I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.

They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.

Why do you find it so cool? Genuinely asking. I find this technology repulsive.

I would never trust the maker of these crappy software products with my life.

Why would you?

Implement a per-mile tax for vehicles with 0 passengers.

I used them all the time when I lived in LA and they worked great. I didn't have a single bad experience. In general they were much more pleasant than having a human Uber, but that's just my opinion.

Super weird! I've been using Waymo's regularly for 3 years now, couple of times a week and this has never happened.

I went to Austin a few months ago and half the interchanges weren't on Google Maps because they were built so recently. In the week I was there I think they finished building a new one near my hotel.

I wonder how reliant self-driving cars are on unchanging road infrastructure.

There's something about the Uber-hailed Waymos that makes them so much worse than regular Waymos IMO.

Did you get a refund and/or bonus credits for future rides?

Was there a traffic jam or closed road or something?

Did it think it needed to take a very out of the way route?

Really? Bad luck, I have literally never had that happen! What time was this? Because Austin is closing down 35 in the evening and it is just doing crazy things to traffic. Maybe it was that?

The perfect driving equivalent of AI slop

They've been testing fairly regularly in the Cambridge/Somerville area. I do wonder how they'll manage in the snow/winter weather

I think the bigger lesson from what you say isn't so much about Waymo or this topic generally but to always remember that forums like HN are not reliable reporters of reality: they can only give you an indication of who was moved to say something and an indication of what they want you to believe... true or not.

I'm sure you were already aware of that, but its easy to forget that and think you're dealing with something more real.

Last week there were two separate posts, one said "AI is not a tool" and the other one said "AI is a tool." Even though that logically covers all possibilities, somehow the vast majority of comments in both were negative or contradicting. My takeaway is that comments aren't a very representative sampling of how people actually feel.

It's not just you. My family gets around on foot, bike and transit, but occasionally we find the most practical way to get somewhere we want to go is by car. Having more options to get a ride is very welcome.

From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.

There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.

anecdotal but waymo was flawless. zenlike music. safe driving. Vs recent uber getting a lot of invasive personal questions from drivers, weird smells, only reason chose is it was half of waymos cost. Even at double the cost might just chose waymo next time.

Waymo is an unbelievably fantastic product IMO.

People on forums will complain about everything!

I learn this each time Apple releases a product. New iPhones could be $500, 10x the speed, half the weight and full week battery life and a fringe loud group will post and upvote some dumb complaint.

I've been using it for a long while in SF. I love it. Never had a problem.

Was excited to take a Waymo, loved the entire experience, would extra love it when they reenable highway usage in LA.

I use Waymo as my primary transport whenever I'm in SF and have yet to have a single bad experience.

Same here. Waymos have been cheaper and safer than Ubers and Lyfts for me here in SF.

i had a funny first experience where the lidar got super lost on a bush, but it did a uie around the block and pulled in from the other side, and from there the experimence was that it was the best driver ive ever seen

Same, used them exclusively last time I was in SF and it was absolutely perfect.

I used it in Atlanta, it was great. HN people hate everything.

Remember that happy people don't come whine on the internet.

And HN has become a very negative hole by itself, rewarding complainers and pushing people who don't complain away (positive posts or ones that push back on needless negativity get downvoted a lot these days).

Describing Montreal as "sheer chaos" only makes sense in the north American context. Karachi and other such cities are actually chaos.

I was thinking this too - my guess is the cars simply wouldn't offer rides on days with really poor conditions.

Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.

They have a limited presence in New Orleans, mostly rolling around the French Quarter and Uptown. The roads look bombed out in parts of Uptown, maybe not the absolute worst anywhere but it's close.

>> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.

Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.

Pothole observed. Diverting around pothole -

pothole observed. Diverting a-

pothole observed. d-

pothole.

po-

> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.

The ultimate test would be Cairo or Mumbai or Lagos :-)

Toronto gets snow! Do any other cities they operate in get snow?

So much of winter driving is knowing what is blocked by ice and snow, what snow is probably safe to pass, and navigating around piles of ice and snow that become temporary obstacles.

Granted Toronto gets much less accumulation than a city like Montréal.

Denver just launched ahead of a supposed "Super El Nino" winter. We'll see what happens.

They've been mapping, or whatever they do, Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and it was pretty funny watching the cars navigate around massive snow piles last winter. Curious to see how the rollout goes here. <Insert popcorn emoji.>

on the other hand, montreal doesn't allow right on red, and instead has an extremely strongly planned traffic grid including priority right turns. Not much ambiguity in the prescribed traffic patterns.

There is no chaos there, just traffic jams.

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London too, I believe.

