Largest Autonomous Ride-Hail Territory in US Now Even Larger | Hacker News Reader

Largest Autonomous Ride-Hail Territory in US Now Even Larger

waymo.com

57 pointsxnx72 comments

For people who don't live in a Waymo market, it's easy to think that self-driving cars are vaporware, and perpetually 5 years off. For those that live in a Waymo market, self-driving cars are at once amazingly futuristic and mundane.

Agreed. It's only been a decade as an adult, but riding a waymo was my first real wow moment for a technology. Not VR, not LLMs, etc. I would actually only ride waymos over human driven taxis if they were available in my current area

And incredibly, it’s not some buggy mess. They’re real, they work, and they provide utility.

They’re not perfect, but it’s not some horrible battleground of robotic bumper cars and dead bicyclists.

They work fine but are a privacy nightmare for occupants and the public alike: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en

InB4 “akshully you have no right to privacy in public” — you should, and those laws predate ubiquitous cameras in every pocket, on every doorbell, and rolling down every street.

I think this is a reasonable concern, but it any/much different than Uber or Lyft?

What’s the privacy nightmare? That the cars have cameras?

Do you also think it’s a privacy nightmare when you step into an elevator with cameras? Walk into a building with cameras?

> InB4 “akshully you have no right to privacy in public” — you should, and those laws predate ubiquitous cameras in every pocket, on every doorbell, and rolling down every street.

Surveillance cameras have been ubiquitous for a decade and the laws have been updated in many countries around that fact. Cameras in public spaces are not a new invention.

If you’re trying to suggest that we should ban cameras in public spaces then you’re never going to be happy with reality.

Except for when a dozen of them all fail in the same intersection, and the endless videos of them nearly hitting pedestrians

10 years ago HN was full of threads about self-driving cars. Waymo, Cruise, Tesla, Uber... 1000+ comments shouting about the end of trucking and mass layoffs. We must have UBI now! because of the power of this technology and its rapid growth that the next 5-10 years surely hold in store.

Where exactly are we now? The greater-Phoenix metro?

It really puts the AI threads in perspective. The same comments appear in those threads today.

Interesting.

And also San Francisco and LA, if we're talking about Waymo.

More generally, I think this is the kind of rollout you'd expect from a technology like self-driving cars: slow to start, and likely exponential beyond a certain point.

The time from 1 to 10 cities may very well be longer than from 10 to 100 cities.

Should still have UBI or at least some form of government training and placement. Just because it’s slower than overnight, doesn’t mean it won’t affect people’s livelihood.

People will do other things, like maintain them, pick them up when there is an error, clean them, etc. I’m still waiting for a car shape change.

Robotaxi economics simply don't work out if there's a 1:1 shift from driving to maintenance.

As for the shape, they're all going to converge to rounded bricks eventually.

50K+ paid autonomous rides/week

I just visited San Francisco for a few days (first time!) and it was absolutely amazing seeing all of these cars driving around everywhere.

I also thought the driverless car companies had stalled (bad pun); but that is obviously not the case. I reflected on why I thought that and I realized I had allowed news about the Tesla self driving technology to negatively affect my understanding of this whole market.

I have since watched a bunch of Waymo videos online, they are so cool! The possibilities seem huge.

Is it possible you were similarly mistaken about FSD?

FSD vs Waymo is not even close.

True. FSD works anywhere while Waymo works in a few square miles.

FSD is level 4 nowhere. The human is always responsible for driving.

Tell me then, what Tesla do you own? When's the last time you used FSD? What version did you use?

And if your answer is "I don't own a Tesla" why should anyone take you seriously?

I own a Model 3 and have used FSD v12.3.x as recently as a month ago. I've also taken several Waymo rides in that time. I can confidently say it's not even in the same league as Waymo.

Maybe! I get quite a lot of Ubers here in Vancouver and they are almost exclusively Tesla. I don’t known if the “3d view” that is displayed on the screen in the dashboard is used by FSD or not; but if it is there is no way that could be safe for self driving cars. It’s so inaccurate!

I could be wrong about their progress though, always happy to be corrected.

What you see in those cars is not FSD, but Autopilot that comes with every car. Autopilot is lane keeping + traffic aware cruise control plus a few small features like green light chimes and speed sign detection.

