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California DMV approves map increase in Waymo driverless operations
- eduction 11mo ago“Map increase?” Is that hackernewsish for “larger area”?
- pimlottc 11mo agoI understand editing for space but some of the edited titles lately have been really confusingly worded.
- Fricken 11mo agoIt's been a long time coming, but Waymo is doing it. Waymo is scaleable and on the march! They've been announcing plans to roll out in new cities every month or 2 all year, and by the end of 2026 they'll be testing or offering the public rides over 30 metropolitan areas. I'm most curious to see how they do in the winter city of Minneapolis over the next several months.
- dijipiji 11mo agoyeah - me too
- njarboe 11mo agoCompetition does encourage action. Glad Tesla started rolling out their robotaxies.
- epolanski 11mo agoThe dancing robots are going to drive them.
- ashdksnndck 11mo agoGood idea, robots don’t fall asleep.
- bitpush 11mo agoAre you suggesting that Waymo is responding to Tesla? My reading it Waymo was always on a schedule and Tesla wasn't a factor First slowly and then suddenly.
- hintklb 11mo agoTesla is not competition to Waymo. There are 10 other companies that are currently testing without a driver. Those are competition. Tesla so far is a gimmick of self-driving with a safety driver that takes over once in a while. That's where Waymo was more than 5 years ago.
- qwerpy 11mo agoThe recent version of FSD in my Tesla is pretty amazing. Press "Start FSD" when in my driveway, and 20 minutes later it arrives at my destination and parks, without any input from me the entire time. I was skeptical too about FSD for a while but I'm starting to believe. These days I pretty much only disengage it when I'm impatient that it's being too polite. Unsupervised isn't far off!
- nutjob2 11mo agoOne successful ride on one route is not dispositive
- njarboe 11mo agoI hope so. Similarly I only disengage when I want to go faster or forget to set the destination. Too bad the owners of FSD can't decide that they want unsupervised. In an earlier or different world that would be possible.
- hintklb 11mo agothe issue is that your Tesla cannot be "too far off" as you seem to indicate. it needs to be right absolutely every single time. One successful ride is easy. 10 successful rides is still easy. 100k successful rides without a serious incident? Way more difficult. And that's why those anecdotal reports over a couple ride mean absolutely nothing
- Mawr 11mo agoYou're describing the 99% problem—getting 99% there is relatively easy, but once you do, you find out that you have the remaining 99% of work left to do. This illusion is partially why Musk has been promising self-driving to be available at the end of $current_year+1 for years. It's cool your car can drive itself. Now do it again, but fall asleep at the wheel. What's that? You're not willing to? That's exactly the core of the issue—it's not sufficient for the car to be able to drive itself most of the time, it must do so safely every single time, no matter what.
- nutjob2 11mo agoUnless Waymo has started offering vaporware, Tesla is not the competition.
- SkyPuncher 11mo agoI took my first Waymo in SF this week. As a midwestern, freezing weather was my immediate first thought.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo agoWhoah, Waymo would be able to take one from Mountain View to Napa. (I get why Cupertino is excluded. But. Oof. Come on.)
- alooPotato 11mo agowhy?`
- NullHypothesist 11mo agoCupertino is in there, no?
- benatkin 11mo agoIt appears not to be. Here are the ones in Santa Clara County: - Milpitas - Mountain View - Palo Alto Santa - San Jose - Sunnyvale - Unincorporated Area (Lexington Hills area, overlapping Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties) I don't know why it says "Palo Alto Santa" Edit: I guess it's "Palo Alto Santa" to disambiguate between Palo Alto, which is in Santa Clara County, and East Palo Alto, which is in San Mateo County (BTW the westmost point of East Palo Alto is east of the westmost point of Palo Alto, but the eastmost point of East Palo Alto is not east of the eastmost point of Palo Alto).
- astrange 11mo agoIt looks like the map includes north of 280, so you can use it to go to Gamba Karaoke and Tea Era. And really, what else could you need from Cupertino?
- benatkin 11mo agoIt might be that you can start a trip in one of the cities, but you can travel out of the city to anywhere in the highlighted area.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- throwaway48476 11mo agoIt's disappointing that where I live is politically difficult and waymo won't come anytime soon.
- jonny_eh 11mo agoWhy not say where you are?
- rangestransform 11mo agoProbably one of the political interest group owned cities like nyc
- alooPotato 11mo agowhy is there an approved map? like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere. Why would one county be allowed waymos but not another. I get that they might not be approved in the high sierras but just make that a deny list not allow list. Or even just deny the specific conditions you're worried about (snow).
- throwaway48476 11mo agoI suspect it's limited by what the request was for. Waymo has to create the high res map before they can offer service.
- BoorishBears 11mo agoI think laypeople vastly overestimate how much the maps are a bottleneck compared to boring things like infrastructure to charge, people to clean the vehicles, integrating with local governments to allow things like disabling Pickup/Dropoff in certain areas at certain times, etc. Even with local partners that all takes a lot of time.
