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They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparabl
by mint2 3y ago
They aren’t littered through CA, in CA they are exclusively in SF. In SF they are common and as they seem to drive nonstop, take more road time than a comparable number of normal cars.
They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.
- aaron425 3y agoThere are some in LA as well, although at a smaller scale.
- Solvency 3y agoWhy would they keep driving at all times with no passengers? How is that ecologically smart or sensible from a business perspective?
- hadlock 3y ago1) collect additional driving data. driving data is the moat for autonomous driving 2) move to a location where you're statistically most likely to pick up your next passenger, to reduce average wait time
- paganel 3y agoThat was always the selling point about autonomous cars, i.e. that they could be driven 24/7, almost. There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe whole point of having them on a limited basis is to gather data. No useful data is gathered when they aren't driving.
- tesseract 3y agoIn the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area I see Waymo, Nuro, and unmarked-but-we-all-know-it's-Apple autonomous vehicles quite frequently. A few times a week at least. Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.
- captaincaveman 3y agoWait, I thought Apple had given up on it's car project?
- saagarjha 3y agoNope
- minwcnt5 3y agoWaymos do stop between fares. They've gotten grief from people who don't like them parked in front of their house.
- stouset 3y agoI really hope if anything that seeing so many occupant-less vehicles on the streets makes us collectively realize how inefficiently these vehicles are using a scarce, congestion-prone resource in a way that wasn’t as visible with Uber/Lyft. I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.
- londons_explore 3y agoThe city should just start to bill big fleet operators for passenger-less miles. That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer. By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.
- stouset 3y agoNot the worst idea I’ve heard.
- xnx 3y agoI feel this way about free parking.
- londons_explore 3y agoKinda surprised they stop... When you have a self-driving system that costs $200k+, you want to keep it running and collecting data as much as possible - passenger or no passenger. The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.