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Waymo robotaxis are now giving rides on freeways in LA, SF and Phoenix

341 points by nharada 11mo ago

NullHypothesist 11mo ago
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
- NullHypothesist 11mo ago
  Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?
- terminalshort 11mo ago
  Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
  - jordanb 11mo ago
    There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
    - xnx 11mo ago
      Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.
      - razingeden 11mo ago
        they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed: construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around. the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver. it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but- i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire. it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
        jordanb 11mo ago
        > sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident. The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
    - bluGill 11mo ago
      Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading). Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - repsilat 11mo ago
    "Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
    - andy99 11mo ago
      Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
  - QuadmasterXLII 11mo ago
    It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing. Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.” And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
    - bluGill 11mo ago
      The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
    - terminalshort 11mo ago
      It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.
  - CPLX 11mo ago
    I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
- 0_____0 11mo ago
  Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving. The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  > Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
  - notatoad 11mo ago
    the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
  - xnx 11mo ago
    Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day. On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
    - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
      Those constraints apply to humans too. So it seems likely that: - it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets - it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
      - fragmede 11mo ago
        to wit, http://comma.ai http://comma.ai has the freeway part solved, if you can get your hands on one.
- lumens 11mo ago
  Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
  - eloncuck 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - lumens 11mo ago
      Truly curious - have you tried it recently?
      - eloncuck 11mo ago
        Daily. I'm still unable to leave my culdesac without phantom leaves causing phantom braking. There was a time when I believed in the hype, I'm less skeptical than most. But the evidence now is incontrovertible.
        lumens 11mo ago
        I assume this is not a HW4 vehicle? I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either). That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
        eloncuck 11mo ago
        2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
        11mo ago
- sjducb 11mo ago
  Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph. The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system. Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
- kappi 11mo ago
  This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
- ddp26 11mo ago
  I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights. I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
  - toast0 11mo ago
    When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed. So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
  - philistine 11mo ago
    If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
- dlsfjke 11mo ago
  Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
- creer 11mo ago
  Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
- dekhn 11mo ago
  This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway-south-sf-rescue-13807046.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
  - asdff 11mo ago
    There's videos of waymos absolutely decking delivery robots
    - TulliusCicero 11mo ago
      Robot on robot violence.
- svat 11mo ago
  The article has a couple of quotes from Waymo leads on the topic: > “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said and > While many assume freeway driving is easier, it comes with its own set of challenges, principal software engineer Pierre Kreitmann said in a recent briefing. He noted that critical events happen less often on freeways, which means there are fewer opportunities to expose Waymo’s self-driving system to rare scenarios and prove how the system performs when it really matters. Both point to freeway driving being easier to do well, but harder to be sure is being done well.
bronco21016 11mo ago
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford. What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment. Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph. I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
- huevosabio 11mo ago
  In my experience, Waymo's driving style is more comfortable than most humans.
- Workaccount2 11mo ago
  I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo. You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
- rubicon33 11mo ago
  Honestly you need to try Waymo. It’s in a league of its own.
  - bronco21016 11mo ago
    I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
s1mon 11mo ago
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
- tintor 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - embedding-shape 11mo ago
    Indeed, and I'm guessing the Waymos have forward facing cameras + know their own speed? Feels like a natural jump to begin automatically reporting cars that are speeding past them to the police, with a camera snapshot of the plate, with everything else censored.
  - dogman144 11mo ago
    Why is that the problem for above the legal speed limit drivers? A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic. The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around. After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech? Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
    - testdummy13 11mo ago
