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In a patch of Arizona, everyone knows Waymo, but few use it
- ghaff 5y agoI'm not sure what the story is here. I'm as skeptical of Waymo as anyone but a lot of people basically don't take Uber/Lyft/taxis on anything like a regular basis. I realize a fair number of readers here probably live in cities and maybe don't have cars. But, in my case, I live outside a major city and, while in normal times, I do take reserved cars back and forth to the airport, I haven't taken a taxi/Uber/Lyft around where I live for many years. I do take them maybe a dozen times a year but that's when I'm traveling. So the fact that there's relatively little use of Waymo in the Phoenix suburban sprawl where it operates doesn't seem especially noteworthy.
- typon 5y agoYou don't think $3.5 Billion spent on a project with little customers is noteworthy?
- vikramkr 5y agoIt's still an R&D effort- once they've spent that much on manufacturing and marketing, if they still have few customers then thats something else
- avg_dev 5y agoOnce it works properly, you won't need to spend anything at all on marketing... people will flock to it in droves. Trucking will be up-ended. Freight will change. People will in a short period of time stop owning cars and call them as needed. I'm just not sure we'll ever get there.
- ghaff 5y agoI'm pretty sure we'll see this on certain highways in certain weather conditions--which would actually be a killer feature for a lot of us. But it doesn't fundamentally change car ownership and use--and may or may not change trucking.
- nytesky 5y agoYeah, the actual driving part is just part of the job. You would need personnel at every stop along the route to handle refueling or changing trailers. As well security concerns to an unmanned vehicle laden with goods. I mean an automated cruise control would allow night driving and such some savings there.
- sdenton4 5y agoEh, imagine two drivers for eight trucks... Takes care of the security problem, so long as the US doesn't devolve into road banditry, and the humans can handle refueling, and the trucks can drive without the usual restrictions on human fatigue.
- nytesky 5y agoNot owning a car seems hard for anyone with a life more complicated than single office drone. I often need to stash kids equipment in the car for later pickup; we keep medicine and books in the car used often, strollers, umbrellas, not to mention car seats. That’s a lot of stuff to lug between Uber to Uber. People who play sports after work, sales folks traveling with merchandise, etc. cars are a home away from home in our lifestyles.
- Closi 5y agoIMO Society will adapt and people will find different solutions for these things. Take for instance two scenarios: * London - I used to live there and commute on the tube. Not everyone uses a car on a regular basis, except maybe to go to the supermarket. I didn't find it particularly hard to bring my sportswear in a bag and put a kindle in my jacket pocket. I assume New York is the same! * Amsterdam and The Hague - I used to travel to these cities often, and these societies exist almost entirely on bike. I have a car, but also manage to walk into work and not bring everything with me everywhere. It just seems like the assumption is "it will only work if it can support me doing exactly what I do now", but this sort of technology has the potential to completely change the way people work and live.
- ghaff 5y agoAlso cars equipped with boat racks, bike racks—often fairly specialized for specific equipment. Loading up cars the night before for a trip. Could definitely make a difference at the margins in cities but you already have Uber. This might cut price in half? A lot of people seem to assume that this makes taxi rides almost too cheap to meter relative to owning a car or taking an Uber. And I'm pretty sure that's not true. You don't pay yourself to drive and the US IRS deduction for mileage is something like 50 cents per mile. That's probably a pretty good floor for a robo-taxi including the mileage it takes to get to you.
- 908B64B197 5y agoWaymo might end up replacing the second car, or get someone to travel the last miles to public transportation for the daily commute.
- kc0bfv 5y ago"Once it works properly, you won't need to spend anything at all on marketing... people will flock to it in droves." I agree. However this really remains to be seen. If Waymo got everything working as right as they could it might still fail. This is a culture shift you're talking about, and even when past tech has required less to shift some has failed.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoTrucking and highway driving are so much easier. And will probably be solved far sooner by other people, and Waymo will have missed an obvious stepping stone, business scaler, revenue stream.
- ghaff 5y agoPersonally I'm not convinced that Waymo isn't continuing to flush a whole lot of money down the toilet. But this is a test/prototype in an area where I assume most households own cars and rarely take taxis and ride shares around the local area. So the fact that not a lot of people are taking a Waymo except maybe for the novelty is utterly unsurprising.
