Is there a conclusion that the taxi service kind of works and just needs to fix a few minor issues around the edges fixed to work in limited city use in many cities, or is it so far away it's not even close?
I was down in San Francisco a month ago and my friend has access so we took Waymo's everywhere. We took about 10 over the weekend and never had any issue, even when other cars were doing weird things. From my limited experience I felt like they're pretty solid in the city.
The only hiccup I can remember was being in an intersection (past the crosswalk) to make an unprotected left and while we were waiting the light turned yellow. A human driver would likely wait for the light to go red and then make the turn, but the Waymo gave up almost immediately and instead decided to circle the block to make the left (three rights). A little odd, but I never felt unsafe.
If we had Waymo where I live I'd take it everywhere. It's slightly cheaper than an Uber, a nicer car, a better driver than some Uber's I've been in, and there's something nice about not having to interact with a real person.
I don't mind interacting with people, but the vast majority of my interactions with ride share drivers are not meaningful interactions. I get in the car, say "hi" and then pull out my phone. A large portion of the time my drivers are on the phone or have airpods in.
I would gladly trade the 1% of rides where I had a decent conversation with the driver to remove the 99% where I we both try to make forced small talk or we both awkwardly sit in silence. Plus, not having to worry about me and my friends annoying our driver when we're drunkly coming back from the bars at 2am is such a win.
> A human driver would likely wait for the light to go red and then make the turn, but the Waymo gave up almost immediately and instead decided to circle the block to make the left (three rights)
I totaled two cars when I was newer to driving because I did exactly that (waited for the light to turn red and then went), only to collide with people running the red.
Insurance faults the person who was making the left, so I can understand why the Waymo would want to be more cautious
It definitely works. I was in one just yesterday for over a half hour and it’s a pretty smooth thing, and in some ways better than a human driver (e.g., always yields to pedestrians entering a crosswalk, never exceeds speed limit,etc.)
But both Waymo and Cruise lose money on every ride. All the sensors and on-board compute are expensive, and also the R&D, and the 3D maps. Both services rely on detailed 3D maps of the areas they service, and are geofenced to that.
So right now, it does not scale yet until they can bring down the costs, and/or reduce reliance on those maps, which take a long time to make.
>All the sensors and on-board compute are expensive, and also the R&D, and the 3D maps. Both services rely on detailed 3D maps of the areas they service, and are geofenced to that.
I think we need to split this into fixed vs variable costs. It's hard for me to believe that the sensors+compute is more expensive than a human. Those sound like the variable costs. I'd be surprised if selling an additional ride causes e.g. Cruise to lose a bit of money, but I'd love to be corrected.
I have been told it loses money by Google employees. Not just sensors+compute. R&D and the map-making are substantial costs. Waymo is reported in “Other Bets” which had $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022 and $6.1 billion in operating losses.
But that's largely a sunk cost that (in SF anyway) has already been spent, right? It's not like that cost goes up on a per-ride basis.
For places where that's already done, you only need to account for the cost of sensors/compute/maintenance of the vehicle themselves, which seem (intuitively) like they would be lower than the expense to users. Which would mean that a ride is net positive.
Maybe it's the case that configuring and maintaining the cars is incredibly expensive. That would be the only way I could envision actually losing money on a "per ride" basis.
> But that's largely a sunk cost that (in SF anyway) has already been spent, right?
For mapping, no.
Waymo maps the city constantly with every car, and they have a mapping team that reviews those changes before they go to the other cars. So ongoing cost of the human side is a thing (for now?).
They also have a team of "remote operators" that watch the fleet in real time in case they have a panic attack over something, so more ongoing cost that's not just sensors/cars.
There are substantial non-cash costs that go into cost-of-revenue. These come from amortizing assets like patents and the maps, and depreciation on all the equipment, including whatever backend servers there are. Share-based compensation is typically also a big one. They are "sunk costs" as far as pure cash accounting goes, but that’s not how GAAP accounting works.
Translation: "limited city use in [selected] cities" seems to mean:
- no driving on freeway with passengers (that alone is a huge limitation. You couldn't get to most major airports (in any sensible time) under that limitation. Add in trucks, rush-hour, ripple congestion, lane-splitting motorcyclists.) But presumably also, Waymo and Cruise don't want to pick an all-out war with human drivers working for Uber. Not yet.
