Next stop: Miami

https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/next-stop-miami/

by ra7 • 2 years ago

225 302 2 years ago

waymo.com

timmg• 2 years ago

I wonder when they will be able to provide service in northern cities (that get snow).

Once they can do that -- and (I guess) can prove profitable -- they could expand non-stop across the country.

mavhc2• 2 years ago

Assuming they stop relying on hd maps, or map everywhere

fragmede8• 2 years ago

We're worried that Google, the company that brought us Google street view, can't map the entire world, when they've already done it once?

schiffern2• 2 years ago

Anyone know the timeline for Waymo expanding to northern areas outside urban centers? Or are these underserved populations forever stuck waiting hours for an Uber that still cancels half the time?

comte70925• 2 years ago

At the end of the day that isn’t a technical problem but a unit economics one.

Removing the driver from a taxi doesn’t bring down costs that much. Self driving cars aren’t going to change the uber/taxi model at a fundamental level.

They have a finite fleet that they need to deploy. Urban centers mean that fleet utilization is high, and relatively less time and miles are spent driving with no one on board. In rural areas with little demand they will sit empty or have to drive empty for many more miles to their pickups. It just isn’t profitable to use your fleet that way no matter what you do.

mlyle• 2 years ago

It's got to be the lowest priority; population density improves economics and utilization. Not to mention that it's hard enough to drive in a city with snow, compared to all the other kinds of situations that can manifest outside of urban centers.

timerol2• 2 years ago

SF in 2015 (with passengers 2021), Phoenix in 2022, Miami in 2025. Northern urban centers are probably a decade out, let alone areas outside urban centers. There are a lot of cities in the Sun Belt to expand to first.

duped2• 2 years ago

I think ultimately the solution to this problem is the same as it was for electrification and telco: government funded mandates to provide service to populations where it's otherwise uneconomical.

One interesting thing today is that CoL can be as high in rural areas as urban areas in the same state, partly because the additional costs of things that don't scale (mostly transportation and healthcare). But we've given up on government helping people, apparently.

asdasdsddd2• 2 years ago

People are clowning on you, but I think rural airport rides would be huge for waymo.

IshKebab6• 2 years ago

Based on what I saw in SF they're still pretty limited to noob-level driving. I expect driving difficulty will be way more of a barrier than snow.

AlotOfReading6• 2 years ago

If twin peaks and downtown are your definition of "noob-level driving", what's normal difficulty? Mumbai rush hour? An active war zone?

whimsicalism4• 2 years ago

strong disagree

dyauspitr4• 2 years ago

Driving in SF alone means it’s above mid tier in most other places.

asdasdsddd2• 2 years ago

They've been testing in Michigan for a while. I guess the only problem is that you can only test this stuff in a third of the year.

jitl4• 2 years ago

They should test year round so they can drive year round.

simpleintheory• 2 years ago

I think the most interesting part is that the article says that Waymo's handing its operations to Moove. It seems like Waymo's trying to become a software provider while having other companies handle the capital-intensive parts.

Workaccount2• 2 years ago

Compared to software, hardware sucks.

Mother nature OS is by far the worst to develop for.

lnsru• 2 years ago

It does not suck! Hardware just barely works.

I design motherboards for industrial computers for living. Last gem: radio module draws 5 amps while transmitting instead of specified 2 amps. Trust nobody!

ra78• 2 years ago

The pivot has already happened. They’re handing over Austin and Atlanta to Uber, and now Phoenix and Miami to Moove. The only places they will continue to own operations for at least the next year are SF and LA.

bloomingkales• 2 years ago

Pivot to what exactly?

taneq• 2 years ago

Capital-intensive, or labour-intensive? If I were a provider of 'special smart sauce' that goes on a common piece of equipment, I'd be trying to focus on making it so I could provide the sauce rather than dealing with all the real-world issues that come with all the real-world people using the saucy equipment.

ethbr15• 2 years ago

Depends.

Chick-fil-A grew into a pretty big business by vertically integrating outside of just selling sandwiches to Waffle House.

So sometimes it's worth owning sauce distribution too. ;)

xnx5• 2 years ago

having other companies handle the capital-intensive parts.

Waymo definitely wants to outsource the areas where they don't have special expertise (i.e. Waymo is 100x better at driving, but not 100x better at washing and vacuuming cars). I'm not sure how capital-intensive regional operations are. The vehicles are definitely the largest capital expense. This is more like an AirBnB property owner hiring a cleaning service.

hwc• 2 years ago

Also, contracting out the menial labor makes Waymo's labor practices look much better. They can tell their engineers that all employees make a living wage and get excellent health insurance.

When the actual labor is done by part-timers with no health insurance making not much over minimum wage.

kieranmaine4• 2 years ago

This seems much more scaleable. Car share services (eg. Evo in Vancouver) seem like good partners as they already have the fleet management services and a recognizable (and hopefully trusted) brand.

I'm not sure about other car share services work, but in the case of Evo they have existing relationships with the cities that make up Metro Vancouver. I wonder if this would ease rollout as you'd already know all the required people to talk to within municipal government?

