Err... that sounds like gambling sir

So you think it's going to raise further?

More than that, I think the ride-hailing business is just the fist volley in the self driving vehicle space. It’s a short jump from there to self driving trucks, self driving package delivery, self driving private vehicles, and on and on.

Think of Waymo Driver as the equivalent of Android for vehicles. It's an operating system and a suite of cloud services for both autonomy and ride hailing.

And costs should be lower in the long run if you don't have to share the ride fee with a driver (not case yet because seems like they still have alot of staff to manage the cars)

Statistically Waymos are more expensive than Uber rides, but practically as an individual they are often cheaper than Uber, its very easy for the stated price to be lower

So its not even about willingness to pay more

Gig drivers are cooked

Who are these people?

There is no downside to having someone drive you Uber has homogenised the experience.

Waymo doesn’t own manufacturing of vehicles.

They have already spent an enormous amount of money. It’s hard to see how they could make it back quickly, if ever. I’d like to be wrong, but I expect they will continue to be a money losing experiment for a long time yet.

Faith in the fact that Elon has never lost investors money.

Robotics I think.

The cost of the computers, LIDAR, special maintenance, vandalism, staffing humans for remote issue handling etc will probably costs the same as a year's income for an Uber driver. But after that it's mostly profit and they can run cars longer.

The most important thing for Waymo is scaling up production of LIDAR and maintaining them efficiently. They will have a massive fleet running very sophisticated radar+computers. That's a huge logistical investment when it's a million cars. Those sensors will break or be damaged.

Autonomous cars won't sue you, never sleep, don't go on strike, don't sleep 8 hours a day, keep driving when the car needs obvious repairs.

I think the plan is that other entities will own and maintain the cars. That's why they're working with partners like Uber and Avis.

But the market is so, so much bigger. And the margins will likely stay high for a long time while there are few competitors, and their main competition is human drivers.

Not having to pay drivers is an enormous source of profit.

Let's settle on calling the founder of Hyperloop a "showman".

That is a real, important accomplishment, but he's also a showman.

Don’t forget Zip2, PayPal, Neuralink, OpenAI, and The Boring Company.

There are large swaths of people that accept headlines as fact and/or cannot or will not grapple with nuance and complexity (“I think Elon’s a jerk and he is a formidable engineer.”) Perhaps it’s a sign of these polarized times, or, as I believe, people have always been like this. We just have more time and resources to dedicate to outrage and flamewarring than we did in the past.

Wild that people will call a guy who bought SpaceX the founder of SpaceX.

"Deserve" is a human construction.

I think its the later. And also the fact that they are not the firstmover in AI search. More people know about chatgpt than they know about gemini

The supervisors are not in the driver's seat.

My Model Y in Vancouver drives me to and from work daily. I cannot get a Waymo here -- and I certainly cannot purchase one privately. Which is more effective where I live?

Market says “as effective” doesn’t matter. Needs to be “good enough”.

I mean FSD is pretty good and useful. But yes, not unsupervised.

I have 2 AI4 Teslas with FSD, and I don't find V13.2.9 lacking at all in the Vancouver area. V14 will be a 10x increase in parameters, too. Why do you feel it's a "joke"?

I have friends on the Autopilot team (and a son). Their goal is by end of year. I've been on HN for 15+ years, and seemingly the only downvotes I get are when I post my thoughts and opinions on Tesla.

The hard part of automated driving is dealing with all the ground clutter that planes serenely fly over. If pedestrians could charge out in front of a 777 going 650 mph at 34,000 feet... well... we'd be living in pretty different world! And in that world, flying would be much more difficult. Not just for computers but for humans too.

Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.

In the abstract yes but in practice the economic (ratio of cost of pilot to pax miles) and safety context of aviation mean fully autonomous flying has to be extremely robust before it has actual utility in industry.

On the happy path, yes. Though I don’t think takeoff is automated yet.

Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.

When everything is working correctly, no other pilots have emergencies, and no temporary restrictions are in place, and there are no clouds in the sky. Then yes, it /could/ be easier, but almost always it never actually is.

