Taking a private taxi to commute to work or school is easily the worst thing you can do environmentally in a city. Doesn’t really matter that you’re not burning dinosaur juice.
If you don't have a train or bus along the way, ebikes can also save you sweat. You don't even need to pedal at all.
Worse than owning a large single family home that lowers density and pushes everyone further from their destinations?
Surely it's whatever is most sustainable, which Waymo (or equivalent) very well could be.
Free your mind. Cost per passenger mile is atrocious for most US transit systems. All that cost equals carbon: concrete, steel, fuel, salaries, etc.
Not mentioned that I could find in the materials, but ride-sharing/shuttle service would be a natural option to first pilot with Waymo for Business. That would put Waymo one step closer to upgrading legacy public transportation systems.
GoA 4 trains exist today. GoA 3 is usually more practical and is widely used today. So Waymo would be very late to that and have all the wrong technology stack. But sure, there could be room for the Waymo Driver driving a bus, that may not make as much sense as you imagine but anything is possible.
Remove the driver from the equation and modern buses are oversized, particularly in a region with rail transportation.
For shorter journeys not having to walk as far to, go down into and up from rail stations can make up for the slower speeds.
What is going on, if you have PMF the logical next step is scale.
The Zeekr vehicle was announced in 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet...
100% tariff in 2024: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/14/joe... ; https://www.reuters.com/business/us-locks-steep-china-tariff...
Hyundai partnership announced a few months later: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/waymo-and-hyundai-enter-partn...
Plus what others have said about sheer number of vehicles not being the only obstacle to scaling.
I think I remember them targeting 1M rides/week in 2026.
I am no expert here, but my assumption scaling is not yet dependent on just having more cars, that they have to do extra work, that is not yet automatable, in each area they service plus some extra maintenance cost for every area they service.
Announced: * Dallas * Denver * Miami * Seattle * Washington, DC * New York City * San Diego * Las Vegas * Philadelphia * London * Tokyo
Seems like they are definitely scaling up...
Another thing to keep in mind is that rideshare revenue in the US is extremely geographically concentrated in urban cores. This is why every AV company was targeting SF as their first city (excepting Waymo, which did some stuff in PHX). 'Hyperfocused expansion' probably looks a lot closer to tackling new, novel areas in different metro areas rather than, say, expanding down in to San Jose and the central valley.
These things, they take time.
They've clearly hit (or projections confidently show they'll hit) a point where each car is profitable. I worked in the space for a while - platform upgrades (new cars, sensors, etc) are planned out years in advance and are pretty complex processes. But generally, each upgrade was a massive decrease in cost per car. (usually 50% cheaper or more). So also possible they want to wait for the next platform transition.
Provide safe and sustainable autonomous rides for your team with Waymo for Business. Easily set up commuter programs, events transportation, and corporate travel for a variety of industries and use cases.
With Waymo for Business, you’ll get access to our business portal to set program parameters, manage members, generate codes for events, and keep track of everything, from budget to program engagement.
I mean how many people drive for 30 to 60 minutes just to get to work in or already a bit stressed out because of the drive.
But second, wouldn't it be cool if places that serve alcohol could have a whole bunch of these codes to hand out! If somebody looks a bit too buzzed, just give them a code for a ride and send them on home. Heck even give him another code to come back in the morning and get their car!
Will this still make sense if Weymo has to spend 30-60 minutes getting to wherever the worker needs to be picked up, presumably the suburbs?
And yes, for certain cases it will be - employees who start their day less stressed produce more value. For people with paid mid-six-figures, this potentially lets the company wring more cognitive labor out of their them instead of them wasting it on driving (and maybe they'll even work from the car).
Most people assumed that self driving trucks are easier to automate since they just do highway driving with limited turns.
This isn’t a real challenge. There are more cities that want to be early adopters (for the investment and jobs) than have a politically-active Luddite streak.
At the end of the day, we’ll do the labour-intensive work of development in the former and deploy to the latter once it’s efficiently scalable, probably with limited local labor (and thus consent) requirements.
Worthless and a waste of my time. Total joke. For everything I hear about Uber's supposed good engineering, I couldn't see a lick of it.
Let people work remote from home so they don't waste time and energy commuting into the office.
