I love Waymo and use it all the time.<p>One aspect I'd still like to see them figure out:<p>As a bike commuter, I share the road with Waymo often. When cycling, you're always checking the eyes of other drivers to confirm if they see you.<p>I've had a couple incidents where I was a little thrown/unnerved because I couldn't confirm if a Waymo was registering me. It ultimately behaved fine, but I had to put my guard way up because I just couldn't tell.<p>I've wondered if they could use the light/display on top to signal acknowledgment? How do you simulate the precision of a gaze with a machine that's "seeing" everything at once?
Hell yeah. This is the best news I've read today. Waymo has completely replaced all usages of Uber for me whenever possible. Expanding the range makes me thrilled. Hopefully they're able to put more vehicles on the road, too, because wait times have been going up.<p>The app isn't updated yet, though. I wonder how long it'll take?
Waymo is awesome. Got to try it 3 months ago in Phoenix, love the whole experience. Amazing to see how the car deals with every trick thing that you find in traffic. Plus the Jaguar they use is a great car.
Fantastic news. I use them all the time in Phoenix. My mom uses them to get to her doctor appointments. I think people underestimate how much of a quality of life improvement these are for people even when compared to Uber/Lyft.
I speak to VCs quite a bit and recently I was hanging around with a bunch of them, they were all making fun of the state of self-driving cars, ah, stupid industry, will never work, whatever.<p>But to me it's strange, if you go to San Francisco today you can see cars driving around with nobody inside. They drive around, they pick people up, they mostly don't crash into shit. There's nobody behind the wheel. I know that everyone is incredibly quick to point out their flaws and relative safety rating and remote interventions and so on but can we just take a step back, even for a moment, and acknowledge that they freaking did it, they basically did the thing that a lot of people said would never happen - the car drives around all day with nobody inside, of it's own volition!! It's amazing! Am I a deranged silicon valley optimist for thinking this?<p>I agree that there's still endless work to do, some companies are probably behaving in a way that is dangerous, they aren't half as good as you want them to be, it's not clear whether they are good for society or financially viable etc. etc. but it just seems weird that so few people are willing to be like, "fair play, they basically pulled it off, round of applause", even just for a second.<p>The only real reason that would make sense to me is if this is actually just a giant fraud and they are driving the things over LTE/4G a much larger fraction of the time than I have been led to believe. Anyone know the realistic ratio of self-driving to remote control? The fact that the safety statistics are 100X worse or whatever is obviously deadly serious but on a scale of six or so orders of magnitude it remains meaningfully impressive to my dumb brain.
This is incredible news. In the next 10 years more and more transportation will shift to self driving and save thousands of lives and prevent many more injuries. Already in San Francisco waymo's are and feel much safer than human driven rideshare.
An underrated thing about Waymo:<p>If you open Uber and the app says a car is 9 minutes away that’s really anywhere from 5 to 15.<p>With Waymo if they say it’s 9 minutes to get a ride they mean 9 minutes. They’re not waiting for a human to accept your ride, they’re scheduling resources.<p>The lack of variance makes delays much more tolerable, IMO.
I was very bummed on a recent trip to SF to find there was a waitlist for Waymo and I couldn't use the service! But I've since been 'accepted' so my next West Coast trip I'll definitely be taking a driverless car. I was a long time SF resident so I'll use my local knowledge to choose the most ratchet route possible.<p>The potential for self-driving cars to bring down the cost of rides is very exciting to me. I've been carless for decades and though I'm a huge proponent and user of mass transit, we have to be realistic. Most of this country is exceptionally ill-suited to mass transit and is custom-built for car traffic.
Look at these comments:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568066">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568066</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568076">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568076</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568083">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568083</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568119">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568119</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568226">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39568226</a><p>That's the value-sell of self-driving cars: placating an anti-social techno-"patrician" class that fears people, a class who now has the luxury of avoiding them.<p>Self-driving cars seem to be a technological solution to a modern socio-cultural pathology, nothing more. That's not healthy. Seems like the better solution would be to address the pathology directly and eliminate it, rather than create workarounds for it.<p>How did you find yourself in a low-trust society, with anti-social leanings? And how can we fix that? That needs to be addressed.
Just yesterday, walking in the inner sunset neighborhood of SF, I saw an old lady in a 1980s Volvo come to a 4-way stop. She looked really old, as in probably even 90+. She wasn't sure about the rules of the stop sign: she came to the stop and was hesitating to go. Other cars were waiting for her and some of them started just going through, creating a very dangerous situation. Eventually she mustered the courage to just make her turn. That made me think: her life would be so much easier if she didn't have to drive at all to go run her errands. She was creating an unsafe situation for everyone, not just herself.<p>The City (SF) has a fleet of transport vehicles that transport Seniors (old folks) around town. It would be much more cost effective to just have a bunch of Waymos available to Seniors.
If Waymo was not too expensive and easy to get at rush hour in LA I'd certainly consider it. If I want to leave work between 5:30 and 6:30 pm, my commute can be 60 mins. At 8pm it will be 20 mins. That sucks but if I could use the 60 mins then it sucks less.<p>On the other hand, unlike Uber/Lyft, Waymo can't scale like they do. For them, demand pricing means more drivers with their own car driving when there's lots of people to pick up. For Waymo, they'd go broke trying to have enough cars for high demand times that would all sit idle (and have to drive somewhere to park) off peak.<p>Taking it up a notch. I'd be nice to redesign cars that have no driver. A bench, a desk, small buses for shared rides, or something.
The driving is extremely smooth in general --- much smoother than many taxi journeys I've taken in that past.<p>I found myself in a corner case recently, with an illegally parked car blocking the street, we got partially round, blocked by another vehicle and then a fire engine with sirens approached from behind, the waymo handled it excellently!
Great, more cars on the road.<p>I don’t know why people are excited. Whether it’s self driving or driven by a meat bag, it just means one more car on the road. One more car sitting in a parking lot/street/parking garage or driving around aimlessly until it gets assigned.<p>Instead of helping to alleviate traffic. TNCs were shown to actually increase traffic in urban areas [1]. I expect this won’t be any different with “self driving” vehicles.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z" rel="nofollow">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-00678-z</a>
So, will these be geofenced to a small area, or turned loose on the whole Southland? If it’s the latter, I’m genuinely impressed: LA’s roads and freeways have a florid variety of edge cases unlike anywhere else.
Is this the only approval they need? I guess they will need to build some facilities in various places. Maybe they can start right away with the facilities they already have in Mountain View?
I'm in the new service area, and look forward to this being available.<p>Do you have to have a Google account?<p>Do you have to accept the Google Play Store?
As a resident, I don’t support this at all.<p>Waymos are annoying to have on the road - they go extremely slowly (with good reason) and make weird traffic moves.<p>Do we want our roads getting clogged up with super slow taxis that steal jobs from ordinary people and give them to the tech industry?