- Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly.
- Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get.
- AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver.
- No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby.
Negatives:
- Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber.
- Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations.
Forgot one more positive - you can choose a soothing music play list in the car and it automatically resumes in the next ride. Small but really nice detail when traveling with a baby.
> You can choose a soothing music play list in the car and it automatically resumes in the next ride
Oh wow! There is a non zero chance that was implemented because of some feedback I provided as a trusted tester many months ago. I napped my son in them a lot when they were free and just spent my time thinking up things they should do and reporting them in app.
> Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber.
Waymo says they are a premium service like Uber Black because they have nice cars (Jaguar I-Pace), plus the novelty and safety of being driverless. They’re not trying to be competitive with Uber X or shared rides for in their current form.
A rarely discussed negative to Waymo is that they drive slower than human drivers. Anecdotally they can be 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic, and it's not uncommon to see human drivers do unsafe moves to pass a Waymo.
From my experience prices for Waymo are at least double that of an equivalent Lyft/Uber ride and wait times are usually 20+ minutes. It is a great novelty but nowhere near where it needs to be to handle real scale.
> - Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get.
- AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver.
How much of the cars being clean, quiet, and having HVAC working is just because it's new?
A few years down the line the cars will be old (until they're replaced) and won't be as clean or quiet or have reliable AC. It will probably become like aircraft where they prioritize maintenance of safety-critical features but not so much the seat comfort.
There are lots of upsides to not having a driver in the car, but I wouldn't count on the cars always being nice.
Wait how do they justify having an even more expensive ride with fewer people to pay? The whole point of cutting the driver out is to save on cost, without that the entire project is no better than uber or lyft (which already overcharges by an arm and a leg)
You are using a product before enshittification begins, of course it's much nicer.
When it's been 28 quarters of general availability of Wayno and profits need to keep growing faster than before, they'll get dirty, the AC will stop being fixed, they'll start getting flats / engine trouble, etc. in the middle of the drive.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Be sure you move quickly to the next new thing before this one goes downhill too :/
Waymos are fantastic, I actually look forward to riding them every time. It's a quiet, peaceful space where you can relax for a bit on the way to your destination. Haven't had any issues with them except for one time where the car was super hot on the inside for whatever reason and the AC was not working.
Some curiosities from seeing them on the road a lot. You can tell it's them even when you can't see the extra protuberances:
- They take extended stops at stop signs, around 3-4 seconds.
- They have extra-bright headlights and brake lights.
- When waiting for a ride, they pull up next to parks and parking lots to avoid bothering residents. Their brake lights are on the whole time. If demand is low, they'll hang out in batches of 2-4. If a block has a hazy red hue at night, you know you've found a Waymo nest.
If they use waze logic for routing they are screwed with their baked in hesitation. Enjoy waiting until 8pm to get a sufficient gap for the far too polite waymo to make that unprotected left across six lanes waze is asking you to do.
As a cyclist, I trust the Waymos significantly more than human drivers to not hit me (I've been biking in SF since Jan and already had 3 unsafe incidents). The more, the better, I say.
I love Waymos compared to my ride sharing experience.
The base car is appealing (currently Jaguars). They're spacious for a >6 ft individual like myself. The user interface is intuitive and fun. There's a cool factor that exists.
Against ride sharing, given the lack of a driver, there's no variability in driver with regards to ambiance, scents, cleanliness, chattiness, and smoothness of the ride.
In my experience Waymo has been much worse compared to Lyft/Uber for longer rides.
A big problem with Waymo in its current state is how its routes are terribly inefficient.
It purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads, opting to take more inefficient routes without regards to the number of stop signs, hills, and other factors which will inevitably lead to a longer travel time. It's almost like it's using a worse version of the "Avoid highways" feature on Google Maps, and getting to a further destination can take almost twice the amount of time as compared to a Lyft/Uber.
Another problem is its lack of human intuition and strategies when driving in the city during some kind of event where many of the roads are blocked off. A human driver would have been navigating the blocked roads throughout the day and already know where to go to avoid the crowds, where as Waymo naively follows its navigation system and gets stuck in a bunch of traffic for no reason.
It also drives annoyingly slowly which leads to frustration from human drivers who constantly try to overtake you.
Wooooooo! Goodbye Lyft and Uber. Honestly, I get a bag driver, use the AI for a while. Feels too sterile, switch back, get some interesting drivers. Waymo has everything going for it but good company. Love it.
Unfortunately Waymo still wont operate on freeways or at SFO. But I long for the day when I can take a Waymo between SF and Berkley or to SFO, those are my most frequent reasons to call a Lyft.
