I live very close to LAX, and we have hundreds of Waymos in our area. At first i was a little weary, and kinda weirded out by all of them.
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
>and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
I took one to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. Chaotic traffic environment: lots of cars, cones, people directing traffic, pedestrians everywhere. It did great.
It's very interesting, because on one side we have clear data showing that autonomous cars at the Waymo level are safer than humans.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make. IE, humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations. I think the "fail to respond to novel situations" is probably the biggest blocker for people to trust them enough for widespread deployment. I'd love to see one of these things drive on a poorly mapped dirt road up in the mountains, for instance (I'm not saying it can't -- I just mean I would personally love to see how it can adapt to that kind of situation)
Statistics is still the most reliable indicator, because you can’t really tell if a situation is “novel”. How novel is novel? I doubt even Waymo knows for sure.
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
> humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
> I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
My understanding is that they only operate in areas they’ve had approved and pre-mapped out for them though. Practically I don’t think the scenario you’ve described would ever happen, but I too would like to see it (I suspect they wouldn’t handle it well).
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
IDK, I've been in the car with someone when they just up and up drove off the road because they failed to notice that there was a corner - and that's a sober human. Another time, someone else, they rounded a corner, saw a tractor in the other lane, and were so surprised that they hit a tree. My mother has totalled six cars - she insists it was someone else's fault every time, but the statistics are somewhat damning. My wife's driving has given me haemmorhoids, I clench so fucking hard. Blind corners at twice the speed limit, looks over her shoulder to talk to passengers, and I constantly find myself buying wing mirrors, fenders, headlights, body panels, hubcaps, and anything else she can break off on traffic, rocks, or street furniture. Well, I did until someone finally took her license away from her for a year.
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
> meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
If a human makes a mistake, we give them the liability to own up to their mistakes, and carry the costs.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
We don’t tolerate machine incidents because who is liable if an accident occurs? A company with a $4.6 trillion market cap? They’re not a legal opponent any of us really want to take on.
> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
When a human driver messes up, there's a person to hold responsible. When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible? If the human messes up to the point they are no longer allowed to drive, that person is no longer on the streets to cause more mistakes. When a robot car messes up, are all of the other cars pulled off the streets as well until the glitch is fixed? Every robot car is essentially the same driver.
While we hold humans financially responsible for all accidents, we don’t hold them personally responsible in every case. Most accidents end with no arrests or even tickets. If your hand slips on the steering wheel, you don’t go to jail.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
We have a much higher level of tolerance for things that benefit us while posing a risk to others ("should my own car have FSD") than we do for things that benefit others while posing a risk to us ("should Waymos be allowed in my neighborhood").
Been in a Waymo in SF — impressive tech. But I keep wondering: does the math actually work? Car + all the sensors + maintenance + mapping. Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, I suspect Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
Uber rides are around $1.5 per mile on average. Assume Waymo car drives 200K miles over it's lifetime, 3mi/kWh EV efficiently and $0.20/kWh electricity cost. It will generate $300K over it's lifetime and use $13K worth of electricity. Right now it costs $150K to manufacture Waymo car because they are custom built and Lidars are still expensive. Even at $150K unit economics should be OK. But the cost of self driving cars will go down as they are manufactured at larger scale and will eventually approach cost of regular mid-range car. In a few years they will be under $50K per car. Mapping is a one-time cost and the need for mapping will eventually disappear. This will be a massively profitable business for self-driving fleet operators.
These companies are taking a very long view (and are funded accordingly). The future vision is one in which cars with drivers just aren't a thing in cities anymore. Nobody owns a car to use in day-to-day intra-city journeys; instead, you just take a drive in an autonomous vehicle on demand.
Back of the envelope, three car costs $200k, charge $20/ride, say that ride costs $5 to operate, $200k/$15 gets you 14,000 rides (rounded). Say 10 rides a day... shy of 4 years to break even.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
I thought about this as well. The dsytopian world I think will exist in the future where the Waymo is priced higher and people will want to take it more, over a cheaper Uber. Precisely because the human driver is removed from the equation.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
Surprisingly low hype for a company running perhaps the most advanced consumer-interactive robots. I’m quite fond of these machines and will periodically rescue them when someone has misused them (door not closed, most commonly). Hope they do well. Very good road participants.
