Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...
Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
Waymo sometimes does weird, unexpected things - but safely. Once it seemed to change its mind about the optimal route a few times over the course of 10 seconds, switching safely between two lanes back and forth a few times before committing. It used its turn signal fine, and the lanes were clear, so it wasn't a problem, but this isn't something humans do.
Sometimes it behaves oddly, but I have developed confidence that it will do those odd things safely.
Oh, I disagree, this is something I observe and in fact do myself quite a lot. We all run it through our minds which route might be the quickest spending on certain factors. The difference is Waymo (or any tech) will base this on actual data (i.e., getting there quicker) vs humans who will be more emotionally driven (i.e., frustration at the driver in front, wanting to take the more scenic route, being undecided about stopping at that cafe halfway).
I'm all for self driving in highly populated areas. In a perfect world I'd like to see it integrated into all vehicles, and when entering specific areas you are told your car will enter self-driving mode. Arguably this makes the most business sense for Waymo, licence the underlying tech to manufacturers that already have capacity to produce vehicles vs compete.
That said I admit if these are the kinds of complaints we are discussing, as opposed to the kinds Uber attracted (like running a woman over in Nevada), Waymo must be doing pretty well. These are nitpicks to gradually address, not fundamental issues. Kudos to waymo, it was always obvious they were nearly the only player seriously trying
Early on, they had those concept cars that looked like they belonged at Disneyland or in a Chevron commercial. Then, they started modding off-the-shelf cars at talking up the Waymo Driver. I think at some point they decided their core competence would be self-driving specifically, leaving the "car of the future" bit to traditional car companies.
I expect that robot taxis will be both consumers and producers of that actual data. They will likely report the traffic conditions they experience back to the company that runs the robot taxi service, and that will become input to the rest of the fleet.
If the time it takes for observations from a given robot taxi to be incorporated into the data received by other robot taxis is short enough it might be possible to get interesting feedback loops. It may even be possible to get oscillations.
Still, a person can dream.
maybe it's a cultural difference
As far as humans suck at driving, it's not that they suck on average, but that the ones who do suck at it don't always have a sticker saying that they suck.
Averages don't work for risk evaluation.
Eg, turn off the phone or turn off notifications, even vibrations. Or at least make a strict rule to ignore it while moving and only look while fully stopped, eg at a stoplight although that's just decent driver grade not excellent driver, because of the temptation the notification will present each time.
A great driver also reviews the route for a couple of minutes before leaving in order to reduce reliance on GPS-- you still use GPS but because it's not the first time you've seen the material, already know the shape of the route, and just need reminders to encourage you you're on the right track, the GPS will genuinely steal far less attention. The two minutes will be well spent, and may save lots of time, because it vastly reduces the likelihood of wrong turns.
No one with kids wants to ride in taxis with kids all the time. Ditto for anyone with hobbies that require transporting large things, like kayaks, bikes, etc. Or people with large pets. Or grocery shopping for more than 1-2 people. Or any of the dozens of other conveniences that Americans have come to expect from owning a car over the past century.
I can take my time to get car seats in and kids buckled, without feeling the pressure to hurry from the human driver.
I don't have to feel like my kids misbehaving are going to annoy a human driver, or get me a bad review in Uber/Lyft.
I don't have to worry about tipping, or the driver taking a longer route to charge me more.
I don't have to worry about small-talk, or awkwardly sitting in silence when I normally would be talking with those I'm driving with.
Obviously this doesn't cover all use cases for a car (pretty sure you can't load a kayak onto a Waymo because you'd block sensors), but it seems WAY better to me as someone who doesn't like to deal with the people aspect of Taxis.
In a world where waymo works as a taxi, it also works to deliver a human-drivable rental car right to your door (and send it on to the next customer when you're done with it).
So now the short term car rental user experience should be dramatically better, even if the robotaxi isn't appropriate for all the tasks.
This or an equivalent will arrive to a robo taxi near you when the service inevitably gets enshittified to hell and back.
Ads, trips shared with other humans, pay extra for heated seats, etc.
Is it Yuck? Yes of course. But it also seems extremely unlikely. And it's a lot less Yuck than thinking about what's in the sand in public playgrounds that all kids visit constantly. And while I have a reasonable chance of preventing them from licking the seats, I have no chance of preventing them from eating some sand.
