Waymo is opening its driverless service to more people in Phoenix
blog.waymo.com
blog.waymo.com
> We’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app
So...this is just an extension of what they currently do where it's not really open to the public? Waymo One is something you have to apply for and almost nobody gets in. It's not clear to me what "welcome more people directly into the service through our app" means.
Waymo is terrible at PR. I can't even tell what they're trying to say here. But there is no date. There is no definitive statement. It's just another vague press release about how they're going driverless "soon"
>Beginning today, October 8, we’re excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders. Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world.
According to the article: "take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world"
Waymo One has been shut down for a while now due to COVID, but now that driverless rides are an option they're re-opening the service with 100% fully driverless rides. Once they get around to installing barriers between the driver and passenger seats they plan to go back to most rides having a safety driver, but with some smaller percentage of Waymo One rides continuing to be fully driverless.
I think this explains the reasoning behind the gradual ramp-up. Even at the product launch like new iPhones, the demand is difficult to estimate, so IMO it seems more responsible to give a reasonable expectation to the public like this, than just saying bravely "the service is fully public from today".
I think the take-away from this announcement is their commitment for wider rollout over time from this point on.
You shouldn't have to analyze the takeaways of what Waymo really meant when they used the extremely common phrase "general public."
This isn't e-mail. The cost and hassle of switching to a competing service is nearly zero.
I mean, look at McDonalds and Coca-Cola, for example. I'm skeptical about the idea that simply having the SDV technology somehow also translates to being in a leadership position in terms of regulation, customer support, branding/marketing/being-installed-on-peoples-phones, etc etc.
Uber already had to fight uphill regarding regulation in many places so it definitely has some moat now (see, e.g. Uber and Ola in London). Waymo is on completely uncharted territory, regulation-wise.
I'm also curious about how the economics and logistics will play out. One criticism of existing ride sharing is not accounting for vehicle depreciation and wear and tear (and this on mass produced vehicles). Waymo vehicles have a lot more expensive technology on board, so I'm curious how that balances out in terms of lidar/etc shelf-life + specialized tech inspections vs ROI.
Also, cost of switching goes both ways. If this forces the hand of the other players to roll out SDV (via Cruise partnerships for example), Waymo doesn't necessarily stand to dominate the market, since it's already so crowded w/ well-funded/well-positioned players from all sorts of directions.
But at least for the next few years, technology is the barrier. So Google can partner with Lyft, for example, to get a good brand, app, customer service, regulation, etc.
But on top of that, the brand in this market is the promise "our cars are safe". Google is in a distinct place to own that, because of all the press they had, they press they will have, and by really leading technologically.
As for this being a commodity ? I believe we're really far from that.
I think a bigger challenge for Waymo is going to be getting trust and regulatory favor. Everyone keeps clinging on to the "oh, comparing prices, waymo is cheaper than uber because there's no driver!" narrative, but from what I've seen from the few reports so far, the prices aren't all that different from other services.
I can also imagine quite a few other not-so-flattering narratives being relatively realistic:
- "I'll never trust some faceless AI w/ my kids in the car! I'd rather pay a bit more and get a real person behind the wheel. Support the local economy, you know?"
- "Oh, so you want a license to put an entire class of workers out of jobs under MY government term?"
- "I got a trashed waymo car and customer support ignored me when I asked for a refund!"
- "I took a waymo after partying a bit too hard and now I'm locked out of all my google accounts with no recourse!"
- etc
I think people on HN often give way too much weight to the "cool tech" aspect of waymo, and disregard the very real and very significant meat bag aspect.
Current prices include a safety driver and small scale. Prices should go down in the future.
And sure, regulation and trust should be huge barriers. But besides the customer service issue(which seems too pessimistic), Google should be leading over others, on the trust issue(no accidents, more miles, highly skilled tech company), And on the regulation issue(good ties with Washington).
But those 2 are still a big risk, like you mention.
Not that particular company no, but the longevity of taxi service in general, yes. Although, it depends on why I'm riding in a taxi. If it's an occasional ride, it's not a big deal if taxi service disappears, I can pay for long term parking at the airport, or call a friend, or something. If it's an everyday ride, loss of service means a big change.
