6 ms·

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infr

by xnx 2mo ago

Apologies for repeating myself, but it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. They're growing fast, but I do wonder what they see as the bottlenecks: municipal approval, training, manufacturing? It's really unfortunate that lobbying is slowing self-driving rollout in some of the biggest and most important cities: NYC, Chicago, DC.

liliumregale 2mo ago
Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.
- xnx 2mo ago
  Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.
  - egypturnash 2mo ago
    Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop. The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.
    - pnw 2mo ago
      I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.
      - egypturnash 2mo ago
        I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhere on Zorhan's to-do list :)
        DiscourseFan 2mo ago
        Yeah but the plan of "ban them because the taxi drivers union said so" is ludicrous. Why not have a partial integration with re-training programs for existing taxi drivers, and work with the city council to establish laws that effectively strip Waymo of its profits for operating in the city, making them only barely break even, and siphoning the rest of the funds into the aforementioned retraining programs and transport infrastructure more broadly. Even a 3% profit margin in one of the largest markets in the world is better than none at all, Waymo is effectively forced to comply with any measures NYC imposes. This doesn't have to be the case nationally either: many areas are relatively underserved by even Uber and Lyft, and there is plenty of room for Waymo in those markets, and I imagine those "empty" parts of the US, in total, eclipse the size of NYC. There, it will be nothing but a boon. But in established cities like NYC, it is almost certainly best practice to keep as much profit in the local economy as possible, since Waymo is not, in the end, drastically multiplying economic productivity in those cities.
        fragmede 2mo ago
        Then again, the areas underserved by Uber/Lyft are underserved because they're bad neighborhoods so drivers won't go there. How many Waymos need to be torched or their passengers carjacked before Waymo decides to stop going there? Fun fact, if you throw a traffic cone at the Waymo, it panics and stops moving, meaning your can now break the rear windows and assault the passengers for their valuables. If you wear a mask and leave your phone at home, there's no recourse for the passengers.
        DiscourseFan 2mo ago
        I was thinking of rural areas, not dangerous neighbourhoods, which are already served by uber/lyft
    - xnx 2mo ago
      Allow Waymo and leave the choice up to residents. If they want to pay a driver they can.
    - matchbok3 2mo ago
      Nobody is keeping money in anybody's pockets. What you are advocating for is a tax on NYC people to force them to use human drivers instead of new technology. Just like the toll booth operators of the 90s. It is so disappointing to see the tech class advocate for laws that keep jobs that are unhealthy and lead to nowhere (cabbies) instead of moving the country forward (and those people getting other, hopefully better, jobs). But again, that type of short-sighted, zero-sum/socialist thinking is becoming more common, sadly.
- cyberax 2mo ago
  Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".
  - realo 2mo ago
    30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.
    - xnx 2mo ago
      No contest when the bus is full, but the overall efficiency (/"greeness") of the system is much less clear considering: buses are rarely full, most buses are diesel, heavy buses tear up the pavement on their routes (especially near stops), and buses don't take riders directly to/from their destinations.
      - laurencerowe 2mo ago
        Most of the city buses in my UK home town are now battery electric double deckers. These carry up to 85-90 people (with 25 standing), weigh 11 tonnes, and is 10.5m long. A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long. So the double decker bus should be more environmentally efficient with maybe 5 passengers making independent journeys, though operational costs for paying a driver probably make the Waymo more financially efficient in that situation. I suspect robotaxis will become very important in suburban areas with distributed jobs where buses don’t work well. In busy cities there simply isn’t the roadspace to replace buses with robotaxis (or any other form of car) for commuting.
        cyberax 2mo ago
        > A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long. A more reasonable taxi for single riders is going to weigh around 1.5 tons (e.g. the prototype Tesla Robocab). You also incorrectly assume that the efficiency depends linearly on weight. It doesn't, it depends more on aerodynamics, speed, and the number of stops. London buses (11 tons) average around 2.2 kWh/mi, Tesla Model 3 is at 0.21 kWh/mi while weighing 1.8 tons.
lanstin 2mo ago
