? How is that ecologically smart or sensible from a business perspective?

1) collect additional driving data. driving data is the moat for autonomous driving

2) move to a location where you're statistically most likely to pick up your next passenger, to reduce average wait time

That was always the selling point about autonomous cars, i.e. that they could be driven 24/7, almost.

There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.

The whole point of having them on a limited basis is to gather data. No useful data is gathered when they aren't driving.