The danger of using a Google service is two-fold. The obvious part is, you might get used to it, only for it to be dropped. But also, they may run competitors out of business before dropping it, leaving you without any options.
Your cited risk is not realistic.
> The obvious part is, you might get used to it, only for it to be dropped.
> But also, they may run competitors out of business before dropping it, leaving you without any options.
It's a taxi. You call a number, or click a button on an app. A car arrives and drives you somewhere. The value delivered by the guy in the beat-up Prius, to me, is the exact same as Waymo. It's the most homogenized, commoditized industry in the world. Waymo could corner the entire market, and then go out of business, and the very next day, the streets would be full of independent taxis picking up passengers.
Some people care. They buy directly from the same families for many decades.
Also, they seem to have the lead over most and the market opportunity is huge.
The fact remains they are out there, and you can buy them, and they can do some sort of self-driving. Waymo is an impressive tech demo at this point.
Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road. How many zeros are there on that number? Who is going to be paying that bill?
Given this, even if Waymo are first to driving 100% perfectly, I expect that Tesla will eventually leapfrog them.
Waymo can just license the tech and sensor suite to manufacturers and make money off that. They don't need to actually build and sell a million Waymo vehicles.
The beauty of the Tesla model is that they've already made tonnes of the cars that should eventually be able to do this. Furthermore, instead of each vehicles being a cost for them, the vehicles are a source of revenue.
I acknowledge that it does all hinge upon Tesla reaching a point with their autonomy where it can be unsupervised. Some people say they will never get there, but I think that's pretty shortsighted. The data collected by their existing fleet is a massive advantage. Let's not forget that it's been more than 11 years since the first video of what became Waymo, and they can pretty much only drive a small area in Phoenix, with high likelihood of needing to train extensively for every new location as they're now doing in California. Tesla are doing most of the world in (more or less) one go.
The problem with Tesla is that while they've sold cars with that as marketing claim, there is very little reason to believe that its true.
And cars don't have an infinite shelf life; sure, they've sold lots of vehicles with that claim, but even if it were true, a whole bunch of those are already 1/4 of the way through an average US vehicle lifespan, and Tesla may end up with lower lifespan given its rock-bottom initial quality.
But where did you get a million cars from? To equal Tesla's existing fleet?
Uber has 3 million active drivers globally. If you assume that they're working in 8 hour shifts, 1 million Waymo cars is a rollout sized to replace Uber.
Coming at the math from another direction, Uber does 1.6 billion rides a quarter. A million cars would mean 18 rides per car per day. Totally doable.
But Waymo would surely focus on countries with high wages - US, Canada, UK, Australia, most of Western Europe. Replacing Uber in only those countries would only need perhaps 500,000 cars.
Of course they're going to ramp up towards those numbers, but once the tech works and it's just a matter of cash, it's going to happen very quickly.
If Waymo can get a 60% gross margin instead of a 20% gross margin, their profits could be an order of magnitude higher.
This is a trillion dollar opportunity, and its the first thing Alphabet is seriously pursuing that can rival search.
Aftermarket conversion kits are a rounding error and there's no long term moat. And that's before you start to get in to issues like improper installation and use, aftermarket modification, accidents causing bad PR when the gear isn't even running etc.
Remember that AEB demo a decade back where the car just slammed in to the object it was meant to stop for and it turned out they hadn't turned it on? Nightmare.
Yes, they definitely have the lead in outsourcing costs.
> Think about how much capital will be required to put a million Waymo vehicles on the road.
Actual deployment, not counting developing the technology, maybe, what, $100 billion or so at the outside, given a generous guess at the unit cost of the cars and a generous multiplier to cover other deployment capital costs.
> How many zeros are there on that number?
8
> Who is going to be paying that bill?
Well, I mean, if they couldn't convince outside investors, Alphabet could do it with cash on hand and still have money left over, but if they can demonstrate the technology, investors will be falling all over themselves to jump on board.
*: I don't know the actual number.