I'm just curious how it works on the legal side: if a human run the red light he gets a fine, who gets fined with a waymo car?
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
Elon may have been technically correct about 'if humans can do it with vision only then theres no reason why vision-only cannot work' but turned out to be the wrong strategy for learning how to get there. lidar gives you a constant stream of data to check your vision yourself against and interatively learn. Once trained you turn it off. whereas teslas strategy ended up having to rely on human drivers for error feedback which made the learning loop way longer.
This is somewhat similar to the situation here in LA where they service and very often drive through Westlake/MacArthur-Park which undoubtedly low income. I think it’s for practical reasons though, as they’re not allowed to use the freeways here yet. So for people going from rich areas (Bel-Air/Beverly Hills) to DTLA they need to cross/drive through there anyways.
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
I doubt the geofence exclusion is because of the demographics of those areas and not the demand for autonomous vehicles in those areas, although I don't doubt the latter is a result of the former.
I doubt this is correct. “It’s expensive to be poor” — a lot of people who can’t afford cars (or have bad credit) end up Ubering to/from work every day
If you are curious about this, I recommend There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It covers how some folks, with no credit, are forced to live in extended stay hotels (where they take cash up front and don’t run credit) which can cost multiple times what rent can cost.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
>How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
Tesla has fewer miles than I have driven in my lifetime. It’s currently still a half baked product. This might be a story in a few years but today you’re comparing an F150 to a Delorean.
That's also when the partnership with Rivian really takes off. Uber clearly wants its own fleet of robotaxis; they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago. Looks like they're content letting other companies take the risk while helping fund them.
Uber also partners with Zoox and Lucid on self-driving, missing this wave may be an existential risk, so they aren't putting eggs in one basket. Nevermind a level of duress due to the Uber/Waymo partnership being (almost certainly) part of a settlement agreement regarding alleged IP theft from Google by way of Anthony Levandowki.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
It sounds too much like "parasite" for me to be comfortable using it. I'm assuming some random person made it up. It's okay to just say "people of/from <place>", guys.
I am really wondering, how they tackle the long trail problem of unknown situations. Sure they are monitor them constantly but I am asking precisely, how to handle situations that occur ridiculously infrequently: do they sample them 1000x in sim? Or do they use a different model and track uncertainty in the model constantly?
How to get another 0 between the dot and the percent sign in situations where the model makes the wrong choice with a significant probability?
There was an article a while back that talked about their simulated world model. It has the ability to do things like floods, elephants on the road, etc.
Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles. Indeed, the vast majority of trips are taken by single people and it's ridiculous to have a giant machine for them. It would also be okay to have a handful of larger, Model Y-sized vehicles for the multi-person trips.
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
Why would it make more sense? It isn't like a car half the size would cost half as much, but it would severely limit the capacity. Now, you can get a waymo for 1-4 people, but if some (or all) were single occupant, you would be limited.
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
I’m thinking that since 2015. Like BMW C1 just with doors on the side and a bit more security. This would approx allow 3-4x as many travellers on a given route compared to traditional cars.
Dear American government regulators: nationwide autonomous driving is proving to be easier than delivering fiber to every home. Why do you hate Americans?
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Boston, according to Waymo[1], is dependent on the legislature making autonomous vehicles legal. Apparently NY state laws also require a human driver at the wheel.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
NYC has Mamdani, who is a very progressive populist mayor, and a longtime (active) supporter of the taxi drivers union.
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
maybe weather events that disrupt travel, but impact things like visibility, lane definition, etc? That's still super-common in Chicago and a lot of the US.
I love Waymo. The only problem I have with it is that it further siphons wages from local economies into Silicon Valley, beyond what Uber/Lyft already did.
You could argue that cheaper/safer local rideshare would boost traffic to local bars and restaurants in denser areas though. If you want to keep the $ local, just add an AV tax that goes to the city.