      As long as they don't sit in the passing lane, I don't see how a fleet of vehicles moving at a consistent speed and not driving erratically will have any more negative impact on traffic than a human driver. Like other's have mentioned, it might actually improve traffic as you don't have people speeding up to get close to a person and then quickly slowing down, causing "phantom" traffic jams. Also, if the Waymos are following the laws, and that causes problems... then maybe those laws should be changed? Especially if most drivers already don't follow the laws.
m0llusk 11mo ago
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
- tanseydavid 11mo ago
  >> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here. I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
xnx 11mo ago
The gap between Waymo's service and Tesla's public beta test keeps getting larger.
- smoovb 11mo ago
  While I'm not sure that is true, it's fun to watch the bets that were made, unfold. And who's going to take spot #3?
  - xnx 11mo ago
    Tesla would be lucky if it's the "Pepsi" of self-driving. Cola market share: Coke: 69% Pepsi: 27% 3rd: ???
ChrisArchitect 11mo ago
Official post: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/taking-riders-further-safely-with-freeways https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/taking-riders-further-safely-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905)
- beastman82 11mo ago
  I will never understand blog spam. post the source luke!
dfee 11mo ago
I want to see the Waymo's go up to Skyline. Can they handle the windy roads?
- fnord77 11mo ago
  I rode one through the Presidio which has some windy roads. It didn't have problems.
- toast0 11mo ago
  They should be fine in the wind, they're not driving boxtrucks. :P
- asdff 11mo ago
  No, my hilly twisty neighborhood is geolocked from the service.
greesil 11mo ago
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
- brokencode 11mo ago
  Waymo continues to improve every year, but dumb drivers never will.
  - izzydata 11mo ago
    It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too. Or public transit on a track.
    - jeffbee 11mo ago
      American drivers specifically can be improved. Every other country stands as an existence proof of that.
      - some_random 11mo ago
        You clearly haven't been to very many countries if you think American drivers are the worst out there.
        jeffbee 11mo ago
        I don't need to travel to learn this: https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/graph_americas_road_fatalities.jpg https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
mmmlinux 11mo ago
I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
- prismatix 11mo ago
  I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo. I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.). I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
  - Swizec 11mo ago
    > I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that. Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too. For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
    - astrange 11mo ago
      I did have one drive straight through a big pothole in LA once, and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes. But neither of those are very surprising. Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.
world2vec 11mo ago
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s
- smoovb 11mo ago
  If it comes to pass that traffic jams are in large part due to poor human choices, that will bode poorly for the general populace to continue to be allowed to drive. Flying used to be like this - my grandpa had 3 airplanes, used one to fly a calf back to his farm. But flying got regulated till it's quite rare to meet a casual pilot with his own plane.
paganel 11mo ago
No cats on freeways, so they’re safe in that regard. Any word back from Alphabet on the cat their machines killed in SF?
NooneAtAll3 11mo ago
does anyone know statistics on computer-controlled cars' safety? I can guess "safer than humans most likely", but by how much? it seems like these robotaxis have been around long enough to have conclusions now
- brunoTbear 11mo ago
  https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-for-vru https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-fo...
next_xibalba 11mo ago
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality. I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
- boulos 11mo ago
  Sorry about that. Please file in-app feedback (now under Help > Leave Feedback) any time you experience something like that. There's a dedicated "Car Condition" tag.
anthem2025 11mo ago
[dead]
vasusen 11mo ago
I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph. It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
- whimsicalism 11mo ago
  high on what?
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - junon 11mo ago
    Does it matter? Can't think of a single substance that's safe for driving a car.
    - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
      Amphetamines certainly
    - whimsicalism 11mo ago
      antidepressants?
  - iammattmurphy 11mo ago
    Speed?
  - asadm 11mo ago
    mj likely? which should be illegal.
    - GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
      is there any place on earth where it's not expressly illegal to be under the influence of cannabis while operating a motor vehicle?
robocat 11mo ago
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available. Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
qnleigh 11mo ago
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term? Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
- rrr_oh_man 11mo ago
  Convenience beats everything (in capitalism)
- alain94040 11mo ago
  To each their own. If you value human interaction, continue to book rides with humans.
- modeless 11mo ago
  I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
- maxwellg 11mo ago
  I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
- MatekCopatek 11mo ago
  Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements. So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
rconti 11mo ago
Only ridden Waymo twice but I've been much happier with them than the average Uber driver over the past few years. I keep seeing them around my home in Menlo Park (Redwood City), but they're still in testing phase and not available for booking yet.
- codemac 11mo ago
  As of this morning, they should be. My app sent me a notification today.
  - rconti 11mo ago
    Aha, right you are! I wasn't logged in since I recently got a new phone.
  - johnneville 11mo ago
    the service area still stops at Burlingame for me without peninsula access yet
