I wonder if the cleanliness will be maintained over time? Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically, and it seems like this would suffer when the company starts to squeeze costs to improve margins.
I’m sure the account agreement is going to require you to to accept being charged egregious bills for damaging or dirty-ing the cabin
A friend of mine works night audit in a rough part of the valley. As soon as he says the magic words 'we require a major credit card or a $300 deposit', they immediately hang up.
Sure you can pay in cash at the end if you want.
But you can't get a room in the first place without a credit card, even if they never charge it.
(I mean I'm sure there are some exceptions somewhere, but generally speaking, no, cash isn't sufficient.)
The point is when there's damage, it can be billed to the malicious actor in question.
At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.
Starting to sound a bit like a credit system or some other dystopian shit show. You do something dumb, drunk while in college and you're cut off...sounds amazing.
This would reductively mean a more effective form of punishing vandalism, which would in of itself be a slight net good overall.
In the ideal case, there would be a recompense program to pay for the damages made + extra, in return for being able to ride them again.
Meta-point: This discussion has significant overlap with busses/trains/public transportation. How we deal with bad actors in that space would translate well into this space.
But for some people, a fine is just the cost of doing the thing. And for every bad actor you ban, there's another bad actor willing to take their place.
The keyword there being "some". If an account is tied to the person, recourse for negligent/malicious behavior can be applied, but that only works if there's an account to add the penalty to.
On Waymo's part, requiring an account to use the service would be in the benefit of the service as a whole.
The future is awesome
Think of those self-cleaning toilets.
I totally agree we will start to see very specific driverless designs that are very easy to clean.
Either that, or Johnny Cabs. I'm easy.
That's a good robotics project. All the cars are the same. The cars do not have any objects inside that belong to the occupants and should stay. So robotic interior vacuuming could be quite practical, as a station in the car wash. A vision system can inspect for damage and route that car to the maintenance line.