8 ms·

I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-ro

by boc 5mo ago

I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-road), but I can also let it drive me across the country at night while I camp in the back. Would absolutely change the way we move across the US, especially if you have hobbies that involve a lot of gear and equipment.

quux 5mo ago
That's kind of a beautiful vision
ge96 5mo ago
That would be something being asleep and waking up to a car crash
- ticulatedspline 5mo ago
  reminds me of an old joke: "When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"
  - Polizeiposaune 5mo ago
    The version I've heard a bunch of times had him as a bus driver..
    - BenjiWiebe 5mo ago
      The version I've heard: When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa; not like Grandma, who died screaming "Look out for that car!"
derwiki 5mo ago
Snowstorms are probably when I’d most want self driving. Back in February driving from Tahoe to SF, they closed the road, not because of conditions, but because too many impatient drivers spun out. I trust Waymo to go the recommended speed and not get impatient.
- walrus01 5mo ago
  In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on. Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre". Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
  - smilekzs 5mo ago
    Turnouts exist. Unfortunately, head-of-line-blockers are very commonly already overwhelmed by the task of keeping tab of their own vehicle; would be a far stretch to expect them to simultaneously stay aware of traffic situations, spot the turnouts ahead, and then take the turnout.
- rottencupcakes 5mo ago
  I drove up there in the AM Thursday, Feb 18th, during the snowstorm, about an hour before they closed the pass for the rest of the day. You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.
  - 5mo ago
xnx 5mo ago
Yes. The longer-term possible second-order effects are going to be wild. Easier t o get to wilderness? Awesome!, but also crowding like you've never seen (but maybe also more small parks because there will be a glut of unused parking).
- nostrademons 5mo ago
  I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a service do all of that for you. Plus self-driving cars fix several issues with human rideshares, eg. you can drive it out to the boonies without worrying about how it's going to get back; you don't need to worry about getting assaulted by the robot driver; when they wait for you you only need to pay the opportunity cost of another ride rather than the opportunity cost of the driver's time. It's feasible to take a Waymo out to a state park, though you wouldn't usually do that with an Uber. The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car. All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares. The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go. The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.
NitpickLawyer 5mo ago
> something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech So a Tesla?
- smilekzs 5mo ago
  Off-roading aspirations and 3rd row legroom (S1) seem to be major differentiators from Rivian. As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy. I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.
- guywithahat 5mo ago
  I, independently, made almost exactly the same comment before seeing yours lol. I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep, which is only possible because I'm not meaningfully fatigued driving. it's still technically supervised but I think that's beyond the point OP is making
  - rootusrootus 5mo ago
    > I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep Always feels a little weird to read a comment that is plausibly going to end up being referenced in a future news article.
  - UltraSane 5mo ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/self-driving-car-technology-tesla-crash/686054/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/self-driving-ca... My Tesla Was Driving Itself Perfectly—Until It Crashed The danger of almost-perfect tech
    - guywithahat 5mo ago
      I don't disagree tesla's have been in accidents but FSD is provably safer than human drivers. My likelihood of crashing is a lot lower using FSD
- cheema33 5mo ago
Silamoth 5mo ago
At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you. I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.
- pryanbeng 5mo ago
  Its the ultra independence mindset. I don't think trains work for the commenter you talked to. I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.
  - Lammy 5mo ago
    > Its the ultra independence mindset. And there's nothing wrong with it! I take detours on road trips all the time following “Historic <thing> →” signs or just because I see something interesting in the distance and want to go check it out. On a train journey I'd just have to watch them pass by.
- aketchum 5mo ago
  there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods
  - mmooss 5mo ago
    > Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. Buses can be slower, but I don't even know of a 2x difference. For longer trips they can travel 24/7. And overall they are more efficient because you can do other things instead of driving. > This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both I don't have a problem on buses and trains. I have more problem with other drivers when I drive. Your comment is, ironically, antisocial.
guywithahat 5mo ago
> I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech So a Tesla? I think your dream is pretty common, since they make the most popular vehicle in the world
- xnx 5mo ago
  It will be amazing if they get self-driving working. Currently, you can't even sit in the back seat.
  - guywithahat 5mo ago
    It depends what you mean by self-driving. The car drives itself without any input; I would argue that fits the definition of self driving. Legally you must be supervising it, which is a valid criticism, but the car drives itself well enough that I can provide basically no input on 20+ hour cross-country trips, which allows me to do things like not stop to sleep.
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      Self driving means self driving. If I drive myself to work, my wife doesn’t need to keep her eyes on the road for me. The supervised driving is great, I have used it with my Model Y, but let me know when the car can pickup and drop off my kids at their school and activities. Like Waymo can. Then, it will be self driving.
prestigious 5mo ago
So you want a cyber truck but you have Elon Derangement syndrome?
qwerpy 5mo ago
I want this as well. Hopefully my Cybertruck will get unsupervised driving someday, but until then, it's the closest thing to the dream of electric off-roading, self-driving vehicle with huge cargo capacity. I've already stopped driving myself around 98% of the time, according to my FSD stats.
- UltraSane 5mo ago
  Why did you buy a Cybertruck?
  - qwerpy 5mo ago
    They’re awesome, why wouldn’t I?
    - UltraSane 5mo ago
      They are basically the car Homer designed in that famous episode of The Simpsons. They are the ugliest and and most impractical car ever designed. The fact that the bed cover blocks the rear view window should be illegal. Dozens of people must have told Elon how stupid using stainless steel for the body is but he ignored them all. The cabin looks incredibly cheap for an $80,000 car. It is a very bad truck. I do have to admit the steer by wire system with adaptive sensitivity is neat.
      - qwerpy 5mo ago
        None of the subjective things you said has any bearing on my lived experience of the past two years I’ve owned it. It off roads well. Holds lots of stuff. Backed up my whole house when we had a power outage. Safest truck ever tested. Drives itself. Looks awesome.
        UltraSane 5mo ago
        How many times have you been flipped off while driving it? And buying one after Elon lost his mind and did a nazi salute TWICE is pretty gross.
konschubert 5mo ago
Yea. With a huge 100 kWh battery and a removable range extender for those extra-long trips :) Plus that battery (and range extender) can also provide power and heating when parked.