They are not even close to being able to do what Waymo does.
The question is not, who has the first taxi on any public road anywhere, but who first can launch 10000 of autonomous taxis and make money.
Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waymo has incredibly few ours driven on public roads outside of a limited area.
Self driving is mostly a software problem, and to solve general driving, a gigantic learning problem. How is gone solve that first and scale it, is open.
I would put my money on Tesla, and I wouldn't invest in Waymo if I could.
Maybe if Waymo demonstrates that they can drive on and off all major highways in the world without hd mapping of them. Then i might believe they are ahead.
So, can Tesla do this right now?
Also, why should Waymo not use HD mapping when they clearly have the ability to do it? Seems like a weird criteria.
And its highly questionable that their mapping can actually deal with all the incredibly complexity of the real world.
I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.
Funny, I have the same the opinion of Tesla’s camera-only approach.
> I'm going with the better process, not the better demo.
A “demo” with 20 million autonomous miles clocked vs 12.2 miles. The “process” that has so far yielded very little in terms of actual autonomous driving if you ignore the FSD marketing speak.
Probably Waymo
> Waymo so far is just a gigantic money fire, and even if you assume their autonomy works, many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all. Waymo has incredibly few ours driven on public roads outside of a limited area.
and Alphabet / Google is a money printing machine, if they get to self driving first it’s pretty much over for their competition.
> many people have made arguments that the businesses case is really not very solid at all
So self driving technology isn’t a solid business model? Why are so many companies trying to do this?
What’s stopping Waymo from patenting this after they get to an acceptable threshold and selling it to their competitors?
Waymo has spend 10+ years and they can now barley driven in possibly the easiest location in the world, a location where they have logged millions of miles. Waymo focuses on the easiest thing first. The technology on their car is incredibly expensive both now and to scale it to 10k, 100k, 1M vehicles is a huge challenge, both capital and manufacturing.
They are like a rocket company who says, we have this amazing air-frame, launch pad, software we only need to figure out the engine, then we are gone make money.
I place my bets on the company that has million of cars on the road, seeing every corner case possible in every location, because that is the real challenge to overcome if you actually want to have many 1000s of cars in every city. Plus the sensor suit and compute power in a Tesla maybe cost a few 1000$, scalable to 10s of millions of vehicles.
I don't think either of them is really close to self driving, but at least Tesla is focusing on the right problem with a scalable solution.
> What’s stopping Waymo from patenting this after they get to an acceptable threshold and selling it to their competitors?
If their technology actually works they would want to dominate the self driving taxi market and not sell it to the competition.
Their competitors would then have to install this whole Waymo hardware suit, making it not very practical for OEMs and normal cars. Uber or Lyft might be costumers, but why would you sell it to them if you could just replace them.
Waymo has burned money for 10+ years, signing a few licensing deal for a slightly better Mobile Eye will not give the return they are hoping for.
They are still in a learning phase -- they charge enough so as not to distort rider behavior, but they expect to lose money on each ride.
Apart from that, why build cars when you can sell the system to everyone?
Not having lidar has directly caused a bunch of autopilot crashes, so I expect they'll add it.
Hilarious to hear this come from someone rooting for the guys who took an off the shelf LKA + ACC system that couldn't handle stationary objects, turned it on full-time, and called it "Autopilot".
Of course the decision to essentially misuse that sensor suite killed a few people but that's neither here nor there right.
I don't think you can disparage Waymo and cheerlead Tesla on the basis that you think Waymo a money fire whilst ignoring that Tesla is massively in debt and has yet to post a positive annual net income. Tesla has burnt money for 17 years and it's recent profitable quarters are only the beginning of a turnaround that is not yet anywhere near sufficient to recoup it's losses.
In the meantime legacy car manufacturers are catching up with Tesla's offering and providing ever stronger competition. The coronavirus has disrupted production & made sales numbers confusing, but Tesla has lost its top spot in markets it led until recently. Tesla has been great PR for EVs and an important early market innovator, but it is by no means guaranteed long term success in either self-driving or car production.