modeless 11mo ago
Nice, there's already a button in the app to get on the waitlist for freeways. I'm curious to see how much it would cost to commute with Waymo.
t1234s 11mo ago
Can Waymo scale up its fleet fast enough to match Tesla?
- ra7 11mo ago
  Can Tesla make its software autonomous enough to match Waymo?
  - roman_soldier 11mo ago
    Given Waymo are just now able to go on the highway which Tesla's have been doing for years they are already way ahead. Waymo won't exist this time next year they can't compete on scaling and price.
    - inkysigma 11mo ago
      If the standard for "going on the highway" is whatever Tesla is doing, then Waymo was able to go on highways in 2010 under the Chaffeur project. It turns out though that the reliability of actually being driverless is a pretty big gap and so no Tesla is not able to go the highway yet, at least not in the same sense.
    - ra7 11mo ago
      Tesla can’t go on highway (or anywhere) without a safety driver or a safety monitor in the passenger seat after nearly a decade of development. Not sure I’d call that “way ahead”.
    - RivieraKid 11mo ago
      Waymo have been driving on highways 15 years ago in supervised mode. And 1 or 2 years ago unsupervised.
- TulliusCicero 11mo ago
  Tesla doesn't have an actual robotaxi fleet at all yet, they're still in the testing phase with safety drivers/monitors.
cess11 11mo ago
It'll be interesting to follow how these machines will be exploited. I'm waiting for the first robotaxi mediated bombing or similar attack.
zkmon 11mo ago
Are they fully self-contained or they need to talk back to internet during the ride?
- brokensegue 11mo ago
  i don't know the answer but i'm curious why you want to know
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
- mindstorms6 11mo ago
  Driving all happens locally in the onboard computer on the Waymo. The car does maintain internet connectivity - but generally it's used for non-driving scenarios. (traffic info, next pickup drop off, entertainment systems, etc) There are cases where the onboard computer can't make a decision or needs "help" - in which case a support specialist is presented with options the onboard computer needs help deciding between. To be clear - the human is not driving it's more the car asks "Hey - there's something ahead and I am unsure if it's safe to proceed. Here's a video clip of the thing I'm seeing. Help?" Common cases might be an out of distribution thing like steam or an unidentifiable object in the road. In a "worst case" mode - a human can remotely give the onboard computer a directed path to follow - eg "draw points and follow this path" to get back to where it needs to be. Even then - the onboard computer is following the path but still maintaining it's constraints "eg don't hit pedestrians." You can read more about this here: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
  - zkmon 11mo ago
    That sounds good. Thank you.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
denimnerd42 11mo ago
This makes Dallas much more viable. I'm not sure if I'd have a usecase for waymo other than going to the airport. The other use cases such as going to work when my car is in the shop require the freeway too. Only non freeway thing I'd use it for otherwise is coming home from a neighborhood party or local restaurant/bar when I've been drinking and I don't really drink.
schainks 11mo ago
I am super impressed by Waymo now. Uber and Lyft are in huge trouble because the customer experience is just better in every way.
lvl155 11mo ago
US has way too many red tapes. As far as autonomous goes, I think Baidu will eventually win that race.
yowayb 11mo ago
I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.
neom 11mo ago
I read that Waymo has cost somewhere between 30 billion and 40 billion to bring to this point. Seems like an incredibly small amount of money considering what it will become. https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/waymo-gets-another-5-6bn-2024-10/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/waymo-gets-a... https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-tesla-waymos-radically-different-robotaxi-approaches-will-shape-industry-2025-08-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-te...
- NewJazz 11mo ago
  The whole "alphabet" thing was basically "we have loads of cash -- instead of stock buybacks, let's try to generate new sources of revenue". Take that number you have, then consider all of Google's failed projects and consider the total roi.
AndrewKemendo 11mo ago
So do HN users consider Waymo AI?
- zamadatix 11mo ago
  Depends which definition of "AI". The latest hype around generative AI or progress towards AGI the no. The more traditional applied machine learning type yes.
cleandreams 11mo ago
I'm amazed no one brings up the obvious: the need for reactions that are reliable at high speed. There is no way I will trust my tuckus to a freeway driving Waymo for a couple of years.
- fred_is_fred 11mo ago
  I understand the sentiment- really, but I am not sure that most human drivers have reliable reactions at high-speed either.
fred_is_fred 11mo ago
Have any of these companies made progress that would bring them to cities that get snow? I assume that's what is locking out Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, Denver, etc.
ookblah 11mo ago
another subjective data point, took waymo multiple times in SF and also lyft when waymo was taking too long. honestly, waymo was better in every single way and it wasn't even close. the only comparison was "maybe" taking a black XL from the airport. in no particular order, my problems w/ lyft: 1) driver trying to talk to you when you just want some quiet time 2) unclean/smelly car, have no idea if it's some econobox or actually decent 3) sometimes questionable driving, talking on the phone or talking to you or watching some youtube video or using their phone trying to grab the next fare waymo i just get in, it takes me where i need to go and i get out, no fuss. maybe i'll eat my words if i get into some catastrophic situation, but honestly i'll take that over the "feeling" i get when i step into current ride shares. people don't drink starbucks because it's the best coffee, they do it because it's consistent for the most part and that's what i want. i don't want to roll the damn dice everytime i call for a car.
xnx 11mo ago
Just shared clip from Waymo of it navigating very dangerous situations on the highway: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1988672463761485882 https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1988672463761485882

