California DMV approves map increase in Waymo driverless operations
dmv.ca.gov
dmv.ca.gov
I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.
From my experience, lot of people actively seek out Waymo if it is available.
The story they told is that they were unable to get a ride. That’s not enshittification, that’s simply scammers on the platform not doing their job.
That won’t happen with robots.
They might raise the prices, or clean the cars less frequently, but if it shows up and runs the program, it won’t ever get worse than that.
But yes, I originally switched to them because Bay Area cabs just will not pick you up if they don't feel like it.
There is probably some market equilibrium where they could reasonably provide <5 minute pickups for waymo users that would both cover the cost of the automobile and still be less than the price of an uber today.
I do worry in general about what the enshittification of Waymo will look like, though.
This is such a common problem in SF (esp in odd times / from the airport). Waymo has been a lifesaver in these situations.
Person wants to go somewhat far from airport? That's more time on this single ride and less time pocketing peak demand money
I have similar problems when I dated someone across the bridge.
They also lose a ton of money leaving SF at prime time / etc.
The cars are increasingly beat-up too, another thing we incorrectly believed was Uber being fundamentally different from and better than yellow cabs.
You must have very rosy glasses because calling a tired/rude Taxi operator at 1am and not knowing whether your cab was coming in 5 or 20min was a major drag, so you always had to plan for 20min+ and sit patiently without social media to fill the void.
Having 2 ubers cancel before you get a 3rd commitment, within a short time frame, and only at the airport or a busy concert isn't that bad at all. Modern entitlement IMO
> The cars are increasingly beat-up too
Regular taxis never had an anonymous review system and they often just bought old police cars, used by 2 drivers across 2 day/night shifts . Good chance the night driver drank on the job too
Uber requires them to have a newish car which in my experience is usually a decent hybrid. A big improvement IMO (although I do love old crown Vic's from back in the pre Uber days).
If anything the biggest issue is Uber not strictly enforcing reuse of other authorized drivers accounts, usually by immigrants without official company clearance
One time the guy was just 3 blocks away so I walked to where his icon was, found the car, and banged on his window.
During a weekend trip to Orlando trying to get from our hotel to Disney it took 6 drivers until someone finally came to pick us up.
At least the price is given ahead of time and paid through the app. I once had a cab driver charge my card for $300 when I was borderline blackout drunk in Miami Beach trying to get back to mainland Miami. Didn't use the card reader in the cab either, he used something like a Square reader on his phone. Not exactly sure which one, I didn't piece together what he was doing was fishy until the next afternoon when some blurry memories started coming back and I called my bank.
What kind of terrible service do you put up with for this to seem reasonable to you?
FWIW they both still exist so you’re free to choose, which is the nice thing about competition.
Pre booked airport black car taxis have always been a niche within the wider system for a good reason. Uber’s fluid system is not perfect at every scenario.
I won't be at all surprised when they start calculating their profits in real-time, if they aren't already, and cancelling or delaying trips that are deemed unprofitable in the moment. They are robots after all.
That's why taking a Waymo in LA left me without words... like traveling 10 years in the future. And you dont have to deal with all that crap.
I hope Waymo squashes all the competition.
BTW after getting back from LA I increased my GOOG position. Waymo is so groundbreaking and it is THERE.
If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.
But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc.
(It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)
Huh, funny. This model actually explains American behavior to me greatly. Now I understand why the emphasis on transit in the US is primarily on cost and shelter rather than on quality of service. I always thought it seemed odd that they'd emphasize making things that are not useful free rather than making them as costly as is required to make them useful.
But I was modeling 'useful' as optimal transportation across fare-classes. They are modeling 'useful' as 'compassion to the less well-off'. This also explains opposition to HOT lanes and so on.
So I guess it's still pretty valuable
0: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
It's simpler than that; cities are wholly created and controlled by the State. California could one day decide to close all the cities and centralize and it would be 100% legal. States delegate their authority to cities.
If you're interested in this stuff I highly recommend this podcast, not affiliated with it I genuinely think it's a great source to hear about the behind the scenes of fleet operations to meet demand: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/
(Edit) I prefer using the apple podcast app, here's a direct link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id177...
You /should/ be able to save by using shared rides, but in practice when I tried the driver was so mad they just dumped me on the side of the road and I had to call and get a refund.
The new Caltrain schedule isn't half bad though, if it came twice as often on the weekends we'd be cooking.
I dug up my email and found they'd sent me the tester application form like a year ago and I just forgot to fill it out, so maybe they'll let me in sometime.
(Also, the chat claimed the support agent was named Al Pacino. Unless it was a pun on AI and I just couldn't tell with the font.)
It made me realize that even though Waymo is not at level 5 yet, neither are a lot of Uber drivers…
I'm most curious to see how they do in the winter city of Minneapolis over the next several months.
First slowly and then suddenly.
There are 10 other companies that are currently testing without a driver. Those are competition.
Tesla so far is a gimmick of self-driving with a safety driver that takes over once in a while. That's where Waymo was more than 5 years ago.
Too bad the owners of FSD can't decide that they want unsupervised. In an earlier or different world that would be possible.
One successful ride is easy. 10 successful rides is still easy.
100k successful rides without a serious incident? Way more difficult.
