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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora.

Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1]

Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion in 2020.

No pricing yet, so this is still a demo.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/10/waymo-finally-launches-...

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> No pricing yet, so this is still a demo.

If you’re referring to the Waymo rides in Chandler/Phoenix, they do charge. JJRicks (a YouTuber with no affiliation to Waymo AFAIK) has a spreadsheet of the rides he’s taken.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OiYGH4Vmdo_4HYMC9YVA...

Oh, good. Waymo's site says you can sign up, but there's no indication of pricing there.

Toyota's interest may not be in Level-5 autonomous taxis. They have a history of striving to fully understand every part of their supply chain; this could be a play at developing advanced in-house driver assists.

As an example, I was surprised to learn that Toyota designed their own ECU chips rather than buying off-the-shelf automotive grade MCUs until 2019, when they spun that business off to a subsidiary[1]. They really take vertical integration seriously.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...

> advanced in-house driver assists

One thing I wish any car manufacturer would do is create a system that helps their users use the turn indicator. It’s an endemic problem here.

Something like an annoying voice telling them that they should have used it immediately after turning. And if they fail to use it in three turns during the same drive they get a mandatory safety briefing before they can lock the car.

I think the better way would be automated cameras that fine vehicles that turn or change lanes without turning on the blinker beforehand.

More Orwell(TM) is the last thing the world needs.

You wanna write tickets post up a real meatbag cop and make them write tickets. Don't create some dystopian dragnet that you can tune for revenue generation.

Waymo is at the head of the pack. I think we will see full self driving limited to cities + highways this decade.

ZOOX is another company I'm watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoox_(company)

Have some friends at Zoox and can't say I'm confident in them. Retention appears to be a massive problem, entire teams up and quitting.

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