AlotOfReading6• 2 years ago

B.C. in particular went out of their way to ban autonomous vehicles a few years back, so I'm sure waymo's in no rush to talk to local partners there.

bickfordb• 2 years ago

Seems smart. They'll continue to have all the leverage since they own the tech and will offload all the operational risk

summerlight• 2 years ago

This makes sense. If they don't outsource, they need to run millions of cars. This will cost Alphabet hundreds of billions capex, which is not cheap even for them. This is not just the money problem, but also has significant implications on their speed of business expansion. Let's say Google decides to pour tens of billions every year on Waymo, it will takes tens of years to expand into all of the major US cities. They probably don't want to give the competitors that much time.

seeingfurther• 2 years ago

Miami probably has some of the worst, most lawless drivers in the country — it's like a free-for-all out there. Makes me wonder if Waymo picked Miami as a kind of stress test for their self-driving tech. If they can handle the chaos there, they can probably handle just about anything.

bpodgursky2• 2 years ago

Miami car insurance fraud rings are going to have a fun trying to trick Waymo into rear-ending them. Wonder if it will work.

rwmj• 2 years ago

Would you want to commit insurance fraud against a vehicle that is covered in cameras?

itchyouch• 2 years ago

I'd imagine NYC to be worse than Miami.

Miami seems to share enough similarity in warm weather to SF to be a similar enough use case to expand while providing slightly different driving conditions to be able to dip ones toes in to the driving habits of a different city.

dangus2• 2 years ago

Yeah, bad drivers are easy for self-driving to deal with. You just drive defensively and avoid the objects. It’s the snow and other sensor obstructions that make things difficult.

wil421• 2 years ago

Warm yes but SF doesn’t have many thunderstorms and afternoon downpours.

15155• 2 years ago

NYC is unique in that you have no choice but to do extremely dangerous things to actually operate in traffic at all in most scenarios.

Streets, alleys, etc. are blocked or are narrowed by vehicles and a myriad of other possible obstructions, all of which could be concealing pedestrians.

filoleg• 2 years ago

Absolutely agreed. Not even just because of the weather imo, but because of the actual driving experience here itself.

I’ve lived and been driving for nearly 15 years in various large cities (SF, ATL, Seattle, Portland, LA, etc.), both cars and motorcycles, and NYC (where i currently live) is the only place in the US I absolutely refuse to ever drive (or ride) in.

Not just because it isn’t as necessary here due to public transit usefulness (which is also true), but also because driving here feels like entering a warzone. Narrow roads and parking, drivers being extremely on the edge and leaving a few cm distance max between each car in traffic, constant honking, having to make very dangerous maneuvers on the daily just to get somewhere, and just the cutthroatness of the whole thing here.

I genuinely believe that NYC will end up being the final frontier for Waymo, after all the other places in the US (aside from those with extreme snow conditions).

NickC254• 2 years ago

NYC is far better than Miami.

Miami sucks because half the people on the roads here don't actually know how to drive.

They are immigrants that come from countries whose roads are effectively lawless, or come from countries that have a severely underdeveloped automobile infrastructure, or come from countries where all that's needed to get a driver's license is to pay someone.

jitl4• 2 years ago

Big +1. Here using the turn signal is iffy because some drivers see that as a sign to speed up to try to overtake. I’ve had a few close calls where I check my mirrors, everything is safe for a lane change, turn on the blinker, and the guy in the left lane floors it from 5 car lengths back to cut me off. Sigh.

The Waymo driver is very passive and defensive so I imagine it will be quite slow compared to an Uber who is willing to fight to make turns etc.

foobarian• 2 years ago

Not from Miami, so I wonder (based on news etc.) if flooding is ever an issue for traffic in and around the city?

jitl4• 2 years ago

It is during and after a hurricane. I wouldn’t recommend taking a robotaxi during a storm though.

Quinner2• 2 years ago

Flooding is absolutely an issue, during the rainy season (third of the year) localized flooding is quite common. Some streets are partially flooded on an almost daily basis, something human drivers are used to but I imagine will pose a new challenge to waymo.

lopkeny12ko• 2 years ago

Jaguar discontinued the I-PACE and presumably does not manufacture them anymore. It must be the case that Waymo is cannibalizing their fleet capacity from other markets for every new city launch.

jitl4• 2 years ago

Waymo has a zillion I-PACE vehicles in storage/prep and 2 new models in the pipeline.

dangus2• 2 years ago

I can’t imagine that they would have any major difficulties installing their equipment on any other vehicle.

And they also probably have every little default finding I-PACE vehicles that have gone unsold or are unwanted.

poniko• 2 years ago

Waymo is changing to a Hundai iqonic 5, especially made for them. In the meantime they have brought up all Jaguar they could.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

Jaguar did not manufacture the I-Pace at all. It was made by Steyr, who also built a ton of them for Waymo.

0xbadcafebee4• 2 years ago

TIL Magna Steyr is the largest contract manufacturer of automobiles worldwide (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Steyr)

fngjdflmdflg2• 2 years ago

This is important if nothing else because Miami sees much more rain than SF and Phoenix:

Miami: 57 in. (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset...

SF: 25 in. (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset...)

