It sure looks like they’ve solved it.
Still pretty cool.
I think in a few more years with the amount of training their AI will have Waymo will be a truly incredible taxi service. It can only get better!
One concern I had is that once self-driving cars are widespread people might take advantage and treat them poorly with no human driver watching. Where a human would likely notice and deal with weird smells or things added by the past customer. Waymo-type service probably rely on reporting by passengers once the car already arrives, no? (I've never driven in one)
People might be treating them nice today because Waymo is a fancy new service in Jaguars that people treat as a novelty. Once those e-taxi services are under aggressive economic demands I'm curious to see how it plays out.
https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/11/san-francisco-robotaxi-cru...
If you purchase a GoPass, you'll receive a 10% discount on all rides, and 5 free cancellations.
Or will you ever be able to reach support once car takes you to wrong location?
Waymo is closer to a proper liveried taxi service than a rideshare. The only time I use rideshares is for NEMT. I use a human-driven taxi, albeit much less than Waymo, and I book through the taxi company's app.
The taxi company uses traditional medallions allocated by the authorities here. Their dispatch is traditionally over-the-phone, in fact they require me to answer the phone if I expect to get a ride. Their drivers--I don't know their employment status--seem to own their vehicles, which are fleet models, liveried, and usually identical. So I can always count on uniformity when I get in a car like that.
The human taxi service usually charges/estimates prices at least 20% higher than an identical itinerary with Waymo.
Waymo service is not Uber or Lyft. First of all, it's a liveried fleet vehicle. When I summon a Waymo, I know that they'll send a Jaguar I-PACE, and I'll know how to board it and fasten my seatbelt. That is absolutely golden knowledge to have. (Rideshares routinely give me panic attacks as I try and figure out how to seat belt when they've already started moving.)
The Waymo has an absolutely uniform experience, because it's always "the same Driver". Human drivers I've met have been drunk, belligerent, rude, scammers, incompetent, unsafe, late, lost, wrong car, overly friendly/nosy, you name it. Waymo is none of these.
Waymo's power trunk door means I can always stow my cargo, because the driver isn't living out of his car. Unfortunately, there is no human to assist me in lifting it, but there's room and there's a button to close it again.
Of course the in-car experience is luxurious and relaxing. I don't have to be concerned with a jerk driver or entertaining the guy or pretending to ignore him. I can basically curl up and zone out. I feel safety and security in Waymo alone.
The in-car display has plenty of telemetry to watch the 3D visualization, play music, adjust temperature, do what I want. There are always charging ports for my phone, cup holders, and sun visors.
Waymo is a Godsend for me. And it's a Godsend for anyone in a vulnerable population who may be at-risk while alone with another human like that. It's about time.
Waymo decided to solve the problem using whatever they deemed necessary.
This was when I really started to doubt that guy's genius. That was a phenomenally stupid assertion. I can drive with 2 eyes because I have a bunch of other sensors as well as an entire world model in my head with 30 years of driving experience.
Is it Halloween tonight? Better drive extra slowly. Did that white semi with the bright background sky just disappear? Probably not. Is that deer going to bolt in front of the car coming the other way? Maybe. Is the road slick because it recently rained here? etc.
Solving the technical side is only half the problem, otherwise we'd all be flying in Concorde jets.
I'm curious to see if Waymo can scale up to mass production of their sensor suite and maintain them economically, where it makes sense as a business. There may be a big business in LIDAR factories and repairmen soon.
That means very limited routes. That is a technical problem.
Hopefully, NASA solves the technical problem and commercial supersonic flight returns
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/armstrong/taming...
Waymo is currently limited to a small amount of towns for a mix of economic, policy, and social reasons. Probably in that order. Just being sufficiently better than human drivers was never the entire barrier to entry for this to be a real business for Google, at least one that becomes nation-wide or global.
I don't think this is how most people expected this to go. My personal belief was that self-driving cars would be limited to medium-density suburban areas initially (i.e. places where the driving is relatively simple, but there's still enough demand for it to be economically viable). It's astonishing that they were able to move from suburban trials to high density environments so quickly.
I have doubts the very slow pace of expansion was just a matter of regulations and nailing down the tech. It has to make sense as a business otherwise they aren’t going to dump billions into sensor factories (where each LIDAR suite currently costs around $75k to make), cars, and service infrastructure.
Just like how Tesla wasn’t just a of matter of making the first prototypes of electric sports cars. The real magic and barrier to entry was the factories and infrastructure to make the economics work.
To me it sounds like you’re just being sort of vague. Yes, absolutely everyone knew there were social issues too.
Where will self driving be in 5 or 10 years?
My interest atm is mostly the economics question of whether LIDAR will scale widely in near term combined with the social risks (ie, millions of cars with $30-50k in sensors, which atm cost as much as the car itself, so basically only e-taxis, no personal ownership + high cost of maintenance) vs cameras being good-enough... that's a far more interesting question. It's pretty obvious LIDAR/ultrasonic or a combination with cameras is superior. So maybe some ambitious person will find some mass-producible middle ground within <5yrs shrug