- bastawhiz 5y agoBut their Arizona test is just that, a test. They are (or at least they state that they're) polishing the experience of using the service. What better place to do that than in a place where demand isn't going to be especially high, with ideal weather and lots of well-kept roads? Surely nobody thinks the Arizona service is Waymo's best stab at a productionalized offering.
- stefan_ 5y agoThey opened up a pork shop in a muslim area and we're not supposed to question that? These are the people supposed to make cars autonomous and they are utterly ignorant to all these things? Is it designed to fail or are they stuck in the suburban sprawl because that's the only place where the thing will not practically fail and kill someone?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ghaff 5y agoIt might be safe to assume that Waymo management has given more than a passing thought to their test location.
- HWR_14 5y agoWaymo's test location was driven by Arizona's friendly legal environment.
- bobthepanda 5y agothese suburban sprawl places were also very gung ho about rolling out the regulatory equivalent of a red carpet. I'm not aware of any major city that has nearly as permissive autonomous regulations in their central area, probably because of concerns about reliability. then the question becomes chicken and egg.
- 1023bytes 5y agoThe author also mentioned some key points in a tweet [1]. If it's more expensive and slower, of course it can't compete. [1] https://twitter.com/Ryandoofy/status/1410253369420226560 https://twitter.com/Ryandoofy/status/1410253369420226560
- bastawhiz 5y agoI wonder why the cost is high. Maybe to discourage folks who want a service competitive with a human driver?
- jack_riminton 5y agoI read somewhere that each vehicle cost $250k because of all the hardware
- bastawhiz 5y agoSurely, though, the cost of operation has little to do with the cost of rides? Google has poured billions into the project. A few dollars per ride isn't helping their accountants sleep any better.
- shadilay 5y agoHardware costs are dropping pretty fast. Lidar is already an order of magnitude cheaper and compute benefits from Moore's Law.
- cloudwalking 5y agoMuch cheaper, maybe half that. Krafcik says approximately the price of a Mercedes S class ($110k) https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ceo-says-tesla-is-not-a-competitor-gives-estimated-cost-of-autonomous-vehicles/?sh=eabed6e541b1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/johanmoreno/2021/01/22/waymo-ce...
- jack_riminton 5y agoI stand corrected
- newobj 5y agoWut? Phoenix metro area is not the bay or Seattle or NY. Everyone out there has cars. It’s hot as hell and things are spread out. Spend any time there: there are only cars. Anyone on a bus is down on their luck. Same with bicyclists, either that or they are bike maniacs biking for political or health reasons. tldr anyone not using a car is already not in Waymos target audience because they can’t afford a taxi or are just really determined to ride a bike. Downtown Phoenix, or ASU (students), or downtown Scottsdale (drunk night life) would have been the better test locations. Chandler? Wow
- crazygringo 5y agoI'm curious who is taking the Waymos then. Senior citizens who aren't comfortable driving anymore? When other family members have taken all the cars but you still need to get somewhere? When your car's being repaired?
- ghaff 5y agoThose seem like valid use cases. From the numbers I saw this is only about 0.01% of the population per day.
- ghaff 5y agoI think you’ve answered your own question. They don’t want drunk nightlife for these early tests. They want as predictable and car centric as possible.
- mchusma 5y agoWhich is fine, but if you can't use it as a designated driver, to the airport, or to most locations near you, it just isn't much of a taxi service. I think the real answer here is they clearly don't really want people to use it yet. They just want to say they are the first robotaxi.
- shadilay 5y agoThere's also an enormous amount of work to be done figuring out autonomous fleet operations and optimizing that.
- jmpman 5y agoIt doesn’t service the major bar area of downtown Chandler, much less Old Town Scottsdale, Tempe or Downtown Phoenix. Although it does service Chandler Fashion Center (one of the main malls in the south east valley), you can’t use it to send your 15 year old to the mall/theater, as you must be 18 to use the service alone. Intel’s Ocotillo campus appears to be in their service area, so if an Intel employee lived in the 40 square mile area, they might be able to commute with it. It doesn’t service either of the airports. The trial area effectively requires a vehicle for any practical lifestyle, and any of the use cases that I’d normally take a Lyft/Uber for, just aren’t serviced by Waymo.
- ErikVandeWater 5y agoThe question isn't whether it's used much but whether it's at full capacity. Waymo might as well use it in the suburbs where there are less corner case situations if it's at full capacity. The article suggests it is not used at full capacity, but isn't clear.