Phoenix: 7 in. (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/us-climate-normals/#dataset...)

bbor3• 2 years ago

Good point! Though also worth mentioning that they're already in Atlanta, which gets ~50in (and 59in so far this year, despite the mind-bending "first October without rain in recorded history")

newfocogi• 2 years ago

I think they've announced they're headed to Atlanta in early 2025. So they may be testing there, but I don't believe they are at GA in GA :)

fngjdflmdflg2• 2 years ago

Good point, I guess I missed when that happened. Looking at some news sites and Waymo's blog, it seems that they are testing in Atlanta and will start accepting customers in 2025.[0]

It currently operates fleets of driverless cars in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin, and Phoenix. It also plans to launch a robotaxi service in Atlanta in an exclusive partnership with Uber.[1]

[0] https://waymo.com/blog/2024/09/waymo-and-uber-expand-partner...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24313346/waymo-miami-robo...

ecesena2• 2 years ago

Interesting random fact: when it rains, waymo turns on the windshield wipers

falcor842• 2 years ago

Is this relevant? Are any of its cameras/sensors behind the windshield? Or are there wipers directly on the external cameras?

stemlord• 2 years ago

Plenty of south florida rain is not helped by windshield wipers. Anyway I wonder if waymo sensors actually have better visibility in such conditions than people do

pengaru2• 2 years ago

Interesting random fact: when it rains, waymo turns on the windshield wipers

The jaguar i-pace does this independent of the waymo use case.

jayd16• 2 years ago

They would probably have to go out of their way to disable the auto-wipers, no?

bushbaba• 2 years ago

Rain + lidar = challenges

ecocentrik4• 2 years ago

I'm guessing you've never tried driving in a tropical rainstorm. It's as bad a driving in heavy fog. Sometimes you only really have visibility of a few feet.

ethbr15• 2 years ago

Also relevant, when it rains in Miami during the summer, it pours.

As in, zero visibility for 15-30 minutes, then it's past.

So if it can handle Miami tropical rain, it should be okay with all sorts of normal rain.

Out of curiosity, what's Waymo's current production sensor suite mix? I'd assume lidar and radar would also be very unhappy with the surrounding space suddenly being ~10%(?) liquid water droplets.

david-gpu4• 2 years ago

I would expect service to be canceled while it is pouring down. Do we have reasons to believe that they have the ability to ride safely during heavy rain? I haven't been keeping up.

nilstycho• 2 years ago

Far less than 10%. During a heavy downpour, by volume, about one part in a million is liquid. In a cubic meter of heavily rain, there are only a few tens of raindrops.

CasperH2O• 2 years ago

LiDAR sensors, like for example from SICK can have multiple 'layers' of sensors, which combined with various algorithms can handle rain pretty good.

diggan• 2 years ago

So if it can handle Miami tropical rain, it should be okay with all sorts of normal rain.

I feel like a lot of "How well does it handle rain?" comes down to how the roads are built and maintained (Huge puddles, proper drainage, etc) rather than about the car itself, as the car you could test by blasting it with water from different directions and amounts.

ibejoeb• 2 years ago

Not just visibility in the rain, but diminished or fully obstructed visibility due to ponding and full flooding. Then there are the physical navigational problems associated with that. They probably shouldn't be driving though a foot of sea water.

porphyra• 2 years ago

Lidars perform very well in the rain [1].

[1] https://ouster.com/insights/blog/lidar-vs-camera-comparison-...

somethoughts• 2 years ago

Interestingly is there a potential moral issue in the making here? What happens if/when self driving dependency is so prevalent that the majority of inhabitants in a city don't know how to drive. In addition add the fact that self driving cars don't have a steering wheel so even people who know how to take over driving can't actually take over.

What happens if there's an event that requires a mass evacuation such as a Category 5 hurricane and the major self driving car companies deem it too risky to drive in the conditions that precede the storm?

RivieraKid5• 2 years ago

Waymo can handle heavy rain, see time 6:00 here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Bm1A3aaQnh0

OnlineGladiator• 2 years ago

And yet I regularly get stuck behind a Waymo in SF when there's just a little bit of fog.

drewg123• 2 years ago

When I took Waymo in Phoenix, I booked a ride from a suburban hotel to a restaurant in a strip mall. One of the things I noticed was that I was picked up far away from the entrance of the hotel (eg, not under the overhang that protects from sun and rain, where every Uber has picked me up and dropped me off). I recall thinking that it was good there was no weather in Phoenix b/c I had to walk far enough I'd have gotten soaked in a decent rainstorm.

Have they changed this?

dannyobrien• 2 years ago

One thing I've noticed about the SF deployment is that it's slowly gotten better at this. At first it was very cautious about where it would pick you up/drop you off, but now it offers much closer options (from a menu -- a bit like Uber at airports).

I suspect this might be something that is human-added from data collected in past trips.

tortilla• 2 years ago

Also Waymo will not pick you up on private streets. I live in a small community with a private street and I have to walk to the nearest public one (2 mins).

ecocentrik4• 2 years ago

The rainfall can pose serious visibility risks that will be as much of a challenge as picking up and dropping off customers on a rainy day. Extreme high tides do still flood some roads on Miami Beach with brackish water, which isn't something you want to drive through in an electric car.

On the less challenging side, the city has zero snow, no road ice to worry about.

mg2• 2 years ago

    our service – which already provides over 150,000
    trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San
    Francisco, and Austin

Interesting. That's about 8 million rides per year.

I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast.

I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B?

If they at some point make $10 per ride, they would only need something like 50 million rides per year to justify that investment with a p/e ratio of 20.

To go from 8M rides to 50M in 5 years they would have to increase their capacity by 50% per year. Might be possible?

ezfe2• 2 years ago

Profitable from an operations perspective? Surely close since they charge the same order of magnitude as an Uber/Lyft and have fewer than one driver per vehicle (monitoring the vehicles).

mg2• 2 years ago

We have to add the deprecation and maintenance of the car.