I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)

They handle school buses which have a similar mechanism, so I would hope it's already a solved problem.

Waymo can come up with some extraordinarily high prices at times. Sometimes it may cost $4-$5 to get me to church, very early in the morning (a 3-mile, 10 minute ride.) Sometimes, it can cost $25+ to get me home from church at peak times, like Saturday evenings.

On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening.

Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand.

I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.

Are they actually allowed to dynamically price the rides based on information about you in particular? I understand a supply and demand based dynamic pricing model.

Personalized dynamic pricing seems like something that should absolutely be illegal across the board.

Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.

> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.

Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.

And that's how it should be.

(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)

Years ago Waymo bet on a completely different self-driving approach compared to Tesla: putting a big expensive LIDAR on each car so that their self-driving model has tons of reliable 3d distance data, instead of only using comparatively cheap cameras and having the model infer everything from that. Now that testing results are in, AFAIK the conclusion is that the Waymo approach actually works (driving safer than actual human drivers) and Tesla's doesn't.

The average human driver is safe enough that a single anecdotal experience isn't a good measure of safety. Waymo has, from the start, had a very serious focus on making the system safe and reliable in a fully autonomous context, in comparison to a far more 'YOLO' approach from their competitors. Tesla, meanwhile, has been consistently trying to jazz up a driver assist approach into a fully autonomous system, and in general it just hasn't demonstrated that it's actually reliable enough there (despite many claims for years that the reason they require hands on the wheel is just for regulatory reasons, it's actually been quite important for safety. It's quite easy to lie with statistics here and Tesla is quite prone to it).

Waymo does extensive mapping/scanning of the service areas.

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> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.

I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.

> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.

> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.

> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.

[0]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/waymo-drives-through-denver-farm...

>Luckily, no one was hurt.

It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.

Earlier this year a 92-year-old woman drove into our local Asian supermarket, killed three people and injured at least six. No criminal charges were filed. At least they pulled her driver license.

https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/westwood-99-ran...

I don't say this to suggest excusing autonomous car companies from bearing liability, but just for context.

Perhaps we should not make the regulations too punitive on the AV companies as that would reduce the speed of replacing bad human drivers who currently cause 40,000 deaths a year in the US.

> I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.

I would be shocked if that was the case.

A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].

When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.

[1]:https://abc7news.com/post/80-year-old-san-francisco-driver-k...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLLkGaKX7NI

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8gMd9XZJyg

I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.

A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.

How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?

There are drive-by-wire cars on the road. ABS systems can disable breaks.

If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?

> Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime.

This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.

Did you want the cops to arrest the car?

Google employs thousands of people in Canada...

Oh there's going to be opinions, for sure. This is the high cost, zero returns portion though. They aren't trying to go live until 2028. In a way, it becomes a bargaining chip if they've spent all this money on mapping/testing Toronto and want to start operating in earnest. Though, ideally by 2028 we don't have to behave as low and as transactionally as the current American regime.

In theory, Waymo should have a very up to date map of lanes and should be able to very precisely triangulate where it is, so with snow covered road markings it may still do better than humans.

Canada has two official languages: Canadian English and Canadian French. This satisfies both the English-speaking population and the French-speaking population. As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.

They'll have to translate their whole site. That's usually how Canadian releases are used; it forces companies to make their operations multilingual.

A legally required one, natch.

Proactive public sentiment management to lessen the chance of reactive policies.

In Canada, it's currently vogue to hate on all things American. (I'm making this observation as a Canadian resident)

Because people will see the training vehicles?

Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".

Bike lines don't send Canadian money to a startup in the USA so I guess bike lines don't have financial means to lobby the government.

I'd 100% rather bike around a Waymo than a human driver.

It'd be good to have more bike lanes, and waymo-type transport being used as a part of a public transport ecosystem rather than just pure taxi.

I'd rather not have any roads people can walk.

both?

both!

Please, not this shit again.

Ford is already removing bike lanes.

Tax dollars to put in bike lanes, and then tax dollars to remove them.

I'm sure disabled or elderly people would agree with you.

You can see their planned locations on the map here https://waymo.com/

Includes St Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Minneapolis etc.

I’ve seen Waymo cars driving around Minneapolis lately.

I'd rather we left that car dependency enabler to the yanks thank you very much

As a driver in places where it snows... I'm curious about how it will handle:

1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.

2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.

3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)

4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")

5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).

---

Tangent for the "how do you handle lanes when you can't see any" ... old school approach: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/833362

> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.

https://ahmct.ucdavis.edu/advanced-snow-plow

When all an account posts is claims of first-hand experience with various unrelated technologies, the strategy becomes a bit too obvious: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hncbw02z5a&next=5009...

