Yes, there are more driverless Waymos in S.F

[stopachka]

I rode my first Waymo last weekend. It's _significantly_ better than an Uber. You get an almost 'white-glove' experience getting inside. Then, you have complete privacy. I could get work done in the car guilt-free. I was very surprised with the experience

[bhhaskin]

Odd that you felt you had complete privacy. I would imagine you are monitored six ways to Sunday.

[jMyles]

> I could get work done in the car guilt-free.

...have rideshare drivers guilt-tripped you about working?

Or is this just some kind of reflexive response?

If the addition of a human per se produces guilt, I want to gentle suggest that work on boundaries is in order, and that no amount of automation is likely to fix the underlying problem.

It's OK to meet your wants and needs (such as getting some work done - a want I think nearly all of us share, many of us somewhat compulsively) in the presence of other people. No shame in it.

[zactato]

The best thing about waymos is the screen that shows the machine vision and object identification. It sees all the cars, bikes, pedestrians, buses in a full 360 degree circle around the vehicle. It can make good predictions about what each one is doing.

This visual makes it clear how much better it is at driving than humans. There aren't blind spots, it stops at stop signs, it doesn't dangerously speed around corners.

Human drivers create a lot of dangers for pedestrians and cyclists in the city.

[george___c]

This object identification and prediction capability can be easily overloaded. Last night, coming home from Summer Symphony (Idaho's big improvement on Frisco's Stern Grove), I encountered 30 or so drivers behaving rather erratically due to a small roadside meadow containing at least 75 deer, all of which could decide to cross the roadway en masse within a few seconds. I successfully navigated all this, but I would NOT want to be in a Waymo for this trip. And this was in very good weather; obviously bad weather complicates this scenario even further.

[fishtoaster]

"Waymo operates about 300 driverless cars in the city, up from the roughly 250 robotaxis it used to start commercial service last August."

Sounds like a relatively small increase in actual cars over the last year despite a significant increase in use of those cars.

[abeppu]

I regularly walk by one of their parking lots (14th St & Shotwell), which used to be typically relatively full, and now it's generally pretty empty. They're all out and about ... but on the other hand, a significant proportion of the waymo vehicles I see on the street are empty. I would be curious to see the difference in miles driven without a passenger per vehicle relative to Uber/Lyft. Are those empty miles about distance between drop-off and next pick-up? Or are they still doing a lot of extra miles just to collect data (e.g. going down streets that fares typically don't go down)?

[klooney]

I wonder how far they are from profitability on a cost per ride basis. The biggest long term risk to self driving cars is probably that number being unreachable.

The super expensive base vehicles don't help either. They need lidar hats for the Kia Forte or whatever

[ghaff]

Replacing ~minimum wage drivers in conventional cars with expensive cars backed by expensive software developers and operations staffs is almost certainly not a business model. There may be (probably will be) a business model behind autonomous driving technology in some undefined future. But there's no guarantee Waymo won't be another killed by Google in the interim. The thought from a decade ago that the average teenager wouldn't need to learn to drive is basically a fantasy.

[dmitrygr]

Just a LIDAR on top is not NEARLY the instrumentation requirement. There are cameras and LIDARs all around, and many other changes made to the car. Designing a strap-on self driving kit that would actually work is likely impossible to make cost-efficient without the car manufacturer's help.

[lucianbr]

I am curious how much support staff this fleet has, and how much work they do. The article mentions nothing about that.

[650REDHAIR]

I’d like to see the financial analysis.

This job competes directly with San Franciscans who pay taxes and commuting drivers who spend money on food and gas.

When we wipe them out and replace it with a tax-dodging multinational corporation what happens to our local economy?

[Jyaif]

You have to read carefully the article to extract the information. This is like the opposite of journalism.

tldr:

* 903,000 vehicle miles traveled during commercial driverless ride-hailing in May (57% increase from April).

* Waymo increased from 250 taxis last August to 300 in May.

So there's almost no new taxis, the increase comes from an increased utilization of the fleet.

[jeffbee]

A 2016 Muni analysis said that daily VMT in SF was 6 million and that Uber+Lyft were 570k of that, so given that scale Waymo would be about 5% of TNC traffic and 0.5% of all VMT.

[ec109685]

The 903k miles driven is across all of California while the 20% month over month increase in Waymo cars from 250 to 300 was just in San Francisco.

[tlhunter]

Waymo isn't going to revolutionize transportation until it costs less than an Uber or Lyft. Right now it's just a novell way for high salaried folks to get around or to show off when family is in town. In my experience it's been 25-50% costlier than the competition.

Sure, there are a lot of engineers to pay, but the same applies to Uber and Lyft.

[dudus]

Since Uber and Lyft make no money it's not a reasonable comparison, they are only cheap because they are financed by VC money. Uber and Lyft only exists today because there's an expectation that in a not so distant future they'll be able to replace all their pesky drivers that demand compensation and benefits for Waymos.

[gen3]

My recent experiences puts them at +$4-8 the cost, so similar price after tip. The biggest limiting factor for me is service range and +20% ride times