Can anyone in Phoenix answer if Waymo is cheaper?
Is Waymo hoping people will choose Waymo for safety?
* You don't need an army of marketers/hr/legal/support staff for your drivers
* You don't need to dodge ambiguous contractor vs. employee laws
* You don't have any risk about individual drivers being bad actors or acting fraudulently
* You can predict, with great accuracy, how many cars will be available at any given time, whether or not they'll want to do another drive after (they will), and where they want to end up
* Your cars meet a minimum level of safety (if it works) that humans can't guarantee, especially in regards to distracted, tired, drunk, or whatever driving
Given how much effort is spent on attracting and retaining drivers, I'd say Waymo has many competitive advantages lined up. If it works.
I mean sure, there is a camera. But that is hugely different than a person (both positive and negative)
The obvious advantage will be price, if Uber even still exists.
With Uber/Lyft, you never know who you're going to get and what the experience will be like, and as someone that easily took 200-300 Uber rides per year pre-covid, I've seen some shit.
It also lets you a. optimize exactly where cars are driving to maximize ride share revenue, b. have the cars ready to pick someone up 24/7.
It's going to be a much more efficient use of car capital than hiring a person to drive it.
My take is that this will become widely available in the next 5 years. The future is bright!
In the long-term, the obvious benefit is the price. In the next 5 to 10 years I don't expect it to be cheaper than Uber, even if their cost is half of Uber's.
Long term it should be possible for the service to be cheaper than manned since they don't have to pay a driver.
Cars with different seat configuration — I would love to sit with my family, friends, not on separate rows.
Smaller cars for one-two passengers, brand it Eco friendly, I would certainly select Firefly over usual car.
https://www.google.com/search?q=driverless+car+interior&tbm=...
> We’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app
So...this is just an extension of what they currently do where it's not really open to the public? Waymo One is something you have to apply for and almost nobody gets in. It's not clear to me what "welcome more people directly into the service through our app" means.
Waymo is terrible at PR. I can't even tell what they're trying to say here. But there is no date. There is no definitive statement. It's just another vague press release about how they're going driverless "soon"
I think this explains the reasoning behind the gradual ramp-up. Even at the product launch like new iPhones, the demand is difficult to estimate, so IMO it seems more responsible to give a reasonable expectation to the public like this, than just saying bravely "the service is fully public from today".
I think the take-away from this announcement is their commitment for wider rollout over time from this point on.
You shouldn't have to analyze the takeaways of what Waymo really meant when they used the extremely common phrase "general public."
>Beginning today, October 8, we’re excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders. Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world.
While Uber and other folks are all boasting about their self driving project and collecting the lion share of controversy and unwanted attention, waymo is quietly, step by step, heading towards it's total dominance, staying completely off the radar.
*off the LIDAR.
Also, they seem to have the lead over most and the market opportunity is huge.
This isn't e-mail. The cost and hassle of switching to a competing service is nearly zero.
Tesla will miss out I think by not taking advantage of doing even the cheapest possible one sensor lidar to augment their existing system.
$500 -> in the future $100 for the data lidar gives you is gold.
However, I can see a scenario where, despite that, it is not the right choice for Tesla. It's important to remember that self-driving technology will be commodity at some point (like the lidar units themselves). Whoever offers the most affordable option meeting some baseline performance will dominate the market and licence to every self-driving fleet. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo ended up meeting that criteria first and licensing the tech to everyone from Uber to Toyota.
Once that tech is out, anyone else that succeeds in developing comparable tech effectively has an uphill battle ahead of them trying to sell their new, less proven version at a price and volume that can recoup their R&D investment. I think we'll see a lot of players leave the race once the first licensable product hits the market. In fact, I think we've seen a bit of that already.
Which brings me back to Tesla. My guess is their strategy is not just to develop self-driving - they'd lose on equal ground (due to not being first) - but to develop "2nd gen" self-driving which has a specific competitive advantage of not requiring lidar and thus having lower total cost per unit. This allows them to enter the market late but still have a significant edge in that market.
If a company lets their engineer's use lidar to develop self-driving tech, then the tech they build will be 100% dependent on lidar. That's Parkinson's law. If, on the other hand, the company adds a strict constraint that lidar is not an option, then the engineers might fail to build something that works - or else they will produce something with a unique advantage.
They'll be able to drive in the rain and snow.
The blog post is relatively clear that ramp up will take a few weeks - "we’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app"
before you comment watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4
No, it's not. Waymo has been doing amazing work, but the problem is that they PR department is a little bit too good at it's job.