I just took a Waymo in San Jose, having taken a few from San Francisco - it dropped me off in a place that would have made sense in SF (across the street from my destination at a light, avoiding a U turn) but was terrible in the suburban streetscape where the road was literally 10 lanes 4 / 4 / 2 turning and no one would ever drop someone off like that instead of U turning so they didn't have to cross scary giant traffic. So weird little things for scaling, but overall it was a good ride till that point. Also, the dropoff was at a hospital/clinic and Lyft for the return trip had no issue with going into the property to the actual destination.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago
  That seems like something not hard to fix, I am surprised they haven't already addressed it. Uber, as a comparison, absolutely narrows down the drop-off & pickup to the side of the road you want. I would demand the same of Waymo.
  - tfehring 2mo ago
    Waymo also lets you pick, but only from a predetermined list of pickup/dropoff locations. Sometimes there's not a spot on the side of the street you'd want, other times it will default to a spot on the other side of the street but you can override.
    - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
      Your market may vary, but I can assure you that in Phoenix, you can drop the pin practically anywhere that's safe and legal. The app has changed the method a few times. It used to show green or blue segments for valid spots, but today as it is, I just pick up the pin, drop it, hope for the best. It also demonstrates which way the car will be facing. Dropping a precise pin on the map is no guarantee that it will actually stop right there, depending on the situation on the ground when it arrives. But, you can still adjust the pin while the car waits, or you can hit the "Pull Forward" button to try and improve it. The app has also been updated to disallow adjustment of multiple dropoffs beyond the initial stop. So if you want a precise pin-drop in a multi-stop trip, you need to intervene along the way, instead of during your initial setup. There was a recent case reported in the news, where people were trying to Waymo to the San Bruno airport, but their pin got dropped off in a residential neighborhood. This was apparently because Waymo doesn't directly serve the airport's lanes yet, so the pin dropped as close as possible, but the residents of that street were nonplussed about the results. So were the airline passengers who were lugging luggage!
classictraffic 2mo ago
FWIW they started actively testing in Chicago a few months ago. I frequently see them around town now
- xnx 2mo ago
  Yes! I've seen cars as far north as Evanston and as far west as Oak Park.
AndrewKemendo 2mo ago
I’m glad you said it because as a 40 something nerd roboticist taking a Waymo is nothing short of a miracle to me. I mean drafting code on my phone with chatgpt in a Waymo is legitimately some Jestons shit and I’m not hearing otherwise. Amazing
- xnx 2mo ago
  And that's not even pointing out that also makes Waymo the most advanced robotics company.
m463 2mo ago
So are they? I know that tesla is behind, but they have so many simulation miles, several generations of their own hardware, and lots of people behind the wheel taking over. I've also seen the autonomous waymo vans, which seem nice too. Is there a "theoetical" ahead and a "practical" ahead? How do the finances look and does financial solvency count? will someone run out of money first? There have been two waymo articles (about sensors, and now about hardware), is this a sign they are worried? I am actually wondering.
- xnx 2mo ago
  > Is there a "theoetical" ahead and a "practical" ahead? Yes. Waymo is doing something like 400K fully autonomous rides per week and Tesla is doing hundreds or low thousands of supervised rides.
  - m463 2mo ago
    Tesla has 1.5m subscribers to FSD, maybe that's millions of drives per day (or two)
KennyBlanken 2mo ago
> it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. In the last two years there have been dozens of incidents of Waymos obstructing first responders in life-threatening situations. Every major metropolitan area Waymo has deployed in, the police departments have reported extensive issues with Waymos obstructing officers and emergency vehicles, and worse, their remote support staff often being unable to do anything about it. If that's "so far ahead" of everyone else, then we are pretty fucked.
fragmede 2mo ago
> it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is What are you comparing it to though? Tesla Robotaxi service is fine, there's a safety driver that isn't really supposed to talk, and I'd say that Zoox is better than Waymo, except getting rides on that is very limited so I have less experience with it. I like the Zooclx vehicles way more than even the new Waymo Ohai vehicles. I think there's a fourth competitor in this space currently active but I can't remember their name off the top of my head. Cruise is defunct though they were mostly fine as well. The real quandary is for the cars to freak out if something happens and just stop and sit there, while a human driver is going to drive off if you're getting eg carjacked.

