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Waymo for Business
- xnx 1y agoCool and natural expansion of their ride services to match Uber for Business. 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.
- tialaramex 1y agoI guess by "legacy public transportation systems" you're thinking buses? 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.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> there could be room for the Waymo Driver driving a bus Remove the driver from the equation and modern buses are oversized, particularly in a region with rail transportation.
- laurencerowe 1y agoThat depends a lot on where you are. Even with BART running beneath, the 125 capacity articulated buses running every 2 minutes along Mission St in San Francisco are pretty packed at rush hour. 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.
- asdff 1y agoGet the perfect storm of just three wheelchair users and your standard bus is no longer so oversized seeming.
- xnx 1y agoThe term hasn't caught on widely, but "vansit" is a term or the midpoint between individual taxis and fixed-route oversized (most of the time) buses: https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/future-transit.html https://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/future-transit.html
- znkynz 1y agoFilling the roads with single person occupancy vehicles is not a replacement for "legacy public transportation".
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- signatoremo 1y agoGP said upgrading, not replacement. Bus or train currently can’t do last mile. Without a viable option people may opt for cars instead of bus or train. This will help, not replace, public transportation. It may make bus/train more popular.
- asdff 1y agoA 5000lb car to move a <200lb person is a terrible last mile option. There has never been a better time for last mile options than today. On the train I see all sorts of bikes, ebikes, escooters, and skateboards being used.
- xnx 1y agoElectric microtransit is awesome in the right situation: able bodied, acceptable weather, minimal cargo, traveling solo, secure vehicle storage at destination. Waymo vehicles will be an excellent tool in the toolkit for moving people safely, efficiently, and affordably.
- pastage 1y agoEverything that's easy to reach on a bicycle is also easy to reach on a mobility scooter, see Netherlands
- asdff 1y agoThat right situation describes the vast majority of peoples trips. Not many disabled people hauling a cord of wood through a blizzard very often. Most peoples trips by far are their single occupant commute to and from work.
- sfblah 1y agoTo me the real challenge is just getting local communities to allow Waymo. I live in Oakland and am not holding my breath.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> the real challenge is just getting local communities to allow Waymo 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- xnx 1y agoThe service is so good that citizens will ask for it and will be upset if a neighboring city has it, but they don't.
- darkamaul 1y agoJust read the blog post but I’m not clear on what's actually being launched here. As an org, why would I 'subscribe' today, what do I concretely get (coverage, pricing, SLAs, etc.) vs. just signing up for a future interest list?
- Workaccount2 1y agoYou can bulk purchase daily transportation for your employees, so they can work on their commute too. How exciting.
- gruez 1y agoI never heard of companies doing this. The most I've heard of is some sort of shuttle bus service, and even then there's no real expectation that you'll work on the ride there. Taxi-style transport is only for exceptional circumstances (eg. you worked late), or you're on some sort of business trip.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoIt's a reasonably common perk for tech companies in my experience. Often with limitations on the allowed endpoints and maximum daily cost, but routine use is still expected.
- jdlshore 1y agoThey’re announcing that they’re building an offering that suits business needs (provide vouchers to employees, track spending, etc.) and giving businesses the opportunity to sign up to be notified when it’s available. Pretty straightforward stuff.
- kevinsundar 1y agoIt's common for events / conferences / businesses to provide Lyft and Uber codes for some percentage off a ride or even a free ride to or from the location. This is effectively that but for Waymo.
- ugh123 1y ago
- ElijahLynn 1y agoThis is really exciting news! I think many tech companies would be interested in this service as it's a huge perk if you make your people commute into work. 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!
- barbazoo 1y ago> 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. 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?
- LordDragonfang 1y agoPresumably that part of the drive would happen before rush hour, so it would be faster. 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).
- JambalayaJimbo 1y agoPlenty of workplaces reimburse for ubers right now
- esafak 1y agoI hope they'll support car pooling, and bigger vehicles for the same.
- Liwink 1y agoThe next generation vehicle is much bigger https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo-driver https://waymo.com/blog/2024/08/meet-the-6th-generation-waymo...
- jeffbee 1y agoThat doesn't seem to say anything about the seating capacity?