Once it goes really mainstream, I can see angry Uber/Lyft drivers and/or their supporters destroy Waymos in large quantities (isolated incidents already have happened multiple times in SF [0][1]), driving economical feasibility to zero and causing Waymo to cease operations in some cities.
Glad to see this development. The amount of FUD around AVs is too high, and allowing each individual municipality to set their own regulations for AVs would have been a ridiculous amount of red tape for these companies to deal with. Just to pull one particularly bad quote from this article:
> “I hope that, in the meantime, our communities do not suffer too much in terms of injuries and community damages due to the current regulatory gaps,” Cortese said in a statement.
What gaps? What injuries? What community damages? If someone can actually present statistics that these cars are more socially dangerous than an equivalent amount of Ubers and Lyfts, I would be very, very surprised.
It's been nonstop lies from opponents, especially South Bay opponents of this technology with the tiniest kernel of truth that Cruise has not been very responsible. I still can't get over San Mateo County flatly lying about Waymo not talking to them (https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/-/media/cpuc-website/divisions/consu..., "in its protests, San Mateo stated...").
I'm still surprised that they, and most of their competitors, chose to start off in such difficult to navigate regions. I would have started off in a retirement community or the like.
Waymo rides in PHX area were a pleasent surprise. While on our trip, the waymo slammed it's brakes as a precarious event transpired that I'm almost positive if a human was at the wheel, would have resulted in an accident. Very optimistic to see how many lives they can save over the next decade.
With the current apps/services, 70% of the time the driver won’t stop talking on the phone, or won’t turn on the AC, or will drive in a way that’ll make you want to throw up, etc etc.
they should move away from the shitty jaguars and chryslers they have in their fleet though. Maybe Honda would make a good partner as they have the only US autonomous level 3.
Cool. Can I take one without my identity and travel patterns being tracked? Like, suppose I want to get picked up from work and dropped off at my girlfriend's house in San Mateo. Something I might not want my soon-to-be-ex's lawyer to be able to subpoena. There's one of those machines onboard that are all over the place in supermarkets where I can feed bills right?
Or maybe not. Okay then, Luxor Cab it is. Cheaper, better conversation, more aggressive about squeezing through traffic, and doesn't violate my privacy.
I'm not against automated taxi services in principle. I'm just not interested if it's a package deal where I have to surrender my physical comings and goings to a scummy data broker like Google.
interestingly the NYC yellow cabs were recording all this data for a while and released it in an "anonymized" dataset, which turned out to be pretty easy to deanonymize because people tend to be picked up or dropped off near their homes or workplaces.
I can't imagine a self-driving car request via an app could be accomplished without _someone_ knowing / tracking your travel patterns. You can't do cash transactions because that would be rife for smash-n-grabs from others.
Obviously you do surrender all of your travel privacy to the data broker. That's why they are making self-driving cars in the first place. But you're already doing all of that by carrying an Android phone.
[+] [-] tanvach|1 year ago|reply
- Quality of Lyft and Uber rides have gone down significantly.
- Consistently spacious, clean and quiet cars. You know what you'll get.
- AC always works and not up to the whim of the driver.
- No chatty driver to disturb our sleeping baby.
Negatives:
- Rides have usually 10% mark up over Lyft and Uber.
- Pick up and drop off tend to be a small walk from requested locations.
Forgot one more positive - you can choose a soothing music play list in the car and it automatically resumes in the next ride. Small but really nice detail when traveling with a baby.
[+] [-] fhub|1 year ago|reply
Oh wow! There is a non zero chance that was implemented because of some feedback I provided as a trusted tester many months ago. I napped my son in them a lot when they were free and just spent my time thinking up things they should do and reporting them in app.
[+] [-] ra7|1 year ago|reply
Waymo says they are a premium service like Uber Black because they have nice cars (Jaguar I-Pace), plus the novelty and safety of being driverless. They’re not trying to be competitive with Uber X or shared rides for in their current form.
[+] [-] firloop|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u|1 year ago|reply
I don't expect this to hold true once Waymo become generally available, alas.
[+] [-] TigeriusKirk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nojvek|1 year ago|reply
Waymo just doesn’t want the backlash of them replacing human jobs right now.
Slightly expensive than humans for a premium consistent service is a good play.
Kudos to consistent execution for Waymo.
Wish we could say the same for Tesla.
[+] [-] homefree|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] perfectstorm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asphodel_gray|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|1 year ago|reply
How much of the cars being clean, quiet, and having HVAC working is just because it's new?