True. But don't most people drive in the tracks of the car ahead? I know when it snows people sometimes make a three-lane highway into a two-way "rut railway" road, and make do.

They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.

They linked to https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... discussing the snow mitigations all the way from software down to the built-in heaters on the sensors.

I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?

I have zero idea about lidar operational capabilities, but can you heat them to stop snow and ice from piling up?

that's in the FAQ. They say they have sensor cleaning tech. But they aren't launching until 2028 so 2 winters of testing should tell.

That's one of the reasons lidar will prove to be a dead end for this application. It's a temporary enabling technology on the path to the simpler multiple camera based solution.

Despite campaign promises, Canada is not part of the US

I fail to see any unique argument in this. That is to say you can replace Ontario with San Jose and it'll all work.

> Digital sovereignty and privacy is at stake.

This is the most strongest argument, and luckily that's the first one. Many ways to solve this so not really a big problem.

> Ontarians’ jobs risk being outsourced

What jobs are being displaced by driverless cars? The best argument here is uber drivers are going to be affected. Who would you rather drive you at 3am if you're a drunk woman? An uber driver or Waymo?

> Public transit could lose riders

What is the goal here? The goal is to move people efficiently and decrease the reliance on human driving, which can cause deaths. Public transportation is vital but again, there are times when subway / buses wont work.

Also, if public transit is a major concern, shouldnt we be asking Uber (see point #2) to go away?

The last two points are super generic, it isnt even worth discussion.

Not convinced with the approach here.

>people with diseases

I'll let you rewrite this, since as written it implies having a disease makes you in some way bad.

Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver behind the wheel) in NYC.

[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...

A lot of women want it along with the ability to order Uber/Lyft from women drivers only.

It’s doing Manhattan, it’ll be fine.

Do you know any women who have had drivers act inappropriately towards them? Or drivers who pretend the meter is broken and try to charge more?

There are lots of reasons somebody might prefer a driverless car and lots of reasons somebody might prefer a human driver. Why not have a choice?

What does a 1-driver taxi compared to a 2-drivers taxi offer apart from fewer taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.

Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?

The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.

30-35% of the cost of running a city bus is the driver.

Imagine what cities could do with 50% higher bus frequency or more bus routes.

- frees up people to do more important things than drive you around.

- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.

- obeys traffic rules

Safety. Waymos are safer for passengers and pedestrians than human-driven cars.

A more uniform experience across taxi rides.

I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.

But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.

Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.

It obeys the rules of the road and kills many fewer people - 0 killed in 250M miles. Driving a machine is something people are not good enough at frankly.

> What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs?

One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.

Of the robotaxis in Austin, I've only used Waymo, but have used it fairly extensively. So far I have noticed:

- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,

- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,

- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),

- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,

- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,

- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.

There are three major disadvantages right now:

- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,

- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,

- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.

IMO it's a safer and more comfortable passenger experience

Road safety. Personal safety. A consistent experience.

HackerNews is a bubble in itself. Most people here cannot relate to a person who drives a cab for a living and is having a real tangbile crisis seeing how these tech companies are eating up their livelihood. Switching jobs for a taxi driver is not the same as switching jobs or career as a software coolie.

No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/23/cruise-waymo-spent-million...

New York is still holding on but I dont know how long it can. https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-new-york-city-political-ro...

This is called the lump of labor fallacy. When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)

Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.

Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.

The vast majority of people used to be farmers; I am glad to live in a future where farming jobs have largely been automated away.

With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.

Don't get me wrong on this, I love driving.. the right car. But, most of the time, driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world. I guess you could argue that some commuters (who aren't driving themselves) don't exactly fill that time with the most productive things but thats a separate issue.

I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.

Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.

> How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?

I live in a location that has won the top spot on "worst drivers in the country" and "worst roads in the nation" lists multiple times. By all means, put the robots in the driver's seat. Can't be any worse.

It's because women, late at night, intoxicated, don't need to get into the car of a strange man, and get assaulted.

Have you considered all the jobs in the horse keeping industry when the automobile came around?

Once AI optimized away all our jobs nobody needs to drive to work anyway.

Did you feel the same when mass automation came to manufacturing?

Google already has quite a large office in Toronto.

Maybe we'll end up cancelling whatever contract Waymo got and give them a secret payout amount like we did for Starlink.

>hostile orange individual

Orange guy may make news, but Canada has greater problems from within.

So your response to asocial, xenophobic politicians is give them what they want?

"I will show that America first President who wants to fracture global trade...by arguing for fracturing global trade."

That gen pops tune changed with the political climate just like big corp previously going on about left wing shit is stunning

Ya'll are just LARPing what you watch on TV and read online