The olfactory problem with waymos is that if someone gets in one dirty or foul smelling there isn't a driver to kick them out. Waymos are starting to get more ridership and some of those people are going to be absolute pigs. I gave feedback to Waymo about a recent ride where the entire car smelled like a fat, unwashed ass and the best case scenario there is that they took the car out of rotation immediately, the rider right before me left it that way and that the rider will be identified after several instances of those reports. The reality is probably that the car picked up several riders after me until one reported a problem mid-ride.

> I gave feedback to Waymo about a recent ride where the entire car smelled like a fat, unwashed ass

Knowing BigCo reputation, I think it’s equally possible that Waymo and/or BigCo accounts will be banned for actual perp, complainant or random rider in-between… what a world…

Wouldn't take long before that gets abused I bet. I'm picturing a world where someone knows their ex uses Waymo to get home every day so requests rides around that time/place so they can report them as odorous/damaged/vomit/etc and get the prior rider banned.

Need to add some smell sensors to the inside of the car, as well as the cameras

They do have always on cameras inside.

I've said this on HN before as well, but I've turned into a full-on Waymo evangelist (Los Angeles user here). Couple of things to add to Jake's comment...

The driving experience itself is on par with the "best" drivers I've ever ridden with (things like stopping at actual stop signs, for instance, and not racing from one traffic light to the next, and being courteous to bikes and pedestrians), not to mention just the peace and tranquility of being in a car solo when you're not having to drive (I know, I know, mass transit is better for countless reasons and this is actually doubling down on human isolation which is probably not great long term). Anyway, I have zero interest in getting into an Uber at this point. I'd wait longer and pay more for a Waymo if given the choice. And I'm fully aware people will, if this works more broadly, lose jobs bc of it. I'm not insensitive to that, but I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle barring catastrophic incidents by Waymo et al that cause regulators to kill self-driving cars altogether. Note that I did witness an incident where on a road with no lane markings the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane. It's an intersection I transit often and normal drivers have great trouble with and frankly makes me uneasy every time I turn left there as well. The Waymo was definitely perplexed by it.

For those who talk about how Phoenix's roads are straight and wide... This is not true in Los Angeles (nor in SF though SF is more of a compact grid than LA). For those of you unfamiliar, a lot of the streets in LA where Waymo operates today are very narrow, with cars parked on both sides and so there's inadequate room for two cars to go down them without waiting for another car to pass. These same streets have zero lane markings on them. I've experienced this several times in Waymo to date where the car just "gets it," though it's almost too cautious when it needs to get over to let another car pass when there's not enough space for both. And if you read all of that and say "what about the weather?" It's obviously an issue and I fully agree it will delay the rollout "everywhere."

All that said, I cannot wait until I can jump in one of these things, from Waymo or any other company, and safely go up to the mountains or some other road-trip destination. The economics of longer trips, particularly to rural areas, are likely tricky bc of the inability to count on a return fare, but, man, I do think self-driving cars are a radically important technology that will vastly change how we transit and, really, how we live. That is, if they don't fuck up too much en route to getting there.

Honest question out of curiosity, since you seem genuine and open to discussion…

I agree with all of your points about Waymo vs. Uber-like ridesharing—the average Uber ride is so much less safe that it’s hard to argue for.

But I also agree with your aside about the growing isolation of society—the longer term implications of every event, meal, and errand being separated by autonomous journeys are staggering.

So the question is, how do the societal isolation factors play into your decision making? (Honest question, not a gotcha, I’m curious how others think about these tradeoffs.)

If you're already inclined towards isolation, like I am sometimes, driverless taxies will help with that. But if you're inclined towards going out and doing things, which I also am sometimes, there are few incentives more alluring than a fast and cheap way to get from point A to point B. If labor and gasoline are removed from the equation there's no reason rides can't be ridiculously cheap, and spending $20 on a round trip instead of $80 lowers one of the biggest barriers for going out (at least in urban areas and/or when drinking/drugs are involved).

Cheaper, safer and more effective transportation seems likely to increase mobility and decrease isolation.