341 points by nharada 11mo ago

This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.

NullHypothesist 11mo ago
Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?
terminalshort 11mo ago
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
- jordanb 11mo ago
  There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
  - xnx 11mo ago
    Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.
    - razingeden 11mo ago
      they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed: construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around. the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver. it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but- i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire. it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
      - jordanb 11mo ago
        > sits there confused for awhile before it goes away. Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident. The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading). Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- repsilat 11mo ago
  "Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
  - andy99 11mo ago
    Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
- QuadmasterXLII 11mo ago
  It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing. Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.” And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
  - bluGill 11mo ago
    The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
  - terminalshort 11mo ago
    It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.
- CPLX 11mo ago
  I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
0_____0 11mo ago
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving. The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
embedding-shape 11mo ago
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
- notatoad 11mo ago
  the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
- xnx 11mo ago
  Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day. On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
  - bryanlarsen 11mo ago
    Those constraints apply to humans too. So it seems likely that: - it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets - it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
    - fragmede 11mo ago
      to wit, http://comma.ai http://comma.ai has the freeway part solved, if you can get your hands on one.
lumens 11mo ago
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
- eloncuck 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - lumens 11mo ago
    Truly curious - have you tried it recently?
    - eloncuck 11mo ago
      Daily. I'm still unable to leave my culdesac without phantom leaves causing phantom braking. There was a time when I believed in the hype, I'm less skeptical than most. But the evidence now is incontrovertible.
      - lumens 11mo ago
        I assume this is not a HW4 vehicle? I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either). That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
        eloncuck 11mo ago
        2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
        11mo ago
sjducb 11mo ago
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph. The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system. Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
kappi 11mo ago
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
ddp26 11mo ago
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights. I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
- toast0 11mo ago
  When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed. So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
- philistine 11mo ago
  If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
dlsfjke 11mo ago
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
creer 11mo ago
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
dekhn 11mo ago
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway-south-sf-rescue-13807046.php https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
- asdff 11mo ago
  There's videos of waymos absolutely decking delivery robots
  - TulliusCicero 11mo ago
    Robot on robot violence.
svat 11mo ago
The article has a couple of quotes from Waymo leads on the topic: > “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said and > While many assume freeway driving is easier, it comes with its own set of challenges, principal software engineer Pierre Kreitmann said in a recent briefing. He noted that critical events happen less often on freeways, which means there are fewer opportunities to expose Waymo’s self-driving system to rare scenarios and prove how the system performs when it really matters. Both point to freeway driving being easier to do well, but harder to be sure is being done well.

