If you have the chance to try out a Waymo (you own a credit card and smart phone and find yourself in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix or Austin if you can get through that waitlist) I thoroughly recommend it.<p>Right now it's the most exciting tourist attraction in San Francisco.<p>The first few minutes are pretty terrifying... but the ride is so smooth that you very quickly settle into it. It's absolutely worth experiencing.
The quality of app drivers in LA is wanting. I’ve been proselytized, informed of imminent apocalyptic civil wars, asked if I know any guys who want to buy copper in bulk. And how can I forget the driver asleep at the wheel of a Tesla with regenerative braking on max, with each doze into slumberland jolting the whole carriage into alert with a smart ping of the battery charging, all the long way from downtown to the airport? I don’t care if it’s double the price and I occasionally get stuck behind an errant traffic cone for an hour, I will gladly take Waymo.
Here's the detailed area coverage map for LA: <a href="https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119#LA" rel="nofollow">https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119#LA</a>
I doubt there's ever going to be a big bang moment where self driving just works everywhere. Instead it's going to be a slow rollout of self driving taxi's in increasingly different environments.
Looks like Waymo will be the first Alphabet moonshot that will reach 100B valuation in the not too distant future. Just need to hit the most profitable cities and Uber will have to compete at lower prices, while they're a public company. The nest egg will will be kept full as it's the only working autonomous ride solution out there making any money.
WARNING: never try to take Waymo to the Hollywood Bowl.<p>Their app lets you book a ride to the entrance... then stops and makes you exiut, in front of a motel, blocking its driveway, a mile from the venue.<p>There is an invisible "exclusion zone" there that is not marked on maps, and not communicated to you in any way. You just get dumped somewhere other than the displayed destination and there is no ability to "add a stop" or otherwise modify the ride.<p>Ask me how I know when trying to make a show... or ask the people in the other Waymos we watched pull up as were frantically trying to get a Lyft.
Well worth to watch 'Not Just Bikes' new video 'How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)':<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0</a>
On a recent SF trip except for the airport I used waymo the entire time. About the same price as uber/lyft, cheaper if you tip human drivers.<p>Very cool to see how fast we went from taxis, to the app based rides to app based self driving cars like this.<p>After working in silicon valley tech companies for almost 10 years, ive been become really cynical about it all. This is one of the few things that actually seems really cool. I actually looked up to see if their hiring but they don't hire remote.
The end result of self-driving? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0</a>
What happens when the car starts making the decisions about where you're headed, or not headed? Oddly, "autonomous" now refers to he machine, not to the human. Palantir just started training Anthropic against secret government data. Isn't it easier to have your cybertaxi drive you to the authorities than for them to have to track you down?
Does google report the quarterly numbers for Waymo separately? It will be interesting to see how these taxi services are producing. Feels like they have finally found a path to monetizing their investments in this space but cannot help but also think it’s a net negative because of the cost of each car
This is going to be another one of those things where most people underestimate it for a while.<p>Growth in 2025-2027 will be absolutely incredible! The sharpest part of the exponential growth curve is just ahead.
I think this is against the site guidelines but will try and phrase it so that it's compliant because I'm curious if others have noticed this. Waymo threads seem to always end up on the HN front page, but then the last few ones quickly end up off of it (I assume because of downvotes?). There's so much investment in a company like Tesla where they've hitched their wagon to self-driving cars that my knee-jerk reaction is that folks are downvoting because "good press" for Waymo is not great news for Tesla (at least until Tesla releases a comparably or better-performing robotaxi).<p>I might also be that I'm in some odd Waymo bubble because I'm impressed with their performance and also incredibly hopeful it will greatly help usher in the era of self-driving vehicles more broadly, which I think is a net positive for humanity (I get it if folks find that thought ridiculous, but just the amount of brain damage (literal and figurative I guess!) we spend driving when we could be doing other things, how cars have been such a driving force for our built environment, etc., etc., etc.).
So that's why a Waymo car cut me off yesterday at an intersection in West Los Angeles. The two streets intersect at a 60 degree angle. Waymo had a Stop sign. I didn't. It just rushed out of the intersection going fast, as if it hadn't seen me.
Very nice, really hope to see them on mi city eventually and give them a try.<p>Anyone here has used Waymo already?<p>My only real concern before boarding one would be not being able to stop and exit vehicle at any time I wanted to, for whatever reason.<p>Is this something they already address? Like a big red "STOP" button somewhere in the dashboard?
This wonderful short story from Terraform is about a self-driving taxi service. It is well worth the read before getting into any self driving taxi service. Basically, it can turn against you, and you're locked inside with no recourse.<p><a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/one-star/" rel="nofollow">https://www.vice.com/en/article/one-star/</a>
Waymo has had the move crashes of any autonomous driving system so obviously the thing to do is expand their reign of terror.
<a href="https://www.govtech.com/transportation/how-many-waymo-cruise-driverless-cars-have-crashed" rel="nofollow">https://www.govtech.com/transportation/how-many-waymo-cruise...</a>