by boc 5mo ago

quux 5mo ago

That's kind of a beautiful vision

ge96 5mo ago

That would be something being asleep and waking up to a car crash

ticulatedspline 5mo ago
reminds me of an old joke: "When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"
- Polizeiposaune 5mo ago
  The version I've heard a bunch of times had him as a bus driver..
  - BenjiWiebe 5mo ago
    The version I've heard: When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep like Grandpa; not like Grandma, who died screaming "Look out for that car!"

derwiki 5mo ago

Snowstorms are probably when I’d most want self driving. Back in February driving from Tahoe to SF, they closed the road, not because of conditions, but because too many impatient drivers spun out. I trust Waymo to go the recommended speed and not get impatient.

walrus01 5mo ago
In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on. Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre". Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.
- smilekzs 5mo ago
  Turnouts exist. Unfortunately, head-of-line-blockers are very commonly already overwhelmed by the task of keeping tab of their own vehicle; would be a far stretch to expect them to simultaneously stay aware of traffic situations, spot the turnouts ahead, and then take the turnout.
rottencupcakes 5mo ago
I drove up there in the AM Thursday, Feb 18th, during the snowstorm, about an hour before they closed the pass for the rest of the day. You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck. I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.
- 5mo ago

xnx 5mo ago

Yes. The longer-term possible second-order effects are going to be wild. Easier t o get to wilderness? Awesome!, but also crowding like you've never seen (but maybe also more small parks because there will be a glut of unused parking).

nostrademons 5mo ago
I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a service do all of that for you. Plus self-driving cars fix several issues with human rideshares, eg. you can drive it out to the boonies without worrying about how it's going to get back; you don't need to worry about getting assaulted by the robot driver; when they wait for you you only need to pay the opportunity cost of another ride rather than the opportunity cost of the driver's time. It's feasible to take a Waymo out to a state park, though you wouldn't usually do that with an Uber. The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car. All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares. The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go. The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.