Plus I guess they need high resolution maps? Not sure if that is a significant cost factor.

bbor3• 2 years ago

I imagine it's hard to quantify "profit" with such a research-driven org. It's like penciling out the profitability of the metaverse after years of $XX billion dollar losses. In general I get the sense that Waymo is more of a diverse investment than a pure ride-hailing play; for example, as of 2020 they were working for Volvo, Chrysler, Jaguar, and Nissan[1], presumably for $$$.

It's also worth remembering that Zoox exists (Amazon's more futuristic self-driving car play, no steering wheel at all), and has not at all gone the way of Alexa/the Dodo bird (yet). I expect them to make a big splash sometime in the coming decade, personally.

That is, of course, assuming they survive regulatory capture by Tesla, which would need a miracle or an unfair advantage to beat these two at this point, even if they finally follow the science on the need for LiDAR. Another big unknown is how the electorate will react to self-driving cars becoming more than a novelty; Elon Musk is absolutely correct that a backlash of some kind is inevitable even if the safety stats pencil out, IMHO. Trusting a machine is kind of inherently creepy - see Prof. Weinersmith's lectures on the topic:

- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/decisions

- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/fsd

- https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-driving-car-ethics

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidsilver/2020/06/29/waymo-an...

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

Just a few hours ago Sundar Pichai said it's 175k/wk https://youtu.be/kZzeWLOzc_4?t=926

avrionov• 2 years ago

The number of trips increased 10x from Sep 2023 to August 2024. https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/waymo-robotax...

oblio6• 2 years ago

Google has invested and also drawn external funding. From what I've seen in the last 15 years since founding the lower bound for their cost seems to be higher than $12bn and I can only imagine expenses will only accelerate.

fragmede8• 2 years ago

Assuming they don't license the technology to everybody else and keep running their own cars. How much is this technology worth to every taxi company, every car manufacturer, every fleet operator in the world?

marketerinland• 2 years ago

How many rides are there every day in developed countries?

Their internal business case probably has them targeting not 50 million rides per year, but per week… at an absolute minimum

Regardless; at some point specialised vehicles will be developed which are ultra small and lightweight - less than $1,000 to produce - to take care of short downtown rides, for example.

It’s going to be a wild world.

jeffbee4• 2 years ago

There were three things in Waymo's latest CPUC filing that interested me. First, through the end of August, Los Angeles still irrelevant. Over 85% of their California rides were still in SF. Second, ridership in SF doubled in 90 days without a significant expansion in either vehicles or trips per service hour, but they had the cars out on the road more hours every day. Third, the geographic concentration of their rides is extreme, with a large fraction of trips starting near either the Ferry Building or Fisherman's Wharf, which suggests that it is popular with and useful to tourists.

deadbabe2• 2 years ago

It will be a showdown of man vs machine in the city with the worst drivers in the nation. Interesting times.

timerol2• 2 years ago

Did you know that almost every city believes this about their local drivers? I've gotten it in LA, Boston, NYC, DC, SF, Philly, Atlanta, and Austin. Adding Miami to the list.

BWStearns2• 2 years ago

Having lived in most of those cities and in Miami I can say Miami is definitely the most dangerous driving I've seen. And my car insurance company certainly seems to agree.

maybelsyrup• 2 years ago

Yes, that’s true, but in this case they’re all actually wrong. I’ve driven or lived in all of those cities, and they’re all placid next to Miami. It’s not even close.

Quinner2• 2 years ago

LA Drivers aren't that bad, driving just is awful there because the amount of traffic. NYC Driving is an absolute pleasure compared to Miami driving. I have what should be an easy ten minute commute and every day I am avoiding an accident due to a driver doing something crazy you would almost never see in another US city.

This is exacerbated by the dysfunctional government which is happy to let developers do whatever they want without regard to impact on traffic flow, while doing no investment in infrastructure itself. I'm generally pro-growth, and I think California goes too far with its restrictions, but living in Miami has caused me to gain some appreciation for the reason behind some of what California does.

kemotep2• 2 years ago

In my experience it is a State wide problem. I95 seemed to be a speed minimum of 95 if you didn’t want to get run off the road by everyone else for going too slow. I-4 (Daytona to Tampa, through Orlando) had over 400 deaths caused by traffic accidents one year. More than 1 death per mile of road. I don’t think 75 was any better, of course it was rough in Atlanta too, but still.

My experience with Florida driving was not a great experience for the few years I lived there.

xnx5• 2 years ago

LendingTree says Massachusetts is the worst: https://www.lendingtree.com/insurance/best-worst-drivers-stu...

jmyeet• 2 years ago

That's an interesting choice for several reasons:

1. Literally nobody in Florida can drive. Nobody indicates. People run red lights. They speed on the hard shoulder to overtake someone else who is speeding slightly less;

2. There's a lot of things that come down to timing, like when the bridges are up on the Venetian and over the Miami River. You can also get trains blocking the entire of downtown;

3. It seems like there's constant rerouting for closed roads, typically due to contruction;

4. Inclement weather. High winds and flooding. Biscayne Boulevard is often called Lake Biscayne. 30 minutes can be the difference between Miami Beach being dry and every road being 1 foot deep in water (not an exaggeration); and

5. What will be the covered area? I guess Phoenix and LA sprawl too but what constitutes "Miami" goes south, west and north pretty far. I mean there's no break between Miami, unincorporated Miami-Dade County and Fort Lauterdale.

