I happened to drive past 2 of them in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. One was making a left turn into an alley, another was on the otherwise of the road so I never got to see how they actually drove but I giddily squealed like a happy pig rolling in the mud WAYMO! as I tried explaining to my shocked wife wtf was going on. It's been so long since I've had this feel of wonder when seeing technology.
I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.
I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.
They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.
I live under the flight path for an airport, which should be kind of annoying. Instead I find it inspiring to hear the roar of the jets and see the small planes hurling through the air. We dreamed of the day for so long and now it is common!
Took a few last year on a trip to San Francisco and it felt like the future. It's not lost on me that enshittification will take its toll, the fleet will get nastier over time, prices will increase, etc. I'm also torn about more money being given to mega corporations. But purely from a service-enjoyment and technology-appreciation point of view it was amazing!
I started working at Google in 2008 and while walking to lunch one day saw some of the early self-driving cars in a parking lot, just sitting there idle. They had a funny mast that didn't look like street view and I distinctly remember thinking "wait, Google is working on self driving cars"?
Saving lives is the main thing for me. Waymo at least seems to take safety fairly seriously, with data indicating they cause far fewer serious accidents than the average human driver.
Traffic fatalities are one of the top 3 causes of death for kids in the US (iirc it's right behind firearms).
As a motorcyclist, I am confident that I'd rather trust software to drive near me than the median motorist. I've ridden in a Waymo and I've ridden in the back of countless rideshares driven by humans, and I've never had to complain that my Waymo was speeding or running stop signs.
Considering that there is pretty reliable evidence that Waymo is safer than the average human driver, that seems like a simply false characterization of the Waymo driver.
I’ve never ridden in one but if I get the chance I definitely will.
Waymo is a mostly seperate group of people from Google, to start with. What's more, on the whole I think the reason they've been winning the self-driving race is that they've actually taken the safety and reliability of the system very seriously, in comparison to a lot of their competitors. Waymo seems to be the only one that both has the necessary level of respect for the problem and the ability to execute on it.
Torontonian here. Our traffic gridlock is among the top 10 worst in the world for major urban centres, and I think you have to be a bit of a lunatic to drive into the city core. There are simply too many large-footprint vehicles clogging our streets, which were never designed for the volumes we now see. Rather than adding more vehicles (driverless or otherwise), Toronto needs more investment and prioritization of public transit and cycling infrastructure.
I note the Toronto announcement cites job creation in the very first sentence. I live near another snowy city where Waymo has been teased, but has yet to have any significant presence:
Took my first Waymo in Austin, TX last weekend and it did not go well. Was supposed to be a 9 minute drive, then randomly it tells us the ride has been 'slightly extended' to 45 minutes. Customer support dropped us off at a restaurant and said sorry. We ordered a human Uber.
Honestly the last thing I thought would happen would be that it would get lost. I thought maybe it would get confused on the road, but it drove better than most human drivers.
I used them all the time when I lived in LA and they worked great. I didn't have a single bad experience. In general they were much more pleasant than having a human Uber, but that's just my opinion.
I went to Austin a few months ago and half the interchanges weren't on Google Maps because they were built so recently. In the week I was there I think they finished building a new one near my hotel.
I wonder how reliant self-driving cars are on unchanging road infrastructure.
> half the interchanges weren't on Google Maps because they were built so recently
Uh, bullshit? It takes more than a year to build a modern interchange. Plenty of time for Google to update its maps. Can you provide a couple example satellite photos of the interchanges that are not yet mapped by Google?
Really? Bad luck, I have literally never had that happen! What time was this? Because Austin is closing down 35 in the evening and it is just doing crazy things to traffic. Maybe it was that?
I think the bigger lesson from what you say isn't so much about Waymo or this topic generally but to always remember that forums like HN are not reliable reporters of reality: they can only give you an indication of who was moved to say something and an indication of what they want you to believe... true or not.
I'm sure you were already aware of that, but its easy to forget that and think you're dealing with something more real.
Last week there were two separate posts, one said "AI is not a tool" and the other one said "AI is a tool." Even though that logically covers all possibilities, somehow the vast majority of comments in both were negative or contradicting. My takeaway is that comments aren't a very representative sampling of how people actually feel.
It's not just you. My family gets around on foot, bike and transit, but occasionally we find the most practical way to get somewhere we want to go is by car. Having more options to get a ride is very welcome.
From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.
There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.
anecdotal but waymo was flawless. zenlike music. safe driving. Vs recent uber getting a lot of invasive personal questions from drivers, weird smells, only reason chose is it was half of waymos cost. Even at double the cost might just chose waymo next time.
I learn this each time Apple releases a product. New iPhones could be $500, 10x the speed, half the weight and full week battery life and a fringe loud group will post and upvote some dumb complaint.
i had a funny first experience where the lidar got super lost on a bush, but it did a uie around the block and pulled in from the other side, and from there the experimence was that it was the best driver ive ever seen
Remember that happy people don't come whine on the internet.
And HN has become a very negative hole by itself, rewarding complainers and pushing people who don't complain away (positive posts or ones that push back on needless negativity get downvoted a lot these days).
Will be interesting how it handles the tougher climate conditions.
Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos. Those Roadster jets may finally make a smooth ride throughout the whole of the city possible.
I find the anarchist traffic of developing world cities to be more aligned with natural game theory principles than proscriptive protocols. For a computer it may be simpler.
You are confusing predictable continuous low level noise for sheer chaos. The chaotic potential Montreal has in winter, and it uses, is spectacular. The fact that it is so unpredictable in exercising this merely contributes to the problem.
I was thinking this too - my guess is the cars simply wouldn't offer rides on days with really poor conditions.
Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.
This could still be a problem. Human drivers are still available on these days today, and if services like Waymo take over and theres less Uber (et al) drivers, then we'll have no support on the worst days.
They have a limited presence in New Orleans, mostly rolling around the French Quarter and Uptown. The roads look bombed out in parts of Uptown, maybe not the absolute worst anywhere but it's close.
Yeah, I've seen them going around. The last one I saw at Jackson Square looked like the safety driver was driving. This is probably the worse urban environment for Waymo to be. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the roads or the people dancing in the streets (as well as mules, pedicabs, wacky bikes, scooters, drunk people and all of the wonderful chaos). Not looking forward to them becoming operational here.
>> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.
Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.
I wouldn't say Montréal is more dangerous, but it is 100% more complicated for drivers. There are so many variables that change suddenly. A road is fully plowed and salted, you turn right and everything turns to shit with tons of snow on the ground. You keep going, suddenly there's ice *underneath* a layer of snow so the car starts skidding, and the plow's going the other way trying not to swallow your car whole.
You're talking about one variable I'm familiar with, but it's one variable. With snow cover in a plain, you just drive much slower and turn on your hazards.
I had a similar thought from my time living in Alaska. half the year there aren't any lines on the road other than the occasional tracks from the previous car that drove on it, and that's if the wind is low. It's not unusual to have half the road covered in a foot or two of snow from a drift. Humans can see them and usually avoid them, but it involves strategically using the oncoming lane. Would be interesting to see the nav system deal with that!
It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).
Toronto gets snow! Do any other cities they operate in get snow?
So much of winter driving is knowing what is blocked by ice and snow, what snow is probably safe to pass, and navigating around piles of ice and snow that become temporary obstacles.
Granted Toronto gets much less accumulation than a city like Montréal.
They've been mapping, or whatever they do, Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and it was pretty funny watching the cars navigate around massive snow piles last winter. Curious to see how the rollout goes here. <Insert popcorn emoji.>
I'll giddily await the moment when a Waymo gets swallowed by a random sinkhole.
I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.
on the other hand, montreal doesn't allow right on red, and instead has an extremely strongly planned traffic grid including priority right turns. Not much ambiguity in the prescribed traffic patterns.
