I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
I feel like I won the lottery whenever I have an aggressive driver that knows the city well. It makes me wonder if breaking the law will be the main value proposition of human drivers at some point.
We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
Waymo cars are also more likely to be properly maintained. I've noticed that a lot of Uber / Lyft cars have some kind of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, low tire pressure, overdue for service.
Waymo cars are new. Wait until their fleets are 10+ years old. They'll have all the same bad maintenance issues that airplanes, semis, rental cars, and any other company-owned vehicles have.
I had my first waymo ride in Austin recently and it suddenly slowed down to 20mph in 40mph zone for 5+ mins before returning to normal speed. Cars were passing around us and it felt like the car was glitching out, which felt very sketchy.
I was doing this a lot in US whenever I’d see construction work speed limits and had similar experience. Realized no one cares about these custom signs.
I've been in ride shares where the driver has crossed a curb road divider or squeezed through tiny gaps in front of trucks. Going too slow sounds like a better 'bad' experience to me.
They’re a good experience, but consider, the other day I took an uber in sf with a gay taxi driver who sang along to the Tina turner he had on full blast, told me I was fabulous and almost caused a crash at a 4 way stop. 5 stars. No notes.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
> Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
> it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
> These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
It's easier to get from zero to something that works on divided highways, since there's only lanes, other vehicles, and a few signs to care about. No cross traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving.
The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
While young and stupid, I did 100 mph on the 710 once. Driving home from work at 12:30 am on Monday gives opportunity for lots of speed. There's no traffic at that time of day. It was many years ago, and traffic grows with population, but still, I can't imagine there's much traffic then; I visit the area at least once a year for about a week and there's always some opportunities during the trip to travel above the speed limit, even though I'm not out very late anymore.
I remember my buddy telling me it would sometimes take him 2 hours to go a few miles in LA traffic and sometimes he would just walk to work instead because he'd get there faster.
It's hilarious to see people in LA buying sports cars. Like even if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket you won't be able to drive faster than the traffic in front of you. Just a status symbol, I guess.
Have you driven in LA? Traffic speed is generally bimodal: either stuck in traffic jam or easily 15 mph above the limit. (Source: live in LA, drive regularly.)
As someone who doesn’t drive but has done a UK theory test - aren’t you supposed to stick to the “slow lane” (no matter how fast you’re going) unless you’re overtaking? And that’s why it’s not actually called the “fast lane” but the “passing lane”. So I don’t see why you would be in the passing lane unless you’re going faster than others anyway. And there are plenty of lorries and coaches (trucks and buses in US terms?) that are physically limited to below the speed limit anyway
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The slow lane and passing lane dichotomy makes sense in a rural highway with two lanes in your direction.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
If there are vehicles going slow due to capability, you are pretty likely to be in an area where traffic density means that there's lots of vehicles in all the available lanes.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
In Ontario we have lots of 3 lane highways (we'll ignore Toronto area, where speed is limited by traffic anyways). What happens is that trucks & people getting on/off exits are in right most lane. Middle lane is everyone else, going 10-20 km/h over speed limit. Leftmost lane is people passing, or the maniacs going over 150 km/h while relying on their map system to alert them of highway patrol
You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.
Yes. People do in fact safely drive the speed limit.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
With self driving cars population on roads increasing, a side effect can be that all traffic will be shaped towards staying within the speed limits. With more cars staying within the limits, breaking the limits becomes more difficult.
If you watch the videos that insiders have been posting, it never exceeds the speed limits.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
I was on 101 during evening rush hour, speeding along like everyone. Then I saw brake lights from a Waymo. Later followed by all the surrounding cars. Interesting that it was the first to detect a slowdown.
The omnipresent threat of being splattered by someone who's weaving lanes or distracted by their phone and not expecting to see a vehicle doing 20mph (!!!!) below traffic speed is exactly what I want when I'm in a taxi. /s
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
Why is that the problem for above the legal speed limit drivers?