This is just a bizarre irrational worry...
Do you and your kids take public transport regularly? In a failing city/society, that is.
Because if the answer is "yes, I do take public transport in a city that struggles to pay its bills and I still don't care that the chairs have weird organic substances on them" then fair-play to you, but for me personally at some point I had to purchase a personal car (when I was already approaching my mid-30s) because I just couldn't convince myself anymore that it is ok to not want to sit down inside of a train ("better stand up by the window, that seat is too dirty").
And these robo-taxis will be worse than public transport, for the main reason that there's no-one "standing guard" inside of them (and, no, Big Brother cameras placed inside of them, which should be a dedicated topic all by itself, btw, really won't change a thing in that respect).
Do you avoid handrails and sanitize the doorknobs and gas pumps you interact with? Those are going to be far worse than subway chairs. It's probably not a bad idea, but it's a bit beyond what I suspect most people consider normal. I had a friend who lived like that, and he ended up being diagnosed with OCD.
If you soil a waymo taxi, they can ban you from ever booking another one, the same cannot be said for public transport
While I consider this somewhat dystopian, I do think it's pretty clear that they will be much cleaner than public transport for that reason
You reached a situation where everyday things are "too dirty" and rather than realising that's a mental health problem and you might need to fix that, you... found an expensive and elaborate coping strategy which necessitates further crazy beliefs.
That's just one tiny example out of sea of examples.
Before making such bold claims, you've got to know a little tiny bit of the topic or at least look it up to make sure.
I can almost guarantee that if they don’t already, the robo-taxis will eventually start asking for tips.
This is already the case at self-checkout in some stores for example.
As long as the companies can get away with it, they will tack on any number of extra fees and charges even if those fees and charges really don’t make any sense.
Hell, even tipping people does not really make sense the way it works in some places. A person working for a company should receive enough pay from the company itself that they don’t have to actually rely on tips in order to make enough money to survive. Tips should be a nice extra that customers willingly add because of good service. Not a forced extra percentage that they have to pay on every transaction just so that the company can pay less to their employees.
If people are willing to pay base charge + tip for an Uber, then that is what robo-taxies will charge too. Especially if one company is allowed to keep a monopoly on the technology.
You mention American at the end of your comment, but the rest of the world isn’t the same. Waymo doesn’t really have to limit itself to the states once they get the concept worked out.
When I'm out doing something, the car also serves as a reasonably secure private locker where I can store things without carrying them around.
Hell there's people who just use uber exclusively now.
Not every young person spends all day hiding in their room, doom scrolling on social media. Some of them have to get to sports practice with bulky equipment in places that public transit and robo-taxis don't go.
What’s more I don’t think we will have that privilege for long, personal transportation is a luxury in most of the world, it is becoming a luxury here also. We will adapt though like everyone else has.
Renting gear is fine for casual users, but serious practioners in almost every sport are very particular about their gear.
Americans have become emotionally attached to cars because of what they enable them to do. That might take a while to die. But in Europe cars are more of a pita to own and run because we have less space. I don’t have any great love for mine. As soon as waymo gets here and is reasonably priced I’ll get rid of my car.
Working remotely helps a lot since there's no need to drive every day, but it's only a fraction of overall people who have this privilege.
Still, I'm looking forward to seeing Waymo at my town. It would make a good DD and backup in case my car needs repairs, etc.
People in the Netherlands get fine without a car: kids just bike to school with their friends instead of sitting in the backseat in traffic for 45m every morning. This is because money and space is not spent exclusively in car infrastructure, but cycling and walking and public transport.
> Just because they're driven by computers now isn't going to magically change all the reasons that people didn't use them before (hint: it wasn't because they were driven by humans).
Sort of. The primary reason I don't hire vehicles more often is cost, which is related to the human driver. The wealthiest families I know are much more likely to use a car service to ferry family members around.
If there was a car service that could whisk us to school, work, grocery shopping, etc with no more than 15 minutes advanced notice for less than the cumulative cost of a similarly-sized private vehicle I'd sell one of our cars in a heartbeat. I have no idea whether that future is years or decades away, but when it occurs many families I know would go from 2 or 3 cars down to 1.
