Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYU2hAbx_Fc

by notgloating • 7 months ago

299 107 7 months ago

https://x.com/fulligin/status/2003925653113184498

https://xcancel.com/fulligin/status/2003925653113184498

HolySE• 7 months ago

That art fixture's placement at the Mission Waymo Depot is kinda cool. It's evocative of a future in which humanity lives a life of indolence propped up by automation.

ramraj07• 7 months ago

I had to look up indolence. At least for the time being im not indolent enough not to look up such things I suppose.

polyomino• 7 months ago

Looks like it's GAIA by Marco Cochrane, I remember seeing it out in the desert. It looks like it might not be related to Waymo and just on the adjacent property

schoen• 7 months ago

Thanks, I was assuming it was the same artist as the one at the Embarcadero, and that seems to be right.

flomo• 7 months ago

As an old time burner, sometimes this kind of stuff seems like a flex, like 'you had to be there, sorry pleb' from the tech exec class. Anyway I'm glad they have something there than not.

throwaway2037• 7 months ago

Spot on! I confirm it here: https://www.instagram.com/reel/C1CxhN-J2T_/?hl=en

CobrastanJorji• 7 months ago

I don't think the goal is indolence. The goal is freedom. We want a post-need society propped up by automation. That doesn't mean that we should spend our reclaimed time idling, though, but certainly we could.

atonse2• 7 months ago

This is how I describe financial freedom. It’s not a particular number, it’s the freedom from thinking about money.

And which number gets you there depends on your lifestyle.

And taking a job without any consideration of pay.

rossjudson2• 7 months ago

It makes me think that we need more representations of humans on and in our cities, to remind us about who they are for. We can shift a small amount of architectural scale towards the human.

0x38B• 7 months ago

Reminds me of the half-buried in the sands of time sculptures in Blade Runner 2049; the surrounding self-driving auto depot only adds to the resemblance to some far off future.

clemo_ra• 7 months ago

This is cool and soothing. Merry xmas

lateforwork• 7 months ago

Seeing all these Waymos together like this... is depressing. You get a sense of the scale at which machines are replacing humans. This could be a scary movie made in 1970s about the robotic future... and that future has now arrived. What will the world look like 10, 20 years from now? What would a scary movie made today contain?

bgwalter3• 7 months ago

I would make a movie about UBI recipients wearing shock collars that are supervised by Optimus robots and pluck almonds or apples.

Perhaps we need a euphemism for UBI: Let's call it "level-1 rich".

nutjob2• 7 months ago

Robots and technology have been replacing humans for many decades. It's a positive thing and change is a natural part of life. It's hardly depressing, it's progress.

It's not like humans are somehow put on this earth only to do certain jobs or the same job forever. Contrary to 100+ plus years of predictions, humans will never become obsolete.

svara• 7 months ago

It reminds me a bit of a very small scale version of a robotic harbor, which very much exists in many places across the world already.

I once toured the one in Hamburg, which is highly recommended if you ever get the chance.

Nothing else has quite given me that feeling of being tiny next to this giant city-scale robot since.

DetectDefect• 7 months ago

Curious if you have ever seen footage from a modern industrial farm, which has already replaced humans with domesticated animals and associated machinery, by a wide margin. Unfortunately those videos are a lot less appealing to most people.

bgwalter3• 7 months ago

There are also neighborhood self-help groups who try to "stack" the Waymos into alleys so that they can sleep:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/25/us/santa-monica-waymo-bat...

soulofmischief• 7 months ago

https://archive.is/KvK7D

The_President• 7 months ago

The juxtaposition of the Google Captcha in front of this self driving car article to train it on motorcycles and crosswalks for a full minute.

rootusrootus• 7 months ago

That would drive me insane, they have my sympathy.

Cockbrand• 7 months ago

How it can be legal for Waymo to operate a noisy lot like this right in a residential area is absolutely beyond me. Also, did Waymo really not consider the neighbors before setting up the lot? That sounds hardly credible to me.

Sophira• 7 months ago

If anybody is wondering, the music in this video appears to be "Alonia" by Valante. Very soothing.

fabiensanglard• 7 months ago

Thank you, I was about to start searching for it :) !

tomduncalf• 7 months ago

It has a similar feel to Vletrmx21 by Autechre if you dig the spooky ambient feel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-fhfYhqBr4

ekjhgkejhgk2• 7 months ago

Couldn't hear it over the sound of Jethro Tull playing in my ears.

netsharc• 7 months ago

Makes me think of Miniatur Wunderland's "self-charging" system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC8aOLWR134

It's the world most complex model railway with cars (not just trains) that go around in predetermined routes, and also go to the charging station when their battery is low. And I guess Waymos are a version of that but with human-scale! (Oh they still need humans to plug the charging cables into them).