0xbadcafebee4• 2 years ago

Yeah, I dunno if the team understands just how crazy Miami driving is. Maybe they'll restrict it to Downtown, Miami Beach, the Grove, etc to limit the chaos?

NickC254• 2 years ago

That won't limit the chaos. FWIW I went to whole foods downtown today and nearly got hit twice. I live in Midtown, so it's quite literally a 27-block trip. Some of the worst driving (save for on 95) I've seen here has been either 1. idiots on the Beach 2. idiots in Brickell or 3. idiots in downtown.

People here suck at driving.

BWStearns2• 2 years ago

I am morbidly curious to see how Waymos interact with the Good Vibes Only crazies. Miami is definitely going to be hard mode for self driving.

tsunamifury• 2 years ago

Haha that’s nothing compared to its hometown of San Francisco. People attack, destroy, burn waymos here. Let alone extreme hills and visibility issues.

Miami will be comparably far simpler.

entropi2• 2 years ago

I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing.

I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here? I don't mean "problem" like "solving the technical problem of making a car move autonomously in a chaotic city" sense. I mean what is the need that's being addressed here, exactly?

Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage. They were also handling most of the maintenance and customer relations aspects of the work, for basically free. Are these sexy cutting edge tech firms with eye-watering budgets and even more eye-watering valuations really going after whatever these people were making?

If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city; well to be honest I find this premise a bit ridiculous. Call me a European, but I find the idea that moving 1-2 people in private vehicles on roads being superior than public transit -preferably on rail- simply absurd.

Is the idea of living and moving around in a city full of autonomous vehicles actually appealing to anyone? I personally find the whole idea completely disgusting for a number of reasons.

What is the goal here? Am I missing a grand vision? What is there to get excited for? Sorry if this post has been a rant-y one. I feel like I am really missing the point of most of these things.

falcor842• 2 years ago

As I see it, the biggest goal is safety - self-driving cars seem to reduce accidents per distance driven by at least one order of magnitude.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

Citation needed. I've seen claims like that, but none of them from a source that stands up to scrutiny. Most such claims come from the people promoting self driving cars and so they have reason to "lie with statistics". Those who have unbiased data (ie governments) are not talking about it from what I can see.

I personally am significnatly safer than the average driver. This comes solely down to me not drinking alcohol and thus I never drive while drunk. The typical driver also isn't under the influence and thus is significantly better than the average. (I also try to follow other safety practices, but I'm not sure if I'm really better - I'm aware of and pay attention to one thing which makes me better - but what am I not aware of that others are doing?)

NoLinkToMe• 2 years ago

1. The global Taxi market is one that does a quarter trillion dollar revenue per year.

2. the biggest cost component is labour. The biggest safety component is labour. The biggest service component is related to labour.

3. if you cut down cost of labour, make it more safe than before, and provide a quiet and private ride allowing private calls, conversations, music, you can beat other market participants

So yes it's commercially interesting and that's all it needs to be.

As for efficient and sustainable transport, there are certainly criticisms to be had. But these must be addressed via regulation, in my view. You can't expect taxi companies to disappear. You can add a tax to fuel to encourage a transition to electric. You can put a tax on noisy cars to encourage silent ones. You can put a tax on size, to encourage 1-person taxi pods for 1 person which will be 80% of the self-driving taxi fleet, and encourage 100% utilisation of self-driving busses for a small portion of the fleet. But you can't expect companies to simply not do business in the taxi industry because cars are imperfect from a sustainability/transport point of view.

I'm not sure what's disgusting to you.

sixQuarks6• 2 years ago

It also expands the market. Currently bus riders can’t afford to take Ubers but would prefer to. People that would rather take Ubers than walk or bike, and people who would rather give up their car and do uber full time.

This will all be possible with low cost autonomous transport

onlyrealcuzzo5• 2 years ago

If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city; well to be honest I find this premise a bit ridiculous. Call me a European, but I find the idea that moving 1-2 people in private vehicles on roads being superior than public transit -preferably on rail- simply absurd.

Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure.

Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.

~50% of your fare goes to the driver.

entropi2• 2 years ago

Much of the US like Huston and Miami is extremely lacking in public transit, and will likely never build the infrastructure.

I am not trying to be a contrarian here, but I fail to see how that is an answer. I feel like what you say boils down to "since we are not solving the problem at hand in a good way, we decided to solve it in a worse way".

~50% of your fare goes to the driver.

Yet these ride-hailing companies who receive whatever is remaining after the meager pay of the rider and other costs only recently started to make actual profits. And even though it feels like the prices for customers increased a lot over the years, these companies are not exactly printing money.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

Huston is in fact building transit. They have a large spread out city which makes it a hard problem, but if you carefully choose where you look you will find people living there who don't have a car and just rely on transit and don't notice any loss of lifestyle.

comte70925• 2 years ago

*50% of your fare goes to the driver, as well as paying for fuel, vehicle maintenance and depreciation, insurance, etc.

Without a driver those other costs don’t go away.

rangestransform2• 2 years ago

At least for me the goal is to have me seated, heated/cooled, separated from smelly hobos and showtimes, not breathing in crack smoke, not breathing in brake dust in subway tunnels, not breathing in other peoples diseases. Anyone who tells me my individual wants are disgusting will not get my vote.