The difference is that Tesla had a clear buissness plan to profit that they executed step by step. And the only reason they lost money is because they were expanding production capacity.
The analysis of the cars clearly showed that they had great margin on the cars, by far the best in the industry for BEV.
The same can not be said for Waymo. Its basically burning money and not even a clear plan on how this can eventually be recaptured. Tesla already makes money with teams that work on this stuff.
> In the meantime legacy car manufacturers are catching up with Tesla's offering
Wait, are you somebody from 2014? Because we have been hearing that since then and its still not true. And even if it were, it would not be a thread for Tesla, its a thread for ICE vehicles.
> but Tesla has lost its top spot in markets it led until recently.
Tell that to the 18% global market share in terms of EV sales. Its more if we are talking BEV. And its even more if we are talking revenue. And its even higher in terms of profit.
The facts actually say that Tesla has been expanding its global market share. But of course if you only read media articles that say 'in August Tesla fell to second spot in Lithuania' and BS like that, then you end up being misinformed.
Tesla also a has 3 gigantic new factories coming online next year, plus they easily have the best strategy for battery scale.
I'll bet you $1000 Tesla won't be the first to develop self-driving that is at least as good as humans (wrt. accident rate) in all weather and terrain conditions. Hell, I don't even think they'll be the third.
Disclosure: I work at a self driving company that is neither Tesla nor Waymo.
I'm also wary because ride sharing is a customer service intensive industry, an area Alphabet isn't exactly strong at.
These were never my problems with taxi service.
Tracking is the thing that makes the rideshare services better--and taxis could apply that, if they wanted to.
Tracking solves most bad things about taxis. "Is it actually coming? How long until it gets here? Did they hit something unexpected? etc."
Don’t forget: upfront pricing. Most taxis won’t tell you the price until you get to your destination. And how do you know they took the quickest route?
Again, I can't remember ever having that problem.
If I had to phone call the taxi--I always got a price. That's fair as the price needs to be high enough to roll the taxi.
If I didn't, then the price was specified--$X from Zone A to B and $0.Y for time spent not moving.
> And how do you know they took the quickest route?
This is questionable even with ridesharing. I regularly have to fight with drivers going to my airport in the morning. "Look, I know your route says go via State 666. Don't. It's completely green now but in 10 minutes at 6:45AM that road goes from green to black AND you can't change route once you're on it--it will take 40+ minutes. Go via Interstate 13--it will take 20 minutes, tops. Everything will be fine, and, if it isn't, you can get off the Interstate and take another route, of which there are lots."
And those are exactly the kind of routes that cabbies use to inflate prices. See: Las Vegas--a good cabbie moves a couple of streets in the wrong direction to get away from the strip, moves most of the distance, and then works back to your destination.
If they take a suboptimal route, you as the rider aren't charged more.
The incentives are also better aligned, since the driver now would always prefer the quickest route, since they get the same payment regardless of the route.
> If I didn't, then the price was specified--$X from Zone A to B and $0.Y for time spent not moving.
That's...exactly the non-upfront pricing that got taxis killed. Upfront pricing is $X to your destination. It's not route and time dependent as almost all taxi pricing was.
The only question about payment is "Who?"
As much as you can fight it, at the end of the day the answer will always be "the end consumer." The only question is whether you pay it on every ride as an up front increase or whether you pay it on the unfortunate ride as an addition. Both are perfectly acceptable solutions and can even coexist in the market in different companies.
People have gotten spoiled by the fact that ridesharing was burning VC cash to subsidize exceptional cases. Once those costs all quit being subsidized, they're all going to materialize back to the end consumer.
What no one ends up paying for when incentives are aligned however, is taking the tourist from the airport on an unsolicited tour of the city rather than directly to their destination.
Or the taxi driver who accidentally ends up on that one road that always has an idiot who caused a fatality when there were others that were less busy at the time.
_That_ is what most people are worried about, not having to reimburse someone for an unforeseen circumstance.