- alooPotato 11mo agoRight but what does that have to do with the DMV. Waymo should apply for certain weather conditions and then the DMV says yes or no, then they stay the hell out of the way. Let waymo operate whereever they want and expand however they see fit and whenever they feel ready. Like the DMV is actually checking Waymos map of a new area is good to go or not. Its just administrative burden.
- dragonwriter 11mo agoThere's an approved map because the approval process requires the manufacturer to specify both areas and conditions they are applying for, and documents supporting that the vehicle is ready to be operated autonomously in those areas and conditions (which doesn't just include technical readiness, but also administrative readiness in the form of things like a law enforcement interaction plan, etc.) > like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere. Because “everywhere” isn't a uniform domain (Waymo is kind of way out in one tail of the distribution in terms of both the geographical range and range of conditions they have applied for and been approved to operate in, other AV manufacturers are in much tinier zones, and narrow road/weather conditions.) And because for some AV manufacturers (if there is one that can demonstrate they don't need this, they'd probably have an easier lift getting broader approvals) part of readiness to deploy (or test) in an area is detailed, manufacturer specific mapping/surveying of the roads.
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoI'm so excited how much of Southern California is opened - Waymo LAX to SD after midnight (there's no trains or buses from 12 to 6)!!
- bob_theslob646 11mo agoHow do you get home if you do not have transit? What is the typical cost of a cab then?
- trillic 11mo ago$150-$200 if you book ahead.
- codethief 11mo agoJeez. How much is a Waymo gonna be?
- trillic 11mo agoI only do LAX if it’s cheaper/ faster than SAN. LAX is so much better connected in terms of direct flights because of the competition the cost/time is often worth it. I’d rather sit in a cab than get stuck in ATL/DTW/SLC.
- kylehotchkiss 11mo agoLAX is better for flights to Asia, I don’t want a layover in SF ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Rebelgecko 11mo agoI've never been in that boat but if you don't want an exorbitant Uber, it's probably cheapest to either get a hotel and take Amtrak in the morning or just rent a car. LA and SD are close enough that it often won't accrue any "one-way" fees
- 11mo ago
- pfooti 11mo agoLooking forward to the highway expansion next. I had to get from mountain view to san francisco yesterday, and waymo was _able_ to do this trip, it was going to take several hours and get routed up el camino real the whole way. Luckily I was standing very close to a caltrain station when I needed the ride, so i just caltrained, and then waymo'd from the SF station to where i needed to be.
- CamelCaseName 11mo agoHighway expansion is already here in many areas! Waymo has been laying the groundwork for this rapid rollout for so many years and it's amazing to see it all come together.
- smlacy 11mo agoWhat's the pricing like? Taking an Uber/Lyft all the way from Mountain View to SF is outrageously expensive, I presume Waymo is the same?
- astrange 11mo agoLyft from MV to SF is like $100 I think? It's definitely not enjoyable but for Bay Area prices it's not ruinously expensive. You /should/ be able to save by using shared rides, but in practice when I tried the driver was so mad they just dumped me on the side of the road and I had to call and get a refund. The new Caltrain schedule isn't half bad though, if it came twice as often on the weekends we'd be cooking.
- uranium 11mo agoWaymo's usually something like 50% more expensive than Lyft in SF, in my experience. But the drivers don't tailgate, have colds, listen to your conversation (AFAIK)...I'll generally opt for Waymo now if I have a choice. The biggest problem I have is that it's usually a longer wait due to the smaller fleet size, but if I'm planning ahead, I'll just book one for a given time, and that takes care of it.
- CaliforniaKarl 11mo ago
- HPMOR 11mo agoSo when will they be available for commercial rides? Can't wait to waymo from SF to Berkeley!
- arjie 11mo agoThe effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers. If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.
- BurningFrog 11mo agoMaybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...
- piva00 11mo agoAlso, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.
- astrange 11mo agoJapan Rail is public-private and many of the other train lines are fully private. "Public" is kind of an empty distinction here, Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses. But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc. (It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)
- 11mo ago
- epicureanideal 11mo agoI’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.
- freddie_mercury 11mo agoHow do you know it isn't already at that price? Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate. Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it. I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day. Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things. https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_per_revenue_mile_estimate/ https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p... Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter! And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
- tshaddox 11mo ago> Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car. > Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
- willio58 11mo agoI didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently. I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.
- bitpush 11mo agoCurious why didn't you try Waymo until then? Was it just that it never had a reason to, or was something holding you back? From my experience, lot of people actively seek out Waymo if it is available.
- willio58 11mo agoI don’t live in SF, or any place with Waymo. So I really just hadn’t downloaded the app yet
- poszlem 11mo agoNot saying this HAS to happen. But I remember when Ubers were clean, quiet, cheap too. I think you are just looking at a product before the enshittification, when they still have to pretend they care about your comfort.
- Rodeoclash 11mo agoIt will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.
