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Maybe if you're under 25 and have always lived in a dense city this seems like a valid take. Taxis aren't new, they have always existed. Just because they're dr

• spiderice 2y ago
  I have kids and don't like Taxis, but I'm not sure I entirely agree with your take. The idea of a humanless Taxi showing up to my house sounds way more appealing to me. I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver. I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft. I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more. I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with. Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.
  • codetrotter 2y ago
    > I don't have to worry about tipping I can almost guarantee that if they don’t already, the robo-taxis will eventually start asking for tips. This is already the case at self-checkout in some stores for example. As long as the companies can get away with it, they will tack on any number of extra fees and charges even if those fees and charges really don’t make any sense. Hell, even tipping people does not really make sense the way it works in some places. A person working for a company should receive enough pay from the company itself that they don’t have to actually rely on tips in order to make enough money to survive. Tips should be a nice extra that customers willingly add because of good service. Not a forced extra percentage that they have to pay on every transaction just so that the company can pay less to their employees.
    • dventimi 2y ago
      I do not accept your guarantee.
      • bigfudge 2y ago
        There will be bullshit booking charges etc though. The thrust of their point is largely correct. I really wish people were more sensitive to being stiffed like we are by these sorts of stupid charges … that they arent means there is often no alternative.
        • Denvercoder9 2y ago
          I'll take bullshit charges that I can know about upfront over being nagged for tips every day.
          • bigfudge 2y ago
            The point of bullshit charges is often to obscure total cost upfront. We are absolutely rotten with them in the UK. Not sure the US is better but I think they are really anticompetitive because they create a cost to discovering the true cost of goods. I have a personal policy of not buying if I discover stupid charges at the end of a sales pipeline but it’s sometimes incredibly inconvenient.
      • inlined 2y ago
        I actually wonder if “tip the development team” makes sense (assuming tipping is gratuity and not because an employer pays below-living wages). Weirdly it might even lead to quality improvement because low tip areas could be detected and debugged.
      • SoftTalker 2y ago
        They won't be tips as such, but the average amount of the tip will be baked into the price. If people are willing to pay base charge + tip for an Uber, then that is what robo-taxies will charge too. Especially if one company is allowed to keep a monopoly on the technology.
  • thih9 2y ago
    > I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more. I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with. This or an equivalent will arrive to a robo taxi near you when the service inevitably gets enshittified to hell and back. Ads, trips shared with other humans, pay extra for heated seats, etc.
  • jajko 2y ago
    If you have smaller kids, most taxi rides are completely illegal in any western country and very dangerous for kids. Ever saw a taxi with 2 spare child seats or at least boosters? They are required by law for very good reasons, and those reasons are kids dying or ending up crippled even in relatively mild crashes. That's just one tiny example out of sea of examples.
    • resolutebat 2y ago
      In many countries, taxis are often specifically exempted from child seat mandates. Doesn't make them any safer, but it's not necessarily illegal.
    • xandrius 2y ago
      A quick search online shows that your statement is misinformation, taxis can be exempted in many "western" countries. Before making such bold claims, you've got to know a little tiny bit of the topic or at least look it up to make sure.
    • asoneth 2y ago
      I've taken taxis with infants and small children several dozen times. It doesn't take me more than about twenty seconds to pop the car seat out of the stroller and latch it into the back seat of a taxi, for slightly older kids we have a few lightweight folding booster seats, and personally I've found that a car seat vest is particularly handy and lightweight.
  • paganel 2y ago
    How do you make sure there isn’t human semen or worse on the seats on which you and your children will sit? At least with taxis driven by humans you knew that there was someone making sure that won’t happen that often, but with driverless taxis all bets are off.
    • mavhc 2y ago
      Do you think that Waymo doesn't have cameras inside the car?
    • saagarjha 2y ago
      Waymos have been far cleaner than the Ubers I've ridden in. I think they are cleaned daily?
      • robertlagrant 2y ago
        I wonder how this affects the price. Is the price you're paying now the real price, or a subsidised price?
    • pyrale 2y ago
      Well, how will taxi-sex enjoyers make sure that no toddler vomited on the seat they intend to frolic on?
    • leoedin 2y ago
      Is that not just a general issue in public? Park bench? Back of the bus? There could be human semen everywhere! It's why I always insist on wrapping my kids in plastic before letting them leave the house.
    • nl 2y ago
      Surely they have cameras? I’d trust that a lot more than a taxi driver keeping their cab clean.
      • paganel 2y ago
        When has that stopped anyone?