Not to mention ridesharing apps have incentivized safer driving with their review systems much more than taxi drivers who generally felt they were beholden to no one or "their own" (which is why they felt comfortable doing things like taking people on joyrides) ever did
There's a lot of ambiguity about accident rates when a passenger is not in the vehicle with an Uber driver, but the rates for actual trips are lower than national averages: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/05/ubers-fatal-accident-tally...
Amortizing the cost of rare negative pricing events across all trips seems a much better model to me. I'd personally choose that option every single time.
The time-and-distance model asks me to learn average wait times, approximate route information, and consider potential worst case outcomes for both time and distance. It also requires me to police the route the cab driver is taking to ensure they aren't taking advantage of me. And I need to do all of this in every city I visit.
The upfront model asks me to be able to compare prices between different offerings (a skill I already have), and doesn't change at all between cities.
The whole Prop22 thing in California is another facet to the equation: ride sharing companies argue that freelance status means they have a far bigger, broader and elastic fleet, whereas a model with fixed costs would make availability look more like taxis before rideshare came along.
Serious now, no, Google does not get a break because they wish so. They have the right to shutter products and we have the right to bitch. Freedom at its best.
While Uber and other folks are all boasting about their self driving project and collecting the lion share of controversy and unwanted attention, waymo is quietly, step by step, heading towards it's total dominance, staying completely off the radar.
*off the LIDAR.
The blog post is relatively clear that ramp up will take a few weeks - "we’ll start with those who are already a part of Waymo One and, over the next several weeks, welcome more people directly into the service through our app"
before you comment watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBLkX2VaQs4
Also, I'm pretty sure Tesla has a lot of PhDs and probably about 100x more unit tests then Waymo as they have an gigantic amount of strange real-world corner cases that they have converted to unit-tests. There is no way Waymo has anything like that database, as they simply have never encountered all the strange scenarios Tesla see daily on the roads of China and all the other places they drive around in.
A bunch of hobbyist reverse engineers have explored how Tesla's data pipeline works in practice. @greentheonly does great work.
I assure you that people on the other side of this "Yay $Bigco" vs. "Boo $Bigco" death match feel that HN is extremely biased in exactly the reverse way, and make just as grandiose claims.
No, it's not. Waymo has been doing amazing work, but the problem is that they PR department is a little bit too good at it's job.
Waymo has these kinds of announcements very couple of months (sometimes more often) and if you don't pay close attention all of them sound like Waymo finally had a breakthrough. But if you look closer each of them is only small incremental progress from their last announcement. In this case, Waymo was already doing driverless rides and they also didn't open them up to everyone. So even though I think that Waymo is making great progress towards a self-driving future, I understand that people get Waymo announcement fatigue.
Waymo is taking a slow but steady approach to the development and roll-out of self-driving cars, and I agree with you that that can sometimes make the individual milestones they choose to announce along the way seem pretty minor. Milestones are arbitrary by nature after all, and Waymo has a long road ahead before driverless cars become ubiquitous. Over time though, this sort of slow, incremental progress is going to add up.
I made this same point a couple years ago, when Waymo first announced Waymo One[1]. The point where "self driving cars are here" is going to be a blurry line.
Tesla will miss out I think by not taking advantage of doing even the cheapest possible one sensor lidar to augment their existing system.
$500 -> in the future $100 for the data lidar gives you is gold.
However, I can see a scenario where, despite that, it is not the right choice for Tesla. It's important to remember that self-driving technology will be commodity at some point (like the lidar units themselves). Whoever offers the most affordable option meeting some baseline performance will dominate the market and licence to every self-driving fleet. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo ended up meeting that criteria first and licensing the tech to everyone from Uber to Toyota.
Once that tech is out, anyone else that succeeds in developing comparable tech effectively has an uphill battle ahead of them trying to sell their new, less proven version at a price and volume that can recoup their R&D investment. I think we'll see a lot of players leave the race once the first licensable product hits the market. In fact, I think we've seen a bit of that already.
Which brings me back to Tesla. My guess is their strategy is not just to develop self-driving - they'd lose on equal ground (due to not being first) - but to develop "2nd gen" self-driving which has a specific competitive advantage of not requiring lidar and thus having lower total cost per unit. This allows them to enter the market late but still have a significant edge in that market.