I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It
has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how
he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info
sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they
not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging
going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far
outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must
get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)
Munich has been a long-standing operational base for many US companies in EU, so they might try just a pilot, but it's not only waymos I see here, also some bmw self-driving test vehicles, also nvidia(?) test vehicles etc. And trust me as a ukrainian myself I know what people think about orange man both here and back there. And europeans are largely sceptical about US companies not because of him but mostly because they're just american.
For the uninitiated, what technologies do Waymos use that allow them to offer unsupervised FSD?
I ask because I find my Tesla Model Y FSD to be incredible, requiring effectively no intervention (only in parking lots because I am picky about where I like to park), and I often wonder if it is purely bureaucratic inertia that is preventing it from being treated as unsupervised.
The real heart of what I am getting at: will Waymo in Canada nudge the regulators to reconsider Tesla FSD or does it have something special that Tesla is lacking?
Years ago Waymo bet on a completely different self-driving approach compared to Tesla: putting a big expensive LIDAR on each car so that their self-driving model has tons of reliable 3d distance data, instead of only using comparatively cheap cameras and having the model infer everything from that. Now that testing results are in, AFAIK the conclusion is that the Waymo approach actually works (driving safer than actual human drivers) and Tesla's doesn't.
The average human driver is safe enough that a single anecdotal experience isn't a good measure of safety. Waymo has, from the start, had a very serious focus on making the system safe and reliable in a fully autonomous context, in comparison to a far more 'YOLO' approach from their competitors. Tesla, meanwhile, has been consistently trying to jazz up a driver assist approach into a fully autonomous system, and in general it just hasn't demonstrated that it's actually reliable enough there (despite many claims for years that the reason they require hands on the wheel is just for regulatory reasons, it's actually been quite important for safety. It's quite easy to lie with statistics here and Tesla is quite prone to it).
I wonder how this will handle streetcars. It's illegal to pass a streetcar with the doors opening. There's a flashing signal on the vehicle, but it seems like a fairly important local difference. I hope it won't take a pedestrian death to get that sort of thing looked at.
No it's quite dissimilar. Streetcars in Toronto travel in mixed traffic in the middle lanes and deposit passengers into the right lane of traffic, which is expected to stop behind the open doors. What happens if the right lane is occupied by stopped traffic? You have to sit and wait while the passengers do their thing around the hopefully-attentive driver of the stopped vehicle.
Being in mixed traffic, streetcars are easily blocked by disabled vehicles or straight-up idiots. The time between launch and one of these things sperging out and blocking streetcars will be measured in minutes.
I watched one today in SF turn down a road, stop, back into an active intersection and continued to back up into the wrong lane, then back into a lane with a car in the lane before it stopped and blocked both lanes.
A bit off topic, but I've been a Waymo booster for a minute here, as you can see in my comment history, but here in LA their pricing has jumped the shark a bit. Yesterday it quoted me > $10/mile for a short, < 5 miles trip. That was the return trip after I had a less expensive price of around $6/mile to the original destination (still pricey!).
I have zero insight into their pricing mechanism, but I was getting in the car coming back from, no exaggeration, one of the most expensive cities on the planet and so if I was Waymo I would probably price that ride pretty aggressively based on the location alone. Then you throw in all the other data points Google has about its users and I had my first "fuck me" moment where dynamic pricing really slapped me in the face (I've seen it firsthand with the airlines but Waymo is particularly insidious because of the use of my Google history).
And of course I'm aware Waymo has to price high while they're fleet-constrained or folks are going to be waiting forever for a car, but I hope they don't get too content with the absurd margin at $10+/mile. They will be tempted to do just that and so instead of flooding the market with fleet decide they'll put just enough cars in service to maximize profit instead of going for market share (of all riders I mean). But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Waymo can come up with some extraordinarily high prices at times. Sometimes it may cost $4-$5 to get me to church, very early in the morning (a 3-mile, 10 minute ride.) Sometimes, it can cost $25+ to get me home from church at peak times, like Saturday evenings.
On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening.
Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand.
I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.
Are they actually allowed to dynamically price the rides based on information about you in particular? I understand a supply and demand based dynamic pricing model.
Personalized dynamic pricing seems like something that should absolutely be illegal across the board.
I said it and thought it but they’re saying they are not doing it by individual. Does that mean they have zero access to proprietary Google user activity? Anonymized/aggregated/etc. to inform pricing?
My intent is not to spread misinformation so I guess I’ll believe there’s a solid wall up between Waymo and Google data sharing.
Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.
> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.
And that's how it should be.
(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)
Can you give more color on local partners? I don't think you mean Uber, like I think it was or maybe still is in Austin, but maybe that's what you mean.
And, yeah, them charging more makes sense strictly on quality of experience so a price premium makes sense, but if there is margin to be eroded and these other providers roll out more broadly the prices will end up coming down.
One other thing I found interesting here and you and others might as well... I couldn't help but give feedback about my happiness with the service overall, but my reluctance at the current pricing and I specifically said I don't need to receive a reply to my request (Waymo asks if you want someone to reply when you give feedback and I said "no"). But sure enough they replied and the gist of it was we're sorry we're not a good fit for you now because of the price and hope you'll give us another chance down the road.
I'm not sure what I expected them to say, but at this still-early hour I would've expected more nuance in reply. Would've been better for them to not reply at all given the tone of the reply they sent.
I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.
> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.
> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.
> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.
It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.
This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area.
It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.
Earlier this year a 92-year-old woman drove into our local Asian supermarket, killed three people and injured at least six. No criminal charges were filed. At least they pulled her driver license.
I don't say this to suggest excusing autonomous car companies from bearing liability, but just for context.
Perhaps we should not make the regulations too punitive on the AV companies as that would reduce the speed of replacing bad human drivers who currently cause 40,000 deaths a year in the US.
A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].
When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
I happened to be in that area of West Portal on that fateful day (damn you, Noe Valley Bakery!) I did not see it happen, but went to see what that noise was all about. The images of that scene from that day still haunt me; they are very vivid. It was a terrible, terrible accident and may that old witch Mary Lau spend an eternity in hell.
> Two years ago, the family of four was on their way to the San Francisco Zoo with their two young children when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.
A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.
How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?
There are drive-by-wire cars on the road.
ABS systems can disable breaks.
If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?
Just to be clear: there are humans choosing to have the car operate. That's not just semantics. Responsibility lies with the people making the choice to cause a system to operate.
Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.
If the violation is serious enough the autonomous predatory tow trucks will hear it on the radio then show up promptly to whisk the vehicle away, as usual. Plus in this case the driver is detained and the vehicle is impounded in the same stroke :)
After that it would only be fair that they would have to not only pay bail to the court, but also towing & storage fees before being released, like for any normal driver.
And if they skip bail, they're going back in the slammer :0
I just tried to sign up for Waymo. It requires a Google account, which you can’t get here without a mobile number and a residential/end user IP (both of which uniquely identify you by ID and home address).
I can’t possibly imagine a world in which I want to connect all of my comings and goings with a Google account. This is exactly the kind of advertising surveillance company that I would least want to have my physical movement data.
It obviously makes sense to have begun this autonomy journey in much easier cities. It'll be interesting to see the incremental improvements as they navigate how to handle everything that winter does to driving. I hope the plan isn't, "just stop operating for five months." Also a bit of a jerk, I am, but I'm looking forward to the funny videos.
I used to be excited about these, but after a year or so of having to drive near them in Midtown Atlanta I would get incredible dopamine out of watching them crushed for scrap.
They cause traffic obstructions during rush hour every single day. Blocking entire lanes of traffic to pick up Uber customers.
Oh there's going to be opinions, for sure. This is the high cost, zero returns portion though. They aren't trying to go live until 2028. In a way, it becomes a bargaining chip if they've spent all this money on mapping/testing Toronto and want to start operating in earnest. Though, ideally by 2028 we don't have to behave as low and as transactionally as the current American regime.