- crazysim 5y agoI don't think campus is covered. At least, you could never be dropped off on campus if the system is in no-autonomous-specialist mode.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> you can’t use it to send your 15 year old to the mall/theater, as you must be 18 to use the service alone. They could honestly relax that constrain. > The trial area effectively requires a vehicle for any practical lifestyle, and any of the use cases that I’d normally take a Lyft/Uber for, just aren’t serviced by Waymo. The trial area seems constrained because in case something goes wrong they still have to dispatch a human. That doesn't really scale.
- ghaff 5y ago>They could honestly relax that constrain. I don't know what legal constraints/tradeoffs they're operating under but I was flying in planes by myself (as an adult) by the time I was 15. So it doesn't seem unreasonable.
- tyingq 5y agoMost of what's said there does little to support the headline. This is interesting though... "Waymo says it provides hundreds of rides a week" Which almost certainly means less than 100 rides per day. Typical Uber drivers do 4-6 trips in a 4 hour shift.
- chiph 5y agoI've been impressed with Waymo from watching JJRicks videos. In this video the Waymo vehicle gets cut-off by a driver changing lanes in front of them, and it handled it correctly. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3DxyTxdUU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3DxyTxdUU I don't see why more people aren't taking advantage of it.
- breckenedge 5y agoThe white 4runner? My read of that driver’s behavior is that lane change was predictable. The 4runner gives up a huge gap to let a space open up, generally indicative of a lane change, but the van wants to keep a constant distance from the car ahead of it. And the van seems to never leave the right-most lane, so I’d expect these events happen pretty often.
- jseliger 5y agoI don't see why more people aren't taking advantage of it. This commenter covers it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28338580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28338580
- onelovetwo 5y agoWho would've thought no one wants to be recorded or be monitored while driving
- perl4ever 5y agoI have no idea, but this makes me think of something I forget the word for. It's when you have a reason for doing or not doing something, and you assume you're the only one, but really, everybody else has the same reason. As a result, everybody is passive and doesn't act like they would if they knew everyone agreed. It's the opposite of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect Ah, this is it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance The nice thing about a "false consensus", of course, is that someone who believes in it can tell others they are victims of "pluralistic ignorance" and once enough people are brainwashed, it's a true consensus!
- gumby 5y agoThere were two interesting nuggets in here: > Waymo has also partnered with organizations—most recently, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference This is odd to me. I don’t see the connection. What am I missing? > Waymo walked away from the term “self-driving” this January in favor of a more precise, multisyllabic “fully autonomous driving tech.” I assume this is because Tesla marketing had polluted the term?
- HWR_14 5y ago>> Waymo has also partnered with organizations—most recently, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference >This is odd to me. I don’t see the connection. What am I missing? The SCLC is a civil rights organization that advocates for social justice. Waymo partnering with them is a signal they want to make sure the Waymo cars don't avoid poor parts of town, are too cost prohibitive, etc. The SCLC also has a strong "get voters to the polls" effort. I can see Waymo volunteering rides to people's polling stations.
- b9a2cab5 5y agoHah, the moment those Waymo cars go into poor areas they're going to get ransacked. I used to live in a poor area and got daily notifications of catalytic converters being stolen. There's tens of thousands of dollars of tech on that car and you can stop it by just standing in front of it. Cameras haven't exactly stopped thieves from doing what they do in the past.
- magicalist 5y ago> I used to live in a poor area and got daily notifications of catalytic converters being stolen I mean, the catalytic converter is going to be like 800° and there's not exactly a big integrated lidar aftermarket yet, so maybe not a great imagined reason to preemptively redline anyone.
- saalweachter 5y agoHow is the drone aftermarket doing?
- gfodor 5y agoUltimately if robocars work, the little anecdotes you hear about people trusting them after the first ride seems to me to confirm we shouldn't expect human factors to kill them.
- mark_l_watson 5y agoSingapore (a city I love, an awesome place) started a fairly large test of self driving taxis in 2016. I just looked for recent news about this service but couldn't find any. Anyone know if this is still a thing?
- andrewmcwatters 5y agoAnother issue is I just never think about Waymo. I was without a car for maybe a couple of months? Didn't think about using Waymo once. Just grabbed an Uber.
- specialist 5y agoWonder if they considered Sun City. Moving seniors around might be a worthy market segment.
- oakfr 5y agoA bunch of robo taxi startups are going after this market which, while being quite real, is minuscule compared to Waymo’s ambition.
