Go back through Waymo’s historic announcements on HN. This is said every time.
Autonomy works. Waymo has solved it. There isn’t yet a number 2, though China has strong candidates. But where you can find Waymo, it works so well that we need to see it in a familiar context to believe it really exists.
"select boroughs in London, including Barking and Dagenham, Brent, Camden, Ealing, Royal Borough of Greenwich, Hackney, Hammersmith and Fulham, Haringey, Islington, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Lambeth, Lewisham, Newham, Redbridge, Southwark, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest, Wandsworth, City of Westminster, and the City of London."
This is true in New York and, to a lesser degree, San Francisco.
However unlike a cop deciding whether to fine people for "jay walking" the Waymo doesn't care whether you're the mayor's grandmother or a wise-talking black teenager if you're in its path, those are both humans and it's not allowed to hit humans.
There aren't going to be many humans in the street in outer Phoenix because where would they even be going? But the Mission, just like Leicester Square, has plenty of pedestrians who might just run into the street in front of you given any reason or opportunity and you need to be ready for that.
So I agree this isn't novel for Waymo, but while technically jay walking is now legal in NYC that's not why Waymo (which also has pencilled in an NYC launch) needs to care about it already.
Like for example how traffic will often modulate its spacing or time its lane changes to reduce issues with merging or exiting traffic and certain intersections with most traffic doing the same thing become an efficient repetitive cycle, Waymo doesn't "get it".
So it works, in the same way a newly licensed teenager "works". It's no cabbie.
Edit: It's been over a year since I've ridden in one. Good to hear it's potentially better now.
It's different than human drivers for sure, but to me at least it's better.
I agree with MVP part, my understanding is that there's still a lot of Wizard of Oz stuff in terms of regularly mapping and remapping its routes and having a lot of human operators remotely checking and maybe controlling the fleet, but I'm impressed personally.
When did you last update this hypothesis?
The Waymos I’ve been in creep, honk and modulate their aggressiveness quite naturally. In the cities they operate in, they’re a premium product to cabs.
The part where you’re right is on freeways. But my point is that tends to be ignored when folks gatekeep “real” autonomy. Instead, it’s some random peculiarity of their city which humans traverse at low speeds. Exactly the thing Waymo has mastered.
I think you just made this up. Almost every anecdote I've heard, and I spend a lot of time in two cities where it's launched, is that "it drives better than most humans". Which is exactly how I would characterize it too. It doesn't drive exactly like a human. But for every subtle human behavior it doesn't do, there are probably several things it does much more skillfully than a human.
Sure, but in terms of traffic difficulty they've done like level 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and now they're jumping to 100! This is different.
It's not the most difficult place to drive (good luck in India, Turkey, southern Italy, etc.), but it's still far more challenging than any American city.
And it needs fundamentally new capabilities like being able to negotiate with other drivers visually and read implicit signals. You can't do it all just by following what the traffic lights say.
This is also important in the US and is a capability the Waymo Driver has.
> it's still far more challenging than any American city.
How would you rate the difficult of London vs. Boston?
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°Which makes it more fun: I love driving in London, but I'm a weirdo. My biggest regret about my last / first visit to Delhi is that I let my wife talk me out of driving. It may indeed have been a prudent choice, but I think I was there long enough to "get" enough to manage next time.
But I've lived in both places and London is very different than SF. I'd say the UK has better drivers on average (and much more strict licensing requirements), but driving in London is much more challenging due to the tiny roads you have to navigate. There is no road in SF that is as hard to navigate as the average suburban London two-way traffic single car width road with parking on both sides.
An I'm not saying London is "the worst" by any means. It's nothing like driving in Vietnam or India. But it is very different to SF.
I think you just described the entire Bernal Heights neighborhood in SF (except with 20+ degree steepness on top of that).
It may be true that all major cities have their own quirks, but London has significantly more complexity than San Francisco or any US grid based city with super wide roads.
Also, the US bought into the ‘Car is King’ idea whereas that’s never really been the case in the UK outside of a few places like Birmingham. It’s generally harder to be a driver in the UK.
Whether that causes significant problems for Waymo, who knows? But I am also of the opinion that if it works in London then that’s a pretty powerful tell that they’ve got it right. We’ll, at least for places where drivers generally stick to the rules.