7 ms·

I mix and match but I’ll take a Waymo if it’s <= $5 more for these reasons: 1. Literally zero variance. Every car is the same. Every driver is the same style.

• camel_gopher 1y ago
  I’m seeing more of them with trash. Last one I took had a rolled up bundle of used bandages.
  • bertil 1y ago
    Were you able to flag it to Waymo?
  • fnordpiglet 1y ago
    People are excited by driverless cars but it also means a car with no social barriers and no person who considers the cars condition important. For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. They’ll be cheap, but you’ll get what you pay for. Private driverless cars will be the premium alternative.
    • seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      Why do you assume the surveillance will go away as they become cheaper? The taxi company know who is in their car and they have access to interior cameras if something happens. In many respects, it is going to be even more difficult to take a dump in one and get away with it than if a human was driving it. They have your credit card number and visual evidence of what you did, they will just charge your card automatically for things like puking.
      • icelancer 1y ago
        Because if they ever become super popular, it will be prohibitively expensive to actually police all the surveillance. Likely to store / process it all. AI does an alright job summarizing videos today (Gemini Flash) but it has to get a lot better if they're going to actually police at scale.
        • csomar 1y ago
          The next rider will alert if something outrageous has happened.
          • squigz 1y ago
            No, most people would just move on and stop using the service. A very small % of users report issues.
            • gilfoy 1y ago
              Incentivize reporting with a discount, combine that with review of video to verify it’s not a false report. Maybe not scalable, but could work. Image recognition is getting better. I rarely have to get my receipt checked at Sam’s Club anymore now that their camera exit thing is in full swing.
        • mft_ 1y ago
          You think? Checking for significant differences between before and after images doesn’t even need AI. Have a triaging system, something like: image diff -> AI assessment -> human assessment -> car drives to human cleaner. In time you can streamline significantly.
        • lurking_swe 1y ago
          I think simple solutions exist. For example the waymo could just ask the rider at the beginning of the ride “Is your car smelly? Any trash in the car?” If they reply YES to any of those questions, then google keeps the recording of the previous ride for later review. Simple, no? If the car actually was dirty, give the person that said “car was dirty” a refund of 20% on their ride. Then charge the party that made the car dirty a few. If a person is found to consistently say cars are dirty when they are not, give them a warning and consider kicking them off the platform (abuse). Alternatively google can switch from recording the first minute of the ride to the last minute of the ride. In other words, only look at the “delta” to compare the car state. That would require a lot less video storage and less effort to review.
    • cyberax 1y ago
      > For now they’re well surveilled and a premium vehicle. Soon they will be filthy pods in a race to the bottom with all the charm of a public bathroom. So, like transit? I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle. And I'm 100% sure that there'll be an upmarket segment with slightly more expensive cars that are kept more clean than the rest.
      • morsch 1y ago
        That's what transit is like in your country? How unfortunate.
        • cyberax 1y ago
          Yep. That's the state of the US transit.
      • klabb3 1y ago
        > I will likely have my own personal self-driving vehicle. The self-driving car ”utopia” (or rather moderate improvement) very much hinges on the space savings on roadways and parking, to increase utilization, reduce congestion and allow dead space to be reclaimed. If people think like you (no value judgment, I suspect this might be the future norm), then you’ll see almost no change to the urban landscape as a whole. It’ll continue to be a one-flesh-body-per-2-tonne vehicle utilization, a ~5:1 provisioning of parking spaces, 25-50% of urban areas being roadways+parking, and a double-digit productivity loss from commuting and running simple errands. That leaves you with an individual comfort improvement (allowing you to be on your phone while in the car) for a premium price, and increased surveillance tech on personal vehicles. (And, to be fair, it can still be huge for drunk driving deaths, access for elderly & disabled, once costs come down). Overall, very mediocre imo. Controversial take: the US has painted itself into a corner, where by ignoring the well being of people in their own communities, they need so many workarounds to prevent space sharing between the ~2-3 social groups where intermingling means friction and fear. There are very real logistical challenges to a gated community segmentation of the physical world. This paints the resistance to public transit in a different light: it’s not so much about being public, but rather being shared with strangers, especially of different social cohorts. It also explains the sacred status of air travel which mainly has been left outside the debate: imo because of the higher socio-economic average clientele. Now that cost has come down and low-cost airlines like Spirit share the same airports, the friction has come there as well.
