Ride into the Future with Waymo on Uber in Austin
uber.com
uber.com
The routes it takes are optimized for safety, if you compare the time of arrival between Waymo and Google Maps it's typically 20-30% slower to get there.
Most of the rides have been without issue, but I have had some things happen:
- It hesitated in the middle of an unprotected left on Lamar and had a car honk at
- It used a bus-only lane.
- It stopped in the middle of the street to drop me off a couple of times, annoying other drivers.
- I've had it get stuck, and it called support to get it out.
Overall, they are great but imperfect right now; I'm sure they'll fix these as time goes on.
In my SF experience, the car got stuck. Trying to leave my pickup spot into rush hour traffic and nobody would let it in. The car then called support and had a human driver do some city-appropriate aggressive driving to force its way into the lane.
> What if there is an emergency and you need to get out?
I could open the door at any time and leave. But was curious to see what would happen.
In SF, when Cruise & Waymo were both operating at the same time, there was a lot of animosity towards autonomous vehicle driving behavior (especially emergency vehicles). Both companies got lumped in together, but this seemed to stop as soon as Cruise paused operations.
It's nice that Austin will get a chance to see Waymo first, and have the ability to differentiate between the performance whenever Tesla launches. It'd be great if both performed flawlessly, but I have my doubts about one of these companies ability to act responsibly...
During the time they were both operating public service in SF, Waymo had slightly fewer incidents proportional to their fleet size, but almost all of them were extremely minor. Cruise had mostly minor incidents with a few catastrophic failures.
Tesla self-driving doesn't exist and will only work on Tesla vehicles if they ever develop the capability.
Waymo self-driving works now and has been demonstrated on multiple vehicles. Waymo could utilize the manufacturing capacity of the entire auto-industry.
Pretty much exactly what companies like Waymo are trying to do.
I'm not sure Tesla level vertical integration is really necessary.
An example of this is that in robotics, the ability to properly insert a piston into an engine block without damage to the piston or block was an unsolved problem for some time in robotics. Doing so using machine vision and robotics control theory required engineering constraints that resulted in a too slow and expensive a mechanism for mechanized assembly lines.
Because of the total control of the assembly line, this problem was solved in the physical space through a reactive physical assembly using two connected planes (I'm sorry but I'm having a hell of a time tracking down a reference) rather than in software.
As for its impact on society, I worry. Famous investor Jeremy Grantham said recently "If the government does not smooth out the benefits of AI, you will have either starvation or revolution." Huge numbers of people rely on driving for their income. More importantly, automated driving can only lead to even more concentration of wealth. With human drivers, most of the income generated stays within the community. With automated drivers, most of the income goes to much fewer places and people.
Look, driving is one of those tasks that I actually do believe to be a great thing to be automated away. But given the history of society since the Internet I have 0 confidence that we'll be able to deal with the giant impacts related to further concentration of wealth.
(I am not saying it will happen or will be done well)
That made legit laugh out loud. No additional cost? Are you for real Uber? It should be significantly cheaper.
Definitely a risk, but one that has been well studied. Waymo is safer than other drivers in the areas it operates: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/12/new-swiss-re-study-waymo
Cost savings are a huge factor, but in self-driving (and other areas) safety and consistency are equally important.
Waymo's make mistakes, but they don't get tired, drunk, distracted, or angry.
I look forward to competition bringing prices down, but on pure quality and willingness to pay, the premium price seems to make sense.
[0] https://waymo.com/research/do-autonomous-vehicles-outperform...
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/18/cars/china-baidu-apollo-go-ro...
In a situation like that, humans are more likely to figure out that they need to break the rules in order to break the gridlock (although it certainly can happen with human drivers, but in almost 30 years of driving in Austin I've never experienced it). For obvious reasons, self-driving cars are not usually given this kind of programming.
Of course, if they're always a small percentage of the cars, it's not really an issue.
If that's the case, I would rather give my money to a human driver than just Uber.
Pet peeve side note on language - if I see one more article from a tech company about Austin that starts with some version of "Yeehaw", I'm going to go postal. It has all the authenticity of the "How do you do, fellow kids!" meme, not to mention that Austin is about as "Texas country" as San Francisco is.
It’s literally already happening in this thread.
I just have some optimism left in me I guess. I really hope worker-owned companies or companies incorporated to chase after the public's interest take off in technology. In a purely capitalist context, it kind of makes a lot of sense. Consumers generate demand and they will do business with companies that have their interest in mind and provide the most value. But for that value to be generated, it usually means less profit for the corporation. But my hypothesis is that profit and growth are not always following the same linear path. A company can generate enough revenue to not just pay it's people but grow at a steady pace and even generate enormous amounts of profits to it's owners in the long run. while at the same time, it's priority would be generating the best value to it's users,customers and the public at large instead of short-term profits.
Take uber for example, until recently they were not even a profitable company, this is after 10+ years. I genuinely believe Uber provided a ton of value to the public at large, including myself. I spend a fortune at Uber. But that was not the goal of the company. To restate, if Uber focused on generating value to it's users and drivers/couriers, it can become a net positive in society and we would depend on it more. In the long run, it would be a monopoly like utility providers.
With Waymo, their priority is clearly profit, not the public interest. This means less employment and less quality of service. I'm sure it will generate a lot of profit in short term, but as much as I am a fan of Uber as a company, this is short-sighted. They will lose the public's trust with such moves and policy makers will have to regulate them a lot more. They will become a service the rich and privileged can afford but only in times of inconvenience. But they could have become more profitable than Walmart and Amazon combined. Think about it, they can dominate delivery, period! Amazon and Walmart are inconvenient and costly middle-men.
In short, businesses should provide not just a barely viable service or products, but they should provide a product their customers want, even at loss sometimes (loss-leaders and all), so long as it is the best strategy for long term profitability. Structuring a company so that it will always prioritize long term viability make sense, and I hope to see that sort of thinking prevail.
It's really a question of wisdom, planting trees under whose shades we'll never sit.
Government ownership makes the most sense when there is a natural monopoly. There is not a need for a monopoly on urban transportation.
Putting even more cars on the roads doesn't sound like it would scale well. Aren't they already massively overloaded?
Building highways is very expensive, but much much less expensive than new rail. The most cost effective and environmentally sound thing to do is to make the most possible use out of existing infrastructure. As safe and predictable drivers (no fast stops and starts, swerving, or accidents), Waymo smooths traffic for everyone.
"Train brain" is working just fine for China and Japan, I think it would work great in the US. Why can't I get on a train from Columbus to go to Philly? I should be able to.
This is true only for contrived examples comparing the vehicles directly. Comparing the real-world throughput of a highway vs. a rail line (in the US) and the density advantage goes away.
> Why can't I get on a train from Columbus to go to Philly?
The US has a different approach to property rights than China, so constructing a new right of way through thousands of private properties is much more expensive. Building new rail lines has massive environmental costs (it's a lot of steel and concrete!). Even once built, it's very hard to compete with a $100 flight that gets you between Columbus and Philly faster.
Does it? Can you post some information to back that up?
In Chicago there's a commuter rail-line that carries 6,171,000 passengers per year (~17,000/day).
There's a tollway that runs roughly the same route that carries 240,000 vehicles per day. Even if you divide that across 8 lanes you get 30,000/day. That number would go up if since there's often more than one person per vehicle.
Trains and rails are amazing at moving people between fixed points during rush hour, but are vastly underutilized the rest of the time.
In the future, it would be great to see rail lines replaced by dedicated self-driving lanes where cars could safely go 100+ mph.
Japan is building a bunch of these! They're called rails.