- xnx 1y agoA more comfortable 5 seat arrangement with easier entry than the Jaguar: https://waymo.com/media-resources/#:~:text=Side%20view%20of%20the%20interior%20of%20Waymo%E2%80%99s%20rider%2Dfirst%20autonomous%20vehicle%20platform https://waymo.com/media-resources/#:~:text=Side%20view%20of%...
- esafak 1y agoIs that not the current generation, with four passengers? https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059053 https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059053
- izabera 1y agomaybe some car pool services for the most frequent routes could run at regular intervals. there could even be some predefined stops to efficiently batch many people getting on and off the car pool at once
- lovich 1y agoYou could even have special lanes dedicated to them so you could move people even more efficiently
- andrewmcwatters 1y agoHope it's better than Uber for Business. I signed up my company for Uber for Business and everything about their pipeline was broken for corporate accounts. They still send me regular reports for an account that I can't use because I can't log into it. 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.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoAw man, when I saw this I thought "oh, finally, trucking!" But no, it's just bulk taxi ride purchasing.
- rpcope1 1y agoTrucking is probably going to be one of the things that's harder to automate, and given the way things are going we best hope they don't given the absolute bloodbath it would create for labor (trucking is one of the most common professions in the US). I would wager that would lead to unrest in a way we've not seen in a long time.
- vineyardmike 1y agoWe have self driving trucks in the United States today. They operate on public roads, today. (Eg by Aurora) Most people assumed that self driving trucks are easier to automate since they just do highway driving with limited turns.
- dabeeeenster 1y ago“Meet Sustainability Goals: Waymo’s fully electric fleet helps organizations advance their sustainability targets” 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.
- asdff 1y agoEspecially when I'm guessing a lot of these "urban tech worker" commutes are mostly on surface streets or congested highways barely moving any faster. In my experience cycling to work I am actually faster on the bike than when I take the car. This is mostly due to filtering to the front of the intersection effectively eliminating any and all effects of rush hour traffic. Another huge factor is I can also park the bike directly in front of the door to the building, no having to walk from a designated parking or drop off zone.
- cortesoft 1y agoI would be 90% sweat if I biked to work. Would need a shower and change
- vineyardmike 1y agoWhile I agree that it’s kinda unpleasant to get all sweaty before work, many larger corporations have offices (usually with gyms) have locker rooms and showers to support bikers. While I’m able to take transit, many of my coworkers do bike+shower at the office for commuting.
- mosura 1y agoIs all that showering better or worse for the environment than using more appropriate transport in the first place?
- asdff 1y agoThe bike is in fact the more appropriate transport for moving a 200lb person than a 5000lb vehicle. Literally 95% of the energy being consumed is just to move the damned vehicle around, not to do anything productive with it.
- game_the0ry 1y agoYou know what would help global sustainability and global warming? Let people work remote from home so they don't waste time and energy commuting into the office.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jasonjmcghee 1y agoI hear they do way mo for your business than the other guys.
- mmoustafa 1y agoWhy are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road now that they have a working system? Is Waymo afraid of flooding the supply and crashing prices? Are they too expensive to build/maintain to justify a lower price point? What is going on, if you have PMF the logical next step is scale.
- davorak 1y ago> Why are they not hyper-focused on scaling the number of vehicles on the road 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.
- jowday 1y agoFrom someone that worked in the industry ~6 years ago, it's clearly going well for them - frankly, they're expanding and scaling way faster than I would have thought possible in 2019. They've got something like 6 cities running right now and what, 3-4 more announced? 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.
- daemonologist 1y agoI suspect Waymo has purchased all available Jaguar i-Paces (~= every Jaguar i-Pace?), which are no longer in production, and was planning on rolling out their purpose-built Zeekr vehicles to scale further. The 100% tariff on Chinese EVs introduced in 2024 probably made this plan financially questionable, leaving them without a supply of new vehicles. Late last year Waymo announced a partnership with Hyundai to buy a version of the Ioniq 5 assembled in the US which might've been motivated by this problem. The Zeekr vehicle was announced in 2021: https://waymo.com/blog/2021/12/expanding-our-waymo-one-fleet-with 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-biden-tariff-chinese-made-electric-vehicles https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/may/14/joe... ; https://www.reuters.com/business/us-locks-steep-china-tariff-hikes-many-start-sept-27-2024-09-13/ 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-partnership/ 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.