It'll be interesting to see how Waymo cars handle snow covering the road markings and road edges, and people flocking to new emergent lanes that do not correspond to the painted lines on the road, and people parking well into the road because of snow piles, etc, etc.
In theory, Waymo should have a very up to date map of lanes and should be able to very precisely triangulate where it is, so with snow covered road markings it may still do better than humans.
Sometimes when the snow builds up, the safest driving is to be in the “lane” made by heavy travel that blows the snow to the sides. Staying in the real lane would make for hard and likely dangerous driving.
No argument or anything here, just saying what I think is an interesting nuance as someone who has spent a lot of life driving in snowy places.
I’m in Denver now and it’ll be really interesting to see how these things handle the effects of a real storm. If I had to make a guess it would be that they’ll all just stop driving for a day or two.
Do you understand that what you have said, this behavior of using the absolute true position of the lanes when all the human drivers are using a different emergent from snow-paths lane, will cause accidents? Doing the "right" thing is wrong when it is different from what humans all do.
Canada has two official languages: Canadian English and Canadian French. This satisfies both the English-speaking population and the French-speaking population. As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
> As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
It is more complex than that. Quebec (Montreal) has additional laws over and above the national laws, often requiring that French text be bigger/longer/more prominent than the English text.
There was also controversy over proper names v. descriptions. "Macdonalds" is a proper name but should "Burger King" be translated to "Burger Roi"?
Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".
Toronto is embroiled in partisan politicking around bike lanes. The provincial premiere is overriding city council to have them removed, which is what I suspect is the motivation behind the parent comment.
You will never stop hearing about this until they are restored. Also enjoy your very slow commute with all the bikes now legally required to ride in the car lane and block you.
My first and only Waymo was in SF last week. The 25 minute walk was also a 20 min drive. Great. Took 45 minutes of odd detours and sudden reroutes to get from Ferry Building to the hotel.
I apologise for the tangent but doesn’t this “future” feel off?
We’re improving the experience with navigating all of these noisy, nasty, ugly, toxic and dangerous car sewers (aka car streets) that actively robs us from our humanity and leads to isolation?
This all feels kinda like the Soviet Union building a shit ton of concrete “monuments” everywhere, pretending that was what people “wanted”
The tech is truly impressive but I wish we were able to step out of the local maxima of “optimising this shitty experience until it is less shitty” and start taking “optimising live in cities so it feels nice again” as an actual goal?
Some countries seem to have stumbled on it and the science of urbanism is progressing, but man if that amount of ingenuity that went into self driving cars had went into green and efficient cities…
Winter is the real test here. Worked on lidar perception for a bit and falling snow throws returns everywhere, plus once the lane lines are under slush everyone just drives in the ruts the car ahead made. Curious how they handle those unofficial lanes.
As a driver in places where it snows... I'm curious about how it will handle:
1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.
2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.
3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)
4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")
5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).
> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.
True. But don't most people drive in the tracks of the car ahead? I know when it snows people sometimes make a three-lane highway into a two-way "rut railway" road, and make do.
They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.
I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?
Parent is referring to snow in the environment, not on the lidar itself.
When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
That's one of the reasons lidar will prove to be a dead end for this application. It's a temporary enabling technology on the path to the simpler multiple camera based solution.
Camera's can't see in the dark. There is no perfect sensor. Waymo relies multiple sensor modalities: Cameras, Lidar, ultrasonics, radar, gps, inertial measurement units.
Some of you downvoted-to-dead this from another poster ("Hi, I'm Nelson" from Technologists for Democracy); new user who had low karma, so it's dead in the thread.
I frankly think it's a legit POV, and I'm also local to this, so I'm going to use my own much higher karma to post it again:
I think there are legitimate concerns in promoting American BigTech as provider of infrastructure/services in Toronto. Concerns about data collection, about technological autonomy, and local employment.
I fail to see any unique argument in this. That is to say you can replace Ontario with San Jose and it'll all work.
> Digital sovereignty and privacy is at stake.
This is the most strongest argument, and luckily that's the first one. Many ways to solve this so not really a big problem.
> Ontarians’ jobs risk being outsourced
What jobs are being displaced by driverless cars? The best argument here is uber drivers are going to be affected. Who would you rather drive you at 3am if you're a drunk woman? An uber driver or Waymo?
> Public transit could lose riders
What is the goal here? The goal is to move people efficiently and decrease the reliance on human driving, which can cause deaths. Public transportation is vital but again, there are times when subway / buses wont work.
Also, if public transit is a major concern, shouldnt we be asking Uber (see point #2) to go away?
The last two points are super generic, it isnt even worth discussion.
They keep announcing new cities, but do they really follow up and actually launch there? I remember a couple of years ago they announced NYC as a market, but I don't think they're fully launched in NYC yet.
Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver behind the wheel) in NYC.
It's not. Waymo was using human-driven cars to collect data in NYC for a while, but their permit expired and they no longer operate at all in New York.
What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Do you know any minors that had the police called on them mid ride by a RoboTaxi company becuase the taxi AI though the minor had guns. Yeah Waymo did that.
For your Women's safety POV. just because now youre alone in the car doesn’t really mean you are alone. You are under constant remote surveillance.
Regarding the meter broke issue. So you'd rather have corporate price fixing. Because that’s what Waymo is doing. The fleet size is same but the costs are going up.
And when a giant tech company is a service provided and rule maker , you don't really have a choice left.
What does a 1-driver taxi compared to a 2-drivers taxi offer apart from fewer taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?
The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.
Well, some long-haul coaches have two drivers to allow them to switch-out for safety but keep the passengers and bus moving. Of all the things to get excited about, I don't understand why reducing the labor costs for corporates is one. Improving transportation instead would benefit us all, for example with better road design and mixed/integrated transport systems.
Buses / Trams are the best use of this tech since not only is a high percentage of the cost the driver but they also drive the same predictable routes and not all over the place.
There are issues though. If you remove the staff from the bus you will need to handle some particularly unruly passengers in a different way. Currently the driver just stops until that person leaves or gets police / special constables involved.
If you've ever seen bus drivers in NYC, it's genuinely impressive how they manage to weave a giant box through the chaos. I'm not sure that self-driving tech will be able to replace them anytime soon.
This would be interesting for my native Kansas City though. There's a severe shortage of buses and it's much simpler driving conditions. Could be a game changer.
Where are you getting this number?
Imagination is free but to execute the imagination is not. So yes, it depends on the imagination of the person who owns the tech AI company not your imagination.
And what is the cost of replacing the driver with the hardware/software and the servicing cost. and the operators in Philippines that are remotely working ?
> frees up people to do more important things than drive you around
Like what?
They still need a paycheck. What do you think the outcome of a bunch of unemployed taxi drivers is going to be? What other low skill career is going to absorb them?
We're really rapidly approaching a "automate too many jobs for the remainder of the job market to absorb" situation imo and It's hard for me to imagine it going very well for anyone.
I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.
But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.
Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.
It obeys the rules of the road and kills many fewer people - 0 killed in 250M miles. Driving a machine is something people are not good enough at frankly.
> What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs?
One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.
Of the robotaxis in Austin, I've only used Waymo, but have used it fairly extensively. So far I have noticed:
- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,
- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,
- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),
- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,
- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,
- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.
There are three major disadvantages right now:
- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,
- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,
- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.
HackerNews is a bubble in itself. Most people here cannot relate to a person who drives a cab for a living and is having a real tangbile crisis seeing how these tech companies are eating up their livelihood. Switching jobs for a taxi driver is not the same as switching jobs or career as a software coolie.
No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.
How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?
I get the idea that you no longer need a driver for a cab, but in my mind all that means is there's an unemployed former cab driver who is explicitly worse off now. The likelihood of that person having tons of great options to go do now that they aren't burdened by driving a cab is pretty low imo?
