I live inside the original area in Phoenix where they did their training. I have to give kudos where it's due. I originally _hated_ their cars constantly driving around our neighborhood, but I was persuaded to try one a few weeks back. It completely changed my mind. They are now my favorite way to get around. I am a very happy, frequent customer and hope they keep adding coverage and more cars. This is absolutely the future I want to live in.
I live downtown PHX (Roosevelt Row) and beyond riding in them I MUCH prefer them driving around on the streets than actual human drivers. There isn't a day goes by that I don't see drivers make up 4-way stops, disregard the 4-way stops, flip a youey in the middle of an intersection, etc. Contrast that to the ever predictable Weymo, just quietly going about their little self-driving existence.
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
Same here (downtown Phoenix area) -- the driverless Waymos have been awesome. Occasionally they get confused but it seems pretty rare. They're better than a lot of the other drivers on the road out here.
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
For those of us not located in areas where Waymo is available, do you mind elaborating on why this is your favorite way to get around? As compared to Uber, Lyft, etc.
A hopefully not-too-annoying reminder that this isn’t a future that is sustainable or desirable to live in compared with alternatives. It’s really just better than the automotive hellscape you are used to.
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
I've gone over to Chandler to check them out - was also really impressed, very smooth ride! I'm on the wrong side of I-10 unfortunately for getting regular rides from my house :/
I'll contrast this with Cruise, which are driving autonomously in San Francisco.
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
For folks that are interested, the discussion at /r/selfdrivingcars [1] picked out some of the salient numbers. Brad Templeton also did his own write up at [2].
I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.
I really hope that I can get access in San Francisco soon. The closest grocery store to me in Bayview is a 30 minute walk across one of SF's riskiest pedestrian intersections and my neighborhood's only bus service is a corporate shuttle. Cruise just announced coverage for the "entire city" but it won't actually include my neighborhood. I've been well aware of Waymo for a long time, and been on the waiting list for over a year now! I've actually seen people getting in and out of Waymos near my apartment, and my limited experiencing riding the Cruise beta has me really excited to someday traverse SF in self driving vehicles. Can't wait.
How well does this scale? At some point do you just turn on the tap, buy a million cars and cover the whole country, or are you reliant on ongoing large amounts of support for the cars which means that the costs for expansion make it currently non viable?
This claim in the Forbes article doesn't make sense to me: "It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for."
Alphabet has been pressured to show more tangible financial results by activist shareholders[1]. Waymo has 2,500 employees. Waymo's annual budget for headcount alone include stock based compensation is over $1B by my estimate.
Really love what waymo have been achieving with a relatively small team, but more importantly, they’ve had their heads down working and solving hard problems instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises (e.g. delivering robotaxies that make you $30k/yr by next year!), getting into ideological (sensor) wars, etc.
(How many people know the name of their CEO? And yet they’re slowly and steadily marching along, hitting one milestone after another.)
> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises
Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]
Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.
Yup, I very much liked the broader approach of solving the general problem, but this actually seems to be doing better.
The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.
Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.
I've had access in SF for the past few months and have been really impressed! The Waymo rides I've taken have been confident + a bit conservative (e.g. driving at the speed limit when traffic is flowing more quickly), but overall the team's done a great job with the experience. It's free for now so I've been using it regularly during commuting/rush hour and casual drives. Some quick thoughts:
Advantages over Uber/Lyft:
- Privacy - having the car to yourself is nice!
- Safety - My friends who are women have almost universally said they feel uncomfortable taking Ubers/Lyfts at night and would prefer the Waymo
- Ride matching happens almost instantly
- Estimated pickup times are consistently accurate
- Trunk is open for use and the car will prompt you to grab your items and open the trunk at the end of a ride
- Extra legroom in backseat because there's no driver
- No driver/car confusion - you can set your initials to be displayed on top of the car at pickup
Parity with Uber/Lyft:
- Drives surprisingly confidently/well - can handle complex urban traffic, pedestrians, cyclists without doing anything obviously "dumb"
- First-class native app experience
- Rides are priced upfront
- Rides can be multi-stop
Disadvantages (today) vs Uber/Lyft:
- Driving is conservative - nothing above the speed limit
- Driving is sometimes a little bit jerky (e.g. at stop signs, while inching on a right turn at a red light)
- Routes can sometimes be odd / longer (usually within 25% of the most direct route)
- Rarely (<5% rides), car will stop for pickup somewhere odd (middle of lane when there's an available curb, right turn lane)
- No driver if you leave something behind (there's a support form online, but I left my phone once and a good samaritan happened to call using the emergency number)
- Pickup times can be longer today than Uber/Lyft as they roll out more cars
Honestly, if they fix the occasional indirect routing and eventually are able to let the cars flow at the same speed as traffic, I'd pick the Waymo almost every time.