There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing.

Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo

It depends a bit on your safety standards. There are already autonomous flying things delivering blood and blowing up oil depots where it doesn't matter so much if stuff goes wrong, but to be an airline pilot you have to know how to deal with a huge range of emergencies and systems packing up.

With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.

I also feel like the demand is way, way lower. A pilot can't be that large a % of the cost of a flight. Maybe if we lived in the jetsons era.

0d (parked) - null program easy

1d (train) - easy. just one lever

2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?

2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.

3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers

Don’t have a ref but heard that it’s been safe for quite a while but they keep the pilots around due to consumer fear rather than actual improved performance. Curious if anyone can confirm.

Navigation might be easier. The battery and safety tech isn't there yet to make it practical.

In a pinch, a car can just put on its hazards and pull over

Sure but it's not autonomous in the sense of Waymo (ie, driverless)

Yes but it should have been obvious that in the context of Waymo + SFO, the implication was autonomous flying of commercial airlines.

Yes, but autopilot usually just keeps the plane flying in a straight line at some specified altitude, which have been around since 1912. It isn't full self-flying (although we definitely have drones that can fly themselves already, so that tech already exists).

Can you imagine how much traffic there would be if NYC didn't have the MTA? The principle of induced demand tells us that as long as there are roads they will have roughly constant traffic because people are willing to spend some roughly constant amount of time getting to and from destinations by road each day. More roads speeds up everyone's commute which brings in more drivers, which brings traffic right back to the baseline terribleness.

The question is how shitty it would be if they also had everyone on them who's currently on public transit.

So basically, it is a traffic-free panacea for everyone who chooses to use it. It's not a goal of trains to eliminate traffic for everyone who insists on driving.

https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/indu...

This is what bikes and busses are for, or just walking because the metro system is comprehensive enough you are at most four blocks away from a station.

They help to remove some congestion in the Netherlands. That’s my everyday experience. Traffic would be way worse otherwise

> have yet to bring on a traffic free utopia

This is a silly expectation to have. As long as there are roads for cars people will put cars on them.

Trains solve traffic for the people who get on them, not for drivers. The more people taking the train, the fewer people impacted by the traffic.

Human beings naturally take advantage of new conveniences.

If public transportation just encourages people to move to the suburbs and commute in every day you've actually just displaced the problem.

Well That’s certainly not been my experience when visiting Europe. In fact, it many cases it’s been the opposite - having a car would have been restrictive in any major city and a source of friction.

Try a bicycle or a stroll instead of embracing the WALL-E.

If you feel that way about transit you may not have tried a good transit option like Hong Kong MTR with 90 second headways and travel from and to substantially everywhere you want to be.

I think the answer to this is microbility bike/scooter sharing (ex: lime)

Trains to cover the longer distance and micro mobility options to get to exactly where you need to go

Fairly unreliably? Unlike cars, trains do not typically suffer from traffic jams.

The last mile problem is only a problem because of poor layout. Build homes and work near transit nodes (instead of in the middle of nowhere) and there isn't a problem in the first place.

> Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.

How would that make those problems go away? It could probably slightly alleviate them in marginal cases, but any given road has a finite throughput limitation, and once it is reached, it wouldn't matter even if every robo-driver were perfectly synchronized.

> Trains still don't solve last mile transport for most people

This has not been my experience since moving to Manhattan last January. Subways, alone, close the gap between regional rail and most destinations astoundingly well. I haven't yet needed to use a bus (but they seem abundant, too), and I haven't even thought of taking a taxi yet.

Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.

The last mile is a solved problem. Most people can walk (and many of those who can't would need human assistance anyway). And then there are bikes, electric scooters, and other light vehicles that use space much more efficiently than a car.

Self-driving cars may help with the actual weakness of transit, which is the long tail of trips. Trips on routes with too few passengers to justify good transit service, and with the trips too long for the last-mile solutions.