bronco21016 11mo ago

I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford. What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment. Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph. I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.

huevosabio 11mo ago
In my experience, Waymo's driving style is more comfortable than most humans.
Workaccount2 11mo ago
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo. You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
rubicon33 11mo ago
Honestly you need to try Waymo. It’s in a league of its own.
- bronco21016 11mo ago
  I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.

s1mon 11mo ago

How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.

tintor 11mo ago
[flagged]
- embedding-shape 11mo ago
  Indeed, and I'm guessing the Waymos have forward facing cameras + know their own speed? Feels like a natural jump to begin automatically reporting cars that are speeding past them to the police, with a camera snapshot of the plate, with everything else censored.
- dogman144 11mo ago
  Why is that the problem for above the legal speed limit drivers? A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic. The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around. After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech? Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
  - testdummy13 11mo ago
    As long as they don't sit in the passing lane, I don't see how a fleet of vehicles moving at a consistent speed and not driving erratically will have any more negative impact on traffic than a human driver. Like other's have mentioned, it might actually improve traffic as you don't have people speeding up to get close to a person and then quickly slowing down, causing "phantom" traffic jams. Also, if the Waymos are following the laws, and that causes problems... then maybe those laws should be changed? Especially if most drivers already don't follow the laws.

m0llusk 11mo ago

All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.

tanseydavid 11mo ago
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here. I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.

xnx 11mo ago

The gap between Waymo's service and Tesla's public beta test keeps getting larger.

smoovb 11mo ago
While I'm not sure that is true, it's fun to watch the bets that were made, unfold. And who's going to take spot #3?
- xnx 11mo ago
  Tesla would be lucky if it's the "Pepsi" of self-driving. Cola market share: Coke: 69% Pepsi: 27% 3rd: ???

ChrisArchitect 11mo ago

Official post: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/taking-riders-further-safely-with-freeways https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/taking-riders-further-safely-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905)

beastman82 11mo ago
I will never understand blog spam. post the source luke!

dfee 11mo ago

I want to see the Waymo's go up to Skyline. Can they handle the windy roads?

fnord77 11mo ago
I rode one through the Presidio which has some windy roads. It didn't have problems.
toast0 11mo ago
They should be fine in the wind, they're not driving boxtrucks. :P
asdff 11mo ago
No, my hilly twisty neighborhood is geolocked from the service.

greesil 11mo ago

I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.

brokencode 11mo ago
Waymo continues to improve every year, but dumb drivers never will.
- izzydata 11mo ago
  It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too. Or public transit on a track.
  - jeffbee 11mo ago
    American drivers specifically can be improved. Every other country stands as an existence proof of that.
    - some_random 11mo ago
      You clearly haven't been to very many countries if you think American drivers are the worst out there.
      - jeffbee 11mo ago
        I don't need to travel to learn this: https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/graph_americas_road_fatalities.jpg https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...

mmmlinux 11mo ago

I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.

prismatix 11mo ago
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo. I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.). I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
- Swizec 11mo ago
  > I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that. Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too. For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
  - astrange 11mo ago
    I did have one drive straight through a big pothole in LA once, and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes. But neither of those are very surprising. Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.

world2vec 11mo ago

An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s

smoovb 11mo ago
If it comes to pass that traffic jams are in large part due to poor human choices, that will bode poorly for the general populace to continue to be allowed to drive. Flying used to be like this - my grandpa had 3 airplanes, used one to fly a calf back to his farm. But flying got regulated till it's quite rare to meet a casual pilot with his own plane.

paganel 11mo ago

No cats on freeways, so they’re safe in that regard. Any word back from Alphabet on the cat their machines killed in SF?

