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.
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...
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).
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.
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
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.
That's just one tiny example out of sea of examples.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hell there's people who just use uber exclusively now.
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.
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.
Renting gear is fine for casual users, but serious practioners in almost every sport are very particular about their gear.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.