- if a driverless car gets confused or can't handle a situation on a city street, it can slow and stop completely and block traffic (and wait for emergency responders to intervene, or wait minutes/hours for remote human driver to override), which is "merely" an annoyance to locals. Whereas doing that on a freeway could injure or kill large numbers of people.
- "selected cities" seems to currently only be southwestern and southern US (SF, PHX, LA, AUS), warm and mostly clear skies, nothing regularly getting near a bad freeze or with bad rain/ snow/ slush/ storms/ gusts/ visibility/ unpredictable ice and skidding [0].
- only cities with well-maintained signage, roads, road markings which can be imaged reliably etc. This is an implicit limit on the locality's income and tax base.
- the recent Cruise secondary incident (near-fatality from a hit-and-run caused by a human-driven car) in SF and other incidents with pedestrians, cyclists and human drivers. "Just fix a few minor issues around the edges" will have a different meaning if you're a pedestrian, cyclist or transit user near a high-traffic street. This could easily become a political issue in some localities. Or maybe driverless will only be allowed in bus lanes or certain lanes of certain streets, or at certain times of day, or not near school pickup/dropoff, or through residential areas (like in 2011 when there were deaths of pedestrians in East Palo Alto residential areas due to drivers rat-running, exacerbated by the rush-hour to Facebook and on 101[1]).
And with all these restrictions on something as simple as intra-city transport, keep in mind the massive investment in autonomous vehicles 5-10 years ago was toward the ultimate goal of replacing humans in long-haul trucking and related logistics. Even if Waymo could place fully autonomous taxis into every city in America, that consolation prize wouldn't nearly make up for the shortfall of not taking over the logistics industry as was hoped.
City-bound autonomous vehicles are still far away for the reasons you point out, but autonomous long-haul trucking is back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point.
I haven't been following autonomous long-haul trucking, why is it "back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point"? Again, is that primarily a technology vs safety story, or is it a political issue due to organized pushback from sections that oppose it?
(also does anyone have current data on the viable market size of driverless rideshare vs driverless delivery vs drone delivery vs helicopter taxis vs autonomous long-haul trucking)?
> "Even if Waymo could place fully autonomous taxis into every city in America, that consolation prize wouldn't nearly make up for the shortfall of not taking over the logistics industry as was hoped."
I want to decouple discussion to what's actually technically and politically achievable (within say 5 yrs), versus whatever story Waymo was telling its shareholders 5-10 yrs ago.
> I haven't been following autonomous long-haul trucking, why is it "back to being a sci-fi pipe dream at this point"? Again, is that primarily a technology vs safety story, or is it a political issue due to organized pushback from sections that oppose it?
I think it's a mix.
Waymo cancelled their self driving truck division recently to focus on ride share[0].
They're most likely feeling push back from someone over self driving trucks, but I wonder if the bigger thing is liability and dangers around the weight it would be hauling. They already have had one of their trucks be ran off the road by another semi already and haven't released ANY statements about it.[1]
> goal of replacing humans in long-haul trucking and related logistics
I am wondering if it is reasonable goal, what share driver's payroll takes from total logistics expenses(vehicle + maintenance cost, gasoline, last mile logistics: loading/unloading truck and storage, delivering package to final recipient).
Why is long-haul a pipe dream now. It seems to me that long-haul is a simpler problem than city driving. Did some insurmountable problem pop up that I haven't heard about?
I was at first too. I'd like to update it to reflect the actual region, rather than merely highlighting all the states that contain parts of the region, but sadly don't have any kind of mapping tools to do so...
Impression I get is that the fundamentals work okay -- which is a huge accomplishment in and of itself -- but there are still enough edge cases that scaling up is hard, and opening up a new city takes substantial effort.
Videos that show up on the r/self drivingcars subredddit show increasing fluency/confidence in driving from Waymo. But there's always going to be socially weird situations in cities where the answer is to benignly break the law, and it's not clear how well SDC's will ever do with those.
I’ve taken 60+ Waymo trips in SF and much prefer them over Uber. There are rough edges but I love playing music I like, the smooth and consistent driving, the same model car each time. I’m an early adopter kind of person and can live with the occasional “why pick me up over there?” Like stuff.
I’m not affiliated with Waymo. Just someone who got early access by joining the waitlist.
Seems to be the legacy taxi industry fighting back with somewhat ride-share-like pricing ("avoid surge pricing"), "professional drivers, more thorough background checks and vehicle inspections", "price shown in app will still be an estimate, not upfront pricing". Currently in NYC, CHI, DC, PHL, MIA, FLL, LA.