FSD looks very different and you can see everything in the road and what the car is planning to do. There's some good YouTube channels where they test different versions of FSD in different situations, AIDRIVR does a good job, eg https://youtu.be/rMDNFLsXFEU?si=SHWAm24ZY3psnO4Z&t=136. Nice thing about those channels is you can also look at old videos and see the rate of improvement.

I had FSD for one month on my car and it was really impressive. There were plenty of disengagements, but they were all what I'd call "quality of life" issues. Car was too hesitant during blind lefts, or advanced lefts, car slowed down too much for speed bumps, it got into turn-only lanes later than I'd like, etc, etc. The hardest part of driving in my town is a 3 lane roundabout where upon exiting the roundabout you have to very quickly and confidently change 2 lanes in order to get on the highway, it handled it with ease. Overall, I would not buy it today, but didn't see any reason why they can't solve the issues I saw.

Fwiw, the outward deployment of Cruise has stalled, but it was mostly because withheld accident footage rather than anything to do with the tech. They were nipping on the heels of Waymo, and they have continued development internally while they wait for their time-out from the regulators to be over. I expect them to be Lyft to Waymo’s Uber.

I don’t know about that. Cruise tried to move too quickly in an attempt to catch up to Waymo and accumulated a ton of much publicized issues in SF. Constant stalling in intersections, involved in a few collisions, etc. CA DMV clearly noted “performance issues” as one of the reasons for their suspension.

The other incidents were much publicized, but I don’t think that had anything to do with their actual burden/costliness, which was quite tiny. After all, a Waymo car got violently totaled by a crowd even though they have had an almost flawless record. Some fraction of the population hates these things intrinsically, and I don’t think the disdain is driven by the actual risk or events; those are just an excuse.

Some of the incidents were overblown, sure, but even before the pedestrian dragging incident the CA DMV had ordered them to scale back their fleet by 50%.

I took a few rides with Cruise and it was clear it was not ready for prime time, the potential was evident but it seemed like they were a couple years behind.

I'm not disputing that Cruise was behind Waymo a bit, just the idea that development was stalling because supporters were losing faith in progress. (That was the possibility raised in the original comment I was replying to.) That is, there is no "autonomous driving winter".

Separately, any level-headed quantitative assessment of the cost-and-benefits of the roll-out to society will find that we are going way, way too slowly. It is madness to slow down a research program -- whose every day of delay costs the US over a billion dollars -- because, out of hundreds of test vehicles driving over many months, a handful blocked traffic for a few minutes. If you wait to start building out the fleet until autonomous vehicles are 2x-10x safer than human drivers (the conventional wisdom among regulators), it will delay things by years and so literally cost tens of thousands of lives.

(I've taken dozens of rides in a Cruise and had zero safety issues, am very happy to have them driving around in my neighborhood, etc.)

> The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

It's distributed in the very few places where the future is very easy to build.

When Waymo was only available in Chandler AZ it was often said here on HN that it needed to go to SF, with all of the foggy weather, and narrow and hilly streets, to prove its worth. I guess Waymo has passed that test and SF has became an “easy” place. What would be the next difficult place that will become easy someday?

They don't run the self-driving cars in the fog. Also, the streets aren't that narrow compared to most other major cities. It's certainly a step up from Arizona, though.

They absolutely do run in the fog, I live in a particularly foggy part of the city and take them several times a week.

And SF absolutely does have lots of narrow streets. There are a lot of neighborhoods where the roads are only wide enough for one direction of traffic at a time due to parked cars. Either you or the oncoming car needs to pull to the side in front of a driveway to pass. Waymo handles these situations expertly.

Based on your other posts in here you seem to have some kind of axe to grind and are making stuff up. Go watch some Youtube videos.

> And SF absolutely does have lots of narrow streets. There are a lot of neighborhoods where the roads are only wide enough for one direction of traffic at a time due to parked cars. Either you or the oncoming car needs to pull to the side in front of a driveway to pass. Waymo handles these situations expertly.

That is not a narrow urban road, unless you have about 3 inches on either side of your car. Drive in Europe or NYC sometime.

I have no axes to grind, but I find the optimism of "[X technology] works in [Y very easy condition], so it's going to explode any time now" somewhat tiresome and naive. I have been hearing it about self-driving cars for >10 years now (since the DARPA challenges). Plenty of technologies never leave the garden of that easy condition.

