Waymo and Uber partner to bring autonomous ride-hailing to Austin and Atlanta
waymo.com
waymo.com
The biggest challenge overall is going to be overcoming the issues with autonomous driving in inclement weather. But I’m sure it’s doable eventually.
They'll do what we've been so-well-trained-for at self-checkouts: the passenger might be given control of the vehicle in such situations (e.g. loss of network connection).
>within 5 years
As for predicting the future: I think within five years ALL vehicles on public roadways will require a beacon for travel, simply to alert other self-driven vehicles & intersection controllers. This process will be gradual, akin to "insurance discounts" for allowing driving habit monitoring (e.g. without a beacon, traffic lights won't auto-cycle for you).
Who handles liability if you get into an accident? When does it take control of the vehicle away? The most likely scenario is the car pulls over safely and asks you to get out or wait.
There are _many_ people who cannot or will not driver. They won't just take over control of a vehicle they're unfamiliar with. Teenagers, the elderly, people without a driver's license, people injured, ...
I personally think within 5-10 years, forward facing cameras will be mandated on all vehicles, starting with commercial/heavy duty vehicles. Yes, there's some degree of a privacy argument with it all, but the safety and liability boosts dramatically outweigh them.
Assuming that happens, either your suggestion could also happen, or a visual solution to the same thing could also be in play.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s very difficult to imagine that if AVs take over let’s say over the next 30 years that the end result will still be running on the same infrastructure we rely on today and that if we will still be a society where most people drive most of the time that AVs will really be all that transformative in the first place since they would be filling a sizeable but still relatively small use case- taking a cab around a major city. I can’t tell whether it’s the amazement of seeing a driverless vehicle or the actual utility of it that generates the excitement
They can already handle quite heavy rain and fog, the only thing missing is snow.
And that's completely ignoring their issue with surges, as their robot car supply is inherently fixed - they either don't intend to handle surges, or intend to have low utilization of their fleet.
None of it makes sense to me.
The cost per vehicle could get to something like $50k in the long-term, labor costs could get to maybe 2 people per 10 vehicles and utilization would be substantially higher compared to personally-owned cars.
The vehicles are / will be designed to last for a long time, Dolgov used 400k miles in his napkin calculation.
They can charge more because the user experience is better, so not only lower cost per mile but also higher price.
Cost of developing the technology will become negligible with scale, it's a fixed cost.
They're not just competing with other taxi services, but with all types of road transport. It's a technology that has the potential to be used by most people on the planet, daily.
Regarding surges, there are multiple ways to deal with it, for example surge pricing (which would motivate people to use the service when utilization is low) or using free capacity for delivery.
Their unit costs are at least break-even in San Francisco, and this is with their 5th gen vehicle, 6th gen is supposed to be much cheaper.
I was pretty baffled by this, but figured that attitude should be expected at a "labor" event, so I brought the topic up with my IT colleagues, and many agreed that they would never trust a driverless car.
I agree that we will eventually get there, but I think major regulatory setbacks should be expected, and a 5-year timeline is pretty optimistic.
> Through this expanded partnership, Uber will provide fleet management services including vehicle cleaning, repair, and other general depot operations. Waymo will continue to be responsible for the testing and operation of the Waymo Driver, including roadside assistance and certain rider support functions.
A lot of the operations for Waymo were also done by contractors Alphabet hired via Adecco.
Most contract hiring at Google is hired from Adecco.
For example - https://www.adecco.com/en-us/job-search/project-manager-ii-m...
They are now entirely reliant on quarter to quarter consumer spending and the performance of three stock holdings which are completely out of their hands.
Expect more and more manufactured headlines to keep the AV story in tact.
Offloading all that to Uber who can basically become a marketplace of robotaxis and service many companies makes a lot of sense for both companies.
You have to always remember that the competition is a guy in a car charging a couple bucks a mile
How this makes sense for Uber is that they don’t want to be left out when robotaxis replace human-driven ride hailing vehicles.