It’s an extremely consistent experience, and you can sit in the front seat (something I like personally). With Uber and taxi services, you never know what kind of driver or ride you’re going to get.
They use to be (along with Lyft). But it's been a very long time since that was clearly true.
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really aren't for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
There are tons of automated systems which take cash. I do agree it would add some complexity to the equipment in the car, but its not like it would be that difficult to do it. These cars have to go back to the depot eventually, emptying the cash bins would just be one more cleaning step. I do agree though they don't bother because it probably would cost more to manage in the end than the amount of rides they're losing not accepting cash.
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
It does seem necessary to have cameras inside driverless cars but I don't want to if Google is running the show. Your biometrics will probably be stored for "enforcing Google's policies" at a minimum [1].
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
I live very close to LAX, and we have hundreds of Waymos in our area. At first i was a little weary, and kinda weirded out by all of them.
They have become completely normal, and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers. They are very predictable, and will always let you pull in front of them when changing lanes (unlike a lot of other LA drivers).
I have seen a few incidents where they seem 'stuck', and it was a bit annoying and kind of funny, but again, it does not happen nearly as often as for human drivers.
I also like taking them. It is nice to just get in and relax and not have to talk to anyone or worry about who is going to pick you up. You can control the temperature and music from your phone, you can drop the pin exactly where you want to be dropped off and picked up, and the ride is smooth and comfortable.
We can debate all the knock on effects of Waymos, but the user experience is pretty great.
>and cause WAY fewer traffic incidents than human drivers.
Ironically the best way to verify this is that when they do cause traffic issues, it becomes national news.
Imagine breaking down and blocking an intersection in Edgewood Georgia, and then getting a call that night from your Uncle in Oregon saying he saw your breakdown on the news...
I took one to a show at the Hollywood Bowl. Chaotic traffic environment: lots of cars, cones, people directing traffic, pedestrians everywhere. It did great.
It's very interesting, because on one side we have clear data showing that autonomous cars at the Waymo level are safer than humans.
On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Which means that self-driving cars need to be a magnitude of order safer than humans.
And even though a self-driving car will never road rage or use the car as a weapon on christmas markets, we'll still tolerate humans driving more than one odd 1-in-a-billion ai-error caused incident.
I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make. IE, humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations. I think the "fail to respond to novel situations" is probably the biggest blocker for people to trust them enough for widespread deployment. I'd love to see one of these things drive on a poorly mapped dirt road up in the mountains, for instance (I'm not saying it can't -- I just mean I would personally love to see how it can adapt to that kind of situation)
Statistics is still the most reliable indicator, because you can’t really tell if a situation is “novel”. How novel is novel? I doubt even Waymo knows for sure.
People will trust them by familiarity, not by any objective measures. Their trust grow as they see them more often, without bad accidents.
> humans are more likely to make emotional mistakes, but self driving is probably more likely to make perceptual mistakes or fail to respond to novel situations
Humans fail chaotically. AVs, at least Waymos, fail safely. In urban environments, there is a case to be made within a few years for banning (or making it massively cumbersome) to manually pilot a private vehicle.
> I don't think you can just look at the statistics though. What I mean is that, the main issue is that the category of mistakes they make are going to be inherently different from the category of mistakes that humans make
Would you rather have a X% chance of a loved one dying from a human-category mistake? Or a 0.5X% chance of a loved one dying from a ML-category mistake? I would take the latter in a heartbeat. Why waste time optimizing for "categories" when you can optimize for your loved ones not dying
While I agree with you, not everyone does.
You and I are thinking with a purely logical thought process, but most people don’t reason that way.
A lot of people want to be able to hold someone accountable, and that is more important than the pure probabilities.
They want to be able to blame a person for making a mistake.
My understanding is that they only operate in areas they’ve had approved and pre-mapped out for them though. Practically I don’t think the scenario you’ve described would ever happen, but I too would like to see it (I suspect they wouldn’t handle it well).
I live East of DTLA and twice I’ve seen people driving them around, presumably to map those areas out. It’s pretty annoying that I can’t use them for my late night commutes yet, but I’m eagerly looking forward to when I can!