I wonder if they park themselves or if the maintenance people park them...

Also, the footage feels like Satellite Reign https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFZVXG0g40Q (or the original game, Syndicate Wars)

transitorykris• 7 months ago

Watch the Zoox test vehicles please. They do absolutely terrifying things, _in every encounter_.

IntenseChaos• 7 months ago

Example?

Fricken• 7 months ago

Getting Bladerunner vibes from several things but mostly that giant translucent synthwave Marco Cochrane statue.

RaftPeople• 7 months ago

I got the same vibe.

MarioMan• 7 months ago

Very interesting to see the workers in yellow presumably cleaning and manually plugging in the cars to charge.

dllu4• 7 months ago

Very neat. I recently went to the Waymo depot in Bayshore (Toland St) and snapped a couple of pictures of the new Zeekrs for Wikipedia.

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Waymo_Zeekr_Vehicle_...

dvrp• 7 months ago

How did you get in?

dllu4• 7 months ago

These were parked on Hudson Ave, which is a public street, and not inside the fenced area of the depot. So I just walked up to them.

blackoil2• 7 months ago

How are Google allowed to get Zeekr? Are they pre tariff or they have some loophole being corporate?

fragmede• 7 months ago

some loophole being corporate

Presumably they use the loophole called "paying the tariff".

toast02• 7 months ago

Tariffs are easy, just pay them. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards are harder... But maybe there's a loophole for commercial transport? or maybe they paid to have the testing done?

bri3d• 7 months ago

They do have a loophole; they import them as kits and “build” them at a Magna facility in Arizona (similar to how early Sprinter vans were re-assembled in the US and sold as Freightliners). But, they are FMVSS compliant (besides steering wheel) and have had several NHTSA organized recalls like any other compliant car might.

rwmj• 7 months ago

The line scan photo of the Shinkansen train is amazing!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Line_scan_photo_of_S... (If you're confused by that page, then so was I. It contains the full photo but it's so long that it gets compressed into a line a few pixels high.)

nilsherzig• 7 months ago

I know nothing about photography, but i really enjoyed your work. Especially the line scan cable car and „ 1390 Market Street“. Thanks for sharing.

balaji1• 7 months ago

Great clips and editing. New perspective on the scale of self driving cars deployed currently.

chiefgeek• 7 months ago

Gave me a new appreciation for the scale of the investment /bet that is being made on transportation of the future.

rossjudson2• 7 months ago

This is actually rather beautiful to look at, covering a full day/night cycle. Well done.

blueblisters2• 7 months ago

Surreal. Almost like an optimistic science fiction film.

After all, self driving cars have some of the highest positive to negative externality ratio of any modern technology

digital-cygnet• 7 months ago

Can you explain more why you think this? As I see it, cars in general remain very highly negative-externality, and self-driving doesn't change it much.

Regular ICE cars: - air pollution from tire wear and brake dust - air pollution from exhaust - embodied carbon - noise - endangering other road users - traffic congestion - land use (sprawl) - long term health impacts (encouraging sedentary lifestyle)

Switch to all-electric and you lose a bit of noise and all the tailpipe emissions, but gain whatever emissions generated the power (sometimes solar, great, but sometimes lignite, boo), whatever environmental damage resulted from the battery materials, and probably marginal worsening of safety as the same ranger requires a heavier vehicle

Switch to self-driving and you may increase safety (feels like Waymo basically yes, Tesla probably no based on their track record with stat manipulation), but also vastly increase use, worsening congestion and land-use. The others stay the same.

So I don't understand why you're saying the externality ratio is good. From my perspective self-driving cars don't really move the needle.

blueblisters2• 7 months ago

I guess I place a premium on safety over land use and congestion.

I also suspect any future congestion and land-use problems will get better after an initial dip. Urban living becomes more desirable as city parking lots disappear.

If roads are used exclusively for self driving cars, this would probably improve traffic flow. Robot cars multiply current highway and city street capacity by coordination. They can smoothen traffic flow due to hard braking, and drive much closer to each other.

themafia4• 7 months ago

You could build 1000 units of housing in the lot where these cars are kept. The bigger picture isn't exactly clear.

nomilk• 7 months ago

Love the moonrise! Beautiful shots.

When most road transport is automated it will seem crazy that everyone had to drive for themselves, or sit in the car with a complete stranger, who may prioritise their comfort over the traveller's with regard to audio, navigation noise, air 'fresheners' / diffusers, temperature. Perhaps analogous to having a flatmate; it's mostly done out of necessity rather than choice.

admissionsguy• 7 months ago

Can't they get out and kill the Ubers already instead of sitting in the lot? (half-serious, but I have been wondering what are the reasons they don't just push the price towards zero during low hours?)

blackoil2• 7 months ago

They know how to boil a frog.

erwincoumans• 7 months ago

Nice shots, would fit well in the Baraka (or Samara) movie.