I can spend more times at my friend's place, maybe have a beer or two without having to worry about driving back - so I think it encourages socialisation

I'm not sure if you mean about Waymo/self-driving cars or more broadly, but I'll assume you mean cars. Let me first say I'd love to create a list of all of the long-term pros and cons of self-driving cars because I'd be far better-equipped to answer, but my off-the-cuff thought: this technology, if it survives, will make it easier, safer, less stressful and less costly for people to transit, and will also make almost every place more livable (the impacts will be more profound in urban areas than rural, but both will benefit). That sounds like a great way to increase interactivity, not lessen it.

Uber sometimes offers a service called UberPool where you share the car with another passenger in order to save money right? Couldn't Waymo do the same?

Didn't Uber start branded as a "ride sharing" app where the app helped you find someone to car pool into work with?

I suspect an underlying issue with socialising is faith in humanity. It's hard to have faith in humanity in the modern world when every front appears to be telling you otherwise. If you don't have faith in humanity, then you're limited to only interacting with those: "you have to" and "are vetted".

That was Lyft. Uber started as an easier/cheaper way to call for a ride in a “black car”.

They could in theory yeah. I’m not sure if Uber still offers it, but I think its uptake is so low (anecdotally from people I know) that it’s effectively not a solution to societal isolation, because it doesn’t end up being used.

I thought it was pretty well used pre-covid, especially when the rides were sometimes 50% of a regular ride.

At least I personally used it a lot, and knew several people that did.

How is that different than if you were driving yourself?

Well, I’d say it’s different in a similar way that Uber’s are different from driving yourself. For physical trips it’s similar, but lower barrier to entry, so you do it more. And for deliveries it’s a much lower barrier because you don’t drive at all.

Can you just clarify in the situation where, 'the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane', whether the behaviour of the Waymo was 'safe' although obviously incorrect for multiple reasons?

It was absolutely incorrect on the Waymo's part. I was trying to counterbalance my positivity with a mistake I've seen a Waymo make. That said, I would not call it unsafe because where it was located it was not going to lead to an accident. It was confused by the intersection, which also happens to human drivers at that intersection. That is not to excuse the Waymo ("oh, it's just like a person so that's ok!"), just trying to point out that it may be a great driver (again, my opinion), but doesn't mean it's infallible. Of course others on this thread have pointed out statistics about how Waymos are faring, but I was just trying to share my experience riding in one.

Thanks. As a human driver sometimes I feel like slowing down and being in the wrong place because the intersection is confusing is actually the safest action. I'm happy if an AI fails in the same way.

In the same vein, I don't ride uber often but when I do I often find that drivers leave their windows closed and car's air circulation turned off completely. When I ask for "a bit of airflow" they apparently hear it as "I'm too hot", so they turn AC to maximum power.

I'm not sure whether this reflects their own preferences, what they think customers want, or if they are just completely oblivious.

I have never had trouble cracking open the window on my own. Do you not try?

The child safety disable is often turned on for backseat windows.

Don't be too timid to tell them what you want. If they turn out the AC to max instead, just say "Sorry, I'm not hot I just want some fresh air."

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 require transporting large things, like kayaks, bikes, etc. Or people with large pets. Or grocery shopping for more than 1-2 people. Or any of the dozens of other conveniences that Americans have come to expect from owning a car over the past century.

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 worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more.

I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.

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.

How do you make sure there isn’t human semen or worse on the seats on which you and your children will sit? At least with taxis driven by humans you knew that there was someone making sure that won’t happen that often, but with driverless taxis all bets are off.

As someone with kids... What if there is? The presence of dried Semen on a seat on which my kids sit will have zero negative impact on them. At all.

Is it Yuck? Yes of course. But it also seems extremely unlikely. And it's a lot less Yuck than thinking about what's in the sand in public playgrounds that all kids visit constantly. And while I have a reasonable chance of preventing them from licking the seats, I have no chance of preventing them from eating some sand.

This is just a bizarre irrational worry...

> This is just a bizarre irrational worry...

Do you and your kids take public transport regularly? In a failing city/society, that is.