Did you get access from the public beta sign-up list, or some other channel? I've been on the waitlist for over a year and have seen people utilizing Waymo near my apartment, but nothing's budged for me. I did get into the Cruise beta, and that just made me positive Waymo will almost completely replace other forms of car transit for me once it's available, but Cruise is very limited.
The Waymo approach has proven itself. Targeted testing, running the driver in hard mode as much as possible, is better than the Tesla approach. Tesla’s plan was essentially “machine learning underpants gnomes”. Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ??? -> profit. Didn’t work and now Tesla is recognized as being dead last in the game, behind dozens of no-name Chinese players.
Now what I wonder is whether Waymo has a durable lead over Cruise, or if Cruise succeeds alongside them.
I have always been a huge proponent of Waymo and obviously Tesla doesn't have something comparable to them now.
But if you look at videos of recorded Tesla autopilot drives on Youtube you will see a huge amount of success in terms of getting people to their destination without crashing or killing anyone. And there is constant gradual improvement.
If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service. The trick will probably be that you need to have a driver's license and sit in the front seat at first. But after X months they will probably allow sitting in the back, especially for certain vetted trip regions.
The baby steps makes sense, but you gotta admit Phoenix has to be thr easiest metro area to test with: Little inclement weather, little terrain change, newer infrastructure, streets mostly laid out in an east-west, north-south grid with consistent naming and numbering.
Tesla approach is to grief their customers into paying for feature they have no concrete plans to ever deliver on (in the absence of lidar/radar sensors it’s a crapshoot) -> profit. Worked pretty well
Last based on what metrics? I've never seen anything better than the Tesla FSD except for the LIDAR robo taxis, but they are solving a very different problem with different constraints. Most recent cost estimate I can find shows a cost per vehicle of $130-150K for Waymo vs the Tesla system that needs to go in a vehicle costing $40-50K which makes using a Waymo style sensor suite impossible. Would be interesting to see how the Tesla software would perform with the sensor input of something like the superior Waymo suite, but we won't ever find out unless costs come down by a massive amount.
What does “running the driver in hard mode as much as possible” mean?
Why do you think Tesla’s approach “didn’t work and they are now dead last in the game?”
Maybe that’s just an opinion because you provided nothing to back it up - but I can tell you not only does AutoPilot/FSD Beta work, the latest FSD Beta stack (I’m driving 11.3.6) works extremely well.
Tesla has orders of magnitude more passenger-miles driven than any other solution, which is one quantitative way to gauge success.
Tesla’s latest FSD Beta safety record on city streets is also excellent - 10x fewer accidents per mile than Cruise for example.
This is another huge win for Tesla but it’s important to note that this is accomplished in part by requiring strict driver oversight (enforced through gaze & attention tracking in the cabin camera). So the significantly lower accident rate is not an apple-to-apples comparison of two L4 solutions, but it convincingly shows that their L2 solution is actively making the city and highway roads safer for the driver and the cars & pedestrians that they are sharing the road with.
> "we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer"
they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.
In this thread I am seeing nearly 100% positive praise for the driving abilities of these vehicles, but that is simply not always true. They are causing almost daily incidents for emergency responders in San Francisco and these companies seem unwilling to address the issue.
I wonder if they plan to test in Europe. I moved to France and one issue I struggle with as a human driver is speed limits. I live in a suburban area where most streets have 30kmh limits (19mph). Nobody respects them, not even busses. I often get honked at when driving the speed limit. What would Waymo do?
I can't for the life of me figure out how to sign up for the waitlist in SF. The app just says "you'll receive updates about San Francisco." Anyone been successful with this?
With all the hype about AI this year, does anyone know whether it's translating in any meaningful sense into self driving? Can they use transformers? If so, is there a step change in performance? Has this already happened?
As we Europeans are very far away from seeing any of those, I have a question: how is the refuel / recharge handled? These are EVs, right? Do they some how do that independently, too?
> we are now serving over 10 thousand trips per week to public riders, not including employees. With this latest expansion, we intend for those numbers to accelerate rapidly to 10 times that scale by next summer.
Waymo cars are safer, cleaner and cheaper than Uber, which has never made an operating profit and has abandoned its self-driving development.
Uber is stalled on the railway tracks while the freight train of self-driving tech hurtles towards it. How is it still worth $76 billion?