IDK, I've been in the car with someone when they just up and up drove off the road because they failed to notice that there was a corner - and that's a sober human. Another time, someone else, they rounded a corner, saw a tractor in the other lane, and were so surprised that they hit a tree. My mother has totalled six cars - she insists it was someone else's fault every time, but the statistics are somewhat damning. My wife's driving has given me haemmorhoids, I clench so fucking hard. Blind corners at twice the speed limit, looks over her shoulder to talk to passengers, and I constantly find myself buying wing mirrors, fenders, headlights, body panels, hubcaps, and anything else she can break off on traffic, rocks, or street furniture. Well, I did until someone finally took her license away from her for a year.
So... not so sure. Every AV I've ever been in has driven incredibly cautiously compared to a human driver.
> meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
Any company that builds self driving cars or operates them should show how reliable they think they are. Not by showing pr material or stats, that's all 'free'.
Make yourself, as the company, legally liable. If you think it's good, put your name on it and own the risk.
When that happens, I'll trust whoever says it's safe.
> a magnitude of order
unless I'm missing something, you meant "order of magnitude"
> a self-driving car will never … use the car as a weapon
You are lacking in creativity and vision. With networked autonomous vehicles, all cars can be used as a weapon simultaneously.
If a human makes a mistake, we give them the liability to own up to their mistakes, and carry the costs.
Most self-driving enterprises are trying very hard to ensure their non-driver continues to carry this liability instead of their company.
This helps a them v. us attitude. The company needs to be trusted widescale by the public, and do seem to undercut their own PR efforts on that, repeatedly.
We don’t tolerate machine incidents because who is liable if an accident occurs? A company with a $4.6 trillion market cap? They’re not a legal opponent any of us really want to take on.
> On the other hand we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans, meaning that we don't tolerate machine incidents the same way we tolerate human ones.
It comes down to accountability, IMO. We tend to be forgiven to humans because we are humans too and we know we, humans, make mistakes, and these can have serious consequences.
When a human makes a mistake, they are immediately accountable, and therefore judged and forgiven (or not). When technology makes a mistake, who's to blame? The CEO? The software developer who wrote the code? The tester? The architect?
Yes, we want technology to be an order of magnitude safer than humans for this reason, because we know that, given the current way our judicial system works, when technology makes a mistake, no one is held accountable.
When a human driver messes up, there's a person to hold responsible. When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible? If the human messes up to the point they are no longer allowed to drive, that person is no longer on the streets to cause more mistakes. When a robot car messes up, are all of the other cars pulled off the streets as well until the glitch is fixed? Every robot car is essentially the same driver.
While we hold humans financially responsible for all accidents, we don’t hold them personally responsible in every case. Most accidents end with no arrests or even tickets. If your hand slips on the steering wheel, you don’t go to jail.
Robot cars would be the same. Insurance is financially responsible, and if the accident is deemed caused by a flaw, it would be the company that made them that is held responsible for fixing it.
Mistakes aren’t glitches when the environment is so dynamic. I imagine they are making errors constantly, and constantly learning from them.
When a robot car makes a mistake, all robot cars learn from the experience. When a human messes up, only that human learns from it.
> When a robot car messes up, who is held responsible?
The company owning and operating the robot?
> we don't give technology the same pass we give to humans
This was the hypothesis. But based on e.g. FSD, it doesn’t seem borne out in reality.
We have a much higher level of tolerance for things that benefit us while posing a risk to others ("should my own car have FSD") than we do for things that benefit others while posing a risk to us ("should Waymos be allowed in my neighborhood").
Been in a Waymo in SF — impressive tech. But I keep wondering: does the math actually work? Car + all the sensors + maintenance + mapping. Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?
> Can a single vehicle ever turn a profit?
That depends on how low they can get the costs. Waymo took delivery of the last Jaguar i-Pace, and are scaling up production of the Zeekr-based EVs, which I assume are significantly cheaper.
I think the math works, using car rental companies as an anchor point: they are (mostly) profitable*; they have relatively lower Cost of Revenue, I suspect Waymo will have much fatter margins.