I've driven in NYC plenty. I think if they can navigate situations that are this narrow they can probably handle narrow roads in NYC adequately: https://youtu.be/YtbhoLp96DE?t=423

People said for a long time that self driving cars would never handle the complexity of SF, the fog, the rain, the hills, the bikes, the narrow streets, the crowds of pedestrians. Now that they do, I take the opposite view of you. I think the only hurdles left are snow, economics, and regulation. They are high hurdles, but seem solvable.

As someone who has lived in the Northeast US for most of my life (except for a stint in LA and SF), someone who has only lived in the two Waymo markets has no idea that they are playing the driving video game on the easiest mode possible. Almost no rain, it never snows, there's never any ice on the road, there are very few potholes, and the worst weather condition is some fog during which the Waymos can hide out in parking lots. At the same time, the pedestrians and other drivers are also relatively polite and concerned about their own survival.

Also, respectfully, most people who live in CA have very little idea about the mechanics of how to drive a car - they never had to learn because of the lack of the aforementioned precipitation - so it's actually a lot easier for Waymo to get to the same level as you because you are all bad drivers (mechanically, not in terms of politeness or rule-following). In CA I frequently got asked whether I ever did amateur racing or go-karting as a child, and when I learned that this was about how I handled a car (at first I thought it was just an odd inquiry about a specific hobby), I politely informed them that I did not, but I learned to drive in an icy version of hell.

I am hopeful, but it's going to be a long slog, and at the pace it took Waymos to become average-to-below-average drivers in SF, I assume it will be 10+ years before self-driving cars come to my area in a serious way.

Almost no rain? Not sure what you're smoking, SF gets rain on 70+ days of the year, and it's concentrated in the winter so you have about three months where it's constantly raining. Sure, east coast cities get more rain in total but it's not binary. I also find SF has pretty poorly maintained roads with lots of potholes but YMMV.

In my admittedly limited and relatively dated experience driving in SF, the potholes are pretty shallow and you can usually drive over them safely. I imagine they have also gotten a lot worse since I left, as the city's management has only grown in incompetence.

A quick Google search shows 50 inches of precipitation over 125 days in NYC, and 23 in SF in 71 days. That's less than half. The source (US NCEI) doesn't say how they measured, but I believe that's only rainfall.

It also does appear that as of 6 months ago, Waymos can now operate in rain and fog, but still stay off the streets when it gets heavy.

As a Tesla owner, It's great to know other companies are working on FSD that doesn't try to kill you every 30 minutes or so. I was in a construction zone a few days ago and my Tesla didn't "see" a chainlink fence and accelerated right for it. I keep both hands on the wheel with FSD activated so it's quick and easy to override but it can catch you by surprise sometimes.

>I keep both hands on the wheel with FSD activated so it's quick and easy to override but it can catch you by surprise sometimes.

Then why on Earth do you use it? Do you not feel this is a threat to others on the road? And what is gained if such "autonomous" driving requires your full attention at all times so as to prevent catastrophic accidents?

You must not live somewhere with gridlock if you can't imagine a use for supervised FSD. It's much less taxing to monitor the Tesla.

How much better is it than regular adaptive cruise control?

So I'm sure some adaptive cruise controls are better than others but coming from a BMW X5, the range of the sensors would result in situations where traffic would speed up, a car in front of me would change lanes, adaptive cruise is set to 65 mph (because we're on the highway, even if we're crawling along) so it speeds up because it thinks it's now "open road" but the cars in front of me are already slowing down because of another bottleneck ahead so it has to slow down quickly once it detects them.

Some automakers do a better job than other for sure, but I heard that Tesla's basic autopilot is pretty good already.

Yes and that's the problem. I think you should be completely focused on the road with full attention, not half zoning out until your Tesla randomly swerves into some innocent bystander. I don't trust that you'll react in time.

Tesla's FSD v12.3+ is pretty impressive. You are essentially no longer driving, you're just watching it drive - and ready to intervene if needed. It is far less mentally taxing on the brain.

There is a sensor to detect that you're gripping the wheel too, which helps keep your attention on the road.

Gosh I don't even keep both hands on the wheel (especially not in gridlock) in my car that's old enough to get a license to drive itself (ironic, given the article).