- xyzzy21 5y agoVery true. Waymos are held in considerable contempt in Chandler. Local HATE them (we have a plant in Chandler). But more broadly, the "learning territory" is bizarrely and truly inapplicable to 99% of the rest of roadways in the USA. Chandler roads are: * Unusually flat * Unusually broad * Unusually straight * Unusually well-lit at high sun angles (no shadows) * Unusually good weather most of the time (ignoring Haboob sand storms and monsoon downpours that happen for a few weeks in the summer) * Unusually light traffic (compared to any urban center) Honestly they are a MINIMUM of 20-50 year away from "any road in the USA" and that still presumes radical and unknown improvements in the technology arriving in a timely fashion! I'm not holding my breath on this technology! I'm OK if someone wants to blow through some serious cash - that's their choice. But it's not going to pay off any time soon. Fools may believe otherwise but fools and their money are quickly parted and that's on the fools.
- Matrixik 5y agoThat's why they are now expanding to San Francisco: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/real-robotaxi-service-gets-a-step-closer-in-san-francisco/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2021/05/real-robotaxi-service-g...
- viscanti 5y agoIt's a PR stunt and an attempt to continue to show "progress" so they can keep getting funding. Their current design requires up-to-date ultra high definition 3d mapping, perfect weather conditions, and a minimal amount of traffic weirdness. Maybe 5g gives them a way to keep up to date 3d maps onboard, but even if that works out the data costs and cost to continually re-map the streets makes it so the unit economics don't work. It's not like they just need a few more miles of "learning", the foundation of their entire strategy is flawed and can't scale.
- amacneil 5y agoWeather and traffic - fair criticisms. HD Maps - really aren’t as difficult as you’re making them out to be. Most AV companies can update their maps using sensor data from their own fleet. And the cars need to recharge/service at a facility every few hours anyway. So there certainly isn’t any need for 5g or expensive cell data to make HD maps scale.
- nostromo 5y agoWaymo is unbearably slow. It’s basically Uber, but the driver is your grandma that is fine waiting several minutes to make a left turn “just to be safe.”
- 37ef_ced3 5y agoWhat is the benefit of self driving taxis versus human taxi drivers with safety assist (collision mitigation braking, and forward-collision warning, etc.)? Is the benefit of self-driving taxis purely cost reduction? You can pay less and have an artificial intelligence drive you, or pay more and have a human (non-artificial intelligence) drive you? How much cheaper will the self-driving taxis be?
- 37ef_ced3 5y agoWhy not answer my question, instead of voting me down? If you can't answer my question, maybe the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes.
- raman162 5y agoI do think the initial question if phrased specifically around safety is an interesting one. This may be the optimist nerd in me but I believe that computers will eventually (if not already) be safer than humans when driving. I think it's too easy for us to become distracted and make mistakes, while a self driving car has 360 vision and can see through opaque objects. If one were to argue that a safety assist system should be capable of correcting all mistakes then I think the car is just basically self-driving at that point. Apart from costs, I think removing the need for attention on the road and other drivers is a benefit for self driving cars, you can spend time engaging loved ones or whatever pleases you.
- erik_seaberg 5y agoThere's a limited number of drivers and they are competing for the most profitable trips at busy times. A self driving fleet can cover a larger area 24/7 because they don't mind parking for hours until the next fare.
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- hamburgerwah 5y agoI really don't understand the pervasive idea that we are going to hold robot cars to so much of a higher standard than human drivers. I'll take 1.2x . Human drivers kill a lot of people every year in what are largely preventable accidents. Lets use robot cars in places that it makes sense to do so and save some lives and they'll get better over time.
- novok 5y agoI think the issue is the kind of accidents will be very different from humans, uncomfortable and very fatal. You also have to compare against sober and awake drivers, not 'the typical driver', because you have a choice to be sober and awake if you're more safety minded, while you don't really have those choices with AI driving. Like tesla cars going straight into concrete barriers on highway exits instead of down the 2 lane options on autopilot mode.
- fma 5y agoIt's usually the optics/media that will torpedo the effort. "Big scary robot car was in an accident". Proof? 13 American soldiers died in Afghanistan in a combat zone and people are up in arms. 1800 Americans died yesterday from covid while going about their daily lives and it's pretty mum.