A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic.
The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around.
After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech?
Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
That's a great way to make them targets for vandalism. I'm in a city they're about to get in to (Nashville), and if the snitch-mobile tattled on everyone (the highways here that are officially 55 are "really" 75 with some exceptions, and going the speed limit can end up being more dangerous), sensors would start getting bullet holes.
Of course, unlike the normal car break-ins here, the cops might do something about them.
Indeed, and I'm guessing the Waymos have forward facing cameras + know their own speed? Feels like a natural jump to begin automatically reporting cars that are speeding past them to the police, with a camera snapshot of the plate, with everything else censored.
No, it is not only a problem for "'well above the legal limit' speeding drivers"; it is a problem for you, and the solution requires more thought than the "just follow the rules" that you put into your post.
There are many instances where the entire mass of traffic across three or four lanes is 10-20mph above the stated limit, e.g., going 75-85mph in a 66mph posted area.
It may not be legal, but it is reality. And when it is everyone, it is not only "aggressive" drivers. It is everyone. And one driver thinking they will change the situation only makes it worse.
If you are going 20-30mph below the speed of traffic you are at least as much a hazard to yourself and everyone around you as going 20-30mph above the speed of traffic, and the stated speed limit has nothing to do with it.
Going substantially slower than traffic, even in the slow lane with flashers on, nearly all of the threats and actions are overtaking you and coming from behind you, meaning to see and react to most of the developing situations, you must be driving through your rear-view mirrors.
And the situation you create can be very deadly, as one car can change lanes to avoid you, revealing you late to the next car, which barely changes lanes, and further reduces time for the next, who hits you and starts the pile-up.
It is not only their problem, it is yours too. Sure, you may be legally in the right, but you have still caused yourself to get hit.
What my grandfather explained to me is still correct:
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance.
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that
buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other
types of vehicles."
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term?
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available.
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality.
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
Waymo is in another league compared to every other autpilot system out there - I've used Tesla, Toyota, and Cruise before it got shut down.
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
> However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.
I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
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It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you.
This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years. I don't feel too bad if they didn't manage to pivot in that time period.
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I feel like I won the lottery whenever I have an aggressive driver that knows the city well. It makes me wonder if breaking the law will be the main value proposition of human drivers at some point.
We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
Waymo cars are also more likely to be properly maintained. I've noticed that a lot of Uber / Lyft cars have some kind of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, low tire pressure, overdue for service.
Waymo cars are new. Wait until their fleets are 10+ years old. They'll have all the same bad maintenance issues that airplanes, semis, rental cars, and any other company-owned vehicles have.
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I had my first waymo ride in Austin recently and it suddenly slowed down to 20mph in 40mph zone for 5+ mins before returning to normal speed. Cars were passing around us and it felt like the car was glitching out, which felt very sketchy.
I was doing this a lot in US whenever I’d see construction work speed limits and had similar experience. Realized no one cares about these custom signs.
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I've been in ride shares where the driver has crossed a curb road divider or squeezed through tiny gaps in front of trucks. Going too slow sounds like a better 'bad' experience to me.
They’re a good experience, but consider, the other day I took an uber in sf with a gay taxi driver who sang along to the Tina turner he had on full blast, told me I was fabulous and almost caused a crash at a 4 way stop. 5 stars. No notes.
Waymo is overly conservative last time I checked. Driving the speed limit basically means getting to your destination twice as slow.
"Twice as slow" is not even slightly accurate.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
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I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
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At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
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> Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
> it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
You want your cab driver to drive on the shoulder and break the law? What?
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> These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
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couldn't you have arrived 10 minutes later or was endangering life worth it?
Uh...driving in the shoulder is illegal.
There will be one day where people will say we were completely nuts to have cars on streets using this technology .
Are they fully self-contained or they need to talk back to internet during the ride?