If a company lets their engineer's use lidar to develop self-driving tech, then the tech they build will be 100% dependent on lidar. That's Parkinson's law. If, on the other hand, the company adds a strict constraint that lidar is not an option, then the engineers might fail to build something that works - or else they will produce something with a unique advantage.
They'll be able to drive in the rain and snow.
Nobody working on (real) SDCs is worried about rain or snow. Yes it's a problem right now, but a clearly solvable one. It hasn't been solved yet because it isn't a high priority.
Slamming the brakes on your vehicle to stop within the sensor distance is more dangerous (to the occupants and cars behidn you) and less effective (less likely to stop in time) the faster you're going.
Can you go significantly faster than you can safely see and stop in time? Sure. Would it still be considered safe when doing so? Hell no.
Do those people still think that it's going to take 10-20 years for this tech to reach say, New York, now that it's live in Phoenix?
It's not even generally available in Phoenix yet. I'm sure someone on HN lives in Phoenix, and has never used Waymo before. Tell us if you can get a driverless ride.
It's got a long way to go before it's something like Uber in Phoenix. It's got even longer to go before it's something like Uber in NYC (10-20 years still sounds right).
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The funny thing is that the pandemic should have been HUGE for self-driving cars... Most people I know haven't taken rideshare in 6+ months because they don't want to ride with somebody, and I only did so in the last few weeeks.
But it was a non-event. I didn't hear anyone talking about self-driving in the last 6 months. If it really worked, and was really available, then there would be certainly some people who would pay 2-5x the price of Lyft/Uber for no driver. (Not most people, but some people.)
But there's only one way remove the possibility of getting sick from the driver. We've been talking about that for 15 years, but it doesn't work yet.
I don't think the risks are equivalent on a per-person basis either. The "viral load" apparently matters, so using the same car as 1 person is not the same as riding with a sick driver for say 30 minutes. It could be that the driver risk is great than that of 30 passengers combined.
And you need to define "anyone" -- that's precisely what's being fudged here (and what's been fudged in previous announcements).
To be clear: I think Waymo will fold or be wound down before this happens.
In a previous comment, I said that IF we get economically feasible self-driving cars in the next 10-20 years, then it will not be from Waymo. It will be from a breakthrough out of left field. In other words, "we" will have thrown out millions of lines of code and billions of dollars of investment, and started over.
Obviously, if they roll it out, then I'll be wrong! But if I thought that was possible now, then I wouldn't bother calling them out on it.
Previous comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22632588
Isn't a large portion of their FCF tied to reducing labor costs by substituting drivers with self-driving tech?
AB5 and Democrats potentially gaining unified control of Washington don't bode well for their cost structure either.
Owning a car is worse for many situations, and so is public transportation.
If you have any friends with 16-18 year old children, ask them if they are going to buy them a car, or if they'd rather just pay for Uber/Lyft (that's an honest question, but I know what my experience is.) Ditto for people taking care of senior citizens.
There is a fundamental efficiency to rideshare. And it will continue to get better. As I said in the prior comment -- we already have self-driving cars. I push a button on my phone and somebody drives me somewhere.
For now, the self-driving tech is just a big distraction that makes things fantastically more expensive and unreliable. (This could change, but again I see that as 20-30 years in the future. I don't price it in for sure)
Also, drivers seem to love Uber and Lyft for the work flexibility, at least when I talked to many of them in 2015-2018. Those jobs were really valuable to a diverse set of people.
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I've heard the viewpoints you quoted in the media, but I don't think they are painting a balanced picture. It seems like a message that somebody wants to get out there, not a neutral viewpoint.
Of course the whole idea that Uber would reduce their costs with self-driving was also a fantasy meant to sell stock. I don't think the market ever priced that in. It's clear now that this area was a disaster, and the stock didn't crash because of that.
I think Uber/Lyft will be creating value for 10-20 years to come. People in SF seem to be bearish on them, but I think that's sort of provincial view. We might be on to the next big thing, but valuable tech is rare, and it takes years/decades for valuable technology to be adopted everywhere that it makes sense.