* There was a blip when Hertz had to write-down its bold bet on EVs didn't quite work out.
Are you running your replies through a LLM, or is the LLM producing them entirely?
Uber rides are around $1.5 per mile on average. Assume Waymo car drives 200K miles over it's lifetime, 3mi/kWh EV efficiently and $0.20/kWh electricity cost. It will generate $300K over it's lifetime and use $13K worth of electricity. Right now it costs $150K to manufacture Waymo car because they are custom built and Lidars are still expensive. Even at $150K unit economics should be OK. But the cost of self driving cars will go down as they are manufactured at larger scale and will eventually approach cost of regular mid-range car. In a few years they will be under $50K per car. Mapping is a one-time cost and the need for mapping will eventually disappear. This will be a massively profitable business for self-driving fleet operators.
These companies are taking a very long view (and are funded accordingly). The future vision is one in which cars with drivers just aren't a thing in cities anymore. Nobody owns a car to use in day-to-day intra-city journeys; instead, you just take a drive in an autonomous vehicle on demand.
Back of the envelope, three car costs $200k, charge $20/ride, say that ride costs $5 to operate, $200k/$15 gets you 14,000 rides (rounded). Say 10 rides a day... shy of 4 years to break even.
Substitute in whatever numbers you think are reasonable.
I thought about this as well. The dsytopian world I think will exist in the future where the Waymo is priced higher and people will want to take it more, over a cheaper Uber. Precisely because the human driver is removed from the equation.
So yes, I think they will be able to turn a profit by charging more for the experience. Which is a humanless car.
At least in my area, Waymos are always more expensive than Ubers.
Surprisingly low hype for a company running perhaps the most advanced consumer-interactive robots. I’m quite fond of these machines and will periodically rescue them when someone has misused them (door not closed, most commonly). Hope they do well. Very good road participants.
I'm just curious how it works on the legal side: if a human run the red light he gets a fine, who gets fined with a waymo car?
If the car I'm in cause a big damage or kill someone? I guess the damage will be paid by the insurance but whom insurance? Mine or waymos? And what about criminal implications? Insurance doesn't cover thoose for sure.
Elon may have been technically correct about 'if humans can do it with vision only then theres no reason why vision-only cannot work' but turned out to be the wrong strategy for learning how to get there. lidar gives you a constant stream of data to check your vision yourself against and interatively learn. Once trained you turn it off. whereas teslas strategy ended up having to rely on human drivers for error feedback which made the learning loop way longer.
Missed opportunity to say "Open to Y'all"
"Open to All Y'all"
Isn't there supposed to be a liaison in there? "Open to Alls Y'all"
It's not French!
Hmm. Maybe in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris,_Texas?
I'd imagine a total of one Waymo car could service all of Paris, Texas and still be sitting idle for the majority of time.
Not all liaisons are French, but all the dangerous ones are.
Service area: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en#DAL
One admirable part of Waymo's service area in Dallas is it serves areas previously devalued by racist redlining. This is in contrast to Uber's Avride and Tesla's Robotaxi offerings, which stick only to the richer, whiter areas of Dallas https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/03/uber-and-avride-launch-rob... https://dallasinnovates.com/tesla-launches-robotaxis-in-dall...
This is somewhat similar to the situation here in LA where they service and very often drive through Westlake/MacArthur-Park which undoubtedly low income. I think it’s for practical reasons though, as they’re not allowed to use the freeways here yet. So for people going from rich areas (Bel-Air/Beverly Hills) to DTLA they need to cross/drive through there anyways.
Even so, I’ve encountered plenty of people who live in those areas and have been able to take Waymos which is great given how sketchy that area can be…
I doubt the geofence exclusion is because of the demographics of those areas and not the demand for autonomous vehicles in those areas, although I don't doubt the latter is a result of the former.
I doubt this is correct. “It’s expensive to be poor” — a lot of people who can’t afford cars (or have bad credit) end up Ubering to/from work every day
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
In any case I pity the state of public transport in US.