I'll admit that going from 1 car to 0 cars would be a tougher sell. For that I'd have to be confident in five nines of availability and vehicles that can haul equipment like bikes and kayaks. But that doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem, just a logistical one that'll take a bit longer.
The driving experience itself is on par with the "best" drivers I've ever ridden with (things like stopping at actual stop signs, for instance, and not racing from one traffic light to the next, and being courteous to bikes and pedestrians), not to mention just the peace and tranquility of being in a car solo when you're not having to drive (I know, I know, mass transit is better for countless reasons and this is actually doubling down on human isolation which is probably not great long term). Anyway, I have zero interest in getting into an Uber at this point. I'd wait longer and pay more for a Waymo if given the choice. And I'm fully aware people will, if this works more broadly, lose jobs bc of it. I'm not insensitive to that, but I don't think the genie is going back in the bottle barring catastrophic incidents by Waymo et al that cause regulators to kill self-driving cars altogether. Note that I did witness an incident where on a road with no lane markings the Waymo straddled a left turn "lane" and a straight-travel lane. It's an intersection I transit often and normal drivers have great trouble with and frankly makes me uneasy every time I turn left there as well. The Waymo was definitely perplexed by it.
For those who talk about how Phoenix's roads are straight and wide... This is not true in Los Angeles (nor in SF though SF is more of a compact grid than LA). For those of you unfamiliar, a lot of the streets in LA where Waymo operates today are very narrow, with cars parked on both sides and so there's inadequate room for two cars to go down them without waiting for another car to pass. These same streets have zero lane markings on them. I've experienced this several times in Waymo to date where the car just "gets it," though it's almost too cautious when it needs to get over to let another car pass when there's not enough space for both. And if you read all of that and say "what about the weather?" It's obviously an issue and I fully agree it will delay the rollout "everywhere."
All that said, I cannot wait until I can jump in one of these things, from Waymo or any other company, and safely go up to the mountains or some other road-trip destination. The economics of longer trips, particularly to rural areas, are likely tricky bc of the inability to count on a return fare, but, man, I do think self-driving cars are a radically important technology that will vastly change how we transit and, really, how we live. That is, if they don't fuck up too much en route to getting there.
I agree with all of your points about Waymo vs. Uber-like ridesharing—the average Uber ride is so much less safe that it’s hard to argue for.
But I also agree with your aside about the growing isolation of society—the longer term implications of every event, meal, and errand being separated by autonomous journeys are staggering.
So the question is, how do the societal isolation factors play into your decision making? (Honest question, not a gotcha, I’m curious how others think about these tradeoffs.)
I suspect an underlying issue with socialising is faith in humanity. It's hard to have faith in humanity in the modern world when every front appears to be telling you otherwise. If you don't have faith in humanity, then you're limited to only interacting with those: "you have to" and "are vetted".
At least I personally used it a lot, and knew several people that did.
I live in a big city (larger population than Phoenix) in the Uk and I've never even seen a self-driving car. Anywhere. I don't even think such a thing exists on public roads in my country. That Gibson quote about the future not being evenly distributed, etc.
Just a data-point.
You won't know if people have Level 3 "Self Driving" cars because unlike Level 4, the Level 3 cars always have a human sat in the driving seat, it's just that maybe the human isn't paying attention and maybe the car is driving anyway. It may be difficult to gauge (beyond guessing) how many people you see are bad drivers and how many aren't actually driving at all under L3...
L1 (the machine does some of the work but a human driver is always doing much of the driving) is certainly something you see and don't even think about. Intelligent Cruise control (ie it won't smack into the car ahead but instead slow down) on a motorway, maybe automatic lane keeping on somebody's fancier or newer car, it's not "Self driving" as you'd understand it, but it's something.
The way these "Levels" work is L3 to L4 is the point where we transition from "The human is legally driving but the machine is offering more and more assistance" to "The machine is legally driving and the human is asked less and less often to do anything at all". As a result a person who is literally blind and thus couldn't possible drive the car or obtain a license to do so - can (and they do) use a Waymo, just like they'd use an Uber, but they cannot do the same with Tesla "Full Self Driving".
https://www.autocar.co.uk/car-news/technology/mercedes-use-t...