People are still buying iPhones for the first time, even though it was released in 2007. It's hard for me to imagine, but there must be people using Google for the first time too in 2020.
Seems pretty clear it will be available to public in the next few weeks, unless you're saying "general access to anyone who chooses to download the app" isn't about general public.
"Beginning Thursday, any existing Waymo One customer can hail a driverless minivan from a fleet of more than 300. The vehicles will be operating in a smaller, roughly 50-square-mile service area. Passengers are free to invite friends and family and to share their experiences on social media. Waymo plans to open the service to new customers within a few weeks. “At that point, we’ll have general access to anyone who chooses to download the app,” Krafcik said." - [0]
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-10-08/waymo-one...
Headline: "Waymo is opening its fully driverless service to the general public in Phoenix"
But
Beginning Thursday, any existing Waymo One customer can hail a driverless minivan from a fleet of more than 300. The vehicles will be operating in a smaller, roughly 50-square-mile service area.
Qualifications:
(1) existing Waymo One customers
(2) you can't go anywhere in Phoenix. Phoenix is a lot bigger than 50 square miles. (Also, even if the area were bigger, 300 cars sounds like a small number to cover it)
(3) Waymo plans to reintroduce safety drivers for some rides as it expands its Phoenix service area
Is it driverless or not?
I'm trying to read between all the doublespeak, and I don't see much progress. Again, I would love for someone who lives in Phoenix to sign up, try it, post here, and prove me wrong. Tell me what it was like.
> Waymo plans to open the service to new customers within a few weeks. “At that point, we’ll have general access to anyone who chooses to download the app,” Krafcik said.
For myself, I would trust this announcement a lot more if it claimed some new technological breakthrough that enables Waymo to do now something that wasn't possible half a year, or 5 or 10 years ago (specifically, this "something" is level-3 self-driving, as poorly as this is unfortunately defined). I don't see any such claims. The announcement instead reads as so much marketing copy to me, and it is not saying anything that has any practical implications for the technological capabilities of Waymo's cars.
Makes it sound like the pandemic was a significant factor in expanding this to people who are not under NDA. Because if they were doing 5-10% before fully driverless and it was working, then there is a big issue with needing to retrofit the cars with infectious disease barriers, its going to make a lot more sense to just reduce the number of drivers entirely if you can.
But one thing that might be a little misleading is that I am reading this announcement as saying that they are actually only letting in Waymo One people now which have had to apply and be accepted, and then in a non-specific number of weeks the public can try to get in via the app. But you still basically have to be on a wait list in the app.
So the real difference today is letting people in the program already who are not under NDA ride without the safety driver.
But it's very exciting. And necessary to have some wait-list because it is actually possible that the thing could become viral (sorry) and turn into driverless ride tourism and then you could have 30,000 tourists standing around at the same time cussing at an app that says "Service at capacity" all day.
What does that mean for the rideshare business? Are Uber/Lyft basically dead if they are years behind Waymo?
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/20/18175563/waymo-one-custom...
I think they have the computers in the trunk.
I'm struggling to understand what this meas. On the one hand "In the near term, 100% of our rides will be fully driverless", but, on the other hand, "Later this year, ..., we'll also be re-introducing rides with a trained vehicle operator, (...)". So "the near term" is at least next year?
Anyway it's difficult to understand exactly what is changing with this announcement. The (original) title makes it sound like everyone in Phoenix ("...the general public in Phoenix") will be able to hitch a driverless ride, but the text on the announcement makes it sound like only Waymo One members -and their relatives- will be able to do so ("Beginning today, October 8, we’re excited to open up our fully driverless offering to Waymo One riders. Members of the public service can now take friends and family along on their rides and share their experience with the world.").
Can anyone in Phoenix answer if Waymo is cheaper?
Is Waymo hoping people will choose Waymo for safety?
It also lets you a. optimize exactly where cars are driving to maximize ride share revenue, b. have the cars ready to pick someone up 24/7.
It's going to be a much more efficient use of car capital than hiring a person to drive it.