NooneAtAll3 11mo ago

does anyone know statistics on computer-controlled cars' safety? I can guess "safer than humans most likely", but by how much? it seems like these robotaxis have been around long enough to have conclusions now

brunoTbear 11mo ago
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-for-vru https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-fo...

next_xibalba 11mo ago

Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality. I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.

boulos 11mo ago
Sorry about that. Please file in-app feedback (now under Help > Leave Feedback) any time you experience something like that. There's a dedicated "Car Condition" tag.

anthem2025 11mo ago

[dead]

vasusen 11mo ago

I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph. It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.

whimsicalism 11mo ago
high on what?
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- junon 11mo ago
  Does it matter? Can't think of a single substance that's safe for driving a car.
  - kjkjadksj 11mo ago
    Amphetamines certainly
  - whimsicalism 11mo ago
    antidepressants?
- iammattmurphy 11mo ago
  Speed?
- asadm 11mo ago
  mj likely? which should be illegal.
  - GuinansEyebrows 11mo ago
    is there any place on earth where it's not expressly illegal to be under the influence of cannabis while operating a motor vehicle?

robocat 11mo ago

Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available. Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.

qnleigh 11mo ago

A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term? Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.

rrr_oh_man 11mo ago
Convenience beats everything (in capitalism)
alain94040 11mo ago
To each their own. If you value human interaction, continue to book rides with humans.
modeless 11mo ago
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
maxwellg 11mo ago
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
MatekCopatek 11mo ago
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements. So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.

rconti 11mo ago

Only ridden Waymo twice but I've been much happier with them than the average Uber driver over the past few years. I keep seeing them around my home in Menlo Park (Redwood City), but they're still in testing phase and not available for booking yet.

codemac 11mo ago
As of this morning, they should be. My app sent me a notification today.
- rconti 11mo ago
  Aha, right you are! I wasn't logged in since I recently got a new phone.
- johnneville 11mo ago
  the service area still stops at Burlingame for me without peninsula access yet

modeless 11mo ago

Nice, there's already a button in the app to get on the waitlist for freeways. I'm curious to see how much it would cost to commute with Waymo.

t1234s 11mo ago

Can Waymo scale up its fleet fast enough to match Tesla?

ra7 11mo ago
Can Tesla make its software autonomous enough to match Waymo?
- roman_soldier 11mo ago
  Given Waymo are just now able to go on the highway which Tesla's have been doing for years they are already way ahead. Waymo won't exist this time next year they can't compete on scaling and price.
  - inkysigma 11mo ago
    If the standard for "going on the highway" is whatever Tesla is doing, then Waymo was able to go on highways in 2010 under the Chaffeur project. It turns out though that the reliability of actually being driverless is a pretty big gap and so no Tesla is not able to go the highway yet, at least not in the same sense.
  - ra7 11mo ago
    Tesla can’t go on highway (or anywhere) without a safety driver or a safety monitor in the passenger seat after nearly a decade of development. Not sure I’d call that “way ahead”.
  - RivieraKid 11mo ago
    Waymo have been driving on highways 15 years ago in supervised mode. And 1 or 2 years ago unsupervised.
TulliusCicero 11mo ago
Tesla doesn't have an actual robotaxi fleet at all yet, they're still in the testing phase with safety drivers/monitors.

cess11 11mo ago

It'll be interesting to follow how these machines will be exploited. I'm waiting for the first robotaxi mediated bombing or similar attack.

zkmon 11mo ago

Are they fully self-contained or they need to talk back to internet during the ride?