That’s an interesting way of saying you live in London ;)
(Phoenix urban area is more populous than every urban area in the UK except for London)
According to Kagi the population of Greater Manchester is 2.8 million vs 1.61 for Phoenix.
Phoenix's metro population alone is 4.8m.
I think my point stands, that even large urban areas in the UK have no SDVs.
Countries develop at different rates on different things.
A significant portion of traffic deaths also occur in special conditions-- at night, with intoxicated persons, in bad weather.
Existing self driving cars won't even drive in those more difficult conditions.
In terms of the passenger miles driven if you compare to non-intoxicate humans the expected number of deaths for self driving cars is still below 1 if they were as safe as non-intoxicated human drivers.
Safer cars are an excellent goal but they're not automatically a given result for self driving.
> Waymos avoid many of the Uber challenges: foul-smelling "air fresheners," dubious music / talk radio choices, etc.
And introduces new ones like being dropped off blocks from your destination because the car refuses to drive on perfectly fine roads, service being unavailable in poor weather, and extending Google's tracking of everything you do online to offline.
:D
Aside, you can just ask uber drivers to turn off the radio.
To put some numbers on it in the US cars are driven about 3.2 x 10^12 miles per year, and around 4 x 10^4 people are killed in car accidents (drivers, passengers, pedestrians, and cyclists).
That's one death per 8 x 10^7 miles.
There are around 2 x 10^6 people non-fatally injured in car accidents per year in the US. That's an injury every 1.6 x 10^6 miles.
There are around 4 x 10^6 non-injury car accidents per year in the US, which is one every 8 x 10^5 miles.
If we assume all miles driving are equally risky and that we drive 40 miles per day 365 days a year, then we would expect to be in a non-injury car accident around once every 55 years, be injured in a car accident around once every 110 years, and be killed in a car accident around once every 5500 years.
Of course almost no one drives all their miles at times and in conditions when the risk per mile is average so when estimating your personal risk you need to take that into account.
A comment I wrote 3 years ago has more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26950254
The old "look at the person to your left, now look to the person on your right" meme comes to mind. One of you will probably have an accident with an injury in your lifetime.
I ran the same calculation for dying in a car accident and got a lifetime probability of 0.7%, but I'm not sure I did it right.
Phoenix has the perfect climate for self-driving cars.
It will require a major technological leap in order for them to succeed in the "real world" (fog, rain, snow, etc).
We handle both dense fog and heavy rain on the latest vehicles. The best blog post is probably https://waymo.com/blog/2021/11/a-fog-blog/ but you can find a lot of videos in the rain.
Snow and very cold weather is a challenge for sensor cleaning. We've done some testing in both NYC and Buffalo (https://waymo.com/blog/2023/11/road-trip-how-our-cross-count...) to collect data.
Winter here changes daily between
- no road lines visible
- snow packed into ice randomly making the road a a camouflage pattern
- snow is fresh/deep so no road is visible and you navigate based on the slight hump in the snow where you know there's a curb
- same as above, but instead of a curb a slight indent where there's a ditch
- slush piles outside the tire lanes, which if hit will suck you in or cause you to spin out
- ice/snow on hills, so time your arrival for rolling stops at intersections because stopping is not an option
- active snowfall (limited camera vision, and I'm guessing reduced/useless signal from lidar)
- hail
- sporadic black ice (its easy to slow down when its icy everywhere, but knowing when and where black ice is likely when it's sporadic is a skill)
- the "lanes" formed by peoples tires in the snow often don't align with the official road, and sometimes a lane goes missing in this situation
And all that's after you deal with sensor cleaning.
Snow drifts in the wind, side roads don't get regularly plowed, and conditions change rapidly so unless they can handle the majority of the list above then they won't be able to handle winter period.
I'm not sure why you are trying to justify such a large shortcoming - for most people having your car be randomly unusable for 1/3 of the year would be a big deal.
I'm not sure whether this reflects their own preferences, what they think customers want, or if they are just completely oblivious.
Knowing BigCo reputation, I think it’s equally possible that Waymo and/or BigCo accounts will be banned for actual perp, complainant or random rider in-between… what a world…