    • seydor 1y ago
      People adapt. Hopefully it will be more like elevators and less like public toilets. And then there will be cameras
      • eptcyka 1y ago
        In public spaces specifically, at least in Sweden, like train stations, the only difference between an elevator and a toilet is that one has to pay to enter the toilet.
        • roughly 1y ago
          > one has to pay to enter the toilet. I’m not sure what people were expecting when they implemented this policy. There’s plenty of places to pee in the world, a restroom is a request it happens in one particular place.
          • rangestransform 1y ago
            I would pay for restrooms if they were regularly cleaned and excluded homeless by virtue of their price
            • fnordpiglet 1y ago
              The challenge of excluding homeless from bathrooms is they still have to go to the bathroom. I’d rather them use a toilet than on the sidewalk. In SF they had self cleaning bathrooms that would cycle cleaning to ensure it was always sanitary and people couldn’t stay in the bathrooms (I.e., sleep in them). There often seems to be the idea that if you exclude homeless people from services and accommodation they disappear. They don’t - their impacts on the city become worse.
      • hanspeter 1y ago
        With per-per-minute sharing cars having existed in many cities in Europe 10+ years, this concept is not new. People will adapt to the level of cleanliness in the car the get into, so it's a slippery slope. Users will behave respectfully in the early days (maybe because they are first-movers), and then it deteriorates long term. My own experience is that people used to not even leave an empty soda bottle in the cars and now I see remains from take-out in the floor, coffee cups, chewing gum left around the dashboard etc. You can report this to the car service, but they won't be able to take any meaningful action on it.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    did you report it? Ideally the person that left the bandages in the car would get flagged. They get flagged a few more times for littering in the car they get banned. Yes, you don't know if it was the previous person, previous previous, etc but if they are a repeat litterer it won't take long to figure out who it is and warn them they'll lose their privilege to use the service if they continue to abuse it.
• matthewdgreen 1y ago
  You’re experiencing the early pre-enshittified product. Ubers used to be cheap and excellent too, but then they started optimizing for profit. I assume this will happen even faster for Waymo, just because tech firms have more experience now.
  • bertil 1y ago
    Which point would you expect to deteriorate?
    • flutas 1y ago
      not op but cleanliness would be my first expectation I've seen many reports of dirty waymos on reddit recently for example. second I'd assume they would start charging you for point 3, "loading delay fee" when you take too long to load, after all that's missed profit from other rides. after that point 1 and 2, with you getting either a Jag (nice car), a Zeekr (unknown to me, Chinese company), or a Ioniq 5 (much cheaper feeling car than a Jag, with hard plastic everywhere). You want the jag? Expect to pay for it. So suddenly all cars aren't the same, and only some are comparable to Uber Black. To summarize: Point 4, followed by 3, followed by 2 and 1 (which imo are just one point). 5 I don't expect to change unless they have to start cost-cutting on compute and sensors, but I HIGHLY doubt that.
      • silvestrov 1y ago
        Wouldn't it be more likely they would charge for "leaving trash in car"? Shouldn't cost much to check car using cameras after each ride.
        • bertil 1y ago
          I would expect this to be triggered by the next passenger complaining, but both options are likely.
      • ratorx 1y ago
        Being pedantic, even if you have to pay for a type of car, you still have no variance to expectation when you know what you are getting. I think that point was more about the variance in driving, driver etc rather than car type. Re: enshittification in general. I think the incentives are better aligned for self-driving. Eg. charging people who create trash etc can also make the company money whilst improving overall experience. With non self-driving, you have to rely on user ratings etc to penalise a specific driver, which seems inherently more fuzzy. The company has conflicting goals of keeping enough drivers (drives costs down etc), whilst guaranteeing a certain experience. It is difficult to create a system for drivers to “improve” (eg. Clean their car) and for a company to directly encourage that, whereas it’s easier to just charge people who litter more etc in a fully automated system.
• digianarchist 1y ago
  6. No tip
  • malshe 1y ago
    For me this goes higher up in this list