Calling San Francisco a "town" diminishes what they've achieved. It is the second densest urban center and ride hailing market in the US, and a difficult place for humans to drive. I think being able to effectively replace Uber drivers there means that once they crack freeway driving and snow, the regulatory, economic, policy, and social hurdles will start to fall like dominos.
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.
The cars were estimated to cost 150k, based on information that's now a few years out of date. Given that they've had time to push down the costs I wouldn't be surprised if it's significantly less now. (Probably still over 100k since the Jaguars are not cheap vehicles.)
But also, each intervention only makes up a fraction of the trip's duration. So one operator might be enough for hundreds of cars. That doesn't include operators for cleaning, charging, maintenance, and other downtime activities though.
Didn't Uber raise over $30 billion from VCs before going public? It seems likely that they could continue for many more years at the current burn rate or even higher.
I've heard that just acquiring and setting up the real estate and setting up depots takes a while. After all there aren't a bunch of robotaxi hubs sitting around in cities waiting to be bought or leased. That's where Tesla could have an advantage (if they could get robotaxis working), since in theory they could bootstrap using their supercharger network.
It is fascinating how Google simultaneously provides a great lesson in how to leverage their primary competency of AI, as well as how not to (losing to OpenAI in LLMs).
On the other hand, HN has consistently underestimated them for the last two years or so as they've begun to commercialize. Their trajectory has been 10x growth in rides served per year for a while now. At the current scale it's hard to imagine they could grow another 10x in the next year without being close to break even on operating cost.
It's wild, most Teslas I encounter drive fine, but every once in a while I see one driving completely erratically. Stopping 20 feet too soon at a stop sign, very weird positioning in lane, sudden acceleration or deceleration. I think I can pretty much tell if a Tesla has FSD enabled if I follow it for a minute or so.
I don't know what to say man, Waymo takes me where I want to go several times a week (why would anyone be a repeat customer if it was just a demo?). My Tesla with FSD can't take me anywhere without me monitoring it.
No, he's telling you that Waymo could do the same thing (and better) in 2015, yet it took them 8 more years to launch a robotaxi service. So, Tesla robotaxi in 2032 maybe?
I don't think the people still saying self driving cars can't work have any sense of the scale Waymo is now operating at. At 100k+ trips per week, you could use the service in SF every day for your whole life and be unlikely to ever encounter any of these types of problems. I'd say it is essentially proven to work at this point.
Indeed, I heard there are plans for a giant equity stake to be awarded to a company called Notsam Naltman, LLC, which would leave nothing left to give to Sam Altman.
Tokyo has taxis and Ubers. I take them quite frequently when there, even though the public transit is amazing. The fact it's blatantly obvious that robotaxis make a ton of sense in even one of the most transit-friendly cities in the world shows how wrong the OP is.
Yeah but why would a passenger in a locked car that's loaded with cameras and connected to a call center be considered an easy target? And it's hard to tell if there's even someone in the Waymo because of the tinted windows.
I've driven in NYC plenty. I think if they can navigate situations that are this narrow they can probably handle narrow roads in NYC adequately: https://youtu.be/YtbhoLp96DE?t=423
People said for a long time that self driving cars would never handle the complexity of SF, the fog, the rain, the hills, the bikes, the narrow streets, the crowds of pedestrians. Now that they do, I take the opposite view of you. I think the only hurdles left are snow, economics, and regulation. They are high hurdles, but seem solvable.
There seem to be a lot of prominent people in the valley, mostly who are heavily invested in competitors (e.g. VC Brad Gerstner), who like to spread the misconception that Waymo uses minimal AI and hand codes a lot of their system. They also take the view that using mapping and lidar can't scale. Maybe they'll turn out to be right, but it comes across as cope to me.
They absolutely do run in the fog, I live in a particularly foggy part of the city and take them several times a week.
And SF absolutely does have lots of narrow streets. There are a lot of neighborhoods where the roads are only wide enough for one direction of traffic at a time due to parked cars. Either you or the oncoming car needs to pull to the side in front of a driveway to pass. Waymo handles these situations expertly.
Based on your other posts in here you seem to have some kind of axe to grind and are making stuff up. Go watch some Youtube videos.
Almost no rain? Not sure what you're smoking, SF gets rain on 70+ days of the year, and it's concentrated in the winter so you have about three months where it's constantly raining. Sure, east coast cities get more rain in total but it's not binary. I also find SF has pretty poorly maintained roads with lots of potholes but YMMV.
Some of the incidents were overblown, sure, but even before the pedestrian dragging incident the CA DMV had ordered them to scale back their fleet by 50%.
I took a few rides with Cruise and it was clear it was not ready for prime time, the potential was evident but it seemed like they were a couple years behind.