They killed someone.
That should require a huge introspection and if needed, shut down unsafe lines of business.
Their self driving car division was, by the accounts I read, never going to achieve self-driving and had serious problems.
If being a visionary means you are okay with killing people, then fuck being a visionary. “Moving fast and breaking things” should NEVER include killing people.
Which line of business would that be? Maybe the one involving human drivers that leads to ~75 deaths per year [1]? Though that's still a lower-than-average death rate compared to the general population (so shutting it down without a replacement could cause even more deaths).
You could argue that Uber has a moral imperative to replace its human drivers with automation as soon as possible.
[1] https://uber.app.box.com/s/lea3xzb70bp2wxe3k3dgk2ghcyr687x3?...
Just a guess but if that’s accurate and then waymo expands to where it becomes the de facto option and familiar for a large number of ride hailers you can rest assured the next step will be to take back operations and cut Uber out
It got axed during the layoffs in 2020-21.
Alumni of Michelangelo and the Self Driving Teams founded a lot of the AI startups you hear about today.
Furthermore, Uber's self-driving program was started when an ex-Goog exec stole Waymo IP when he joined Uber.
GCP was not a strong competitor (in our eyes) when the on-prem decision was being made in the 2011-2013 timeframe, which was also before there was even an Autonomous program. The reason early infra was on-prem largely boiled down to a general distrust for the cloud from the Boss, who in my recollection had had some bad experiences with other portfolio companies suffering major downtime due to AWS outages.
Uber’s relationship with Google was great until that little legal matter. They were huge and very helpful investors in Uber.
* Los Angeles - Waymo One
* San Francisco- Waymo One
* Phoenix - Waymo One, Uber
* Austin - Uber
* Atlanta - Uber
It’s still early days for AVs, so I’m guessing Waymo is still experimenting with which model they want to go with. I wonder if we will see Waymo or Cruise launch on Lyft as well.
https://waymo.com/blog/2019/05/partnering-with-lyft-to-serve...
SF doesn’t get snow or hurricanes
It is not at all unusual for people to get killed this way. They think their car can make it across, and they're wrong.
It's a problem in many parts of Texas because severe thunderstorms happen frequently and some of them bring heavy rain. But in Austin, it's especially bad because Austin is hilly, which makes flash floods worse.
Houston, by comparison, might as well be a river for how often it floods and how widespread flooding tends to be there.
However, in my experience, Austin roads are uniquely bad in one respect: surprisingly often, lane markings are so faded you cannot tell where your lane is. It's even worse when it rains.
Sometimes it is so bad that I know neither I nor anyone else can tell where their lane is, and I make a conscious decision to drive differently to compensate for that. I don't know if autonomous vehicles are going to deal with that very well.
Wonder if air quality improves in cities that get a large adoption of autonomous electric vehicles.
In the meantime, there are 16 million Ford F150s on the road. They’re heavy too, comparable to many EVs.
https://media.ford.com/content/fordmedia/fna/us/en/news/2023...
EVs turned political and people threw out the extra weight of batteries without comparing that to the weight of the current SUVs, etc that Americans drive.
From the article you shared:
> The wear rate of different tyre brands varied substantially and the toxic chemical content varied even more, he said, showing low-cost changes were feasible to cut their environmental impact.
And also
> Dr James Tate, at the University of Leeds’ Institute for Transport Studies in the UK, said the tyre test results were credible. “But it is very important to note that BEVs are becoming lighter very fast,” he said. “By 2024-25 we expect BEVs and [fossil-fuelled] city cars will have comparable weights. Only high-end, large BEVs with high capacity batteries will weigh more.”
And
> The average weight of all cars has been increasing. But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs.
Once we've stamped out emissions from ICE vehicles, we have a new goal: stricter regulations for tires.
Developing countries often have less strict tailpipe emissions standards than developed ones. They'd also benefit from large-scale EV adoption.