KellyCriterion2• 7 months ago

Very impressive video! What you can clearly see:

If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D

This is just the very very early beginning, like the first seconds after big bang, we haven really started this whole thing: If you put just more ressources here, we will have giant parking houses for just self-driving-cars, like "coming home over night and recharge"

And this technology will come on a mass scale, Im pretty sure - there is nothing that can stop this?

How will this affect transportation jobs?

If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.

Lets come back in 10 years! :-)

Thorrez5• 7 months ago

If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?), and the tech is really new & "not 100% reliable" and you believe that this tech will be rolled out - one day you will start lobbying politicans that manual driving needs to be forbidden, except some rare cases.

Why would insurance companies lobby for that? 90% reduction in accidents means 90% reduction in premiums, which means 90% reduction in profits.

Do insurance companies have a history of lobbying for safety regulations?

ezfe2• 7 months ago

Reduction in premiums doesn’t mean reduction in profit.

KellyCriterion2• 7 months ago

Oh sure, they have!

e.g.: https://www.insurance.ca.gov/01-consumers/200-wrr/Safer-from...

And sure, insurances are fine with making profits, but if they can get less catastrophes, they are fine with that as it reduces overall risk etc.

Feel free to check the corp publishing section on https://www.munichre.com/en/insights.html

Philip-J-Fry• 7 months ago

Insurance is cheaper on safer vehicles.

A 90% reduction in accidents is a 90% reduction in _paying out_. That reduces operating costs.

socalgal2• 7 months ago

You have a point. At the same time insurance companies are getting out of insurance because they can't afford it. Apparently (I didn't verify this), the cost to repair cars has gone up so much that the economics don't work out. So they're leaving the market. Maybe less crashes would bring them back?

Pick a source: https://www.google.com/search?q=car+insurance+companies+leav...

esafak• 7 months ago

They can charge companies more, as they drive more miles, for profit.

surajrmal2• 7 months ago

Unless it comes down massively in price, it's not going to displace manual driving for anything other than Uber/taxi. It's far cheaper to drive your own car in most of the us. If parking lots disappear and the parking that remains becomes similar in price to that of major cities and insurance rates skyrocket, then maybe that will change, but only by increasing the overall cost of transportation.

BurningFrog3• 7 months ago

Self driving taxis should absolutely be cheaper to use than current regular cars.

Because they don't need a steering wheel, backseat, and many other things. They can also run close to 24/7.

How "massive" the price drop becomes I don't date to guess though.

bgwalter3• 7 months ago

I'm sure that an insurance company would reject larger premiums and make itself obsolete, assuming that claims you make are true.

Hint: Normies outside the tech world are not hell bent on making themselves unemployed. That phenomenon only exists among software engineers.

CPLX• 7 months ago

If you are today a big insurance like Munich Re, and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents

Insurance companies don't really care that much if accidents are more or less likely, what they care about is that they can be underwritten effectively.

The most interesting shift here as it pertains to insurance is the fact that losses might be correlated in brand new ways. Today there's no simple way for 100,000 cars to all crash a few minutes apart, worldwide, for the same reason. In the future that may in fact be plausible.

themafia4• 7 months ago

If you scale this over the next years, "manual driving is over" :-D

I ride a motorcycle. Unless you make this illegal, then no, "manual driving" is not over anytime soon. Some people actually _like_ driving, although, none of them appear to frequent hacker news.

there is nothing that can stop this?

We learned the lesson of over automation in aviation very quickly. The best solution is very often, turn off autopilot and autothrottles, then hand fly the plane. You don't want pilots with their heads down in a computer making changes when they can, and should, just fly the plane. It also tends to reduce over all competence and harms safety particularly during equipment failures.

and you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents

The utility of these statistics are harmed by the fact that "self-driving" does not occur in all the circumstances that "manual driving" does today. They're barely past the foundation stage, in a limited operational scope (cabs), and in a limited operational area (where it never snows).

Lets come back in 10 years! :-)

I think this technology will eventually be prevalent. I think hacker news constantly gets the time lines wrong. You're going to need 25, minimum, and possibly more like 50.

badestrand• 7 months ago

Good points.

About adoption I want to add that at some point a whole generation will turn 16/18 (legal driving age) and just not do a driver's license anymore because they will buy an autonomous car anyway. And IMO from that point on adoption will be very fast.

atonse2• 7 months ago

As someone who loves driving, I still use full self driving (FSD) on the Tesla all the time since I got a new model Y Juniper.

And occasionally I switch to manual just because I enjoy it.