Ideally: there's a train close enough to walk, or a bus or tram that's nearby that runs frequently, is clean, and doesn't get stuck in traffic because there's not much car traffic.

Slightly more realistic: enough people can and do cycle or walk to the train that pressure is relieved on the roads for those who cannot cycle or walk.

Does it matter where it's developed though? Once it's good enough to expand into all major US cities they could look into deploying in Europe too.

Im happy to let Americans be the beta testers

I saw one in New York the other day!

I'm wondering how self-driving cars will solve the priority problem of narrow streets of UK towns where drivers need to let each other pass all the time.

Yeah I'll believe this when I see it. Most UK roads are significantly harder to drive on than anything in the US. That's why they always test these things in Milton Keynes.

Also a lot of UK driving requires communication with other drivers (letting people out, etc.) in a way that US roads don't. I'm not sure how driverless cars can handle that.

I really wish we could get them, because they're great. But I'd say we're talking 10 years behind the US simply because of the extra engineering challenge.

Rotterdam — a city with a population of around 650,000 — has both a metro and a tram system. Extraordinary density is not a prerequisite.

And in any case, there's no reason that public transit needs to be self-funded. We don't expect the same of most of our other public services.

…What? What sort of terminally online strawman would be spending his free time “virtue-signaling with Europe” to some anonymous bozos on a tech forum? What a dull and intellectually uncurious reply.

I think self-driving cars may eventually become common in areas where cars are currently common. I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates, because it is simply a superior user experience for the majority of people when the government cares to invest in it. (Not to mention far cheaper and more egalitarian.)

I am conveying my lived experience in most European cities I've been to.

Good. Cars ruin walkable cities, and the last-mile problem can be solved in other ways.

And it's not just the EU. I'm sure that e.g. China and Japan will continue to invest in their excellent public transit infrastructure even when there are more self-driving cars on the road.

From the link:

These backup warning systems operate at approximately 1,000 Hz, producing sound levels between 97 and 112 decibels.

Santa Monica’s municipal code adds another layer of complexity, prescribing exterior noise limits of approximately 50 decibels during the day and 40 decibels at night.

The continuous operation—with vehicles reversing dozens of times hourly, including during late-night hours—continues to challenge community peace.

So, constant car screaming BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP I'M BACKING UP HERE right outside your residential window. Kinda sucks. A whole lot.

Yes, but SFO (and the city of SF) has a long history of being hostile towards Waymo: https://missionlocal.org/2023/11/waymo-rebuffed-by-sfo-sf-gu...

What likely happened now is that SFO got a kick up their backside from the Mayor after the press started asking why it was still dragging its feet, while SJC approved Waymo swiftly.

this can be done today with humans. this is just dumb

I'm talking about Uber/Lyft drivers being required by many airports to pick up away from the normal pick-up area, usually down the road a bit or in a parking garage.

No, they need to add a pop up with even more text users will not read.

Sure - a good freeway is actually a lot more predictable in most circumstances than city driving, so as a problem to solve it's likely a little bit less complicated. What I wonder about is what it feels like as a passenger. I wonder if it would be more or less frightening than being a passenger when my 17 year old is driving.

There was a good overview on here a while ago about the challenges[1]. You need to plan longer in the future and your sensors need to reach further. It's also a much bigger challenge to collect sensor data as fewer diversions happen per mile (but those that do have higher stakes).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38973404

Roads that get used more collect more debris. They also break and require maintenance more often. That maintenance is exceptionally disruptive to the normal operation of the road.

Other drivers aren't your only challenge out there.

>rectal car center

Known nickname or typo?

It - along with cell phone waiting lots - are ways for people to drop others off and avoid the traffic around the terminals themselves.

Which can be bad - I often find it easier to just pay for a few minutes parking on dropoff/pickup.

> rectal car center

That's way mo' information than needed thanks.

But seriously. I wonder why they have a designated pickup point if it would make sense to spread the cars out to alleviate traffic bottlenecks.