Because if the answer is "yes, I do take public transport in a city that struggles to pay its bills and I still don't care that the chairs have weird organic substances on them" then fair-play to you, but for me personally at some point I had to purchase a personal car (when I was already approaching my mid-30s) because I just couldn't convince myself anymore that it is ok to not want to sit down inside of a train ("better stand up by the window, that seat is too dirty").

And these robo-taxis will be worse than public transport, for the main reason that there's no-one "standing guard" inside of them (and, no, Big Brother cameras placed inside of them, which should be a dedicated topic all by itself, btw, really won't change a thing in that respect).

I also shake strangers hands and eat food made by teenagers and use public bathrooms and pet cats and sleep in hotel rooms. My children (if/when they occur) will attend daycare and school with other sacks of disease and share the spoils with me, as is tradition. Our society is dirty.

Do you avoid handrails and sanitize the doorknobs and gas pumps you interact with? Those are going to be far worse than subway chairs. It's probably not a bad idea, but it's a bit beyond what I suspect most people consider normal. I had a friend who lived like that, and he ended up being diagnosed with OCD.

> And these robo-taxis will be worse than public transport

If you soil a waymo taxi, they can ban you from ever booking another one, the same cannot be said for public transport

While I consider this somewhat dystopian, I do think it's pretty clear that they will be much cleaner than public transport for that reason

Just so we're clear: You're agreeing right? You're irrational about this and as a result it's damaged your life.

You reached a situation where everyday things are "too dirty" and rather than realising that's a mental health problem and you might need to fix that, you... found an expensive and elaborate coping strategy which necessitates further crazy beliefs.

Nothing like being psychoanalized by some tech people who have most probably not taken public transport in a long time.

Is that not just a general issue in public? Park bench? Back of the bus? There could be human semen everywhere! It's why I always insist on wrapping my kids in plastic before letting them leave the house.

Well, how will taxi-sex enjoyers make sure that no toddler vomited on the seat they intend to frolic on?

Waymos have been far cleaner than the Ubers I've ridden in. I think they are cleaned daily?

I wonder how this affects the price. Is the price you're paying now the real price, or a subsidised price?

Surely they have cameras? I’d trust that a lot more than a taxi driver keeping their cab clean.

When has that stopped anyone?

It may not stop someone the first time, but it's not hard to block the reserving account and prevent a second time from occurring. For most people the threat of being placed on the "no-fly" list is sufficient to ensure prosocial behavior.

Do you think that Waymo doesn't have cameras inside the car?

If you have smaller kids, most taxi rides are completely illegal in any western country and very dangerous for kids. Ever saw a taxi with 2 spare child seats or at least boosters? They are required by law for very good reasons, and those reasons are kids dying or ending up crippled even in relatively mild crashes.

That's just one tiny example out of sea of examples.

In many countries, taxis are often specifically exempted from child seat mandates. Doesn't make them any safer, but it's not necessarily illegal.

I've taken taxis with infants and small children several dozen times. It doesn't take me more than about twenty seconds to pop the car seat out of the stroller and latch it into the back seat of a taxi, for slightly older kids we have a few lightweight folding booster seats, and personally I've found that a car seat vest is particularly handy and lightweight.

A quick search online shows that your statement is misinformation, taxis can be exempted in many "western" countries.

Before making such bold claims, you've got to know a little tiny bit of the topic or at least look it up to make sure.

> I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more. I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.

This or an equivalent will arrive to a robo taxi near you when the service inevitably gets enshittified to hell and back.

Ads, trips shared with other humans, pay extra for heated seats, etc.

> 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 make sense the way it works in some places. A person working for a company should receive enough pay from the company itself that they don’t have to actually rely on tips in order to make enough money to survive. Tips should be a nice extra that customers willingly add because of good service. Not a forced extra percentage that they have to pay on every transaction just so that the company can pay less to their employees.

I do not accept your guarantee.

They won't be tips as such, but the average amount of the tip will be baked into the price.

If people are willing to pay base charge + tip for an Uber, then that is what robo-taxies will charge too. Especially if one company is allowed to keep a monopoly on the technology.

I actually wonder if “tip the development team” makes sense (assuming tipping is gratuity and not because an employer pays below-living wages). Weirdly it might even lead to quality improvement because low tip areas could be detected and debugged.