There's probably a name for this somewhere, some kind of automation paradox that makes "society" better but many individuals lives worse.
As an individual it's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about it though
This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.
Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.
When I read people talking online, it seems as if philosophy has been solved and we all just agree that utilitarian is the way to go? Is the trolley problem solved? So long as people on average are better off (not that I'm conceding they will be, you can't use the past to predict the future), it's fine to go ahead with the technology?
The vast majority of people used to be farmers; I am glad to live in a future where farming jobs have largely been automated away.
With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.
Don't get me wrong on this, I love driving.. the right car. But, most of the time, driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world. I guess you could argue that some commuters (who aren't driving themselves) don't exactly fill that time with the most productive things but thats a separate issue.
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.
Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.
> How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?
I live in a location that has won the top spot on "worst drivers in the country" and "worst roads in the nation" lists multiple times. By all means, put the robots in the driver's seat. Can't be any worse.
I understand the issue of technical power, mind you, but I don't
really see how US companies expanding into Canada is a good idea
as long as a hostile orange individual keeps on potty-mouthing
Canadians.
No, the rest of us will continue trading without the US. Its not giving in, its ignoring the billionaires that are buys favors and not buying from their companies.
I happened to drive past 2 of them in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. One was making a left turn into an alley, another was on the otherwise of the road so I never got to see how they actually drove but I giddily squealed like a happy pig rolling in the mud WAYMO! as I tried explaining to my shocked wife wtf was going on. It's been so long since I've had this feel of wonder when seeing technology.
I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.
I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.
They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.
I live under the flight path for an airport, which should be kind of annoying. Instead I find it inspiring to hear the roar of the jets and see the small planes hurling through the air. We dreamed of the day for so long and now it is common!
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Took a few last year on a trip to San Francisco and it felt like the future. It's not lost on me that enshittification will take its toll, the fleet will get nastier over time, prices will increase, etc. I'm also torn about more money being given to mega corporations. But purely from a service-enjoyment and technology-appreciation point of view it was amazing!
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I started working at Google in 2008 and while walking to lunch one day saw some of the early self-driving cars in a parking lot, just sitting there idle. They had a funny mast that didn't look like street view and I distinctly remember thinking "wait, Google is working on self driving cars"?
I am not. They can alpha test elsewhere.
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Why do you find it so cool? Genuinely asking. I find this technology repulsive.
Saving lives is the main thing for me. Waymo at least seems to take safety fairly seriously, with data indicating they cause far fewer serious accidents than the average human driver.
Traffic fatalities are one of the top 3 causes of death for kids in the US (iirc it's right behind firearms).
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Do you feel the same when you see the level of automation in a modern factory? I doubt it.
In what world is the technology for an autonomous car “repulsive”?
It seems like you’re into using new technology like AI, based on the success you’ve had using it:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162724 > I've recently been into AI and orchestration and have set up some pretty neat systems and side projects :)
Or maybe you think autonomous cars are as evil as AI:
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644738 > There is no room for nuance. AI is capitals access to our labour. It's evil. The end.
Your views on technology sure are interesting, to say the least.
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I find the number of children killed by human drivers repulsive.
I would never trust the maker of these crappy software products with my life.
Why would you?
As a motorcyclist, I am confident that I'd rather trust software to drive near me than the median motorist. I've ridden in a Waymo and I've ridden in the back of countless rideshares driven by humans, and I've never had to complain that my Waymo was speeding or running stop signs.
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Considering that there is pretty reliable evidence that Waymo is safer than the average human driver, that seems like a simply false characterization of the Waymo driver.
I’ve never ridden in one but if I get the chance I definitely will.
Waymo is a mostly seperate group of people from Google, to start with. What's more, on the whole I think the reason they've been winning the self-driving race is that they've actually taken the safety and reliability of the system very seriously, in comparison to a lot of their competitors. Waymo seems to be the only one that both has the necessary level of respect for the problem and the ability to execute on it.
Waymo experience in San Francisco has always been awesome for me as a passenger.
Torontonian here. Our traffic gridlock is among the top 10 worst in the world for major urban centres, and I think you have to be a bit of a lunatic to drive into the city core. There are simply too many large-footprint vehicles clogging our streets, which were never designed for the volumes we now see. Rather than adding more vehicles (driverless or otherwise), Toronto needs more investment and prioritization of public transit and cycling infrastructure.
Implement a per-mile tax for vehicles with 0 passengers.
Why only for 0 passengers? If you want to reduce congestion, price it.
I note the Toronto announcement cites job creation in the very first sentence. I live near another snowy city where Waymo has been teased, but has yet to have any significant presence:
https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/
There apparently is a concerted effort to deny Waymo the legislative changes it needs, driven by a concern about job loss:
https://autonomousboston.com/massachusetts/waymo-opposition
They've been testing fairly regularly in the Cambridge/Somerville area. I do wonder how they'll manage in the snow/winter weather
Took my first Waymo in Austin, TX last weekend and it did not go well. Was supposed to be a 9 minute drive, then randomly it tells us the ride has been 'slightly extended' to 45 minutes. Customer support dropped us off at a restaurant and said sorry. We ordered a human Uber.
Honestly the last thing I thought would happen would be that it would get lost. I thought maybe it would get confused on the road, but it drove better than most human drivers.
I used them all the time when I lived in LA and they worked great. I didn't have a single bad experience. In general they were much more pleasant than having a human Uber, but that's just my opinion.
Super weird! I've been using Waymo's regularly for 3 years now, couple of times a week and this has never happened.
I’ve definitely been in Waymos that take forty minutes compared to an Uber’s 10 to fifteen because they use very circuitous routes.
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I went to Austin a few months ago and half the interchanges weren't on Google Maps because they were built so recently. In the week I was there I think they finished building a new one near my hotel.
I wonder how reliant self-driving cars are on unchanging road infrastructure.
Unless Austin is ahead Waymos currently don't go in freeways anyways because the fail more of simply stopping isn't an option there
Uh, bullshit? It takes more than a year to build a modern interchange. Plenty of time for Google to update its maps. Can you provide a couple example satellite photos of the interchanges that are not yet mapped by Google?
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There's something about the Uber-hailed Waymos that makes them so much worse than regular Waymos IMO.
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Did you get a refund and/or bonus credits for future rides?
Was there a traffic jam or closed road or something?
Did it think it needed to take a very out of the way route?
Really? Bad luck, I have literally never had that happen! What time was this? Because Austin is closing down 35 in the evening and it is just doing crazy things to traffic. Maybe it was that?
The perfect driving equivalent of AI slop
When I read these threads, I sometimes wonder if I was the only person to have a positive/unproblematic experience with Waymo
I think the bigger lesson from what you say isn't so much about Waymo or this topic generally but to always remember that forums like HN are not reliable reporters of reality: they can only give you an indication of who was moved to say something and an indication of what they want you to believe... true or not.
I'm sure you were already aware of that, but its easy to forget that and think you're dealing with something more real.
i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias
Last week there were two separate posts, one said "AI is not a tool" and the other one said "AI is a tool." Even though that logically covers all possibilities, somehow the vast majority of comments in both were negative or contradicting. My takeaway is that comments aren't a very representative sampling of how people actually feel.
> My takeaway is that comments aren't a very representative sampling of how people actually feel.
Comments of a single thread, no.
For a question like "is AI a tool?", there's often little reason to comment if you agree with OP, only if you're critiquing the post.
Good takeaway.
There's a lot of people who have a strong opinion about these things - But they're not sure how to vocalize their thoughts about it.
Or they have strong feelings, but they're not sure what opinions emerge from it yet.
The comments we see are from people who have refined both.
It's not just you. My family gets around on foot, bike and transit, but occasionally we find the most practical way to get somewhere we want to go is by car. Having more options to get a ride is very welcome.