  • JeremyNT 2y ago
    > Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis. In a world where waymo works as a taxi, it also works to deliver a human-drivable rental car right to your door (and send it on to the next customer when you're done with it). So now the short term car rental user experience should be dramatically better, even if the robotaxi isn't appropriate for all the tasks.
• charlie0 2y ago
  This will boil down to availability and price. Taxis are generally just too expensive to use often and also waits are too long. Of course, I'm comparing cost of frequent taxis vs buying a used car.
  • bigfudge 2y ago
    The other problem is the economics flips over once you also have to own a car. The marginal cost of each trip goes down … but if waymo is good enough for 95% of the time the it might not be necessary any more.
    • charlie0 2y ago
      I personally don't think the price will ever drop low enough for it to make sense to most people to drop cars entirely. The US is notorious for being unwalkable, save for a few select areas. Working remotely helps a lot since there's no need to drive every day, but it's only a fraction of overall people who have this privilege. Still, I'm looking forward to seeing Waymo at my town. It would make a good DD and backup in case my car needs repairs, etc.
  • resolutebat 2y ago
    In a place like Singapore, where a taxi ride is $10 but a Corolla starts from $100,000, the equation will strongly favor robotaxis for everyone.
• bigfudge 2y ago
  I think you’re wrong about most of the scenarios on your list. And once the market is mature, I can imagine it would be great to be picked up in a minivan after a days cycling somewhere new and not on a loop route. Americans have become emotionally attached to cars because of what they enable them to do. That might take a while to die. But in Europe cars are more of a pita to own and run because we have less space. I don’t have any great love for mine. As soon as waymo gets here and is reasonably priced I’ll get rid of my car.
  • codexb 2y ago
    Yeah, Americans just have more space, and America is just far larger, and Americans often do relatively long road trips to places where other modes of transportation are not possible or prohibitively expensive. I don't think that is ever going to die, nor should it.
• seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  I used to live in China where taxi usage was much more ubiquitous, and…you really live to live in a world where you aren’t expected to live in a car, be it with public transit (Europe, Japan) or public transit + lots of taxis (China) or tuktuks or whatever. But yes, your hobbies tend to be different and adapted, bikes, for example, get you places, and are not taken places, or you get them on the train which actually hits the trail head you want to use. You rent the kayak on site, and there is always a place to do that because lots of other people are in the same car-less boat as you are. You mention American at the end of your comment, but the rest of the world isn’t the same. Waymo doesn’t really have to limit itself to the states once they get the concept worked out.
  • nradov 2y ago
    Having to depend on crappy rented sports equipment sounds miserable. Maybe people in the rest of the world will tolerate that but I want no part of it. I'll continue buying my own personal large vehicles so that I can fill them with as much stuff as I want. When I'm out doing something, the car also serves as a reasonably secure private locker where I can store things without carrying them around.
    • dageshi 2y ago
      Sure, I don't imagine they care much about changing everyones opinions. What will happen is your kids and grand kids will reach an age where they would need to get a driving license but won't see the point because they've already been using robo-taxi's for 5 or so years already. Hell there's people who just use uber exclusively now.
      • nradov 2y ago
        Unlikely. One kid already has a drivers license and uses it frequently. I'll make sure the other kid gets one as soon as she's eligible. Not every young person spends all day hiding in their room, doom scrolling on social media. Some of them have to get to sports practice with bulky equipment in places that public transit and robo-taxis don't go.
• ar0 2y ago
  I don’t know… I think a very big reason why people don’t take taxis is because they are very expensive especially for longer rides. This seems like a thing robo taxis might change. If the driver goes away, they shouldn’t be much more expensive than e.g. car rentals.
• soco 2y ago
  All these examples are casual rides, while the context was about taking the taxi daily to work. Of course you can keep your car for the weekend drive to the mall, or to the slopes, or if you're a soccer mom, but most employed people will definitely save the daily commute. Expectations change in face of convenience.
• andrepd 2y ago
  That is because the choice is own car or taxi: the automobile is the *only* supported choice for mobility in much of the United States, to the detriment of any other mode of transport. People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.
• asoneth 2y ago
  My family has a couple cars but we still ride with our kids in taxis all the time, for example to the airport or into/out of the city. Even hauling bikes isn't insurmountable -- we've taken weeklong bike camping trips with friends and because biking in a big circle isn't as much fun we hire a bigger vehicle that can haul a dozen bikes to the starting point. > Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans). Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around. If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1. I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.
• golol 2y ago
  The only problem with Taxis is that they are expensive und possibly not available. Both of these issues are very much the kind of thing a robotaxi might fix.