There will be bullshit booking charges etc though. The thrust of their point is largely correct. I really wish people were more sensitive to being stiffed like we are by these sorts of stupid charges … that they arent means there is often no alternative.

I'll take bullshit charges that I can know about upfront over being nagged for tips every day.

The point of bullshit charges is often to obscure total cost upfront. We are absolutely rotten with them in the UK. Not sure the US is better but I think they are really anticompetitive because they create a cost to discovering the true cost of goods. I have a personal policy of not buying if I discover stupid charges at the end of a sales pipeline but it’s sometimes incredibly inconvenient.

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

> 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.

I used to live in China where taxi usage was much more ubiquitous, and…you really live to live in a world where you aren’t expected to live in a car, be it with public transit (Europe, Japan) or public transit + lots of taxis (China) or tuktuks or whatever. But yes, your hobbies tend to be different and adapted, bikes, for example, get you places, and are not taken places, or you get them on the train which actually hits the trail head you want to use. You rent the kayak on site, and there is always a place to do that because lots of other people are in the same car-less boat as you are.

You mention American at the end of your comment, but the rest of the world isn’t the same. Waymo doesn’t really have to limit itself to the states once they get the concept worked out.

Having to depend on crappy rented sports equipment sounds miserable. Maybe people in the rest of the world will tolerate that but I want no part of it. I'll continue buying my own personal large vehicles so that I can fill them with as much stuff as I want.

When I'm out doing something, the car also serves as a reasonably secure private locker where I can store things without carrying them around.

Sure, I don't imagine they care much about changing everyones opinions. What will happen is your kids and grand kids will reach an age where they would need to get a driving license but won't see the point because they've already been using robo-taxi's for 5 or so years already.

Hell there's people who just use uber exclusively now.

Unlikely. One kid already has a drivers license and uses it frequently. I'll make sure the other kid gets one as soon as she's eligible.

Not every young person spends all day hiding in their room, doom scrolling on social media. Some of them have to get to sports practice with bulky equipment in places that public transit and robo-taxis don't go.

You just live in a world where that is possible and common. I just mentioned that much of the rest of the world isn’t like that all. Japan, for example, has trains/trams straight to campgrounds, or at least buses. They still manage with sports somehow, but you can imagine that the dynamics are very different than from what you are used to.

You are an American and have that privilege. If we granted that privilege to everyone else, the world probably couldn’t handle it, self driving taxis or not.

What’s more I don’t think we will have that privilege for long, personal transportation is a luxury in most of the world, it is becoming a luxury here also. We will adapt though like everyone else has.

This will work for some people in some sports, but it's hardly a universal solution. Many activities like rock climbing or backcountry hiking/skiing, will never have good public transport access.

Renting gear is fine for casual users, but serious practioners in almost every sport are very particular about their gear.

I think you’re wrong about most of the scenarios on your list. And once the market is mature, I can imagine it would be great to be picked up in a minivan after a days cycling somewhere new and not on a loop route.

Americans have become emotionally attached to cars because of what they enable them to do. That might take a while to die. But in Europe cars are more of a pita to own and run because we have less space. I don’t have any great love for mine. As soon as waymo gets here and is reasonably priced I’ll get rid of my car.

Yeah, Americans just have more space, and America is just far larger, and Americans often do relatively long road trips to places where other modes of transportation are not possible or prohibitively expensive. I don't think that is ever going to die, nor should it.

My family has a couple cars but we still ride with our kids in taxis all the time, for example to the airport or into/out of the city. Even hauling bikes isn't insurmountable -- we've taken weeklong bike camping trips with friends and because biking in a big circle isn't as much fun we hire a bigger vehicle that can haul a dozen bikes to the starting point.

> 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).

Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around.

If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1.

I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.

I don’t know… I think a very big reason why people don’t take taxis is because they are very expensive especially for longer rides. This seems like a thing robo taxis might change. If the driver goes away, they shouldn’t be much more expensive than e.g. car rentals.

This will boil down to availability and price. Taxis are generally just too expensive to use often and also waits are too long. Of course, I'm comparing cost of frequent taxis vs buying a used car.

In a place like Singapore, where a taxi ride is $10 but a Corolla starts from $100,000, the equation will strongly favor robotaxis for everyone.