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
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It's easier to get from zero to something that works on divided highways, since there's only lanes, other vehicles, and a few signs to care about. No cross traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
One of the first high-profile Tesla fatalities was on a highway, where the vehicle misunderstood a left exit and crashed into a concrete barrier.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
> remember people saying the exact opposite
It was a common but bad hypothesis.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
Highway is easier, but if something goes wrong the chance of death is pretty high. This is bad PR and could get you badly regulated if you fuck it up.
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving.
The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
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It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
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I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
You Tesla/Elon stans crack me up. "2 more weeks" has been the claim for literal decades at this point.
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I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
One time my driver had a TV show playing on their phone on their dashboard on 101.
How could you tell they were high?
> How could you tell they were high?
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
high on what?
Does it matter? Can't think of a single substance that's safe for driving a car.
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mj likely? which should be illegal.
High on life!
Speed?
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
Luckily this won't be a problem in Los Angeles, because traffic prevents you from ever going over the speed limit.
While young and stupid, I did 100 mph on the 710 once. Driving home from work at 12:30 am on Monday gives opportunity for lots of speed. There's no traffic at that time of day. It was many years ago, and traffic grows with population, but still, I can't imagine there's much traffic then; I visit the area at least once a year for about a week and there's always some opportunities during the trip to travel above the speed limit, even though I'm not out very late anymore.
I remember my buddy telling me it would sometimes take him 2 hours to go a few miles in LA traffic and sometimes he would just walk to work instead because he'd get there faster.
It's hilarious to see people in LA buying sports cars. Like even if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket you won't be able to drive faster than the traffic in front of you. Just a status symbol, I guess.
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Have you driven in LA? Traffic speed is generally bimodal: either stuck in traffic jam or easily 15 mph above the limit. (Source: live in LA, drive regularly.)
As someone who doesn’t drive but has done a UK theory test - aren’t you supposed to stick to the “slow lane” (no matter how fast you’re going) unless you’re overtaking? And that’s why it’s not actually called the “fast lane” but the “passing lane”. So I don’t see why you would be in the passing lane unless you’re going faster than others anyway. And there are plenty of lorries and coaches (trucks and buses in US terms?) that are physically limited to below the speed limit anyway
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The slow lane and passing lane dichotomy makes sense in a rural highway with two lanes in your direction.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
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If there are vehicles going slow due to capability, you are pretty likely to be in an area where traffic density means that there's lots of vehicles in all the available lanes.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
In Ontario we have lots of 3 lane highways (we'll ignore Toronto area, where speed is limited by traffic anyways). What happens is that trucks & people getting on/off exits are in right most lane. Middle lane is everyone else, going 10-20 km/h over speed limit. Leftmost lane is people passing, or the maniacs going over 150 km/h while relying on their map system to alert them of highway patrol
You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.
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Yes. People do in fact safely drive the speed limit.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
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In the few times I’ve seen a Waymo on the freeway in the Bay Area, they have always been in the slow lane and driving 55-65 MPH.
With self driving cars population on roads increasing, a side effect can be that all traffic will be shaped towards staying within the speed limits. With more cars staying within the limits, breaking the limits becomes more difficult.
If you watch the videos that insiders have been posting, it never exceeds the speed limits.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
> In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
"Waves" are really what we would want them to prevent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
The autonomous cars can prevent these waves from forming, which would get people to their destinations faster than speeding.
I was on 101 during evening rush hour, speeding along like everyone. Then I saw brake lights from a Waymo. Later followed by all the surrounding cars. Interesting that it was the first to detect a slowdown.
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The omnipresent threat of being splattered by someone who's weaving lanes or distracted by their phone and not expecting to see a vehicle doing 20mph (!!!!) below traffic speed is exactly what I want when I'm in a taxi. /s
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
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Why is that the problem for above the legal speed limit drivers?
A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic.
The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around.
After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech?
Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
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That's a great way to make them targets for vandalism. I'm in a city they're about to get in to (Nashville), and if the snitch-mobile tattled on everyone (the highways here that are officially 55 are "really" 75 with some exceptions, and going the speed limit can end up being more dangerous), sensors would start getting bullet holes.
Of course, unlike the normal car break-ins here, the cops might do something about them.
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Indeed, and I'm guessing the Waymos have forward facing cameras + know their own speed? Feels like a natural jump to begin automatically reporting cars that are speeding past them to the police, with a camera snapshot of the plate, with everything else censored.
No, it is not only a problem for "'well above the legal limit' speeding drivers"; it is a problem for you, and the solution requires more thought than the "just follow the rules" that you put into your post.
There are many instances where the entire mass of traffic across three or four lanes is 10-20mph above the stated limit, e.g., going 75-85mph in a 66mph posted area.
It may not be legal, but it is reality. And when it is everyone, it is not only "aggressive" drivers. It is everyone. And one driver thinking they will change the situation only makes it worse.
If you are going 20-30mph below the speed of traffic you are at least as much a hazard to yourself and everyone around you as going 20-30mph above the speed of traffic, and the stated speed limit has nothing to do with it.
Going substantially slower than traffic, even in the slow lane with flashers on, nearly all of the threats and actions are overtaking you and coming from behind you, meaning to see and react to most of the developing situations, you must be driving through your rear-view mirrors.
And the situation you create can be very deadly, as one car can change lanes to avoid you, revealing you late to the next car, which barely changes lanes, and further reduces time for the next, who hits you and starts the pile-up.
It is not only their problem, it is yours too. Sure, you may be legally in the right, but you have still caused yourself to get hit.
What my grandfather explained to me is still correct:
"You never want to be dead right."
Sounds like you’ve never driven on a highway. Taking some imaginary moral high ground doesn’t make one any less dangerous.
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
Waymo continues to improve every year, but dumb drivers never will.
Weird, because per capita deaths leveled off in the 1930's and declined from that plateau in '70's to lows in the 2010's.
Did we get less dumb drivers starting in the '70's?
It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.
Or public transit on a track.
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Waymos do seem to have gotten a lot more aggressive.
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles."
Maybe that got lost.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-03-apnewsbreak-video-google-self-...
Only ridden Waymo twice but I've been much happier with them than the average Uber driver over the past few years.
I keep seeing them around my home in Menlo Park (Redwood City), but they're still in testing phase and not available for booking yet.
As of this morning, they should be. My app sent me a notification today.
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term?
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
To each their own. If you value human interaction, continue to book rides with humans.
Convenience beats everything (in capitalism)
Can Waymo scale up its fleet fast enough to match Tesla?
Nice, there's already a button in the app to get on the waitlist for freeways. I'm curious to see how much it would cost to commute with Waymo.
The gap between Waymo's service and Tesla's public beta test keeps getting larger.
It'll be interesting to follow how these machines will be exploited. I'm waiting for the first robotaxi mediated bombing or similar attack.
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available.
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
I want to see the Waymo's go up to Skyline. Can they handle the windy roads?
They should be fine in the wind, they're not driving boxtrucks. :P
I rode one through the Presidio which has some windy roads. It didn't have problems.
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality.
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
does anyone know statistics on computer-controlled cars' safety? I can guess "safer than humans most likely", but by how much?
it seems like these robotaxis have been around long enough to have conclusions now
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-fo...
Official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905)
I will never understand blog spam. post the source luke!
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
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No cats on freeways, so they’re safe in that regard. Any word back from Alphabet on the cat their machines killed in SF?
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
In my experience, Waymo's driving style is more comfortable than most humans.
Waymo is in another league compared to every other autpilot system out there - I've used Tesla, Toyota, and Cruise before it got shut down.
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
Waymo isn't relying only on speed matching the car in front, so your experience with SuperCruise and BlueCruise doesn't extrapolate to Waymo.
Honestly you need to try Waymo. It’s in a league of its own.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
> However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.