If you are curious about this, I recommend There’s No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. It covers how some folks, with no credit, are forced to live in extended stay hotels (where they take cash up front and don’t run credit) which can cost multiple times what rent can cost.
If you put the author, Brian Goldstone, into YouTube, you can find some recent news coverage of some of the folks from the book and iirc one of them is Ubering in a lemon, working 60-80 hours a week just to break even.
In America, unfortunately, we’ve perfected the debt trap and turned poverty into a profit center. The same equity companies own rental properties, extended stay hotels, and storage locations so they can vertically integrate homelessness.
>How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
It's not and it's indeed a very sad statement on public transport. My father has spent some time in his retirement Uber-ing and said it was shocking to him how many repeat customers he got that were having to spend so much just to get to a minimum wage job.
It's not. It's expensive to be poor.
How can that be anywhere near financially sustainable.
All you have to do is basic math.
Monthly car payment (which is higher if you're poor) + monthly gas spent (which is higher if you buy it in a poor neighborhood) + monthly insurance (which is likely to be higher if you're poor, and/or live in a poor neighborhood) + maintenance is very often far less than what it costs to take a rideshare ride 14 times a week.
When I drove for Uber, about 20% of my rides were people commuting to and from work who could not afford a car.
Aren't you going 20 times per week, twice, that's 40 rides.
At an average 25$ you're spending 1'000$/month on Uber.
Tesla has fewer miles than I have driven in my lifetime. It’s currently still a half baked product. This might be a story in a few years but today you’re comparing an F150 to a Delorean.
Here in Austin, I'm stuck calling an uber and hoping I get a Waymo. When does that deal expire?
When the girls breakup prolly: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-15/uber-a...
It ends in 2028: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/uber-and-waymo-to-end-exclus...
That's also when the partnership with Rivian really takes off. Uber clearly wants its own fleet of robotaxis; they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago. Looks like they're content letting other companies take the risk while helping fund them.
Uber also partners with Zoox and Lucid on self-driving, missing this wave may be an existential risk, so they aren't putting eggs in one basket. Nevermind a level of duress due to the Uber/Waymo partnership being (almost certainly) part of a settlement agreement regarding alleged IP theft from Google by way of Anthony Levandowki.
> ...they already unsuccessfully burnt a lot of money on it years ago
It was for the best; the Kalanick-era company culture wasn't (/isn't?) compatible with the levels of public trust required for successful self driving.
It is so so so so so so bad to have to risk an uber every time I want to hire a Waymo.
I have still not gotten a Waymo even once. I am in the service area. I don't use the service frequently, just enough to be disappointed.
It sounds too much like "parasite" for me to be comfortable using it. I'm assuming some random person made it up. It's okay to just say "people of/from <place>", guys.
But then you lose extra important information from words like "masshole."
Having grown up in Dallas, I usually just say "Texan" and call it a day.
Dallasians? Dallasers? Dallaslets?
Dallards?
Dalwegians?
Dallonians
Dallazens
Dallamites, Dallsatians
What's your better suggestion? Dallasonian? Dallaser? Dallasan?
Also, do you have the same issue with the demonyms Manhattanite or Seattleite?
Seattleite is fine, it is close to satellite
I live here and use Dallasian myself
Texas -> Texan Kansas - Kansan Honduras -> Honduran
It should be Dallan?
Dallmatians
better than "cityofhate" which is what we're called most of the time.
In all fairness, I've noticed people here in Dallas/TX are indeed more racist than the East and West coast cities, esp. towards brown people.
Understandable, I'd also hate to live in Dallas /s
I like North Texans
I thought it was a typo, or strange url at first.
I'm with you on this and this is something I brought up on Dallas subreddits before moving here and got downvoted to oblivion.
I wonder how they would handle a freak snowstorm
Can't wait for this in my town. I also can't wait to see people freak out over them.
I am really wondering, how they tackle the long trail problem of unknown situations. Sure they are monitor them constantly but I am asking precisely, how to handle situations that occur ridiculously infrequently: do they sample them 1000x in sim? Or do they use a different model and track uncertainty in the model constantly? How to get another 0 between the dot and the percent sign in situations where the model makes the wrong choice with a significant probability?