by xnx 2mo ago

liliumregale 2mo ago

Is it unfortunate, or just a different priority in a different place? Those are also cities with a great public option for transit (unlike, say, Dallas or the Bay Area where different municipalities squabble). One might laud New York driving people away from car culture when the subways/buses can serve more people, greener.

xnx 2mo ago
Perhaps, but I can't think of why Waymo should be prohibited but not Uber or taxis.
- egypturnash 2mo ago
  Taxis and barely-legal app taxis both require a human to drive. Someone who's earning a living doing this, and paying taxes to NYC. Waymo is driven by a robot, owned by a company out in California, who has a lot of lawyers doing their best to avoid as much financial and legal liability as possible. Not that Uber and its ilk isn't doing the same thing but they've still got a tax-paying citizen in the loop. The current mayor of NYC is a DemSoc so he might have some ideas about keeping NYC's money in the pockets of middle-class NYC citizens.
  - pnw 2mo ago
    I don't think all of the economic benefit stays in NYC even when you take a yellow cab. A significant share of NYC taxi medallions are owned by entities based outside the city. Marblegate Capital in Connecticut owns about 2,146 medallions—nearly 16% of all NYC taxi medallions. They make more profit off the medallion financing business than actually operating the taxis which is basically break-even AFAIK.
    - egypturnash 2mo ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if that's somewhere on Zorhan's to-do list :)
      - DiscourseFan 2mo ago
        Yeah but the plan of "ban them because the taxi drivers union said so" is ludicrous. Why not have a partial integration with re-training programs for existing taxi drivers, and work with the city council to establish laws that effectively strip Waymo of its profits for operating in the city, making them only barely break even, and siphoning the rest of the funds into the aforementioned retraining programs and transport infrastructure more broadly. Even a 3% profit margin in one of the largest markets in the world is better than none at all, Waymo is effectively forced to comply with any measures NYC imposes. This doesn't have to be the case nationally either: many areas are relatively underserved by even Uber and Lyft, and there is plenty of room for Waymo in those markets, and I imagine those "empty" parts of the US, in total, eclipse the size of NYC. There, it will be nothing but a boon. But in established cities like NYC, it is almost certainly best practice to keep as much profit in the local economy as possible, since Waymo is not, in the end, drastically multiplying economic productivity in those cities.
        fragmede 2mo ago
        Then again, the areas underserved by Uber/Lyft are underserved because they're bad neighborhoods so drivers won't go there. How many Waymos need to be torched or their passengers carjacked before Waymo decides to stop going there? Fun fact, if you throw a traffic cone at the Waymo, it panics and stops moving, meaning your can now break the rear windows and assault the passengers for their valuables. If you wear a mask and leave your phone at home, there's no recourse for the passengers.
        DiscourseFan 2mo ago
        I was thinking of rural areas, not dangerous neighbourhoods, which are already served by uber/lyft
  - xnx 2mo ago
    Allow Waymo and leave the choice up to residents. If they want to pay a driver they can.
  - matchbok3 2mo ago
    Nobody is keeping money in anybody's pockets. What you are advocating for is a tax on NYC people to force them to use human drivers instead of new technology. Just like the toll booth operators of the 90s. It is so disappointing to see the tech class advocate for laws that keep jobs that are unhealthy and lead to nowhere (cabbies) instead of moving the country forward (and those people getting other, hopefully better, jobs). But again, that type of short-sighted, zero-sum/socialist thinking is becoming more common, sadly.
cyberax 2mo ago
Buses and subways are not necessarily "greener".
- realo 2mo ago
  30 people in 30 waymos vs 30 people in an electric bus? No contest.
  - xnx 2mo ago
    No contest when the bus is full, but the overall efficiency (/"greeness") of the system is much less clear considering: buses are rarely full, most buses are diesel, heavy buses tear up the pavement on their routes (especially near stops), and buses don't take riders directly to/from their destinations.
    - laurencerowe 2mo ago
      Most of the city buses in my UK home town are now battery electric double deckers. These carry up to 85-90 people (with 25 standing), weigh 11 tonnes, and is 10.5m long. A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long. So the double decker bus should be more environmentally efficient with maybe 5 passengers making independent journeys, though operational costs for paying a driver probably make the Waymo more financially efficient in that situation. I suspect robotaxis will become very important in suburban areas with distributed jobs where buses don’t work well. In busy cities there simply isn’t the roadspace to replace buses with robotaxis (or any other form of car) for commuting.
      - cyberax 2mo ago
        > A typical jaguar Waymo usually carries up to 4 people (usually just one), weighs 2.1 tonnes and is 5.2m long. A more reasonable taxi for single riders is going to weigh around 1.5 tons (e.g. the prototype Tesla Robocab). You also incorrectly assume that the efficiency depends linearly on weight. It doesn't, it depends more on aerodynamics, speed, and the number of stops. London buses (11 tons) average around 2.2 kWh/mi, Tesla Model 3 is at 0.21 kWh/mi while weighing 1.8 tons.