A few years down the line the cars will be old (until they're replaced) and won't be as clean or quiet or have reliable AC. It will probably become like aircraft where they prioritize maintenance of safety-critical features but not so much the seat comfort.
There are lots of upsides to not having a driver in the car, but I wouldn't count on the cars always being nice.
[+] [-] Arete314159|1 year ago|reply
Why are they more expensive? I hoped they would be cheaper without a driver to compensate.
[+] [-] ndesaulniers|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] darby_nine|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] aprilthird2021|1 year ago|reply
When it's been 28 quarters of general availability of Wayno and profits need to keep growing faster than before, they'll get dirty, the AC will stop being fixed, they'll start getting flats / engine trouble, etc. in the middle of the drive.
Enjoy it while it lasts. Be sure you move quickly to the next new thing before this one goes downhill too :/
[+] [-] eyeareque|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Me1000|1 year ago|reply
I found that to be true as well, but when you factor in the tip to the driver they come out to more or less the same price.
[+] [-] bushbaba|1 year ago|reply
Isn't the whole point of Waymo is that it'll be cheaper than a human driver?
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] worstspotgain|1 year ago|reply
- They take extended stops at stop signs, around 3-4 seconds.
- They have extra-bright headlights and brake lights.
- When waiting for a ride, they pull up next to parks and parking lots to avoid bothering residents. Their brake lights are on the whole time. If demand is low, they'll hang out in batches of 2-4. If a block has a hazy red hue at night, you know you've found a Waymo nest.
[+] [-] jart|1 year ago|reply
I love this
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] benced|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rsingla|1 year ago|reply
The base car is appealing (currently Jaguars). They're spacious for a >6 ft individual like myself. The user interface is intuitive and fun. There's a cool factor that exists.
Against ride sharing, given the lack of a driver, there's no variability in driver with regards to ambiance, scents, cleanliness, chattiness, and smoothness of the ride.
I am very much looking forward to this expansion.
[+] [-] athoun|1 year ago|reply
A big problem with Waymo in its current state is how its routes are terribly inefficient.
It purposely avoids freeways and higher speed roads, opting to take more inefficient routes without regards to the number of stop signs, hills, and other factors which will inevitably lead to a longer travel time. It's almost like it's using a worse version of the "Avoid highways" feature on Google Maps, and getting to a further destination can take almost twice the amount of time as compared to a Lyft/Uber.
Another problem is its lack of human intuition and strategies when driving in the city during some kind of event where many of the roads are blocked off. A human driver would have been navigating the blocked roads throughout the day and already know where to go to avoid the crowds, where as Waymo naively follows its navigation system and gets stuck in a bunch of traffic for no reason.
It also drives annoyingly slowly which leads to frustration from human drivers who constantly try to overtake you.
[+] [-] seeknotfind|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Me1000|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] extragood|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] coolspot|1 year ago|reply
[0] - https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/11/24069251/waymo-driverless...
[1] - https://abc7news.com/waymo-sf-attacked-self-driving-car-inci...
[+] [-] _jab|1 year ago|reply
> “I hope that, in the meantime, our communities do not suffer too much in terms of injuries and community damages due to the current regulatory gaps,” Cortese said in a statement.
What gaps? What injuries? What community damages? If someone can actually present statistics that these cars are more socially dangerous than an equivalent amount of Ubers and Lyfts, I would be very, very surprised.
[+] [-] benced|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] toomanyrichies|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ortusdux|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] revlolz|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brap|1 year ago|reply
With the current apps/services, 70% of the time the driver won’t stop talking on the phone, or won’t turn on the AC, or will drive in a way that’ll make you want to throw up, etc etc.
[+] [-] sherbondy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Rakshith|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] refulgentis|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blendo|1 year ago|reply
The improved 0-60 times alone will prove Elon the more effective accellerationist.
[+] [-] black_13|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] steelframe|1 year ago|reply
Or maybe not. Okay then, Luxor Cab it is. Cheaper, better conversation, more aggressive about squeezing through traffic, and doesn't violate my privacy.
I'm not against automated taxi services in principle. I'm just not interested if it's a package deal where I have to surrender my physical comings and goings to a scummy data broker like Google.
[+] [-] currymj|1 year ago|reply
https://agkn.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/riding-with-the-stars-...
i think the answer is just that you don't have much meaningful privacy when using a taxi service in a normal way.
[+] [-] spankalee|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] joecasson|1 year ago|reply
I can't imagine a self-driving car request via an app could be accomplished without _someone_ knowing / tracking your travel patterns. You can't do cash transactions because that would be rife for smash-n-grabs from others.
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] yazzku|1 year ago|reply