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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around. They seem to have a mix of robotaxis (like the ones pictured) and decked out Toyota Highlanders that look like Waymos but not as well "packaged", though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.

Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.

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Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.

> Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles

Have you been to San Francisco or LA?

Trust me, strip is much worse than LA and SF. People just forget most societal norms there.

Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…

#1 place cabbies have tried to scam me. #2 being Boston. Uber is such a blessing

Baltimore was infamous for this when I lived there 15 years ago.

San Francisco, too. I'm so glad for Uber.

One downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.

I remember once going on the way back a work trip on a whim, and regretting not checking that the weather was >100 degrees. That step outside was an oven.

It's also kind of far and inconvenient to get to. It's like the inverse of those shuttles that take you from the arrivals loop of the airport to the ass end of the casino loading dock of your hotel (and 10 other hotels. So, unlike Uber, not even remotely worth it).

Fwiw I found it pretty well organized.

Interestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.

"Sorry my card reader isn't working, cash only."

"Oh, sorry, I don't carry cash. Better luck next time man!"

"Oh it just started working."

It still snows in Vegas from time to time. Also, sandstorms are not great for visibility.

Both of which are considerably more rare than snow in Chicago or rain in Seattle.

Also good from the tourist cities perspective. Self driving cars are absolutely a tourist attraction.

The Highlanders are testing vehicles: https://zoox.com/journal/autonomous-zoox-testing-vehicle

AWS Re:Invent is in December, so it's also a good time to show it off to potential evangelists (they've been teasing it for years).

It may be a maze of roads to the backs of casinos, but it's still a small maze of roads. I would expect the mapping of it to be very precise by now.

What's not precise is road work closures, special event closures, detours due to event parking, random traffic patterns during various times of day and random signal availability for both gps and cellular due to massive buillding and parking garages. The randomness of it all is pretty crazy to me if they figure it out.

>> though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.

The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.

I think that comment meant that the Highlanders have drivers.

Zoox calls the person in the self-driving test cars an "operator".

If by robotaxi you mean the vehicles used in the tesla test in Austin and now in the bay area, they are just regular model y with an emergency "stop so you don't kill me button" on the right side. They have a special version of the software that is unreleased. The current model Y's / "robotaxi" have all the regular hardware, including pedals and steering wheel and sensors. If you search, you can even find cases during the Austin Texas where the safety drier gets into the driver seat in a few situations.

We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.

It looks like this, and it launched to the public today in Vegas, that's why this is news.

https://zoox.com/know-your-ride

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