From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.
There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.
anecdotal but waymo was flawless. zenlike music. safe driving. Vs recent uber getting a lot of invasive personal questions from drivers, weird smells, only reason chose is it was half of waymos cost. Even at double the cost might just chose waymo next time.
Waymo is an unbelievably fantastic product IMO.
People on forums will complain about everything!
I learn this each time Apple releases a product. New iPhones could be $500, 10x the speed, half the weight and full week battery life and a fringe loud group will post and upvote some dumb complaint.
I've been using it for a long while in SF. I love it. Never had a problem.
Was excited to take a Waymo, loved the entire experience, would extra love it when they reenable highway usage in LA.
I use Waymo as my primary transport whenever I'm in SF and have yet to have a single bad experience.
Same here. Waymos have been cheaper and safer than Ubers and Lyfts for me here in SF.
i had a funny first experience where the lidar got super lost on a bush, but it did a uie around the block and pulled in from the other side, and from there the experimence was that it was the best driver ive ever seen
Same, used them exclusively last time I was in SF and it was absolutely perfect.
I used it in Atlanta, it was great. HN people hate everything.
Remember that happy people don't come whine on the internet.
And HN has become a very negative hole by itself, rewarding complainers and pushing people who don't complain away (positive posts or ones that push back on needless negativity get downvoted a lot these days).
Will be interesting how it handles the tougher climate conditions.
Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos. Those Roadster jets may finally make a smooth ride throughout the whole of the city possible.
Describing Montreal as "sheer chaos" only makes sense in the north American context. Karachi and other such cities are actually chaos.
At least in Toronto traffic they’ll mostly be capped at 10km/h, doubt they’ll have any high speed collisions with the terrible traffic here lol.
I find the anarchist traffic of developing world cities to be more aligned with natural game theory principles than proscriptive protocols. For a computer it may be simpler.
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You are confusing predictable continuous low level noise for sheer chaos. The chaotic potential Montreal has in winter, and it uses, is spectacular. The fact that it is so unpredictable in exercising this merely contributes to the problem.
Freezing rain, for example. My god.
I was thinking this too - my guess is the cars simply wouldn't offer rides on days with really poor conditions.
Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.
Same thing when people tout how FSD is basically "done"... and talk about their anecdotes driving around SoCal and such.
Don't hear many anecdotes about FSD in Pittsburgh on a night in January...
This could still be a problem. Human drivers are still available on these days today, and if services like Waymo take over and theres less Uber (et al) drivers, then we'll have no support on the worst days.
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They have a limited presence in New Orleans, mostly rolling around the French Quarter and Uptown. The roads look bombed out in parts of Uptown, maybe not the absolute worst anywhere but it's close.
Yeah, I've seen them going around. The last one I saw at Jackson Square looked like the safety driver was driving. This is probably the worse urban environment for Waymo to be. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the roads or the people dancing in the streets (as well as mules, pedicabs, wacky bikes, scooters, drunk people and all of the wonderful chaos). Not looking forward to them becoming operational here.
>> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.
Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.
I wouldn't say Montréal is more dangerous, but it is 100% more complicated for drivers. There are so many variables that change suddenly. A road is fully plowed and salted, you turn right and everything turns to shit with tons of snow on the ground. You keep going, suddenly there's ice *underneath* a layer of snow so the car starts skidding, and the plow's going the other way trying not to swallow your car whole.
You're talking about one variable I'm familiar with, but it's one variable. With snow cover in a plain, you just drive much slower and turn on your hazards.
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Yeah, I regularly drive from Saskatchewan to BC in the winter.
I'm generally enthusiastic for electric vehicles, but batteries and FSD don't really work in a 12 hour blizzard at -40. Doesn't match my use case. :)
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I had a similar thought from my time living in Alaska. half the year there aren't any lines on the road other than the occasional tracks from the previous car that drove on it, and that's if the wind is low. It's not unusual to have half the road covered in a foot or two of snow from a drift. Humans can see them and usually avoid them, but it involves strategically using the oncoming lane. Would be interesting to see the nav system deal with that!
(well, there is Mont Real, for which the city is named... But I'll agree it's not much of a mountain.)
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Lines on the roads in Montreal? Hahahahahah
Pothole observed. Diverting around pothole -
pothole observed. Diverting a-
pothole observed. d-
pothole.
po-
You have crashed into a cone.
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Recursion depth limits exceeded
> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.
The ultimate test would be Cairo or Mumbai or Lagos :-)
I remember the traffic in Cairo (1970s).
It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).
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Not much snow in any of these, or occluded vision. Which drivers seem to struggle with, a lot.
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Toronto gets snow! Do any other cities they operate in get snow?
So much of winter driving is knowing what is blocked by ice and snow, what snow is probably safe to pass, and navigating around piles of ice and snow that become temporary obstacles.
Granted Toronto gets much less accumulation than a city like Montréal.
Denver also gets snow. Waymo has been open to the public for rides from Sept 2026 in Denver. And they started test drives in Sept 2025 I believe
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Denver just launched ahead of a supposed "Super El Nino" winter. We'll see what happens.
They've been mapping, or whatever they do, Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and it was pretty funny watching the cars navigate around massive snow piles last winter. Curious to see how the rollout goes here. <Insert popcorn emoji.>
I'll giddily await the moment when a Waymo gets swallowed by a random sinkhole.
I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.
on the other hand, montreal doesn't allow right on red, and instead has an extremely strongly planned traffic grid including priority right turns. Not much ambiguity in the prescribed traffic patterns.
"montreal doesn't allow right on red".
That is not uniformly true throughout the metro area, especially in the major burbs.
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There is no chaos there, just traffic jams.
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Saw a Waymo test car in Munich recently. Guess they will start operations in EU from here soon.
London too, I believe.
I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)
Munich has been a long-standing operational base for many US companies in EU, so they might try just a pilot, but it's not only waymos I see here, also some bmw self-driving test vehicles, also nvidia(?) test vehicles etc. And trust me as a ukrainian myself I know what people think about orange man both here and back there. And europeans are largely sceptical about US companies not because of him but mostly because they're just american.
For the uninitiated, what technologies do Waymos use that allow them to offer unsupervised FSD?
I ask because I find my Tesla Model Y FSD to be incredible, requiring effectively no intervention (only in parking lots because I am picky about where I like to park), and I often wonder if it is purely bureaucratic inertia that is preventing it from being treated as unsupervised.
The real heart of what I am getting at: will Waymo in Canada nudge the regulators to reconsider Tesla FSD or does it have something special that Tesla is lacking?
Years ago Waymo bet on a completely different self-driving approach compared to Tesla: putting a big expensive LIDAR on each car so that their self-driving model has tons of reliable 3d distance data, instead of only using comparatively cheap cameras and having the model infer everything from that. Now that testing results are in, AFAIK the conclusion is that the Waymo approach actually works (driving safer than actual human drivers) and Tesla's doesn't.
The average human driver is safe enough that a single anecdotal experience isn't a good measure of safety. Waymo has, from the start, had a very serious focus on making the system safe and reliable in a fully autonomous context, in comparison to a far more 'YOLO' approach from their competitors. Tesla, meanwhile, has been consistently trying to jazz up a driver assist approach into a fully autonomous system, and in general it just hasn't demonstrated that it's actually reliable enough there (despite many claims for years that the reason they require hands on the wheel is just for regulatory reasons, it's actually been quite important for safety. It's quite easy to lie with statistics here and Tesla is quite prone to it).
Waymo does extensive mapping/scanning of the service areas.
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I wonder how this will handle streetcars. It's illegal to pass a streetcar with the doors opening. There's a flashing signal on the vehicle, but it seems like a fairly important local difference. I hope it won't take a pedestrian death to get that sort of thing looked at.
They handle school buses which have a similar mechanism, so I would hope it's already a solved problem.