There was an article a while back that talked about their simulated world model. It has the ability to do things like floods, elephants on the road, etc.
No freeways. But Waymo now is available to all of Dallas?
Does that include the suburbs?
It's open to _everyone in Dallas_, not available _in all of Dallas_.
everyone != everywhere
I believe they paused freeways everywhere because they drove through some construction (or didn't handle construction zones well).
Freeways are back as of just 6 days ago: https://x.com/Waymo/status/2082501792001056984
Oh wow! Hadn't checked in awhile, thanks for the update.
Open to all people, not open to all roads.
looks like Bishop Arts -> Fair Park -> White Rock -> NW Hwy -> Hampton/Inwood, with a weird section jutting out toward Irving along 114
so, no suburbs, only enclaves
our group sees them all the time while skating the katy trail and through downtown dallas
Thanks
Why isn't downtown called the superurbs?
Superbs?
Something to hold in mind are the issues with scaling out to new cities in terms of safety risks: https://junkoyoshidaparis.substack.com/p/rapid-scaling-turns...
Why are the cars so big? Wouldn't it make sense to have a bunch of much smaller, single person vehicles?
Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles. Indeed, the vast majority of trips are taken by single people and it's ridiculous to have a giant machine for them. It would also be okay to have a handful of larger, Model Y-sized vehicles for the multi-person trips.
To actually answer your question: Part of the reason why the Waymo cars are so big is because they got a deal on buying all the Jaguar I-Pace vehicles, which checked several boxes:
* Electric vehicles and hybrids are preferable for self driving cars as they have robust electrical power for the sensors and compute
* Larger minivans or SUVs are preferable for both development work and early scaling up where you can't afford to have both smaller and larger vehicles
* The I-Pace wasn't selling well so they managed to snag the whole production batch
* Though Jaguar isn't exactly known for their great reliability and electrical systems, the I-Pace, manufactured by Magna Steyr, is actually decent
The first two reasons are why the Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid, the only hybrid minivan sold in the US, was so popular for early self driving car efforts (including with Waymo) in the 2010s.
That said, Waymo's Ojai is somewhat more space efficient than the older I-Pace. They also have the Ioniq 5 coming.
> Tesla Cybercab has about three or four times the efficiency and like a fifth of the price by having smaller, two person vehicles
I read this as Tesla Cybertruck and was mightily confused for a minute.
Looking it up in Wikipedia I see it has no driver support (steering, pedals, etc). Is that even road-legal?
Why would it make more sense? It isn't like a car half the size would cost half as much, but it would severely limit the capacity. Now, you can get a waymo for 1-4 people, but if some (or all) were single occupant, you would be limited.
Being smaller does not help that much much in cost per mile, but has a big cost for functionality.
I’m thinking that since 2015. Like BMW C1 just with doors on the side and a bit more security. This would approx allow 3-4x as many travellers on a given route compared to traditional cars.
A C1 with more security, meaning more material and air between you and a potential high-speed obstacle, is called a car and is sized like one.
SFC costs don’t scale linearly with volume or number of seats.
The cameras, LIDAR, and sensors are all fixed costs. You need them on even a single-person car. And they’re extremely costly.
Americans are fat, they don't fit.
The All-American Retatrutide is (nearly) here to save us all thankfully.
I love waymo, but it's very costly compared to Uber.
Dear American government regulators: nationwide autonomous driving is proving to be easier than delivering fiber to every home. Why do you hate Americans?
Keeps on being rolled out in red states while being delayed in blue states, quite unfortunate.
Divide this differently:
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for > 3 months
- states where the major cities commonly have snow for < 1 month
Inclement weather is likely the differentiator. Blue state California gets Waymo in its biggest cities, which handily do not get much snow. The other Waymo cities are all below the Mason-Dixon Line.
Blocked even from testing in NYC. Blocked from DC and Boston. Unfortunately this does have more to do with bad government than bad weather.
Boston, according to Waymo[1], is dependent on the legislature making autonomous vehicles legal. Apparently NY state laws also require a human driver at the wheel.
