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Comment by eggpy | Hacker News Reader

I dunno I can see this remaining small-scale for a while so Waymo can gather data about how people feel about the experience. I can see the backlash now if they were to suddenly unleash a battalion of fully autonomous vehicles on the unsuspecting public. I suspect keeping the numbers relatively low will be a good way to gather just how disturbing this is to the general populace without overwhelming people and ultimately causing an unnecessary uproar and rejection based on appearance, with no regard to quality.

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The cars are a familiar sight in Phoenix, they've been testing there for a couple years now. They started up an early rider program in the spring, with real people volunteering to be guinea pigs while they refine the human UI and logistics. This isn't coming out of the blue.

I'm aware, I live in Phoenix :) I'm referring to this bit

> I predict Waymo will price their service competitively, will ramp up to a large fleet, and that after a few months Uber / Lyft will be in trouble

Waymo vehicles are far less ubiquitous than either Lyft/Uber vehicles. I expect to see a growth in Waymo cars, I just mean that I don't think we will see a huge ramp up in the number of driverless Waymo vehicles soon as people need time to acclimate and no one yet knows what the response will be. IT will happen, just not immediately.

> as people need time to acclimate

I suspect it will be the opposite. Who-ever releases driveless taxi's first, people will clamour for the experience. People will be ordering rides for the sake of it for initial weeks/months. Then assuming the experience is safe etc, people will go by price and ride availability which driveless is sure to win.

I also guess there will be some big drama about the danger, then find out it wasn't the cars fault. E.g Massive headline about someone dying in a Waymo car and then we find out they decided to climb out the window while moving or something like that.

I agree with most of your story, but I do think there will be deaths from Waymo/Tesla/Uber. It'll have a very negative impact on the tech sector, but I also think they'll learn from their mistakes and after several years they'll get better and trust will be rebuilt.

Be prepared for a five year self-driving winter that will slowly subside.

Once they get the software down, they'll need to find a way to lower the cost of those LIDARs. No one is paying $150k for a self-driving car, and it'll be difficult to recoup that investment as a taxi.

On the other hand, there is also an advantage to moving quickly. Waymo seems to be far ahead, but if others (like Tesla?) release their self-driving vehicles prematurely, that would cause a backlash perhaps against the whole industry. (For example, Uber's self-driving cars running red lights in San Francisco I think helped result in tighter regulations across California.)

Moving quickly to show that the technology is safe might prevent a heavy-handed regulatory backlash.

My impression was that tesla is years behind Waymo.

That is also my impression, and it scares me that they have been so aggressive getting something "autonomous" to market.

If flaky products are released that end up killing drivers (or worse, pedestrians), it'll set the entire self-driving tech sector back 5 years or longer.

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