Comment by mmmlinux
6 hours ago
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 did have one drive straight through a big pothole in LA once, and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes. But neither of those are very surprising.
Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.
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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.
"It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you."
You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?
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You say the term pivot like its a startup founder who has every option in life. You should feel bad for anyone who would struggle for a basic job.
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It's interesting that we're on the cusp of a major change in our world and no one is really talking about it. Self driving cars will have a profound impact on society. Everything from real estate to logistics will be impacted.
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Actually i spoke a uber driver about this and he said he was waiting for cars with FSD available to buy then he could make his car work for him.
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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.
You mean just like programmers watching AI replacing them?
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> 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.
The one thing you can trust Waymo to do is spy on you. Hurray, more surveillance-on-wheels! Every one of these things has 29 visible-light cameras, 5 LIDARs, 4 RADARs, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime imagery of you: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
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.
Yeah it always wigs me out going through those super narrow "55 mph" construction zones on US highways. I'm not in a hurry and want to slow down, but if I did I'd have semis blowing past at 75 which feels even more unsafe. Honestly I think they should put up speed cameras.
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Are you sure it was actually a 40mph zone in that section? Austin has plenty of school and construction zones with lower speed limits that most drivers completely ignore.
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.
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 expect that Waymo will have standards. In theory Uber does as well, but since the drivers own their own cars they can't enforce them. A 15 year old car that has been well maintained is still safe to have on the road (within the limits of the safety systems on board), while a 6 year old car with a lot of miles that hasn't been maintained can be deadly.
Really? I fly a lot and Part 121 commercial airliners seem to be pretty well maintained.
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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.
Absolutely. The value proposition for me with rideshare services has ALWAYS been the conversations and experiences you get to have with a diverse cross section of humanity. I'd take the bus / train otherwise.
So it might come down to how many "9s" you're comfortable with. The experience is really good 99.999% of the time until it's not, and that "not" could be catastrophic. I suppose the data engineers are quite confident in the 9s.
Lyft is 99.99999% with 1.02 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled[0].
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.[2]
0: https://assets.ctfassets.net/vz6nkkbc6q75/3yrO0aP4mPfTTvyaUZ...
1: https://www.airsafe.com/journal/issue14.htm
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
> and that "not" could be catastrophic
Any different than with a human taxi driver?
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
> you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
Another very interesting thing about robotaxis is agency and blame. Taxi driver had an accident? Just that driver is suspect. Robotaxi had an accident? They're all suspect.
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This also applies to getting in a car with a human driver, or to driving yourself. Or to any other way of getting from point A to point B
How many 9s does lyft guarantee?
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.
That is dumb. Go to a developing country and see what happens when everyone is aggressive. Everyone cuts off everyone else and drivers brake a lot (none of this waiting for a gap before entering from a side street, for example, the understanding is they'll brake for you). The end result is much more slower traffic.
In NY city, I've noticed that taxi drivers will get agressive when we are stuck in traffic. They will start honking, yelling, or changing from one almost stopped lane to another almost stopped lane. I always thought it was theatrical, to show me that they were trying hard, and not just letting the fee increase while they sat stopped in traffic.
I think this is too much credit given for emotional labor. NY has an intrusive din and these people live in their cars all day. They evolve toward chronic irritation alleviated with impotent shows of force.
next fare
Oh great! Doing life-threatening activities is now verified by anecdotal evidence.
I get there. Basically isn't any laws for corporations anymore, is there any way I can see anything in regards to the safety of this at a statistical level?
Where is NHTSA? Oh right, no federal agencies exist anymore except for those that maintain the oligarchy.
And I don't give a crap if Uber has really good statistics and studies and evidence. We are talking about one of the least ethical companies in the last 20 years.
I want independent Federal testing.
You could, you know, just Google it: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/. TLDR ~90% reduction of serious injury compared with human drivers.
Now, before you say this peer-reviewed paper is corporate propaganda, all self-driving companies are required by law to disclose accidents they are involved in, whether liable or not, in CA. You could access each raw accident report published by the CA DMV periodically and come up with your own statistics.
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.
93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].
This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.
After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.
Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.
Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1981-svenson.pdf
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Yeah, I chuckle a bit when the person who blew by me on the freeway at 80mph is just 2 cars ahead of me at the offramp stop light.
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Twice as slow was probably accurate when comparing Uber with freeways vs Waymo (which wasn't using freeways yet).
But now that Waymo is gonna use freeways, that major speed difference is gonna evaporate.
In the real world 45 in a 40 will often enough get through lights just before they turn to red often enough that your real speed is more than twice as fast! Unless the city has timed their lights correctly - which sounds easy but on a grid is almost impossible for all streets. It all depends on how the red lights are timed.
I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.
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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.
My understanding was waymo in LA does not yet take freeways (maybe this announcement will change that) which makes it a strictly worse experience in LA specifically.
I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.
Waymo may be currently safer than human drivers, but this right here is why I don't believe for a second they'll stay that way. People will complain it took to long to get somewhere because "stupid car was following all the rules!" and they'll be programmed to become more aggressive and dangerous (and due to regulatory capture they'll get away with this of course). I've already noticed this in San Francisco.
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.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic. It can technically be illegal to drive at (or below) the speed limit because it creates an unsafe environment for all the other cars on the road that are driving faster, even if they’re all breaking the legal speed limit.
It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.
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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?
You may want to become aware of the existence of New York City. It's a pretty interesting place.
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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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My hot take is that anyone who would take a taxi from JFK to Manhattan, along the most well-served transit corridor on the continent, is probably a psycho and we shouldn't ask for their input on transportation topics.
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couldn't you have arrived 10 minutes later or was endangering life worth it?
I certainly could have arrived 10 minutes later, but I wouldn't say that arriving 10 minutes later would result in a better experience in every way. It might result in a hypothetically safer experience (in the instance, there were no collisions so safety was achieved) or a morally better experience (according to the HN consensus morals that deem me a psychopath for either taking a cab at all or because I did not intervene and let the cab driver drive as he saw fit). Up to you what criteria you judge the overall trip on, I'm just pointing out that if the trip time is longer, the trip is not better in every way; at least absent an unusual requirement such as if you wanted to see the sights on the way, a shorter but less scenic trip would be a negative; or if you had a timing constraint that you must not arrive before a certain time, a shorter trip might infringe that constraint and would be a negative --- no such constraint was mentioned.
I don't know that any life was endangered either. I would accept an argument that property was endangered, certainly the margin between vehicles was very close, but at speeds where a collision would not have been injurious.
Uh...driving in the shoulder is illegal.