For society, building rail infrastructure in the US is so eye watering expensive and time consuming that transporting everyone by electric AV might actually be an easier way to decarbonize transport.

RivieraKid5• 2 years ago

Here are some benefits:

- Lower costs in the long-term. In the future it should be cheaper than owning a car.

- Lot of space that is currently being used for parking will be freed up.

- Convenience. It's a better experience than Uber and it will be a better experience than a manually-driven car. One example is when I want to drive to place A, take a 3 hour hike to place B and then drive home.

fhub• 2 years ago

Living in SF as a family of four with both adults working from home... Owning 1 car and using Waymo/uber/lyft/e-Bike is already significantly cheaper than owning 2 cars.

ipdashc• 2 years ago

Is the idea of living and moving around in a city full of autonomous vehicles actually appealing to anyone? I personally find the whole idea completely disgusting for a number of reasons.

Assuming they're safe and cheaper than current Ubers/taxis? Yeah I'd be fairly okay with it. I don't think it's necessarily ideal, but I definitely can't relate with "completely disgusting", personally.

Public transit is nice and all but walking to and then waiting around at bus stops (especially in bad weather), squeezing into a crowded bus or train, stopping at intermediate stops, making transfers... there's definitely downsides. I don't use Uber/Lyft/Waymo often but I have to admit walking outside and having a climate-controlled, comfortable ride right there, which takes you straight to where you're going, is pretty nice. If it cost less and was more eco-friendly I'd probably use it more; we'll see if they can tackle that.

triceratops2• 2 years ago

moving 1-2 people in private vehicles

Eliminating the driver opens up so many options:

1. Vehicles designed expressly for 1 or 2 people, so they take up less space 2. Dynamic mini bus routes that can run all hours of the day 3. Dynamic car pooling

marcosdumay3• 2 years ago

I mean, what is the exact problem that's being solved here?

There are people that will pay you to give them a ride from point A to point B; Google has developed a cheaper and more scalable way to give people a ride from point A to point B.

Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.

And now Google made them way more productive, what leads to some combination of higher wages, lower prices, and higher profits. The government there has a moderate amount of control over the proportion, it's not clear to me what values it will pick.

If the problem is efficiently moving people around in a city

Nah, it's certainly not. But if you solve that one, Google will be forced to pivot into efficiently moving people into and out of a city, and they can add a lot of value there.

CobrastanJorji• 2 years ago

Ride-hailing workers were already often working for less than minimum wage.

That's the problem. People want taxis. Taxi drivers are both underpaid and also expensive. Removing the driver is a very expensive research process, but once you've done it and rolled out the solution nationally, you're saving a lot of money.

And you're also creating a huge moat against competition. Say Google "finishes" self-driving cars, stops needing to spend nearly as much money on researching/developing the software, and mostly has figured out scaling. It's now far cheaper for Google to drive around than Uber. They can easily charge less than basically everyone who isn't willing to spend billions developing self-driving cars.

caadxv• 2 years ago

The grand vision is to erode the middle class entirely, have undocumented immigrants work in agriculture and automate the rest.

Who can afford a Waymo ride in that scenario is an open question, but perhaps the tech overlords dream of having a tiny "elite" and a robot army that subjugates the farm workers, in which case Waymo will no longer be required.

rangestransform2• 2 years ago

uber drivers deserve to be eroded entirely if their occupation literally costs lives compared to an autonomous vehicle

tuna74• 2 years ago

"I feel like at this point someone needs to take a step back and think about the general vision and overall goals of this whole fully automated ride-hailing service thing."

The goal is to make money for the owners and managers of those companies.

fragmede8• 2 years ago

The grand vision, the problem being solved, is that humans suck at driving, especially when drunk and texting. If no human ever drove drunk again, it would literally save lives. You can be cynical about the profit motive, because there is one, but fundamentally, reducing traffic fatalities, which is over a million a year, was Sebastian Thrun, one of the original researcher's, stated goal. That it changes the rest of society and makes him a ton of money along the way is just a nice side benefit.

bedobi8• 2 years ago

Imagine if instead Miami built MetroRail extensions to the beach and everywhere else it should go, increased TriRail frequency and express services, built a real network of fully segregated greenways etc etc. It would turn transport nightmare into transport heaven. We don't need more cars on the streets of Miami or the I95...

onlyrealcuzzo5• 2 years ago

Well that would cost Miami taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and this costs Miami taxpayers nothing.

It would also take decades.

This will be happening next year.

Build all the transit you want. You need something for the next 30 years while you're doing that.

bedobi8• 2 years ago

no it would save miami and the state and the federal government billions

trirail frequency increases can be done overnight

a greenway network can also be built quickly and cheaply

metrorail extension would cost more but still less than it costs to build and maintain roads

but they are too busy spending billions building even more car infra which will only make traffic and congestion even worse

NickC254• 2 years ago

Well that would cost Miami taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars, and this costs Miami taxpayers nothing. It would also take decades.

Ironically enough, the county approved and passed a tax back in 2000 to expand the MetroMover. Not a single inch of rail has been built since. Wonder where all the tax revenue went?

davidcbc• 2 years ago

But then a rich person might have to share a ride with a poor person and we can't have that

bluGill4• 2 years ago

That doesn't follow. Nobody has said we will force the rich out of their limos.