[+] [-] austinkhale|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajcp|2 years ago|reply
Only problem I've seen with them is people don't realize that just because you wave them through doesn't mean they will proceed. If a Waymo sees a human on the corner that looks like they will cross it will stop and wait until the heat-death of the universe for them to cross.
[+] [-] icey|2 years ago|reply
I'm mostly excited that they upped the allowed passenger count from 3 to 4. Usually we take a car if we're going out to dinner with friends but the 3 passenger limit made taking one of these a pain in the ass or impossible.
[+] [-] kccqzy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangus|2 years ago|reply
Phoenix is one of the most car-centric places to live in the country. The only reason anyone needs a service like this is because of the area’s complete failure in urban planning.
Car-focused infrastructure is incredibly expensive per capita compared to alternatives that prioritizing walking, cycling, and public transit. It maximizes the amount of public utilities (roads, sewers, etc) needed to serve one family.
One pair of train tracks can serve more human commuters than a 12-lane highway. One bus can replace 30-40 cars, and neither option needs fancy automation to be more cost and carbon efficient than a robotaxi.
Waymo might band-aid the transit situation where you live but it’s doing nothing to address the fundamental problems with large urban areas that require the use of personal vehicles.
[+] [-] conorh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stouset|2 years ago|reply
I hate them.
At least in the area I'm in (the Inner Sunset), they often cruise around with no passengers while waiting for a request. While doing so, they circle around idling at 10-15mph, pausing for 30 seconds or more at stop signs. It's long enough where just when you decide they've completely stopped and start to go around, they "wake up" and start moving again. I have personally been held up by four separate Cruise vehicles acting this way within a ten block section of a single trip. It is maddening, and there's no safe or reasonable way to pass them. I am generally quite patient and not particularly affected by road rage, but I'll confess that I have spent significant amounts of time fantasizing about an Office Space printer scene styled destruction of these vehicles.
They need to either find places to pull over (ideal) or drive like normal participants in traffic. Their current behavior feels disruptively slow (cars end up backed up behind them) and simultaneously unpredictable and confusing.
Worse, in other areas like Fell St., they drive exclusively in the left hand lane while driving 15mph below the flow of traffic. This actually causes significantly extra traffic during busier times as that street is often at or near capacity. It also disrupts the design of that road, which has a "green wave" of lights paced at about 30mph. Dramatically fewer cars make it through any section of road when you have one car driving 20mph that prompts everyone behind it to merge over to the right, further impacting the throughput of other lanes.
I've also seen acute instances where they completely fail in situations where humans would cooperate to solve an issue. In one instance, a left-turning Muni bus was unable to complete the turn due to a Cruise vehicle coming from that direction. The Cruise vehicle had entered too far into the intersection before stopping. There's paint on the intersection to indicate that cars need to stop further back, and the Cruise had failed to obey this. The bus was unable to back up due to traffic behind it as well as visibility concerns, and the only real solution was for the Cruise vehicle to move out of the way. There was, however, no way to instruct, plead with, or otherwise convince the Cruise to move. It had no place in particular to be, so it had no reason to decide to do anything other than sit in place with infinite patience and wait for everyone else to resolve the situation on its behalf. I watched as this completely gridlocked a busy intersection for at least five cycles of traffic lights before I got bored and left. I have no idea how they finally unwedged the situation, but I have to imagine it involved the bus driver getting out and having the cars behind clear a space for it to back up and allow the Cruise to complete its prime directive and pass.
Will these things get better? Sure. But right now, they are inexcusably bad drivers.
[+] [-] dopamean|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petters|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boulos|2 years ago|reply
I mainly hope that people take away that this service exists now. You can download the app and just use it in Phoenix. As mentioned in the post, we're doing thousands of trips per week of non-employee rides. There are some great (and not so great!) examples posted to /r/selfdrivingcars from time to time if you want to see them.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/137hr3l/wa...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2023/05/04/waymo-...
[+] [-] mustacheemperor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AndrewDucker|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] isubkhankulov|2 years ago|reply
This claim in the Forbes article doesn't make sense to me: "It doesn’t need the money but it does want to learn from how riders interact with a service they are paying for."
Alphabet has been pressured to show more tangible financial results by activist shareholders[1]. Waymo has 2,500 employees. Waymo's annual budget for headcount alone include stock based compensation is over $1B by my estimate.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/6daa5d29-8595-4630-a633-eb1f8b138...
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agnosticmantis|2 years ago|reply
Kudos to the hardworking waymonauts!