The other problem is the economics flips over once you also have to own a car. The marginal cost of each trip goes down … but if waymo is good enough for 95% of the time the it might not be necessary any more.

I personally don't think the price will ever drop low enough for it to make sense to most people to drop cars entirely. The US is notorious for being unwalkable, save for a few select areas.

Working remotely helps a lot since there's no need to drive every day, but it's only a fraction of overall people who have this privilege.

Still, I'm looking forward to seeing Waymo at my town. It would make a good DD and backup in case my car needs repairs, etc.

All these examples are casual rides, while the context was about taking the taxi daily to work. Of course you can keep your car for the weekend drive to the mall, or to the slopes, or if you're a soccer mom, but most employed people will definitely save the daily commute. Expectations change in face of convenience.

That is because the choice is own car or taxi: the automobile is the *only* supported choice for mobility in much of the United States, to the detriment of any other mode of transport.

People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.

The only problem with Taxis is that they are expensive und possibly not available. Both of these issues are very much the kind of thing a robotaxi might fix.

After two of my (women) friends were assaulted by Uber/Lyft drivers, a weird smell is the least of my fears. If I'm sending someone on a ride late a night, Waymo's lack of driver is a huge reason to prefer them over Uber/Lyft. But only if the destination is in a safe neighborhood. A human driver's going to be able to make a better assessment of if it's safe to let someone off somewhere, vs Waymos will randomly drop you off blocks away from your destination.

As far as humans suck at driving, it's not that they suck on average, but that the ones who do suck at it don't always have a sticker saying that they suck.

It is also that they suck on average.

Also, the really fantastic ones will be excellent for years and years, and then one day they're slightly sleepy.

And that one day they will take the taxi.

Averages don't work for risk evaluation.

Except for when they don't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldt_Broncos_bus_crash

Or get a text and get distracted at just the wrong time

These days to qualify as excellent you need good phone discipline.

Eg, turn off the phone or turn off notifications, even vibrations. Or at least make a strict rule to ignore it while moving and only look while fully stopped, eg at a stoplight although that's just decent driver grade not excellent driver, because of the temptation the notification will present each time.

A great driver also reviews the route for a couple of minutes before leaving in order to reduce reliance on GPS-- you still use GPS but because it's not the first time you've seen the material, already know the shape of the route, and just need reminders to encourage you you're on the right track, the GPS will genuinely steal far less attention. The two minutes will be well spent, and may save lots of time, because it vastly reduces the likelihood of wrong turns.

I had to give up on the smart watch because being able to turn your wrist and read a text is a really bad feature when driving, and I didn't trust myself with it.

Humans are astonishingly and unreasonably good at driving. There are, indeed, a lot of traffic deaths but this is because we drive a mind-boggling amount so even a very low rate of fatalities adds up to a substantial number.

A significant portion of traffic deaths also occur in special conditions-- at night, with intoxicated persons, in bad weather.

Existing self driving cars won't even drive in those more difficult conditions.

In terms of the passenger miles driven if you compare to non-intoxicate humans the expected number of deaths for self driving cars is still below 1 if they were as safe as non-intoxicated human drivers.

Safer cars are an excellent goal but they're not automatically a given result for self driving.

> Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.

And introduces new ones like being dropped off blocks from your destination because the car refuses to drive on perfectly fine roads, service being unavailable in poor weather, and extending Google's tracking of everything you do online to offline.

:D

Aside, you can just ask uber drivers to turn off the radio.

> Humans are astonishingly and unreasonably good at driving. There are, indeed, a lot of traffic deaths but this is because we drive a mind-boggling amount so even a very low rate of fatalities adds up to a substantial number

To put some numbers on it in the US cars are driven about 3.2 x 10^12 miles per year, and around 4 x 10^4 people are killed in car accidents (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists).

That's one death per 8 x 10^7 miles.

There are around 2 x 10^6 people non-fatally injured in car accidents per year in the US. That's an injury every 1.6 x 10^6 miles.

There are around 4 x 10^6 non-injury car accidents per year in the US, which is one every 8 x 10^5 miles.

