I'd be curious to know how this monitoring scales over time.
https://www.forrester.com/blogs/no-amazon-isnt-killing-just-...
I’m not sure how you could make that work. People that eat Indian food step in and it might get set off, so people will cry racism. You drive next to a particular industrial plant, etc..
If not, what are you expecting to be prohibitive?
Unsupervised in the sense that there's no driver there to clean the car when it gets dirty. At the same time, presumably part of the odor of an uber comes from the driver, so that helps. I wonder if waymos roll down the window (weather permitting) between riders, to air it out. Might be dangerous at a red light, since people could throw stuff in or even dive in through open windows.
What do you think is more likely to get vandalized - a room with a human sitting in it, or a room with a camera watching it?
I worked as a house attendant in an upscale hotel for years. Let me tell you from experience: a shockingly high percentage of people trash and damage their rooms. Not the majority, but enough to keep staff busy every day.
Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?
The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.
The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.
Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.
This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.
The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.
This sometimes leads to in-car vomiting.
There are also still smokers among us.
I assume there are sensors available suitable for Waymo taxis.
Not appealing for me personally.
Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.
I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.