No it's quite dissimilar. Streetcars in Toronto travel in mixed traffic in the middle lanes and deposit passengers into the right lane of traffic, which is expected to stop behind the open doors. What happens if the right lane is occupied by stopped traffic? You have to sit and wait while the passengers do their thing around the hopefully-attentive driver of the stopped vehicle.
Being in mixed traffic, streetcars are easily blocked by disabled vehicles or straight-up idiots. The time between launch and one of these things sperging out and blocking streetcars will be measured in minutes.
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You mean the same school busses they had a NHTSA investigation spun up over passing while they shouldn't, leading to a recall?
https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-...
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I watched one today in SF turn down a road, stop, back into an active intersection and continued to back up into the wrong lane, then back into a lane with a car in the lane before it stopped and blocked both lanes.
A bit off topic, but I've been a Waymo booster for a minute here, as you can see in my comment history, but here in LA their pricing has jumped the shark a bit. Yesterday it quoted me > $10/mile for a short, < 5 miles trip. That was the return trip after I had a less expensive price of around $6/mile to the original destination (still pricey!).
I have zero insight into their pricing mechanism, but I was getting in the car coming back from, no exaggeration, one of the most expensive cities on the planet and so if I was Waymo I would probably price that ride pretty aggressively based on the location alone. Then you throw in all the other data points Google has about its users and I had my first "fuck me" moment where dynamic pricing really slapped me in the face (I've seen it firsthand with the airlines but Waymo is particularly insidious because of the use of my Google history).
And of course I'm aware Waymo has to price high while they're fleet-constrained or folks are going to be waiting forever for a car, but I hope they don't get too content with the absurd margin at $10+/mile. They will be tempted to do just that and so instead of flooding the market with fleet decide they'll put just enough cars in service to maximize profit instead of going for market share (of all riders I mean). But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Waymo can come up with some extraordinarily high prices at times. Sometimes it may cost $4-$5 to get me to church, very early in the morning (a 3-mile, 10 minute ride.) Sometimes, it can cost $25+ to get me home from church at peak times, like Saturday evenings.
On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening.
Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand.
I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.
Are they actually allowed to dynamically price the rides based on information about you in particular? I understand a supply and demand based dynamic pricing model.
Personalized dynamic pricing seems like something that should absolutely be illegal across the board.
I said it and thought it but they’re saying they are not doing it by individual. Does that mean they have zero access to proprietary Google user activity? Anonymized/aggregated/etc. to inform pricing?
My intent is not to spread misinformation so I guess I’ll believe there’s a solid wall up between Waymo and Google data sharing.
Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.
It's a natural metaphorical extension. The idea was that company CEOs developed incoherent plans, which lead to neglect of core values.
> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.
And that's how it should be.
(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)
Can you give more color on local partners? I don't think you mean Uber, like I think it was or maybe still is in Austin, but maybe that's what you mean.
And, yeah, them charging more makes sense strictly on quality of experience so a price premium makes sense, but if there is margin to be eroded and these other providers roll out more broadly the prices will end up coming down.
One other thing I found interesting here and you and others might as well... I couldn't help but give feedback about my happiness with the service overall, but my reluctance at the current pricing and I specifically said I don't need to receive a reply to my request (Waymo asks if you want someone to reply when you give feedback and I said "no"). But sure enough they replied and the gist of it was we're sorry we're not a good fit for you now because of the price and hope you'll give us another chance down the road.
I'm not sure what I expected them to say, but at this still-early hour I would've expected more nuance in reply. Would've been better for them to not reply at all given the tone of the reply they sent.
I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.
> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.
> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.
> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.
[0]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/waymo-drives-through-denver-farm...
>Luckily, no one was hurt.
It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.
This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area.
It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.
> drove into a farmer's market
> wasn't...endangering people
There's a bit of a disconnect there.
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Were you standing on top of the car at the time?
Earlier this year a 92-year-old woman drove into our local Asian supermarket, killed three people and injured at least six. No criminal charges were filed. At least they pulled her driver license.
https://www.nbclosangeles.com/investigations/westwood-99-ran...
I don't say this to suggest excusing autonomous car companies from bearing liability, but just for context.
Perhaps we should not make the regulations too punitive on the AV companies as that would reduce the speed of replacing bad human drivers who currently cause 40,000 deaths a year in the US.
> I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I would be shocked if that was the case.
A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].
When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
[1]:https://abc7news.com/post/80-year-old-san-francisco-driver-k...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLLkGaKX7NI
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8gMd9XZJyg
I happened to be in that area of West Portal on that fateful day (damn you, Noe Valley Bakery!) I did not see it happen, but went to see what that noise was all about. The images of that scene from that day still haunt me; they are very vivid. It was a terrible, terrible accident and may that old witch Mary Lau spend an eternity in hell.
>A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail.
And that's an easy case to prosecute too, because the driver clearly broke laws beyond just "crashing into people":
>when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
> Two years ago, the family of four was on their way to the San Francisco Zoo with their two young children when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
Horrifying. Life is short, enjoy what you have.
> is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
Why?
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I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.
A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.
How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?
There are drive-by-wire cars on the road. ABS systems can disable breaks.
If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?
> Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime.
This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.
Did you want the cops to arrest the car?
Just to be clear: there are humans choosing to have the car operate. That's not just semantics. Responsibility lies with the people making the choice to cause a system to operate.
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Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.
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These may be little, but they are Jaguars.
And cops do sometimes want a higher performance police cruiser than average in case a runaway speeder needs to be apprehended.
Probably going to eventually need an autonomous one of these for some police departments:
https://gmauthority.com/blog/2026/09/california-highway-patr...
No driver needed but you still need to have a Robocop inside to get out and write the citation :)
In the old days this kind of thing was often referred to as a "police interceptor".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW8-1SYvDTI
If the violation is serious enough the autonomous predatory tow trucks will hear it on the radio then show up promptly to whisk the vehicle away, as usual. Plus in this case the driver is detained and the vehicle is impounded in the same stroke :)
After that it would only be fair that they would have to not only pay bail to the court, but also towing & storage fees before being released, like for any normal driver.
And if they skip bail, they're going back in the slammer :0
What do you believe is the correct course of action for law enforcement to take in this situation?
https://apnews.com/article/robot-germany-sexual-assault-colo...
Can you extend that to this situation?
A driver's license suspension would be sufficient, say for six months or so?
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I just tried to sign up for Waymo. It requires a Google account, which you can’t get here without a mobile number and a residential/end user IP (both of which uniquely identify you by ID and home address).
I can’t possibly imagine a world in which I want to connect all of my comings and goings with a Google account. This is exactly the kind of advertising surveillance company that I would least want to have my physical movement data.
It obviously makes sense to have begun this autonomy journey in much easier cities. It'll be interesting to see the incremental improvements as they navigate how to handle everything that winter does to driving. I hope the plan isn't, "just stop operating for five months." Also a bit of a jerk, I am, but I'm looking forward to the funny videos.
I used to be excited about these, but after a year or so of having to drive near them in Midtown Atlanta I would get incredible dopamine out of watching them crushed for scrap.
They cause traffic obstructions during rush hour every single day. Blocking entire lanes of traffic to pick up Uber customers.
I would imagine Canadians aren't going to want an American company replacing their drivers atm...
Google employs thousands of people in Canada...
What’s your point here?
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Oh there's going to be opinions, for sure. This is the high cost, zero returns portion though. They aren't trying to go live until 2028. In a way, it becomes a bargaining chip if they've spent all this money on mapping/testing Toronto and want to start operating in earnest. Though, ideally by 2028 we don't have to behave as low and as transactionally as the current American regime.
Some of the damage is permanent.
It'll be interesting to see how Waymo cars handle snow covering the road markings and road edges, and people flocking to new emergent lanes that do not correspond to the painted lines on the road, and people parking well into the road because of snow piles, etc, etc.