If we assume all miles driving are equally risky and that we drive 40 miles per day 365 days a year, then we would expect to be in a non-injury car accident around once every 55 years, be injured in a car accident around once every 110 years, and be killed in a car accident around once every 5500 years.

Of course almost no one drives all their miles at times and in conditions when the risk per mile is average so when estimating your personal risk you need to take that into account.

An injury every 1.6m miles isn't amazing. That is almost a 1/3 lifetime chance of injury if you drive an average of 12k miles annually for 50 years. (Sidenote: human units are easier to read).

A comment I wrote 3 years ago has more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26950254

The old "look at the person to your left, now look to the person on your right" meme comes to mind. One of you will probably have an accident with an injury in your lifetime.

I ran the same calculation for dying in a car accident and got a lifetime probability of 0.7%, but I'm not sure I did it right.

I live in SF, and I take it daily. It's cheaper than paying for the parking garage near the office. And it's cheaper than Uber: the base rate is similar to Uber's, but there is no need to add a tip.

Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.

Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.

>Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.

Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven (i.e., frustration at the driver in front, wanting to take the more scenic route, being undecided about stopping at that cafe halfway).

I'm all for self driving in highly populated areas. In a perfect world I'd like to see it integrated into all vehicles, and when entering specific areas you are told your car will enter self-driving mode. Arguably this makes the most business sense for Waymo, licence the underlying tech to manufacturers that already have capacity to produce vehicles vs compete.

This tracks with how the messaging about Waymo has changed.

Early on, they had those concept cars that looked like they belonged at Disneyland or in a Chevron commercial. Then, they started modding off-the-shelf cars at talking up the Waymo Driver. I think at some point they decided their core competence would be self-driving specifically, leaving the "car of the future" bit to traditional car companies.

Yes, but switching back and forth multiple times? I admit to having done even this before too, but I certainly didn't feel proud of myself after. A really good human driver would avoid this kind of conduct by having a (just slight) bias towards decision "stickiness" to avoid looking silly. This isn't purely aesthetic-- looking silly or bizarre, even if technically safe and legal and effecient, in your driving behavior can attract police attention (not a concern for self driving I suppose).

That said I admit if these are the kinds of complaints we are discussing, as opposed to the kinds Uber attracted (like running a woman over in Nevada), Waymo must be doing pretty well. These are nitpicks to gradually address, not fundamental issues. Kudos to waymo, it was always obvious they were nearly the only player seriously trying

> We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven [...]

I expect that robot taxis will be both consumers and producers of that actual data. They will likely report the traffic conditions they experience back to the company that runs the robot taxi service, and that will become input to the rest of the fleet.

If the time it takes for observations from a given robot taxi to be incorporated into the data received by other robot taxis is short enough it might be possible to get interesting feedback loops. It may even be possible to get oscillations.

Yes! I dream of traffic that moves and integrates seamlessly almost like a school of fish, because of near-instant communication between vehicles - an automotive hive mind. Imagine not needing traffic lights because each car at the intersection knows when it is their turn...but I know we'll f it up somehow.

Still, a person can dream.

Agreed on this - think wayve is attempting this - building out the tech to license to manufacturers. Honestly makes the most sense and love the idea that all cars can have this and take over driving in specific areas.

I have video from my dashcam of a Waymo taxi doing a sudden three lane change, in moderately heavy traffic, to do a left turn to enter a freeway. This was a month or so ago. I really hope a human was involved in that. If not, there’s no way I would consider riding in one. If an officer had seen it, they would likely have written a ticket to a human.

Human drivers cross multiple lanes if heavy traffic all the time and certainly aren’t ticketed.

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

I agree with your sentiment, but traditionally (in the United States) cab drivers are one of the few service providers that one is culturally expected to tip.

> I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time

I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk and I've never even seen a self-driving car. Anywhere. I don't even think such a thing exists on public roads in my country. That Gibson quote about the future not being evenly distributed, etc.

Just a data-point.

Waymo is basically unique in offering Level 4 Self Driving (hence this article) and they only do this in a small number of locations in the US, such as (parts of) Phoenix - so, yes, you're correct that in the UK, or indeed anywhere outside of those few locations, there aren't real "Self Driving" cars.