There's the big sign there telling you to go to arrivals for drop-off. This is probably a stupid question but can Waymo cars interpret those temporary display signs and follow them? Would it?

Thats AGI

LAX's many parking lots with left lane entrances definitely threw me for a loop the first couple of times.

Overall though, I think I agree with you.

I don't touch JFK with 10mi pole. I've always found EWR to be much more consistent and easier to get to

Is the mark of intelligence being able to navigate to BOS, or refusing to drive through the big dig in the first place?

I'll take JFK over LAX. The construction going on right now at JFK sucks, but LAX is comically bad. Just last week I was on a rental car shuttle at LAX and watched 3 separate groups of people at different terminals miss their flights because traffic just wasn't moving.

Kinda yeah? They certainly don't navigate into long-term multi-storey parking structures.

That's a crazy statistic and an interesting one for him to actually say out loud. Was that in the context of Uber partnering with Waymo in Austin? And thanks for the insight on the manufacturing side. Sounds like it might actually be to their advantage to use third parties because you can spread the demand around and since auto margins are not high the added cost for that benefit is minimal.

Thanks for sharing, oliver. For anything local I've almost entirely switched and I guess I haven't been doing much price comparison between the two. One thing I have noticed here in LA, albeit only a couple of times, is that during rush hour the waiting time is significantly longer for Waymo. I've taken some Ubers because the wait for a Waymo has been way too long.

Zoox just started allowing rides in Vegas 6 days ago.

I've seen them driving around SF as well, but they're not yet available here.

Only for iPhone at the moment

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tesla-robotaxi/id6744257048

The Tesla service is colloquially called "Robotaxi".

Yeah, and just to add even though it's implied in your comment, there's plenty of reason to keep prices where they are independent of a desire to increase revenue. Customers will not wait forever for the car and so if the demand is high you have to keep the price high to discourage people from using it so wait times remain in check. Tricky tightrope they're going to be walking while they optimize the fleet size for local adoption and geographic expansion.

Lots of people, myself included, pay a premium to not have a human at the steering wheel; it's nice to have the car to yourself.

Generally between 11a and 7p. Going to lunch/dinner.

I don’t really think they have to compete much.

Direct competitors are uber and Lyft which they can undercut since they don’t pay drivers.

The people who want to take buses and trains will continue to do so although Waymo might sway some with their ease and if pricing is reasonable.

Bikes and e-scooters only get you so far. Last time I was in SF I didn’t see too many bikes but I saw a ton of e-scooters. Are you really taking an e-scooter further than a few blocks? And when it rains?

Self owned cars make sense for longer trips out of the city but parking is a pain and driving is stressful so this is an easy win for Waymo.

It’s cheaper now so they can take market share. And their cost will certainly be lower than Ubers so they can win the pricing battle. But long term monopoly gonna monopoly. Perfect pricing is a given with the wealth in SF and how many rides will be on a business CC.

Certainly they aim to make it affordable now in order to undercut Lyft and uber. Long term they will own the market and jack up prices as monopolies do.

Public transit connections to SFO are shit-tier. Rideshare prices have little to do with it.

Preach.

Yup, but it is kinda culturally expected to tip. You're right, you dont need to, but then again we do a lot of things just because it is .. polite.

Waymo food delivery will be incredible. You won't even get your food if you don't tip your ubereats.

Self-serve ordering terminals already often ask for tips. Presumably to be legal they're being paid to the kitchen staff, but I think sticking to "tips are for workers who have to pretend to like me" is a pretty firm boundary to stick to.

(Also, arbitrarily reclassifying things as tips is hard, because legally 100% of tip revenue has to go to workers, not management, and certainly not the company's investors or coffers).

Fair enough, I suppose they have a monopoly. Good thing that isn't illegal if they're not anti-competitive about it.

They aren't the only autonomous vehicle for hire service. Zoox is operating in Vegas.

Even if they were the only one, it would be odd to classify autonomous rideshare as a distinct market given they compete directly with other vehicle for hire services where they have nothing close to monopoly-like power.