They also don't source their cost for CDV, which is substantially lower than any other number I can find cited in paper. Further, the current regulatory framework includes huge wealth transfers/incentives for car ownership, so it's not a fair comparison. For instance, the $130/yr cost of a parking permit in SF is a huge wealth transfer to car owners as that is substantially below what the market-price would be for that permit.
https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... shows Uber generated $65B gross booking in 2019, and we know substantial fraction of that goes to the driver.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/For-a-... says driver takes about ~60% of the booking.
So this is a question of whether the capital cost / the engineering cost / operating cost for autonomous vehicle is higher than $65B * 0.6 = $39B per year for the same number of rides.
The engineering cost will be amortized over long enough time that it's likely not a significant factor in the long run. So, the limiting factor will be the capital cost (for vehicles and its support infra) and the operating cost. As you say, at this point we don't know for sure - one thing we know is that the capital cost and the operating cost likely will see significant reduction thanks to the economy of scale.
if FSD actually ends up working on most roads, I don't see why not. there's no inherent reason why engineer headcount would scale linearly with the number of cars.
as for the cost savings, they don't necessarily have to beat uber's pricing today. they could alternatively try to drive uber's costs up by lobbying hard to get drivers classified as employees and catch some PR points at the same time.
With Uber/Lyft, you never know who you're going to get and what the experience will be like, and as someone that easily took 200-300 Uber rides per year pre-covid, I've seen some shit.
Long term it should be possible for the service to be cheaper than manned since they don't have to pay a driver.
The obvious advantage will be price, if Uber even still exists.
In the long-term, the obvious benefit is the price. In the next 5 to 10 years I don't expect it to be cheaper than Uber, even if their cost is half of Uber's.
My take is that this will become widely available in the next 5 years. The future is bright!
* You don't need an army of marketers/hr/legal/support staff for your drivers
* You don't need to dodge ambiguous contractor vs. employee laws
* You don't have any risk about individual drivers being bad actors or acting fraudulently
* You can predict, with great accuracy, how many cars will be available at any given time, whether or not they'll want to do another drive after (they will), and where they want to end up
* Your cars meet a minimum level of safety (if it works) that humans can't guarantee, especially in regards to distracted, tired, drunk, or whatever driving
Given how much effort is spent on attracting and retaining drivers, I'd say Waymo has many competitive advantages lined up. If it works.
I mean sure, there is a camera. But that is hugely different than a person (both positive and negative)
I suspect that a well-defined retention and usage policy could satisfy most business. In fact they might prefer it to having a driver listening in.
You could also pay people to manually remote into car cameras for a brief quality check after every ride. Wouldn't be that expensive. An interesting problem to solve though.
Cars with different seat configuration — I would love to sit with my family, friends, not on separate rows.
Smaller cars for one-two passengers, brand it Eco friendly, I would certainly select Firefly over usual car.
https://www.google.com/search?q=driverless+car+interior&tbm=...
https://azdot.gov/motor-vehicles/professional-services/auton...
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2020/05/16/lawsuit-a...
Their innovation is branding this ADAS as “self driving” and claiming they will eventually release a software update that makes it more like Waymo’s existing technology. They also have avoided safety features like eye tracking that prevent misuse of the ADAS as if it were a self driving system.
Waymo and Tesla really aren’t facing the same issue because the high-profile Tesla crashes are blamed by Tesla on the driver not properly overseeing the ADAS, while Waymo cars are on the road with no safety driver and have never had a major accident, and won’t be able to blame the non-existent driver if they do.
https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/ducey-to-u...
Source: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/03/08/uber-got-off-the-hook...
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/16/21439354/uber-backup-driv...
Furthermore, I'm skeptical that driverless vehicles can factor in all the ways in which someone might maliciously cause accidents or damage to these vehicles. I want to see what happens when someone figures out how to provide false input to the sensors on the vehicle.
You're probably right, but as long as it doesn't happen frequently and there's no way to mislead sensors en masse, it's not a big deal.
There are malicious ways to cause accidents with current-day technologies also. e.g. Park a car in front of a train, fly a drone into a plane, etc.