NitpickLawyer 5mo ago

> something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech So a Tesla?

smilekzs 5mo ago
Off-roading aspirations and 3rd row legroom (S1) seem to be major differentiators from Rivian. As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy. I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.
guywithahat 5mo ago
I, independently, made almost exactly the same comment before seeing yours lol. I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep, which is only possible because I'm not meaningfully fatigued driving. it's still technically supervised but I think that's beyond the point OP is making
- rootusrootus 5mo ago
  > I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep Always feels a little weird to read a comment that is plausibly going to end up being referenced in a future news article.
- UltraSane 5mo ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/self-driving-car-technology-tesla-crash/686054/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/04/self-driving-ca... My Tesla Was Driving Itself Perfectly—Until It Crashed The danger of almost-perfect tech
  - guywithahat 5mo ago
    I don't disagree tesla's have been in accidents but FSD is provably safer than human drivers. My likelihood of crashing is a lot lower using FSD
cheema33 5mo ago

Silamoth 5mo ago

At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you. I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.

pryanbeng 5mo ago
Its the ultra independence mindset. I don't think trains work for the commenter you talked to. I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.
- Lammy 5mo ago
  > Its the ultra independence mindset. And there's nothing wrong with it! I take detours on road trips all the time following “Historic <thing> →” signs or just because I see something interesting in the distance and want to go check it out. On a train journey I'd just have to watch them pass by.
aketchum 5mo ago
there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods
- mmooss 5mo ago
  > Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. Buses can be slower, but I don't even know of a 2x difference. For longer trips they can travel 24/7. And overall they are more efficient because you can do other things instead of driving. > This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both I don't have a problem on buses and trains. I have more problem with other drivers when I drive. Your comment is, ironically, antisocial.

guywithahat 5mo ago

> I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech So a Tesla? I think your dream is pretty common, since they make the most popular vehicle in the world

xnx 5mo ago
It will be amazing if they get self-driving working. Currently, you can't even sit in the back seat.
- guywithahat 5mo ago
  It depends what you mean by self-driving. The car drives itself without any input; I would argue that fits the definition of self driving. Legally you must be supervising it, which is a valid criticism, but the car drives itself well enough that I can provide basically no input on 20+ hour cross-country trips, which allows me to do things like not stop to sleep.
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    Self driving means self driving. If I drive myself to work, my wife doesn’t need to keep her eyes on the road for me. The supervised driving is great, I have used it with my Model Y, but let me know when the car can pickup and drop off my kids at their school and activities. Like Waymo can. Then, it will be self driving.

prestigious 5mo ago

So you want a cyber truck but you have Elon Derangement syndrome?

qwerpy 5mo ago

I want this as well. Hopefully my Cybertruck will get unsupervised driving someday, but until then, it's the closest thing to the dream of electric off-roading, self-driving vehicle with huge cargo capacity. I've already stopped driving myself around 98% of the time, according to my FSD stats.

UltraSane 5mo ago
Why did you buy a Cybertruck?
- qwerpy 5mo ago
  They’re awesome, why wouldn’t I?
  - UltraSane 5mo ago
    They are basically the car Homer designed in that famous episode of The Simpsons. They are the ugliest and and most impractical car ever designed. The fact that the bed cover blocks the rear view window should be illegal. Dozens of people must have told Elon how stupid using stainless steel for the body is but he ignored them all. The cabin looks incredibly cheap for an $80,000 car. It is a very bad truck. I do have to admit the steer by wire system with adaptive sensitivity is neat.
    - qwerpy 5mo ago
      None of the subjective things you said has any bearing on my lived experience of the past two years I’ve owned it. It off roads well. Holds lots of stuff. Backed up my whole house when we had a power outage. Safest truck ever tested. Drives itself. Looks awesome.
      - UltraSane 5mo ago
        How many times have you been flipped off while driving it? And buying one after Elon lost his mind and did a nazi salute TWICE is pretty gross.

konschubert 5mo ago

Yea. With a huge 100 kWh battery and a removable range extender for those extra-long trips :) Plus that battery (and range extender) can also provide power and heating when parked.