You won't know if people have Level 3 "Self Driving" cars because unlike Level 4, the Level 3 cars always have a human sat in the driving seat, it's just that maybe the human isn't paying attention and maybe the car is driving anyway. It may be difficult to gauge (beyond guessing) how many people you see are bad drivers and how many aren't actually driving at all under L3...

L1 (the machine does some of the work but a human driver is always doing much of the driving) is certainly something you see and don't even think about. Intelligent Cruise control (ie it won't smack into the car ahead but instead slow down) on a motorway, maybe automatic lane keeping on somebody's fancier or newer car, it's not "Self driving" as you'd understand it, but it's something.

The way these "Levels" work is L3 to L4 is the point where we transition from "The human is legally driving but the machine is offering more and more assistance" to "The machine is legally driving and the human is asked less and less often to do anything at all". As a result a person who is literally blind and thus couldn't possible drive the car or obtain a license to do so - can (and they do) use a Waymo, just like they'd use an Uber, but they cannot do the same with Tesla "Full Self Driving".

There are only a handful of Level 3 autonomous driving systems in existence. The Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot system illuminates exterior turquoise lights to indicate when it's active so you don't have to guess who is driving. I'm not sure whether Drive Pilot is available in the UK yet.

https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology/mercedes-use-t...

> I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk

That’s an interesting way of saying you live in London ;)

(Phoenix urban area is more populous than every urban area in the UK except for London)

Manchester not London.

According to Kagi the population of Greater Manchester is 2.8 million vs 1.61 for Phoenix.

You're comparing a county area (Greater Manchester) with the direct city population.

Phoenix's metro population alone is 4.8m.

You're right. Thanks for pointing that out.

I think my point stands, that even large urban areas in the UK have no SDVs.

Sure, it's also worth pointing out nobody in Pheonix has ever seen a person with universal healthcare or free university education.

Countries develop at different rates on different things.

I disagree.

Phoenix has the perfect climate for self-driving cars.

It will require a major technological leap in order for them to succeed in the "real world" (fog, rain, snow, etc).

Disclosure: I work for Waymo.

We handle both dense fog and heavy rain on the latest vehicles. The best blog post is probably https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ but you can find a lot of videos in the rain.

Snow and very cold weather is a challenge for sensor cleaning. We've done some testing in both NYC and Buffalo (https://waymo.com/blog/2023/11/road-trip-how-our-cross-count...) to collect data.

I'm rooting for you, but I live in snow country and always have a chuckle any time someone says self driving will be ready soon. There's so many situations that need to be handled when driving in winter and some of them I can't even imagine how you'd address in software.

Winter here changes daily between

- no road lines visible

- snow packed into ice randomly making the road a a camouflage pattern

- snow is fresh/deep so no road is visible and you navigate based on the slight hump in the snow where you know there's a curb

- same as above, but instead of a curb a slight indent where there's a ditch

- slush piles outside the tire lanes, which if hit will suck you in or cause you to spin out

- ice/snow on hills, so time your arrival for rolling stops at intersections because stopping is not an option

- active snowfall (limited camera vision, and I'm guessing reduced/useless signal from lidar)

- hail

- sporadic black ice (its easy to slow down when its icy everywhere, but knowing when and where black ice is likely when it's sporadic is a skill)

- the "lanes" formed by peoples tires in the snow often don't align with the official road, and sometimes a lane goes missing in this situation

And all that's after you deal with sensor cleaning.

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.

Winter here is 4 to 5 months out of the year. When it snows, everyone goes about their day normally, just at a slower pace. The authorities have no problem with that, and having drivers on the road does not affect plowing in any meaningful manner.

I'm not sure why you are trying to justify such a large shortcoming - for most people having your car be randomly unusable for 1/3 of the year would be a big deal.

I’m not saying I would trust getting into a Waymo now in those conditions, but I also wouldn’t assume the same things that are difficult for humans will be difficult for self driving. I’m optimistic these hurdles can be overcome.

Oh I'm also optimistic they can be overcome, I'm just less optimistic on the timeline. I'll be pleasantly surprised if self driving can handle winter a few decades from now.