Waymo has these kinds of announcements very couple of months (sometimes more often) and if you don't pay close attention all of them sound like Waymo finally had a breakthrough. But if you look closer each of them is only small incremental progress from their last announcement. In this case, Waymo was already doing driverless rides and they also didn't open them up to everyone. So even though I think that Waymo is making great progress towards a self-driving future, I understand that people get Waymo announcement fatigue.
Waymo is taking a slow but steady approach to the development and roll-out of self-driving cars, and I agree with you that that can sometimes make the individual milestones they choose to announce along the way seem pretty minor. Milestones are arbitrary by nature after all, and Waymo has a long road ahead before driverless cars become ubiquitous. Over time though, this sort of slow, incremental progress is going to add up.
I made this same point a couple years ago, when Waymo first announced Waymo One[1]. The point where "self driving cars are here" is going to be a blurry line.
Also, I'm pretty sure Tesla has a lot of PhDs and probably about 100x more unit tests then Waymo as they have an gigantic amount of strange real-world corner cases that they have converted to unit-tests. There is no way Waymo has anything like that database, as they simply have never encountered all the strange scenarios Tesla see daily on the roads of China and all the other places they drive around in.
Do those people still think that it's going to take 10-20 years for this tech to reach say, New York, now that it's live in Phoenix?
It's not even generally available in Phoenix yet. I'm sure someone on HN lives in Phoenix, and has never used Waymo before. Tell us if you can get a driverless ride.
It's got a long way to go before it's something like Uber in Phoenix. It's got even longer to go before it's something like Uber in NYC (10-20 years still sounds right).
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The funny thing is that the pandemic should have been HUGE for self-driving cars... Most people I know haven't taken rideshare in 6+ months because they don't want to ride with somebody, and I only did so in the last few weeeks.
But it was a non-event. I didn't hear anyone talking about self-driving in the last 6 months. If it really worked, and was really available, then there would be certainly some people who would pay 2-5x the price of Lyft/Uber for no driver. (Not most people, but some people.)
For myself, I would trust this announcement a lot more if it claimed some new technological breakthrough that enables Waymo to do now something that wasn't possible half a year, or 5 or 10 years ago (specifically, this "something" is level-3 self-driving, as poorly as this is unfortunately defined). I don't see any such claims. The announcement instead reads as so much marketing copy to me, and it is not saying anything that has any practical implications for the technological capabilities of Waymo's cars.
https://azdot.gov/motor-vehicles/professional-services/auton...
https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/ducey-to-u...
What does that mean for the rideshare business? Are Uber/Lyft basically dead if they are years behind Waymo?
Furthermore, I'm skeptical that driverless vehicles can factor in all the ways in which someone might maliciously cause accidents or damage to these vehicles. I want to see what happens when someone figures out how to provide false input to the sensors on the vehicle.
You're probably right, but as long as it doesn't happen frequently and there's no way to mislead sensors en masse, it's not a big deal.
There are malicious ways to cause accidents with current-day technologies also. e.g. Park a car in front of a train, fly a drone into a plane, etc.
Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/08/uber-got-off-the-hook...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/16/21439354/uber-backup-driv...
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/20/18175563/waymo-one-custom...
I think they have the computers in the trunk.
Makes it sound like the pandemic was a significant factor in expanding this to people who are not under NDA. Because if they were doing 5-10% before fully driverless and it was working, then there is a big issue with needing to retrofit the cars with infectious disease barriers, its going to make a lot more sense to just reduce the number of drivers entirely if you can.
But one thing that might be a little misleading is that I am reading this announcement as saying that they are actually only letting in Waymo One people now which have had to apply and be accepted, and then in a non-specific number of weeks the public can try to get in via the app. But you still basically have to be on a wait list in the app.
So the real difference today is letting people in the program already who are not under NDA ride without the safety driver.
But it's very exciting. And necessary to have some wait-list because it is actually possible that the thing could become viral (sorry) and turn into driverless ride tourism and then you could have 30,000 tourists standing around at the same time cussing at an app that says "Service at capacity" all day.
I'm struggling to understand what this meas. On the one hand "In the near term, 100% of our rides will be fully driverless", but, on the other hand, "Later this year, ..., we'll also be re-introducing rides with a trained vehicle operator, (...)". So "the near term" is at least next year?
Anyway it's difficult to understand exactly what is changing with this announcement. The (original) title makes it sound like everyone in Phoenix ("...the general public in Phoenix") will be able to hitch a driverless ride, but the text on the announcement makes it sound like only Waymo One members -and their relatives- will be able to do so ("Beginning today, October 8, we’re excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders. Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world.").