- joe_the_user 5y agoSelf-driving cars are nowhere as safe as humans per mile. People touting self-driving cars like to talk about human accidents but people are remarkably safe per mile. Self-driving cars don't have that many accidents attributed to them but they haven't driven very much compared to humans.
- soared 5y agoSource?
- joe_the_user 5y agoWikipedia gives a summary of the accident rate in the US [1], humans drive millions of miles without accidents. Filip Piekniewski has an ongoing series on self-driving car problems. [2] (I'd look up the earlier articles in the series if I had time). This article I googled [3] give some statistics: ") At the moment, self-driving cars have a higher rate of accidents compared to human-driven cars, but the injuries are less serious. On average, there are 9.1 self-driving car accidents per million miles driven, while the same rate is 4.1 crashes per million miles for regular vehicles." However, nearly all self-driving cars are driven in highly controlled conditions, the safest driving areas available and/or an operator ready to take over - yet they still have a higher rate of accidents than human drivers. There's a reason self-driving cars aren't being deployed yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... [2] https://blog.piekniewski.info/2021/05/12/ai-mid-2021/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2021/05/12/ai-mid-2021/ [3] https://carsurance.net/blog/self-driving-car-statistics/ https://carsurance.net/blog/self-driving-car-statistics/
- novok 5y agoI think waymo's best customers in suburban america would be the old and young people who cannot drive themselves and cannot walk to their destinations. Waymo to shuttle your 10 year old unsupervised to school and back, your 70 year old grandma who a cannot drive anymore and disabled people who cannot drive would be amazing in those communities, but in both cases, they are either not allowed, or are too old to use a smartphone effectively too. I wonder if waymo has human phone dispatchers, which is something I could see the old people being more into, if it would result in way more usage by that segment.
- soared 5y agoAgreed. Lyft and maybe Uber have a specific service for taking under 18s to high school that I’ve seen heavily used (in Denver).
- Animats 5y agoTesla just did it again.[1] "FHP Orlando @FHPOrlando · 10h Happening now: Orange County. Trooper stopped to help a disabled motorist on I-4. When Tesla driving on “auto” mode struck the patrol car. Trooper was outside of car and extremely lucky to have not been struck. #moveover. WB lanes of I-4 remain block as scene is being cleared." [1] https://twitter.com/FHPOrlando/status/1431565185899171840 https://twitter.com/FHPOrlando/status/1431565185899171840
- rmason 5y agoI've got a question on Waymo. Say you're an old person who takes quite a bit of time to exit the vehicle. Is there a button outside to indicate you're clear of the vehicle? Or are you 3/4 out when it gets another ride, slams the van door on you and takes off at 45 mph with you hanging out. I have seen many descriptions of the tech, some of it at a pretty high level on how it navigates but never anything how it ensures that the passenger has had a successful exit.
- lindseymysse 5y agoThat is why Los Angeles Metro's model of a hailable microbus is the correct business model here. Uber showed us what we can do with an app, now the job is to adapt our mass transit systems to these new ways of reasoning about traffic.
- upbeat_general 5y agoI don't have any 1st person experience with this (or work at Waymo) but there are probably several easy ways they avoid this. The car will probably never drive with the door open and all modern cars have sensors to detect this. Second, their cars (and any competent self-driving car) needs to have a very accurate awareness of its surroundings. True it might be difficult to get a clear view of a person just barely outside the car but I'd bet that they have cameras/radar/lidar positioned to see if at least something is there. Lastly, they have internal passenger cameras that can detect whether a person is inside the car.
- rkalla 5y agoThey have specifically strengthened the motors in the sliding door to cut the average adult person in half if they take longer than 30 seconds to exit. (lol I like your example scenario)
- zimbatm 5y ago> “I am very aware of [Waymos] when I'm running on the road or riding my bike,” Stacy, the Chandler resident, told us. “When I was on my bike, I had one creep up on me. I chose to stop and wait for it to pass because it would not go around me as I was moving.” That's something underdiscussed. A lot of driving is predicting other driver's behaviours. After a while you get a sense of what people will do, and in which broad category they fall under. With self-driving cars, now we have new actors on the road that don't act naturally. And each software update might change these behaviours. This has some interesting feedback implications. As we get more of those on the streets, we might see more accidents after software upgrades. Not because of the software, but because people got used to the old behaviour and didn't anticipate the new one.
- detaro 5y agoWhat are the rules to pass bikes there? Could be that the Waymos are breaking expectations by just actually insisting on passing in a 100% legal way.