This seems silly. It’s been obvious even to casual observers like myself for years that Waymo/Google was one of the only groups taking the problem seriously and trying to actually solve it, as opposed to pretending you could add self-driving with just cameras in an over-the-air update (Tesla), or trying to move fast and break things (Uber), or pretending you could gradually improve lane-keeping all the way into autonomous driving (car manufacturers). That’s why it’s working for them. (IIUC, Cruise has pretty much also always been legit?)
Don’t even get me started on the “didn’t take psych 102: Attention and Memory”-level cluelessness required to believe a human can safely pay attention well enough in a vehicle that reliably tricks you into believing it’s autonomous to take over in the split seconds before a disaster…
I find it hard to believe that the Tesla and Auto Manufacturer positions aren’t knowingly deceptive. I mean, what are they going to say? “It’s too hard so we’re just waiting for Waymo or Cruise to license their tech once it works”?
I’m gonna stop here before I start mocking geohot… I seriously can’t believe the journalists who wrote those early stories were willing to risk their lives like that…
I just left a version of this in another thread—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, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems.
Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
Waymo is currently under investigation for multiple incidents, not all of which it had previously disclosed to the NHTSA [0]. The recent light pole incident also doesn't help [1].
If they are doing 50k rides a day, then they would appear to have a remarkable safety record.
It will be interesting to see if these investigations lead to a repeat of the Cruise debacle or if this will become the price of doing business.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-saf...
As a proponent of good public transportation I'm a bit afraid that automated taxis will get big enough in USA that they will start influence city wide decisions on how to develop city transport network even in Europe when time comes for them to expand their business.
Robotaxis are "a real business"? Maybe in the future, but not yet. From the article:
> But even the most bullish believers in autonomous transportation acknowledge the tech still has a ways to go before it’s reliable enough for widespread deployment on U.S. roads.
> ... and made robo-taxis a real business
Has it though? They've come an impressively long way to have 50,000 rides a week, but that needs to increase a thousand fold to justify the $6B of venture capital and $30B valuation. That's a lot of cars and a lot more work than it takes Uber to bring on another underpaid owner driver (Uber has 23 million rides per day)
Waymo was smart to start with taxis. A self-driving car's competition is you, and of course you're an above-average driver. But a taxi's competition is the average Uber driver. People can be more objective about that low bar.
New York City is not going to see robo taxis for a very, very long time. We are just now catching up to the rest of the cities in terms of how garbage is collected, after about a hundred years.
I much prefer Waymos as a pedestrian. They always stop at stop signs.
I wouldn't call it a "real business" just yet.
I've heard they do 50,000 rides per week in SF, LA, Phoenix combined.
Assuming they make $20/ride, that's still $1M/week, or $52M/year. I'm sure they spend in Billions/year.
They would have to scale out to every major city in America and add another 10000 cars before they can turn a profit.
It's only going to be a real business when they approach profitability--now they have massive losses.
Horses all retired. They successfully automated their jobs and now live in a post-scarcity Horseconomy
Side question: when Tesla finally gets FSD working, will I be able to use my Tesla to make money by using it as a taxi? Or will there be licensing issues? In other words, will I own it or not?
For folks that are interested in the business specifically, we have some open roles listed at https://waymo.com/careers/ with the word Commercialization in the titles.
Are multi passenger trips the next step? That is, driverless buses? And ones solving the traveling salesman problem with each new stop?
If yes, perhaps cities with fewer cars can skip the taxi step and go straight to smart buses.
Waymos are not full robotaxis. It's an illusion provided by having the humans responsible for the cars in a remote location. We don't have transparency on how that system runs and how often the humans intervene. We also sweep under the rug many, many non-crash traffic incidents. Watch videos on Youtube of peoplr taking Waymos and you will see the cars do lots of dumb stuff. If there were lots more of them it would make traffic even more of a problem than it is today.
I can!t overstate how depressing it is we managed to figure out private self driving car fleets before we figured out modern public transit funding.
Isthere a foom full of Waymo employees watching over it all remotely and making the hard decisions?
I feel like self driving cars is one area where Google's slow-and-steady culture just works better than the move-fast-and-break things culture, since the things that would break in this case are literal human bodies.
How scalable is this technology? From my experience at an AV company, every deployment site had to be mapped, and after deployment, sites still needed remote teleoperators to occasionally adjust waypoints and resolve stops.
Turns out infinite money, lawyers, lobbyists and engineering time gets you pretty far
They have a fairly big weakness. If someone takes over their control these taxis are basically weapons. You have to admit that the question is not if this is possible but how will it pan out.
Real businesses make money. Waymo loses money hand over fist.
How much do the remote safety drivers intervene, is this something we have good sources on?
For the last ten years or so, there's been an argument on this forum (and others) about whether cutting safety in the pursuit of an earlier rollout is a good thing. If it's beneficial to humanity, then a few deaths now is massively outweighed by the many deaths avoided by earlier rollout of this tech, or so the argument goes.
This seems like a good time to point out that the argument makes too many assumptions to be useful, like that moving fast and breaking things will in fact lead to faster progress overall. In the case of robotaxis, the group moving carefully and deliberately is the clear leader, and many competitors who took the faster/less careful approaches have shuttered along the way. When uber's self-driving division killed someone, for example, it didn't lead to an earlier arrival of self-driving.
This is relevant to all sorts of business stuff where we're always asked to move faster than we can reliably move. It's astoundingly easy to forget that sometimes bad rollouts can shutter a project even worse than slow rollouts.
Waymos also follow traffic laws with regards to loading-unloading zones, which is inconvenient for the passenger.
Compare to a rideshare driver that will often drop you off right in front of your destination, even if that is an illegal maneuver.
"made robo-taxis a real business" sounds like a dig at Enron Musk. I believe he first started calling self driving cars that.
Another article praising degenerate AI companies that kill/injure people, yuppie tech bros unite!
Wait till activists start setting SDCs on fire before calling it a “real business”.
Full article: https://web.archive.org/web/20240529210213/https://fortune.c...