In theory, Waymo should have a very up to date map of lanes and should be able to very precisely triangulate where it is, so with snow covered road markings it may still do better than humans.
Sometimes when the snow builds up, the safest driving is to be in the “lane” made by heavy travel that blows the snow to the sides. Staying in the real lane would make for hard and likely dangerous driving.
No argument or anything here, just saying what I think is an interesting nuance as someone who has spent a lot of life driving in snowy places.
I’m in Denver now and it’ll be really interesting to see how these things handle the effects of a real storm. If I had to make a guess it would be that they’ll all just stop driving for a day or two.
Do you understand that what you have said, this behavior of using the absolute true position of the lanes when all the human drivers are using a different emergent from snow-paths lane, will cause accidents? Doing the "right" thing is wrong when it is different from what humans all do.
The second half of the post in Canadian French is a nice touch.
Canada has two official languages: Canadian English and Canadian French. This satisfies both the English-speaking population and the French-speaking population. As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
> As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
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The official language is Zesty Mordant.
I believe that bilingualism is required by law. Many US product packages have repeats of the information in french.
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It is more complex than that. Quebec (Montreal) has additional laws over and above the national laws, often requiring that French text be bigger/longer/more prominent than the English text.
There was also controversy over proper names v. descriptions. "Macdonalds" is a proper name but should "Burger King" be translated to "Burger Roi"?
They'll have to translate their whole site. That's usually how Canadian releases are used; it forces companies to make their operations multilingual.
A legally required one, natch.
No it isn’t. Not for a press release, and certainly not in Ontario. Most don’t.
Curious how early they're announcing this. Service won't begin until 2028.
Proactive public sentiment management to lessen the chance of reactive policies.
In Canada, it's currently vogue to hate on all things American. (I'm making this observation as a Canadian resident)
Because people will see the training vehicles?
I'd rather have bike lines :(
Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".
I think you mean Doug Ford. It would take a lot of coke for Rob Ford to drive these days, but maybe we shouldn't put it past him.
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Bike lines don't send Canadian money to a startup in the USA so I guess bike lines don't have financial means to lobby the government.
I'd 100% rather bike around a Waymo than a human driver.
Toronto is embroiled in partisan politicking around bike lanes. The provincial premiere is overriding city council to have them removed, which is what I suspect is the motivation behind the parent comment.
It'd be good to have more bike lanes, and waymo-type transport being used as a part of a public transport ecosystem rather than just pure taxi.
I'd rather not have any roads people can walk.
both?
both!
The bike lanes are being removed by our conservative government. So not both :(
Please, not this shit again.
Ford is already removing bike lanes.
Tax dollars to put in bike lanes, and then tax dollars to remove them.
You will never stop hearing about this until they are restored. Also enjoy your very slow commute with all the bikes now legally required to ride in the car lane and block you.
Yes, this shit again. Rolling more steel boxes through the city is not the answer.
I'm sure disabled or elderly people would agree with you.
This give me hope that other snowy midwestern cities are right around the corner.
You can see their planned locations on the map here https://waymo.com/
Includes St Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Minneapolis etc.
I’ve seen Waymo cars driving around Minneapolis lately.
My first and only Waymo was in SF last week. The 25 minute walk was also a 20 min drive. Great. Took 45 minutes of odd detours and sudden reroutes to get from Ferry Building to the hotel.
Edinburgh next please!
I'd rather we left that car dependency enabler to the yanks thank you very much
Yeah, driverless cars are like something out of a sci-fi film. Modern tech like this is not going to fit with the aesthetics of European cities.
You can walk or cycle... Modern bikes are light and pretty fast too.
We need regulation to ensure they don't come here.
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2028 arrival date.
I apologise for the tangent but doesn’t this “future” feel off? We’re improving the experience with navigating all of these noisy, nasty, ugly, toxic and dangerous car sewers (aka car streets) that actively robs us from our humanity and leads to isolation?
This all feels kinda like the Soviet Union building a shit ton of concrete “monuments” everywhere, pretending that was what people “wanted”
The tech is truly impressive but I wish we were able to step out of the local maxima of “optimising this shitty experience until it is less shitty” and start taking “optimising live in cities so it feels nice again” as an actual goal?
Some countries seem to have stumbled on it and the science of urbanism is progressing, but man if that amount of ingenuity that went into self driving cars had went into green and efficient cities…
Winter is the real test here. Worked on lidar perception for a bit and falling snow throws returns everywhere, plus once the lane lines are under slush everyone just drives in the ruts the car ahead made. Curious how they handle those unofficial lanes.
As a driver in places where it snows... I'm curious about how it will handle:
1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.
2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.
3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)
4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")
5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).
---
Tangent for the "how do you handle lanes when you can't see any" ... old school approach: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/833362
> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.
https://ahmct.ucdavis.edu/advanced-snow-plow
> 1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible
Forget unplowed snow. Often in Calgary where I live there's no lane markers visible under the snow for months at a time, even if it's plowed regularly
When all an account posts is claims of first-hand experience with various unrelated technologies, the strategy becomes a bit too obvious: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hncbw02z5a&next=5009...
Thanks for pointing it out. The phrasing made me slightly suspicious, but those kinds of posts are often hard to detect in isolation.
True. But don't most people drive in the tracks of the car ahead? I know when it snows people sometimes make a three-lane highway into a two-way "rut railway" road, and make do.
They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.
Yep, full launching in Denver just recently as well.
They linked to https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... discussing the snow mitigations all the way from software down to the built-in heaters on the sensors.
I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?
I have zero idea about lidar operational capabilities, but can you heat them to stop snow and ice from piling up?
Parent is referring to snow in the environment, not on the lidar itself.
When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
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Afaik the already do this. But another problem is that falling snowflakes reflect lidar pulses and heating doesn't help in that case
that's in the FAQ. They say they have sensor cleaning tech. But they aren't launching until 2028 so 2 winters of testing should tell.
They will also need mother nature to co-operate. Last winter was brutal in terms of snow, we barely had any snow the year before that!
That's one of the reasons lidar will prove to be a dead end for this application. It's a temporary enabling technology on the path to the simpler multiple camera based solution.
Best approach would be to use both lidar and cameras. They compliment each other
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Camera's can't see in the dark. There is no perfect sensor. Waymo relies multiple sensor modalities: Cameras, Lidar, ultrasonics, radar, gps, inertial measurement units.
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Just in time for the bike lane removals /s
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Despite campaign promises, Canada is not part of the US
Some of you downvoted-to-dead this from another poster ("Hi, I'm Nelson" from Technologists for Democracy); new user who had low karma, so it's dead in the thread.
I frankly think it's a legit POV, and I'm also local to this, so I'm going to use my own much higher karma to post it again:
https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/
I think there are legitimate concerns in promoting American BigTech as provider of infrastructure/services in Toronto. Concerns about data collection, about technological autonomy, and local employment.
I fail to see any unique argument in this. That is to say you can replace Ontario with San Jose and it'll all work.
> Digital sovereignty and privacy is at stake.
This is the most strongest argument, and luckily that's the first one. Many ways to solve this so not really a big problem.
> Ontarians’ jobs risk being outsourced
What jobs are being displaced by driverless cars? The best argument here is uber drivers are going to be affected. Who would you rather drive you at 3am if you're a drunk woman? An uber driver or Waymo?
> Public transit could lose riders
What is the goal here? The goal is to move people efficiently and decrease the reliance on human driving, which can cause deaths. Public transportation is vital but again, there are times when subway / buses wont work.
Also, if public transit is a major concern, shouldnt we be asking Uber (see point #2) to go away?
The last two points are super generic, it isnt even worth discussion.
Not convinced with the approach here.
Spreading and metastasizing like a cancer. Soon the 24/7/365 surveillance system will be up and running all across the globe.