lanstin 2mo ago

I just took a Waymo in San Jose, having taken a few from San Francisco - it dropped me off in a place that would have made sense in SF (across the street from my destination at a light, avoiding a U turn) but was terrible in the suburban streetscape where the road was literally 10 lanes 4 / 4 / 2 turning and no one would ever drop someone off like that instead of U turning so they didn't have to cross scary giant traffic. So weird little things for scaling, but overall it was a good ride till that point. Also, the dropoff was at a hospital/clinic and Lyft for the return trip had no issue with going into the property to the actual destination.

rootusrootus 2mo ago
That seems like something not hard to fix, I am surprised they haven't already addressed it. Uber, as a comparison, absolutely narrows down the drop-off & pickup to the side of the road you want. I would demand the same of Waymo.
- tfehring 2mo ago
  Waymo also lets you pick, but only from a predetermined list of pickup/dropoff locations. Sometimes there's not a spot on the side of the street you'd want, other times it will default to a spot on the other side of the street but you can override.
  - ButlerianJihad 2mo ago
    Your market may vary, but I can assure you that in Phoenix, you can drop the pin practically anywhere that's safe and legal. The app has changed the method a few times. It used to show green or blue segments for valid spots, but today as it is, I just pick up the pin, drop it, hope for the best. It also demonstrates which way the car will be facing. Dropping a precise pin on the map is no guarantee that it will actually stop right there, depending on the situation on the ground when it arrives. But, you can still adjust the pin while the car waits, or you can hit the "Pull Forward" button to try and improve it. The app has also been updated to disallow adjustment of multiple dropoffs beyond the initial stop. So if you want a precise pin-drop in a multi-stop trip, you need to intervene along the way, instead of during your initial setup. There was a recent case reported in the news, where people were trying to Waymo to the San Bruno airport, but their pin got dropped off in a residential neighborhood. This was apparently because Waymo doesn't directly serve the airport's lanes yet, so the pin dropped as close as possible, but the residents of that street were nonplussed about the results. So were the airline passengers who were lugging luggage!

classictraffic 2mo ago

FWIW they started actively testing in Chicago a few months ago. I frequently see them around town now

xnx 2mo ago
Yes! I've seen cars as far north as Evanston and as far west as Oak Park.

AndrewKemendo 2mo ago

I’m glad you said it because as a 40 something nerd roboticist taking a Waymo is nothing short of a miracle to me. I mean drafting code on my phone with chatgpt in a Waymo is legitimately some Jestons shit and I’m not hearing otherwise. Amazing

xnx 2mo ago
And that's not even pointing out that also makes Waymo the most advanced robotics company.

m463 2mo ago

So are they? I know that tesla is behind, but they have so many simulation miles, several generations of their own hardware, and lots of people behind the wheel taking over. I've also seen the autonomous waymo vans, which seem nice too. Is there a "theoetical" ahead and a "practical" ahead? How do the finances look and does financial solvency count? will someone run out of money first? There have been two waymo articles (about sensors, and now about hardware), is this a sign they are worried? I am actually wondering.

xnx 2mo ago
> Is there a "theoetical" ahead and a "practical" ahead? Yes. Waymo is doing something like 400K fully autonomous rides per week and Tesla is doing hundreds or low thousands of supervised rides.
- m463 2mo ago
  Tesla has 1.5m subscribers to FSD, maybe that's millions of drives per day (or two)

KennyBlanken 2mo ago

> it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is in every area: sensors, vehicles, training data, markets served, simulation, infrastructure, operations, regulatory. In the last two years there have been dozens of incidents of Waymos obstructing first responders in life-threatening situations. Every major metropolitan area Waymo has deployed in, the police departments have reported extensive issues with Waymos obstructing officers and emergency vehicles, and worse, their remote support staff often being unable to do anything about it. If that's "so far ahead" of everyone else, then we are pretty fucked.

fragmede 2mo ago

> it's hard to convey how far ahead Waymo is What are you comparing it to though? Tesla Robotaxi service is fine, there's a safety driver that isn't really supposed to talk, and I'd say that Zoox is better than Waymo, except getting rides on that is very limited so I have less experience with it. I like the Zooclx vehicles way more than even the new Waymo Ohai vehicles. I think there's a fourth competitor in this space currently active but I can't remember their name off the top of my head. Cruise is defunct though they were mostly fine as well. The real quandary is for the cars to freak out if something happens and just stop and sit there, while a human driver is going to drive off if you're getting eg carjacked.