Tell HN: I took autonomous taxi rides to/from/around SF downtown yesterday
I registered for Waymo One in August '21 and was given access exactly two years later. Geofencing prevented downtown access until two weeks ago. My experience was superb and I will prefer autonomous driving going forward.
Notes:
- Photos: https://imgur.com/a/0PwBPVa
- It was $27 to go downtown. Uber was $19.50 + tip. I wished it had been equally priced. I waited 3-10 minutes for pickups.
- The ride felt posh and comfortable in an electric Jaguar.
- The vehicle tolerates on-street pick-up/drop-off if the street is quiet, prefers pulling over to a curb, and will go around the block searching for a curb if the street is busy.
- The doors unlock via app. The door handles slide out from within the car and "appear" when you unlock.
- There is an LED light on the car. By default, it displays your initials ("SA") and has a customizable background with several color choices. You may adjust these within the app. This wasn't useful to me, but I could see its benefit if there were multiple autonomous vehicles around.
- The vehicle greets you as you open the door and enter. "Hello, Sean. Happy first day of fall."
- The vehicle waits a maximum of five minutes to pick you up. Once inside, you tap a button on a screen to begin the drive.
- There are screens within the car which show some basic functionality: "Play Music", "Pull Over", "Call Specialist". The screens also show you how the car is "seeing" in real-time. The display shows detected stop signs, stop lights, pedestrians, other vehicles, traffic density, etc.
- The car chose reasonable routes. They routes did not match those I've had Uber/Lyft drivers take. It seemed to prefer slower routes that offered increased safety. This added ~1 minute onto ~22 minutes of travel.
- The driving was a good balance of cautious and aggressive. Turns were tighter than I was expecting. It drove through one yellow light which I felt it had time for and it paused for one yellow light which I also felt it had time for. A driver adjacent to me gunned it through the second yellow and made it. There were a couple of moments I felt it was overly defensive - slowing down more than I would expect when overtaking a vehicle parked in a bike lane and giving "too much" right-of-way to pedestrians who were considering jaywalking.
- It handled very tight spaces well. There were two moments where only a few inches of clearance existed between vehicles travelling opposite directions. It routed around drivers opening car doors repeatedly.
- There was one moment of driving where it faltered. It was driving from Mission to Dolores Park around 4PM. There were a lot of people walking on the street and jaywalking. We stopped at a red light intersection and observed a stopped vehicle with their hazard lights on the opposite side of the intersection. When the light turned green, there were people interested in jaywalking in front of the vehicle, but they were trying to figure out how the vehicle was going to respond to the blocked intersection. The vehicle started to cautiously roll forward, then the people got impatient and cut in front of it, and this caused the vehicle to think it was doing something wrong. It paused for about 10 seconds, when it clearly could've moved forward, before re-engaging and navigating through the intersection and around the stopped vehicle blocking the lane.
- There were palpable psychological effects on people. Drivers pulled up next to the vehicle to peer inside and freak out. Children gawked and pointed. People on the streets audibly exclaimed. An elderly person was visibly displeased and shook their head. The inability to make eye contact with a driver impacted how pedestrians interacted with the vehicle.
- The crowd response significantly improved my experience and, for now, justified the extra expense.