Some of the rich will chose to use transit though. There is a group of rich people who got that way by being cheap and that group will use transit if possible just because it is cheaper. They don't care about sharing rides with poor people at all.

There is a group of people who appear rich - they live in mansions, drive limos. They are also in dept up to their eyes and one wrong move will put them out on the streets.

whimsicalism4• 2 years ago

point to point transport is nice. trains are ridiculously expensive nowadays. US governments largely can't do large infra projects anymore

bedobi8• 2 years ago

they can, they just malinvest in roads that only increase traffic and make things worse and cost even more

instead of transit which saves money

fixprix10• 2 years ago

Waymo is cool, but I have no idea how it is going to compete with the tsunami coming that is CyberCab. Tesla will be mass producing this smaller, cheaper vehicle like nothing else. Covering the entire country with self driving vehicles.

I don’t know how Waymo can possibly compete with that. Their deployment by city is slow, their hardware is expensive, slown to produce, and not purpose built for self driving.

oblio6• 2 years ago

Waymo is cool, but I have no idea how it is going to compete with the tsunami coming that is CyberCab. Tesla will be mass producing this smaller, cheaper vehicle like nothing else. Covering the entire country with self driving vehicles.

Don't fall for the hype.

fixprix10• 2 years ago

This is fundamental. Waymo doesn’t make cars. They can’t scale like Tesla can. Waymo vehicles are way more expensive and not optimized at all for FSD, it’s all bolt on.

If nothing changes, when CyberCab comes around Waymo will be screwed.

tomp• 2 years ago

The bigger question is, how can Tesla with it's non-working "full self driving" compete with Waymo's working actual self-driving.

asdff4• 2 years ago

I’ve seen teslas full self driving drive me on surface roads, on the highway, and even navigate the lot, find parking, and park the car. In what way is it non working at this point? Waymo doesn’t even do highway.

sixQuarks6• 2 years ago

How about this?

Tesla’s latest FSD beat Waymo by 30 minutes. Same route and same time of day.

https://youtu.be/CfX8Lu9MHa0?si=cOYWNXjPiYP9R6L_

fixprix10• 2 years ago

That’s a non issue. FSD is quickly approaching self driving in all scenarios. Waymo is limited specific cities and surface streets.

In a way Waymo is behind, they can’t scale fast enough. Their vehicles are far from optimal and expensive. When CyberCab comes around it will blow past Waymo with ease.

Charlie_Black• 2 years ago

Do you believe Musk's timeline estimates?

fixprix10• 2 years ago

I don’t even know what the timeline is, but you see it coming fast plain as day. Both CyberCab and FSD are very far along. I’d say 2 years to build that factory and initial production line. With half the part count, they’re going to be pumping these out fast.

threeseed2• 2 years ago

Waymo doesn't make the cars. Geely does.

And they make the same number of cars each year that Tesla does.

Also deployment by city exists because each state will have different regulations.

fixprix10• 2 years ago

The problem is the vehicles are expensive, it doesn’t scale. CyberCab is designed for mass mass production.

If you need a clue, look at CyberTruck already out producing both Rivian and Lightning in less than a year.

sixQuarks6• 2 years ago

You are exactly right. Look at how you’re getting downvoted.

It’s so disappointing that this so-called tech community is so deranged because of their hatred of Musk so much that they’re not willing to look at the facts.

If it was any other company doing what Tesla is doing with their self driving, the comments here would be completely different.

Sohcahtoa82• 2 years ago

they’re not willing to look at the facts.

Quite the opposite.

The facts are that Elon Musk is notorious for overselling and missing deadlines.

RoboTaxi has supposed to have come out how long ago? How much did Cybertruck get delayed? Roadster was supposed to be out 4 years ago, and there's now basically not a peep about it. Elon has taken who knows how much money from people for reservations, and 4 years later they've got nothing to show for it.

I would bet my life savings that we will not see RoboTaxi or CyberCab by the end of 2026.

fixprix10• 2 years ago

Meh they got Bitcoin wrong as well and after 15 years still think it’s a scam.

seanmcdirmid• 2 years ago

I don't see a taxi service from Tesla yet, while I've rode in a waymo in SF, so it is hard for me to see how Tesla is winning in the auto-taxi segment yet. Maybe their bet pays off and they dominate, or maybe waymo keeps expanding while Tesla keeps talking about vaporware, who knows?

fixprix10• 2 years ago

Relative to Tesla Waymo cannot scale. Waymo vehicles are more expensive, plus the bolted on technology is expensive. Waymo can’t scale up production like Tesla. There is literally no way for them to compete. The field is tilted towards Tesla in every direction.

rurp• 2 years ago

Sure, right, it should be operational by 2017 at the latest, according to the Tesla CEO.

fixprix10• 2 years ago

Get ready. You guys didn’t think CyberTruck would happen, but now it’s already out producing Rivian and Lightning.

I can’t tell you when it will happen, just that it will happen and when it does Waymo is screwed.

danielvaughn• 2 years ago

I’m sure they know much more than me and have thought this through, but it feels like Miami is an absolutely awful choice. Traffic is notoriously chaotic there. I’ve driven in LA, Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia, SF, Miami, etc. It’s by far the worst place to drive, moreso even than Manhattan.