I had my first ride in a Waymo car today. Despite closely following the field, nothing prepared me for the sheer magic of it. It just worked. After my fourth ride in a single day, all I could think was "hot damn!." It's easy to forget that, for most people, this is still the stuff of science fiction. Does it have room to improve? Sure. But today's experience was fantastic. I'm eager to see testing in my medium-sized Midwestern city (with all the snowy goodness). Also, the roads in SF are wild. I used to think Omaha streets were chaotic, but every visit to SF reminds me how much I appreciate the space and sprawl back home.

Mechanical turk chess was also amazing in its day so I do wonder how often there is a remote human driver vs not. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Getting semi-automated remote driving working at scale is an accomplishment.

For all the hype LLMs and chatbots get in this day and age, Waymo has an actual AI product out in the real world in a safety critical setting and is flying completely under the radar. It doesn’t help that they go about their work quietly without much fanfare, but it still amazes me how they’re not the poster child for modern day AI given how state of the art their tech is [1].

[1] https://waymo.com/research/

Their marketing is very modest at this stage. Similar to early Google, they're letting their technology and experience do the job for them.

There seem to be a lot of prominent people in the valley, mostly who are heavily invested in competitors (e.g. VC Brad Gerstner), who like to spread the misconception that Waymo uses minimal AI and hand codes a lot of their system. They also take the view that using mapping and lidar can't scale. Maybe they'll turn out to be right, but it comes across as cope to me.

I have been using Waymo in LA since 2023 and prefer it to Uber - however it still doesn’t do airport pickup/dropoffs here just yet. Eagerly looking forward to expansion of the service area so I can take it to/from LAX!

If they ever finish the people mover they could probably make pickups/dropoffs work pretty easily. Them trying to make it work driving into the terminal though, that's gonna be rough.

The US are like guinea pigs these days. Freedom for the corporations but not for the citizens.

Why do you pat them on the back for this? Why are US streets littered with private tech that very much doesn't belong there? Such a shame to let these companies which are only there to make money test their products with real humans lives.

When do we get Waymo for the SF peninsula area? That's been announced, but it's not live yet.

According to ([1]), a part of the SF peninsula is currently being tested in the Waymo-employees-only mode.

1. https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1cjcpoa/waymo_announ...

I always get a kick out of how these self-congratulatory announcements from Waymo always conveniently omit how often remote assistance personnel teleoperate the vehicles. And whenever you ask, they never give you an answer ;)

Support staff can only give input on what path to take, they cannot remotely "turn the wheel" or "press the pedals".

Yes that and remotely read the road situation via all the sensors (cameras, lidar, etc) and figure out what reasonable path to input. Automation of "turn the wheel" / "press the pedals" is trivial by comparison.

I'm in Phoenix this week. I wanted to use Waymo. They only allow credit cards with a 6 digit zip, so if you're visiting from another country you're not able to use the service.

American zip codes have five digits, so that’s probably what you mean?

Anyway, I agree, using the postal code for credit card authentication is insane. Some significant countries like UK and Canada use letters within these codes, so you can’t even assume that a credit card’s associated zip code can be entered with digits.

yeah, five and the postal code in my country is 4 digits

We support Google Pay and Apple Pay now, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/14160746?hl=en.

huh, yes it seems it does. I'm still in the city for another day, maybe I will get to try it out tomorrow. Cheers for that, I wouldn't have re-installed the app to take another look otherwise.

I did indeed get to ride on it, and I thought it was really good. It did take approximately twice as long as an Uber due to avoiding the highways. I'm ok with that, it was nice to be in a car that didn't tailgate.

Did you try 00000, 99999 or entering just the digits from your postal code with truncation or 0-padding on the right?

Yep I did try that, no go.

They condition this with "in US" because Baidu in China is larger?

They are simply saying they are expanding their area in Phoenix AZ, which is already the largest autonomous ride-hail territory in the US...

If Baidu's numbers are to be believed, Baidu Apollo is indeed much larger, with over 5M rides in 2024 YTD:

https://www.just-auto.com/news/baidu-launches-chinas-first-2...

Assuming the average ride is over 2 mi, this is more than Waymo's cumulative 10M miles driven.

Apples to oranges. Waymo's 10M miles are their autonomous miles, not their total mileage. Apollo's miles are almost entirely with safety drivers until very recently.

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