And that's why those anecdotal reports over a couple ride mean absolutely nothing
This illusion is partially why Musk has been promising self-driving to be available at the end of $current_year+1 for years.
It's cool your car can drive itself. Now do it again, but fall asleep at the wheel. What's that? You're not willing to? That's exactly the core of the issue—it's not sufficient for the car to be able to drive itself most of the time, it must do so safely every single time, no matter what.
Uber estimated that it costs Waymo $2/mile to operate.
Google says they charge $1.60 to $2.60 a mile, depending on location and demand, so Waymo is already almost certainly at the price you claim you'd be taking it.
I think you dramatically underestimate how much it actually costs to operate a car. Most people think they pay $0 to garage their car, for instance, since the cost was rolled into the price of their house purchase and mostly invisible. But it isn't $0 to a business. Likewise, very few people depreciate their car over just 5 years. Or clean it inside and out every single day.
Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car. Also notice the comments talking about how the per vehicle price is high, how that flows into higher insurance, and all kinds of other things.
https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1il5d5i/unit_costs_p...
Maybe someday there will be a discount AV taxi company using 10 year old beat up Honda Civics that only get cleaned once a month and provide extremely barebones support to pull the costs down to $1/mile. That's a 50% drop in costs from today, so hard to see it coming very quickly. But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
And note that the IRS per mile rate is $0.70/mile. It's not perfect but it is a decent third party estimate of the true cost of operating a car. Hard to see any taxi company charging anything less than that. So a 10 mile commute every day is still going to cost you $280/month in an AV taxi for the foreseeable future.
And on the other hand, each Waymo parking spot is probably a lot cheaper per unit time than 250 square feet inside a house in a residential area. And presumably they need a lot less than 1 parking spot per car.
> Here's one attempt at costs for Waymo that finds it costs them about $60,000 a year to operate a single car.
Doesn't that sound cheap? If a car can average 10 rides per day, that's $16 per ride.
That’s surprising. I’ve been trying to find data on rates and crowd-sourced data and anecdotes seem closer to $6/mile
https://waymo-pricing.streamlit.app/
$2 is a good target for the AV mileage rate. It's actually somewhat high if I put my industry hat on for a second. It's not a good estimate for the number you'll get from doing total_price/distance.
Waymo costs are immaterial right now. Their cars are not production cars, and they have spent billions on R&D that they can't even hope to recoup with the current fleet.
That being said, $2 is super-low. The IRS rate for car depreciation write-off is 71 cents per mile.
> But that's still pretty expensive to be using as a daily commuter!
The true cost of a transit ride in NYC or Seattle is around $20-$30 per ride. People don't actually pay that much because it's heavily subsidized.
Once self-driving matures, it'll also be subsidized and it will completely kill off transit. Maaaaaybe excluding subways in some areas.
And if not Waymo and its car, then perhaps autonomous buses. There's already a shortage of bus drivers in my city and it's not getting any smaller.
Without traffic, at highway speeds, it would take you almost four hours to travel from the North end to the South end.
I'm not really sure how to fix this problem.
Also if any Waymo engineers are reading this please make the pedestrian yeild indicator icon visible on the front of the LIDAR. In narrow streets the front is much more visible to pedestrians than the sides as the LIDAR is pretty far back on the car.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/waymo-zeekr-rt-autonomous-ev...
This last weekend, we were in the city (San Francisco) and literally drove by a Waymo trying to park and the wife started laughing - "you are right".
In 20 years? Here's a 7 year old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
Also, you forgot to mention the silence, nearly zero cost infrastructure, nearly zero environmental impact, and immense population-wide health benefits—and therefore healthcare cost savings.
I get that they might not be approved in the high sierras but just make that a deny list not allow list. Or even just deny the specific conditions you're worried about (snow).
Even with local partners that all takes a lot of time.
Like the DMV is actually checking Waymos map of a new area is good to go or not. Its just administrative burden.
> like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere.
Because “everywhere” isn't a uniform domain (Waymo is kind of way out in one tail of the distribution in terms of both the geographical range and range of conditions they have applied for and been approved to operate in, other AV manufacturers are in much tinier zones, and narrow road/weather conditions.) And because for some AV manufacturers (if there is one that can demonstrate they don't need this, they'd probably have an easier lift getting broader approvals) part of readiness to deploy (or test) in an area is detailed, manufacturer specific mapping/surveying of the roads.
Also, there's a practical element. If I have to specify where they can't go, the default position is they can go anywhere... if I inadvertently leave an area out of my black-list where it really ought to exist: the default is "permission granted". With a white-list, the worst case is a forgotten or neglected area can't be operated in as a default and the AV provider will have an interest in correcting.
But also politics. It's a very different message to say we're going to white-list a given AV operator to exist in different areas vs. black-listing them from certain areas.
- Milpitas
- Mountain View
- Palo Alto Santa
- San Jose
- Sunnyvale
- Unincorporated Area (Lexington Hills area, overlapping Santa Clara and Santa Cruz Counties)
I don't know why it says "Palo Alto Santa"
Edit: I guess it's "Palo Alto Santa" to disambiguate between Palo Alto, which is in Santa Clara County, and East Palo Alto, which is in San Mateo County (BTW the westmost point of East Palo Alto is east of the westmost point of Palo Alto, but the eastmost point of East Palo Alto is not east of the eastmost point of Palo Alto).