1024core2• 2 years ago

But have you driven in Boston?

whimsicalism4• 2 years ago

boston driving is so much better than SF+LA driving because at least what the drivers do there makes sense

mankyd• 2 years ago

Nah. I live in Boston. I strongly prefer public transit, but I'll take driving here over most other cities, any day of the week.

The _road layout_ is awful, but drivers are pretty cooperative on the whole. Certainly more than my years driving in DC, for instance.

Granted, you need to be commmital here: if you put on your turn signal, drivers will generally make space for you to get in - briefly - but you need to be quick to take advantage of the gap. I could see Waymo being too slow to the draw for this, based on what I've seen online.

oblio6• 2 years ago

It's probably based on where public administrations are supportive. Isn't Florida notorious for being car centric?

One more lane, bro, one more self driving car company, bro... :-)

s1artibartfast• 2 years ago

Why do you think that makes a bad market for a driverless car?

If driving is miserable, that means lots of people that dont want to do it. If traffic is chaotic, that means a good place to improve their software.

ecocentrik4• 2 years ago

Miami is a challenging place to drive for most Americans with drivers from dozens of different countries on the roads at any given time, very bad traffic that makes drivers impatient and sometimes aggressive. Driving in Manhattan was way more chaotic than anything I experienced in Miami but that was back in the days of yellow cab dominance and those bastards made full use of their bumpers as offensive implements.

rddbs• 2 years ago

The unique difficulties of driving in Miami might be the reason this is a good choice, not the reason it’s a bad one.

kilroy123• 2 years ago

I think that's the point, isn't it? Get the fleet deployed and learn how to drive in very tough cities (LA, Miami, etc.)

simonw• 2 years ago

"... we’ll work to open our doors to riders in 2026". I guess it takes a while to set up for a new city!

oblio6• 2 years ago

Reminder that cars reshaped urban environments and generally for the worse, and self driving cars have a very solid chance to do the same thing:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

If you have an hour, highly recommended video. A bit too doomerist but the threat is there.

Keep in mind that it's not just about tech (which can be amazing), but also about social aspects, money and politics (which can be atrocious and generally override morality and technology).

SubiculumCode• 2 years ago

Question: Do Waymo rides ever get on a freeway within their operating territory?

ra78• 2 years ago

Not yet. Freeway rides are open to employees only for now, so I'd imagine it's pretty close to being available to the public.

Rebuff5007• 2 years ago

I'm so curious about how the internal dev teams feeling about all this scaling. Four cities across 3 states -- surely there are differences in road signs, lane markings, emergency procedures, etc. Let alone the sheer volume of data of doing hundreds of thousands of miles ever week!

Massive kudos to them if they are able to do all this without things being aflame on the inside...

whamlastxmas2• 2 years ago

My understanding is they have to make extremely detailed maps of where they operate and at great expense, and everything sort of breaks when anything changes. So lots of work indeed!

dyauspitr4• 2 years ago

everything sort of breaks when anything changes

What is “your understanding” based on?

threeseed2• 2 years ago

Waymo doesn't rely on the maps to operate. It just helps with redundancy in case it's unable to see.

And it's just a matter of the cars driving through each of the streets and working with local authorities.

ra78• 2 years ago

Your understanding is wrong. They work perfectly well when road features change and the cars are able to update maps in real time. See https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

Hasu• 2 years ago

Four cities across 3 states

This is actually a scale up to five cities across four states:

...which already provides over 150,000 trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Austin

Which of course only adds to your point!

joshjob42• 2 years ago

Actually they Miami would be #6. They are also starting to operate in Atlanta early next year along with Austin. So 6 cities across 5 states.

Fricken2• 2 years ago

Sundar Pichai recently claimed Waymo plans to be in 10 cities by the end of 2025.

fragmede8• 2 years ago

Only they know for sure where the bottleneck is. How much mapping do they really need before their software can drive it. How cautious are they being? How slowed down by the capital cost of cars and needing to set up maintenance depot's are they? How much is held up by legal approval in each jurisdiction? Knowing Google, the software is rock solid, it's the rest of everything that's taking forever.

flkiwi• 2 years ago

The sheer number of these things that are going to get shot by angry Miami drivers ...

drcwpl• 2 years ago

Come to Europe please

BryanBeshore• 2 years ago

Why do I feel like a regulator would immediately file a suit for $1B+ if Waymo did this?

dartos• 2 years ago

Let’s see how they do with Miami drivers.

nextworddev• 2 years ago

This is terrible. Driving Uber is an important source of income for recent immigrants from LatAM countries.

crowcroft• 2 years ago

We should have cut things off back when we had the chance and never let the stocking frame do this to us.

twobitshifter• 2 years ago

How is Waymo going to continue with the iPACE? Jaguar has ceased production of all cars and they are trying to reinvent themselves as an electric Rolls Royce brand.

aembleton• 2 years ago

They have a contract for 20k cars, so I expect that will continue and will help to fund Jaguar's transition: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/27/waymo-sel...

treetalker• 2 years ago

The real question is how it will handle Miami drivers making right turns from three lanes over, or refrigerators falling off of pickup trucks with no railing on one side of the bed while cruising through Hialeah.

CHB0403085482• 2 years ago

Relevant doomer prophecy ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

indigo0086• 2 years ago

Waymo, south American and Caribbean drivers. South American and Caribbean drivers, Waymo.

If there's any stress test for auotmated cars it's driving in Miami

Next stop: Miami

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