[+] [-] amacneil|2 years ago|reply
2,800 employees on Linkedin
> instead of opting for attention-seeking behavior, making ridiculously pompous claims and false promises
Waymo and Jaguar announced in 2018 plans to build up to 20,000 vehicles in the first two years of production [0]
Cheap shots, I know (they did say "up to" 20,000 vehicles, after all). Waymo have been making great progress lately, and it's nice to see the AV industry has transitioned from wild claims to steady progress.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/27/17165992/waymo-jaguar-i-p...
[+] [-] toss1|2 years ago|reply
The general problem has insane amounts of edge cases, and is basically trying to do a pole-vault-height high jump; if you succeed, you own the world (or at least can automatically drive anywhere on it), but until then, you and your customers have lots of problems.
Meanwhile, the approach of map-everything-down-to-the-centimeter and keep it updating is making real practical progress. The question is whether it'll ever get out of cities? While storage is constantly getting cheaper, but is it feasible to map and update the maps sufficiently for a cross-country trip?
Still, there's an awful lot of city territory that can be covered with genuinely useful service.
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
CEOs (plural)
[+] [-] sprout20|2 years ago|reply
Advantages over Uber/Lyft:
Parity with Uber/Lyft: Disadvantages (today) vs Uber/Lyft: Honestly, if they fix the occasional indirect routing and eventually are able to let the cars flow at the same speed as traffic, I'd pick the Waymo almost every time.[+] [-] rahimnathwani|2 years ago|reply
Imagine if all (or even most!) SF drivers decided they would come to a complete stop at each stop sign and at each red light!
[+] [-] mustacheemperor|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neel8986|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbruckner|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|2 years ago|reply
Now what I wonder is whether Waymo has a durable lead over Cruise, or if Cruise succeeds alongside them.
[+] [-] ilaksh|2 years ago|reply
But if you look at videos of recorded Tesla autopilot drives on Youtube you will see a huge amount of success in terms of getting people to their destination without crashing or killing anyone. And there is constant gradual improvement.
If Tesla can get another 2-3% improvement, they may actually be able to launch a robotaxi service. The trick will probably be that you need to have a driver's license and sit in the front seat at first. But after X months they will probably allow sitting in the back, especially for certain vetted trip regions.
[+] [-] hnburnsy|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dilyevsky|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sidibe|2 years ago|reply
It's actually
Profit -> Collect ten billion miles of data from guys driving down 280 -> ???
[+] [-] xnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redox99|2 years ago|reply
It's no surprise that it's easier to get to Level 4 if you have a 50-100k sensor suite, HD maps and a geofence.
However, I wouldn't be shocked if, even if Tesla robotaxis arrive many years later, Tesla achieves profitability before Waymo does.
[+] [-] fallingknife|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaroth|2 years ago|reply
Why do you think Tesla’s approach “didn’t work and they are now dead last in the game?”
Maybe that’s just an opinion because you provided nothing to back it up - but I can tell you not only does AutoPilot/FSD Beta work, the latest FSD Beta stack (I’m driving 11.3.6) works extremely well.
Tesla has orders of magnitude more passenger-miles driven than any other solution, which is one quantitative way to gauge success.
Tesla’s latest FSD Beta safety record on city streets is also excellent - 10x fewer accidents per mile than Cruise for example.
This is another huge win for Tesla but it’s important to note that this is accomplished in part by requiring strict driver oversight (enforced through gaze & attention tracking in the cabin camera). So the significantly lower accident rate is not an apple-to-apples comparison of two L4 solutions, but it convincingly shows that their L2 solution is actively making the city and highway roads safer for the driver and the cars & pedestrians that they are sharing the road with.
[+] [-] alphabetting|2 years ago|reply
they've been pretty cautious on predictions after the AV hype boom and bust a couple years ago. 10x in a year is an ambitious goal.
[+] [-] melling|2 years ago|reply
Self-driving EV’s in all major cities would be a big win for the climate and the air quality.
[+] [-] callalex|2 years ago|reply
https://missionlocal.org/2023/05/waymo-cruise-fire-departmen...
[+] [-] gniv|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgarrity|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lopkeny12ko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RobinL|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hansoolo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmix|2 years ago|reply
What does this mean? It can recognize pedestrians making hand gestures?
[+] [-] MarkMc|2 years ago|reply
Waymo cars are safer, cleaner and cheaper than Uber, which has never made an operating profit and has abandoned its self-driving development.
Uber is stalled on the railway tracks while the freight train of self-driving tech hurtles towards it. How is it still worth $76 billion?
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] esalman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvnx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danvoell|2 years ago|reply