Absolutely sick. Again they are using minimal job creations and people with diseases to push their job-killing, inhumane surveillance devices.
>people with diseases
I'll let you rewrite this, since as written it implies having a disease makes you in some way bad.
As a Toronto resident I’ll be lobbying to my municipal representatives to ban waymo immediately.
They keep announcing new cities, but do they really follow up and actually launch there? I remember a couple of years ago they announced NYC as a market, but I don't think they're fully launched in NYC yet.
Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver behind the wheel) in NYC.
[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...
Waymo is great. But I don’t want it in my town. More money and data for Google. No improvement to my local public transport.
A lot of women want it along with the ability to order Uber/Lyft from women drivers only.
What about race or religious preference too?
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Fair point, Uber has a female driver mode now.
Doesn’t change my desire for better public transport though.
Maybe fix underlying social problem instead of forcing more crap that tries to patch the absolute terrible state?
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I doubt they’ll cut it in Toronto traffic. What’ll they do when going west by DVP and lakeshore, only a human can effectively navigate that space
It’s doing Manhattan, it’ll be fine.
It's not. Waymo was using human-driven cars to collect data in NYC for a while, but their permit expired and they no longer operate at all in New York.
What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Do you know any women who have had drivers act inappropriately towards them? Or drivers who pretend the meter is broken and try to charge more?
There are lots of reasons somebody might prefer a driverless car and lots of reasons somebody might prefer a human driver. Why not have a choice?
Do you know any minors that had the police called on them mid ride by a RoboTaxi company becuase the taxi AI though the minor had guns. Yeah Waymo did that.
For your Women's safety POV. just because now youre alone in the car doesn’t really mean you are alone. You are under constant remote surveillance.
Regarding the meter broke issue. So you'd rather have corporate price fixing. Because that’s what Waymo is doing. The fleet size is same but the costs are going up.
And when a giant tech company is a service provided and rule maker , you don't really have a choice left.
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What does a 1-driver taxi compared to a 2-drivers taxi offer apart from fewer taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?
The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.
Well, some long-haul coaches have two drivers to allow them to switch-out for safety but keep the passengers and bus moving. Of all the things to get excited about, I don't understand why reducing the labor costs for corporates is one. Improving transportation instead would benefit us all, for example with better road design and mixed/integrated transport systems.
30-35% of the cost of running a city bus is the driver.
Imagine what cities could do with 50% higher bus frequency or more bus routes.
Buses / Trams are the best use of this tech since not only is a high percentage of the cost the driver but they also drive the same predictable routes and not all over the place.
There are issues though. If you remove the staff from the bus you will need to handle some particularly unruly passengers in a different way. Currently the driver just stops until that person leaves or gets police / special constables involved.
If you've ever seen bus drivers in NYC, it's genuinely impressive how they manage to weave a giant box through the chaos. I'm not sure that self-driving tech will be able to replace them anytime soon.
This would be interesting for my native Kansas City though. There's a severe shortage of buses and it's much simpler driving conditions. Could be a game changer.
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Where are you getting this number? Imagination is free but to execute the imagination is not. So yes, it depends on the imagination of the person who owns the tech AI company not your imagination.
And what is the cost of replacing the driver with the hardware/software and the servicing cost. and the operators in Philippines that are remotely working ?
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But, Waymo removed the driver and it's not cheaper than Uber, correct?
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Ok except apparently Waymo is more expensive than human-driven alternatives.
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Have more buses blocking traffic?
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- frees up people to do more important things than drive you around.
- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.
- obeys traffic rules
> frees up people to do more important things than drive you around
Like what?
They still need a paycheck. What do you think the outcome of a bunch of unemployed taxi drivers is going to be? What other low skill career is going to absorb them?
We're really rapidly approaching a "automate too many jobs for the remainder of the job market to absorb" situation imo and It's hard for me to imagine it going very well for anyone.
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Safety. Waymos are safer for passengers and pedestrians than human-driven cars.
A more uniform experience across taxi rides.
I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.
But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.
Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.
It obeys the rules of the road and kills many fewer people - 0 killed in 250M miles. Driving a machine is something people are not good enough at frankly.
> What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs?
One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.
Of the robotaxis in Austin, I've only used Waymo, but have used it fairly extensively. So far I have noticed:
- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,
- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,
- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),
- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,
- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,
- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.
There are three major disadvantages right now:
- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,
- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,
- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.
IMO it's a safer and more comfortable passenger experience
Road safety. Personal safety. A consistent experience.
HackerNews is a bubble in itself. Most people here cannot relate to a person who drives a cab for a living and is having a real tangbile crisis seeing how these tech companies are eating up their livelihood. Switching jobs for a taxi driver is not the same as switching jobs or career as a software coolie.
No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/23/cruise-waymo-spent-million...
New York is still holding on but I dont know how long it can. https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-new-york-city-political-ro...
Shouldn't Waymo be renamed into ASIC, "American Super Intelligence Car"?
Toronto is already on Lake America (approved by Google). Maybe bring out the traffic cones or get another trucker protest.
How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?
I get the idea that you no longer need a driver for a cab, but in my mind all that means is there's an unemployed former cab driver who is explicitly worse off now. The likelihood of that person having tons of great options to go do now that they aren't burdened by driving a cab is pretty low imo?
There's probably a name for this somewhere, some kind of automation paradox that makes "society" better but many individuals lives worse.
As an individual it's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about it though
This is called the lump of labor fallacy. When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.
Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.
The past does not repeat.
IMHO jobs were far less specialized in the past. Working in a factory is not that different from working in a kitchen or laying tile.
Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?
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When I read people talking online, it seems as if philosophy has been solved and we all just agree that utilitarian is the way to go? Is the trolley problem solved? So long as people on average are better off (not that I'm conceding they will be, you can't use the past to predict the future), it's fine to go ahead with the technology?
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"When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs"
Never as good pay and many end up on the system.
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Is there something particular that makes Waymo so expensive for expressway driving?
> When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Yes yes I'm aware of the fallacy
It's obviously not the whole picture though. When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?
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The vast majority of people used to be farmers; I am glad to live in a future where farming jobs have largely been automated away.
With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.
Don't get me wrong on this, I love driving.. the right car. But, most of the time, driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world. I guess you could argue that some commuters (who aren't driving themselves) don't exactly fill that time with the most productive things but thats a separate issue.
>driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world
Agreed. So lets build dense cities and efficient mass public transit, right? ...Right?
I think this oversimplifies life and realities.
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
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I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.
Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.
> How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?
I live in a location that has won the top spot on "worst drivers in the country" and "worst roads in the nation" lists multiple times. By all means, put the robots in the driver's seat. Can't be any worse.
It's because women, late at night, intoxicated, don't need to get into the car of a strange man, and get assaulted.
Have you considered all the jobs in the horse keeping industry when the automobile came around?
Yeah I did consider what happened to many horses: they were sent to glue factories
Once AI optimized away all our jobs nobody needs to drive to work anyway.
Did you feel the same when mass automation came to manufacturing?
Wait ... isn't this Google? Aka a US company?
I understand the issue of technical power, mind you, but I don't really see how US companies expanding into Canada is a good idea as long as a hostile orange individual keeps on potty-mouthing Canadians.
Google already has quite a large office in Toronto.
Maybe we'll end up cancelling whatever contract Waymo got and give them a secret payout amount like we did for Starlink.
>hostile orange individual
Orange guy may make news, but Canada has greater problems from within.
So your response to asocial, xenophobic politicians is give them what they want?
"I will show that America first President who wants to fracture global trade...by arguing for fracturing global trade."
That gen pops tune changed with the political climate just like big corp previously going on about left wing shit is stunning
Ya'll are just LARPing what you watch on TV and read online
No, the rest of us will continue trading without the US. Its not giving in, its ignoring the billionaires that are buys favors and not buying from their companies.
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