brokensegue 11mo ago
i don't know the answer but i'm curious why you want to know
- deleted 11mo ago
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mindstorms6 11mo ago
Driving all happens locally in the onboard computer on the Waymo. The car does maintain internet connectivity - but generally it's used for non-driving scenarios. (traffic info, next pickup drop off, entertainment systems, etc) There are cases where the onboard computer can't make a decision or needs "help" - in which case a support specialist is presented with options the onboard computer needs help deciding between. To be clear - the human is not driving it's more the car asks "Hey - there's something ahead and I am unsure if it's safe to proceed. Here's a video clip of the thing I'm seeing. Help?" Common cases might be an out of distribution thing like steam or an unidentifiable object in the road. In a "worst case" mode - a human can remotely give the onboard computer a directed path to follow - eg "draw points and follow this path" to get back to where it needs to be. Even then - the onboard computer is following the path but still maintaining it's constraints "eg don't hit pedestrians." You can read more about this here: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response
- zkmon 11mo ago
  That sounds good. Thank you.

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denimnerd42 11mo ago

This makes Dallas much more viable. I'm not sure if I'd have a usecase for waymo other than going to the airport. The other use cases such as going to work when my car is in the shop require the freeway too. Only non freeway thing I'd use it for otherwise is coming home from a neighborhood party or local restaurant/bar when I've been drinking and I don't really drink.

schainks 11mo ago

I am super impressed by Waymo now. Uber and Lyft are in huge trouble because the customer experience is just better in every way.

lvl155 11mo ago

US has way too many red tapes. As far as autonomous goes, I think Baidu will eventually win that race.

yowayb 11mo ago

I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.

neom 11mo ago

I read that Waymo has cost somewhere between 30 billion and 40 billion to bring to this point. Seems like an incredibly small amount of money considering what it will become. https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/waymo-gets-another-5-6bn-2024-10/ https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/waymo-gets-a... https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-tesla-waymos-radically-different-robotaxi-approaches-will-shape-industry-2025-08-28/ https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-te...

NewJazz 11mo ago
The whole "alphabet" thing was basically "we have loads of cash -- instead of stock buybacks, let's try to generate new sources of revenue". Take that number you have, then consider all of Google's failed projects and consider the total roi.

AndrewKemendo 11mo ago

So do HN users consider Waymo AI?

zamadatix 11mo ago
Depends which definition of "AI". The latest hype around generative AI or progress towards AGI the no. The more traditional applied machine learning type yes.

cleandreams 11mo ago

I'm amazed no one brings up the obvious: the need for reactions that are reliable at high speed. There is no way I will trust my tuckus to a freeway driving Waymo for a couple of years.

fred_is_fred 11mo ago
I understand the sentiment- really, but I am not sure that most human drivers have reliable reactions at high-speed either.

fred_is_fred 11mo ago

Have any of these companies made progress that would bring them to cities that get snow? I assume that's what is locking out Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, Denver, etc.

ookblah 11mo ago

another subjective data point, took waymo multiple times in SF and also lyft when waymo was taking too long. honestly, waymo was better in every single way and it wasn't even close. the only comparison was "maybe" taking a black XL from the airport. in no particular order, my problems w/ lyft: 1) driver trying to talk to you when you just want some quiet time 2) unclean/smelly car, have no idea if it's some econobox or actually decent 3) sometimes questionable driving, talking on the phone or talking to you or watching some youtube video or using their phone trying to grab the next fare waymo i just get in, it takes me where i need to go and i get out, no fuss. maybe i'll eat my words if i get into some catastrophic situation, but honestly i'll take that over the "feeling" i get when i step into current ride shares. people don't drink starbucks because it's the best coffee, they do it because it's consistent for the most part and that's what i want. i don't want to roll the damn dice everytime i call for a car.

xnx 11mo ago

Just shared clip from Waymo of it navigating very dangerous situations on the highway: https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1988672463761485882 https://x.com/dmitri_dolgov/status/1988672463761485882