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Comment by jmpman | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t service the major bar area of downtown Chandler, much less Old Town Scottsdale, Tempe or Downtown Phoenix. Although it does service Chandler Fashion Center (one of the main malls in the south east valley), you can’t use it to send your 15 year old to the mall/theater, as you must be 18 to use the service alone. Intel’s Ocotillo campus appears to be in their service area, so if an Intel employee lived in the 40 square mile area, they might be able to commute with it. It doesn’t service either of the airports. The trial area effectively requires a vehicle for any practical lifestyle, and any of the use cases that I’d normally take a Lyft/Uber for, just aren’t serviced by Waymo.

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Decided I’d try it out today. Drove into the service area, parked, and summoned a Waymo for a trip to the Chandler Mall. A short 10 minute wait until the vehicle arrived, fully autonomous. For the 4.4 mile drive I could have completed in 11 minutes, I was charged $11.30. Immediately, the Waymo failed to properly merge and replanned its route through a quiet neighborhood. It avoided the fastest route, the freeway, instead opting for surface streets. It ultimately arrived after 5.4 miles and 16 minutes. Overall, the braking at stoplights was better than I do, but it drives extremely cautiously, staying behind a bus for a good quarter mile, where a human driver would have passed.

On the return trip, I compared pricing to Lyft and Uber. $9.75 for Waymo, while Uber attempted to extort me for $18.25, and Lyft offered a ride for $8.99 with a 3min wait, or $7.99 with a 10min wait. Again, Waymo avoided the freeway, snaking through residential areas instead.

If my Tesla Full-self driving (tried the subscription - I’d recommend against wasting money on even a single month of the subscription at this point) drove like this Waymo, and I could avoid liability for being intoxicated, I’d gladly fork over the $10k Musk is very proudly asking for his offering. I’m skeptical Tesla’s going to achieve Waymo levels in the next 5 years, or ever, without an improvement to the sensors.

The Waymo experience was much better than I expected, however, the car only fits 3 adults! There’s a child seat occupying one full seat, plus the middle in the rear seat. Both front seats were unavailable.

If I were offered an electric car with Waymo for $25k more than a Tesla, I’d gladly pay. It was impressive.

This is the 1st Waymo user review I've read. Thx for the post. Did you notice if the company has install road signs/hardware that help the cars complete their trips? I would think that would be possible since they have a small service area.

[disclaimer: my opinion, not that of my employer]

Changes to road hardware for autonomous cars have been happening on civil engineering timescales. For example, Caltrans commented in 2017 that it was increasing lane line thickness from 4" to 6" and phasing out the use of Botts' Dots. (Source: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/07/18/cal...)

Ugh I hate the name "Caltrans". They market themselves as a transit company except they provide everything but the transit.

I would have hoped a company called "Caltrans" to provide 100 train routes and 1000 bus routes around California.

> For the 4.4 mile drive I could have completed in 11 minutes, I was charged $11.30.

Shit, that's expensive. I would have imagined autonomous cars to be 1/4 the price of a human taxi or less.

$0.50/mile is likely the low end of what’s possible for the base vehicle costs. $0.50/mile + autonomous hardware costs/expected vehicle lifetime would be the total costs. 200k miles is generous for a Pacifica. I’ve read the autonomous hardware is $250k (could the hardware outlast a vehicle and be transferred?)

$0.50 + $250k/200k mi = $1.75/mi

$1.75/miles * 5.4 miles actually driven = $9.45, very close to what I paid.

If Google can get the autonomous hardware package down to $50k, then this trip would have been $4.05. At $5k (the absolute lowest possible?), the trip would cost $2.85. At that point, this becomes exciting.

Even at $4.05 it's not bad, that's about the level that the autonomous taxi is twice the cost of a city bus.

That would be much cheaper than a city bus, if you account for heavy subsidies the public buses get — the ticket revenues typically cover less than a half of operational cost of running buses, and if you include capex, it gets even worse.

It doesn’t service the major bar area of downtown Chandler, much less Old Town Scottsdale, Tempe or Downtown Phoenix

I live in Arizona and was going to say exactly this: Waymo doesn't go to many useful places right now. If it even expanded to cover Tempe (where ASU is located) and a good chunk of Scottsdale, it would be a lot more useful. Anyone on the margin of keeping a car or selling it, or not buying it in the first place, is unlikely to be heavily persuaded by Waymo availability because the area covered is so small.

> Anyone on the margin of keeping a car or selling it, or not buying it in the first place, is unlikely to be heavily persuaded by Waymo

I visit Arizona frequently and I don’t drive. Waymo’s current service area is useless. It’s in an area with a uniformly rectilinear road layout, low population density and lower incomes than its surrounding. It was picked for research ease. Not product-market fit.

It seems really unlikely that waymo wasn't aware of all these limitations when they selected the area they were going to trial the service in, and more like they selected the trial area to purposefully minimize demand.

> you can’t use it to send your 15 year old to the mall/theater, as you must be 18 to use the service alone.

They could honestly relax that constrain.

> The trial area effectively requires a vehicle for any practical lifestyle, and any of the use cases that I’d normally take a Lyft/Uber for, just aren’t serviced by Waymo.

The trial area seems constrained because in case something goes wrong they still have to dispatch a human. That doesn't really scale.

>They could honestly relax that constrain.

I don't know what legal constraints/tradeoffs they're operating under but I was flying in planes by myself (as an adult) by the time I was 15. So it doesn't seem unreasonable.

But you weren't by yourself. There were airline employees there the whole time.

Are you suggesting that stepping in an autonomous vehicle at home to be delivered to a museum and returning the same way is somehow more challenging than flying to a different state, taking public transportation, going to work at a McDonalds, or walking around a city--all of which are things that teens do? I assume these autonomous vehicles are monitored by humans at, at least, some level.

>They could honestly relax that constrain.

If I were waymo I'd keep that as long as i can because the downside of "child killed by freak accident in waymo car" probably is probably something I'd like to avoid.

The question isn't whether it's used much but whether it's at full capacity.

Waymo might as well use it in the suburbs where there are less corner case situations if it's at full capacity. The article suggests it is not used at full capacity, but isn't clear.

I don't think campus is covered. At least, you could never be dropped off on campus if the system is in no-autonomous-specialist mode.

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