- kfarr 11mo agoThis is super awesome but to set expectations it appears that Waymo is quite limited by fleet capacity in all of its current operating zones, so as a practical matter it may be months or years before it operates in all these areas. If you're interested in this stuff I highly recommend this podcast, not affiliated with it I genuinely think it's a great source to hear about the behind the scenes of fleet operations to meet demand: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/ https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/ (Edit) I prefer using the apple podcast app, here's a direct link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id1770549800 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id177...
- jeffbee 11mo agoTheir ground ops contractor Transdev has been hiring recently in Sacramento so if any new territory is coming soon, I expect it to be Sacramento.
- hackernewds 11mo agoThe bigger blocker isn't the technology or the fleet. It's commercial viability and Luddite and populist politicians.
- OGEnthusiast 11mo agoWaymo has so far been awesome, can't imagine choosing an Uber/Lyft over a Waymo when both are available options. I wonder how much they are bottlenecked by vehicle production though.
- Zigurd 11mo agoThere's a huge difference between a robot who accepts all rides, and a two sided market as in the ride hailing apps. Without the factor of drivers picking their rides, the relatively small Waymo fleet has an outsize impact. The whole fleet is available 24/7/365. I would bet that Waymos rule the night.
- Tade0 11mo agoThis gives me hope that once I'm too old to drive, this tech will reach my, very distant from the US west coast, corner of the world. And if not Waymo and its car, then perhaps autonomous buses. There's already a shortage of bus drivers in my city and it's not getting any smaller.
- siliconc0w 11mo agoDo the driving tests cover what you're supposed to do if you hit a Waymo or one hits you? I assume the cops are instructed just to ignore them?
- ElijahLynn 11mo agoWhat is the dark spot on the maps? Was that the current and then the less dark is the expansion?
- ra7 11mo agoCorrect.
- int0x29 11mo agoMy general experience with Waymos and safety is that while they are generally quite safe and communicative drivers (They have a pedestrian yeild indicator that should be required by law) they tend to create safety issues because people drive stupidly around them. A lot of SF drivers seem to see them, think I know better, and then proceed to do something dumb. I'm not really sure how to fix this problem. Also if any Waymo engineers are reading this please make the pedestrian yeild indicator icon visible on the front of the LIDAR. In narrow streets the front is much more visible to pedestrians than the sides as the LIDAR is pretty far back on the car.
- jmspring 11mo agoFirst used Waymo in Phoenix. It was a decent experience. The funny thing was watching it handle parallel parking. I mentioned it to the wife - self driving with parkinsons. This last weekend, we were in the city (San Francisco) and literally drove by a Waymo trying to park and the wife started laughing - "you are right".
- FireBeyond 11mo agoWhich is weird because the parallel park on my Audi is smoother and faster than me.
- bix6 11mo agoWas curious on the Zeekr RT. Interesting to see it’s owned by Geely. https://www.motortrend.com/news/waymo-zeekr-rt-autonomous-ev-robotaxi-windshield-wipers https://www.motortrend.com/news/waymo-zeekr-rt-autonomous-ev...
- __grob 11mo agoThis is so cool to see. Saw tons of Waymo in LA/Santa Monica area when I was there in October. Very excited to see them expand basically all through SoCal!
- 51Cards 11mo agoI rode in one of these in Phoenix in June, loved the experience! Had to go to a pharmacy so purposely picked one a half hour across the city so I could just watch the car perform. Felt like the future (though it did glitch once). Made a sudden turn off the road into a parking lot, did a lap of the outside of the parking lot, and exited back onto the same road to continue on. Must have thought something was blocking the road and made a detour around it? Other than that it seemed pretty flawless.
- janalsncm 11mo agoI believe that in 20 years there will be cities (probably not in America) where all cars are autonomous. There will be no red lights, no parking lots, less congestion, fewer accidents.
- Mawr 11mo ago> There will be no red lights, no parking lots, less congestion, fewer accidents. In 20 years? Here's a 7 year old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8 Also, you forgot to mention the silence, nearly zero cost infrastructure, nearly zero environmental impact, and immense population-wide health benefits—and therefore healthcare cost savings.
- tcdent 11mo agoThe map area for the Southern California service area is absolutely massive. Without traffic, at highway speeds, it would take you almost four hours to travel from the North end to the South end.
- retired_account 11mo agoPersonally, I can’t wait to be killed by a cold, uncaring robot. Let’s goooo
- redwood 11mo agoNo santa cruz eh?
- visioninmyblood 11mo agoThis means longer driving in highways. Not sure if this is safe. have been developing this tech for a long time and highway speeds are dangerous.
- mvkel 11mo agoThis is huge. Very curious how this affects wait times. If you're in SF and 10% of the fleet is in Marin, are you waiting longer?
- VanTheBrand 11mo agoI was skeptical about Waymo but then I had the opportunity to ride a Waymo and an Uber the same day. The Waymo trip was uneventful but the uber driver drifted into oncoming traffic then jerked the wheel back and said “whoah,” when I alerted him. It made me realize that even though Waymo is not at level 5 yet, neither are a lot of Uber drivers…