The only surprising thing about this is that other states did not require changes in law. It's Good, Actually, that big companies are (sometimes) bound by the same laws that bind the rest of us.
In any case, there are more than 2-3 "blue" states. We can note that it's also not running in cold "red" states either. The climate angle fits the data best and aligns with what Waymo says, which aligns with what we have known about the tech for at least a decade.
(That note also suggests they are still testing their cold-weather kit and are not quite ready.)
1 - https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/
NYC has Mamdani, who is a very progressive populist mayor, and a longtime (active) supporter of the taxi drivers union.
There is close to zero chance it gets approval in NYC before 2030. I'd be totally floored if he goes against the union, but the optics are absolutely terrible for cabs.
Waymo can't launch anywhere in NY state due to state law, but by all means, trot out your favorite whipping boy.
They tried to roll out in New York City, but the city did not approve.
https://www.twu.org/twu-tech-newsletter-waymo-no-mo-in-nyc-f...
I personally saw a Waymo in NYC on June 26th at 14th St and 8th Avenue, so they’ve done some recent testing at least.
NYC's government is focused on maximizing the pain and inconvenience for its citizens. So this tracks.
They have been fully open here in Los Angeles for almost two years now.
the metro areas where it gets rolled out are all blue regardless of state
It's easier to roll out in places where it seldom snows.
Definitely true, but snow affecting driving conditions is becoming pretty rare in cities like Chicago.
maybe weather events that disrupt travel, but impact things like visibility, lane definition, etc? That's still super-common in Chicago and a lot of the US.
"Maybe it's something you've got that they haven't got." - Owen Kellogg
Is it unfortunate, though?
Service area is still miniscule.
Gotta start somewhere. Still bigger than any competitor.
I love Waymo. The only problem I have with it is that it further siphons wages from local economies into Silicon Valley, beyond what Uber/Lyft already did.
You could argue that cheaper/safer local rideshare would boost traffic to local bars and restaurants in denser areas though. If you want to keep the $ local, just add an AV tax that goes to the city.
Dallas drivers are bad enough already...
Waymo sells itself
People hate human drivers more than they hate the idea of AI drivers
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/business/uber-sexual-assa...
It’s an extremely consistent experience, and you can sit in the front seat (something I like personally). With Uber and taxi services, you never know what kind of driver or ride you’re going to get.
Uber is at least 1000x better than traditionally taxi, without any rating system.
They use to be (along with Lyft). But it's been a very long time since that was clearly true.
In reality I think you can get better experiences than a taxi with a rideshare service (which they really aren't for a very long time), but it's very hit or miss.
So less consistently bad as a taxi service... but far from consistently good.
The real test is, can these self-driving cars drive I-4 without getting into any sort of wreck?
https://www.worldatlas.com/places/the-most-dangerous-highway...
Anyone with a credit card
Debit card works just fine with Waymo, just like with Lyft and Uber.
I'm sure you can imagine why it might be unnecessarily complicated for a Waymo to take cash.
There are tons of automated systems which take cash. I do agree it would add some complexity to the equipment in the car, but its not like it would be that difficult to do it. These cars have to go back to the depot eventually, emptying the cash bins would just be one more cleaning step. I do agree though they don't bother because it probably would cost more to manage in the end than the amount of rides they're losing not accepting cash.
Just another example though, while credit card processing fees aren't always cheap its not like its free to process cash.
And presumably their app?, which requires either an Apple or Google account.
Uber app only requires an email address
What reason would someone have not to have a credit or debit card? Credit cards are literally free money, as long as you pay the balance off on time
Credit cards are not free money lmao
It does seem necessary to have cameras inside driverless cars but I don't want to if Google is running the show. Your biometrics will probably be stored for "enforcing Google's policies" at a minimum [1].
And then a Waymo dropped teenagers off at the police? I don't care if that was a human, I don't want no snitch car service [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49027861
[2] https://www.404media.co/waymo-called-police-on-teens-san-mat...
Unfortunately doing drive-bys is also a TOS violation for Uber and Lyft