So when you talk about limited operational scope, I disagree. It’s being used by many as daily drivers (pun intended), like commutes and soccer practice, and road trips, and it’s here (from Tesla FSD v13 and definitely v14). Not 10 years away.

traceroute66• 7 months ago

You don't want pilots with their heads down in a computer making changes when they can, and should, just fly the plane.

There is a famous video on youtube, 'Children of the Magenta Line', an extract from an American Airlines course decades ago.

Well worth the watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs

mlrtime• 7 months ago

I want both tbh, I want the people who have no concern for learning how to drive safely that just want to commute to use these, as I believe they will be statistically safer over large numbers.

On the other hand we'll never see a full self driving 911. And I plan to drive one until I can no longer safely drive myself. It's the best therapy I've paid for.

sky2224• 7 months ago

you see already today that self-driving produces already much less accidents (90% or so I read days ago?)

This is like saying skydiving is safer than driving because you're looking exclusively at accidents and ignoring the total number of events. There are way more cars than there are skydivers. Now in the realm of autonomous vehicles: there are way more manually driven vehicles than there are autonomous ones, so of course there's going to be significantly more accidents from manually driven vehicles.

cjsplat• 7 months ago

The safety stats are per road mile, so it is normalized.

https://waymo.com/safety/impact/

BurningFrog3• 7 months ago

The accident rate isn't even the biggest advantage over human drivers.

The big game changer is that the computer doesn't need sleep!!

Human truck drivers in the US are only legally allowed to drive 10-12 hours per day. Which usually means the truck is parked half the time. With a computer driving, trucks can run non stop 24/7.

This is revolutionary change! Twice the delivery speed at half the cost. Should improve a lot of things across the economy. Unless some luddites find the power to stop it.

How will this affect transportation jobs?

The human long distance truck driver will fade away as a career. It will probably take a decade or two, so people will have time to adjust.

The transportation industry should end up substantially larger, which normally creates a bunch of new jobs/professions, but I won't pretend to know how that will play out.

spwa4• 7 months ago

What amazes me about Waymo is how expensive the rides are. They're at least 20% more expensive than Uber (the much more expensive Uber of today, not the Uber of 2-4 years ago), sometimes 100-150% more expensive.

If they can't be cheaper, then what's the point?

Daneel_• 7 months ago

No need to make small-talk with someone is a positive for many people. That might make it worth it?

ufmace• 7 months ago

Having ridden a few of them in the area, I think they're worth it.

Waymos are 100% reliable. If you book it and it says it's coming at X time, it will definitely actually show up at X time. No more of, driver cancelled at the last minute because they don't actually want to drive to destination Y but Uber etc gave it to them anyways and they get dinged if they just cancel instead of claiming not to be able to find the rider etc. Or driver got lost or stopped for food or gas or something so is late.

It also gets to the destination exactly when it says it will. No weird routes because of the driver's whim or driving too fast or too slow. And no chance of bad music, loud conversation in some foreign language, annoying commentary, etc.

And I want them to be profitable to run too, so they have plenty of incentive to expand the program.

themafia4• 7 months ago

Waymos are 100% reliable.

There is nothing in this world that is 100% reliable. The vehicles are new. Wait until they start clocking more miles.

it will definitely actually show up at X time.

In what city and at what time of day? Waymo is just one vehicle in a sea of them. If traffic starts choking the city I don't see how they're not as vulnerable as every other vehicle.

Ylpertnodi• 7 months ago

And no chance of....loud conversation in some foreign language,

Ah!

gniv• 7 months ago

The novelty premium?

ThrowawayTestr• 7 months ago

There are people that will wait for a self-checkout kiosk to be available instead of going to a cashier. There are definitely people that will pay for a solo car ride.

rangestransform• 7 months ago

the jaguar ipace base vehicle is uber black eligible in some markets, compared to the shitty check engine light hoopties you could risk with uberx

chakintosh• 7 months ago

Waymo's been doing for the past 5 years what Elon's promised to deliver 10 years ago (and is still not delivering)

forinti• 7 months ago

Probably because their CEOs are focusing on their job and not fooling around.

HarHarVeryFunny• 7 months ago

Plus:

Waymos are safer - they have Lidar and Radar in addition to vision

Waymos have human fallback to remote operators

Google takes responsibility for Waymos, vs Teslas being privately owned

Google took a more regulator savvy incremental approach

ekjhgkejhgk2• 7 months ago

Tesla is so dead LOL

Cadwhisker• 7 months ago

I had to replay that to appreciate how the transitions from night to day were done so very, very well. The dynamic range of the shots always seemed spot on.

That isn't easy to get right.

vicpara• 7 months ago

Pretty cool. How do they get charged?

themafia4• 7 months ago

The same way they get cleaned. You can see the workers in high-vis are coming out to service them.

Who Watches the Waymos? I do [video]

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