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.