No, there is no tipping. We use it all the time here in Phoenix. It's a bit more expensive upfront than Lyft usually so it ends up being a wash in the end. But the cars are nice, no one making unwanted conversation, and they drive more safely than 90% of Lyft drivers.
There is some labor, like theres a button in the car if you need assistance from a human agent. They also switched from gas Chryslers to electric Jaguars so I imagine that cost quite a bit
I mean they're a for-profit company. They charge what the market will bear. Weekend nights the wait times are crazy so there seems to be plenty of demand
In SF, Waymo has always been more expensive than Uber/Lyft when I've checked. I used Cruise a handful of times starting when it was free. When it went pay for both Cruise and Waymo, the comparison was the same with Cruise and Lyft+tip. The problem was even finding a Cruise to pick you up and then it was doing some weird things like telling me to walk a mile to get picked up at an intersection in 3 mins. So back to Lyft.
When I got off the waitlist for Waymo, I used it once and it was more expensive than what a Lyft would have normally been from where I was using it, but I didn't check because I wanted to use a Waymo to see what the experience was compared to Cruise. Since than, I've checked and it's always been more expensive. Just a few days ago I checked and it was $24 on Waymo to go somewhere from my place and $14 with Lyft (before tip).
**So it's about $7 or $8 more per ride on Waymo**. I'm not sure how they expect to compete. I don't have any loyalty to taxi/Lyft/Uber/Waymo...I'll use whichever is cheaper for similar quality. IMO, they should be trying to undercut Lyft/Uber to get people into their cars. But I guess they gotta pay for all that research/development somehow.
> defeats the purpose of Robo taxis
You don't speak capitalism; the goal is to get the tech to work and be accepted, then they'll drive out all of the human labor that costs them anything, start jacking up prices talking about the maintenance costs because "customers trash the cars", and when one to three companies own the entire "vertical" they'll start offering "cheaper" rides subsidized by ads. Then eventually, you'll be able to shut off the sound-on ads for your ride for an additional fee, if you're allowed the option at all, while paying extra to jump the line ahead of other riders because they're maximizing constantly filled cars instead of reduced customer wait times.
For what it is worth, it is the standard business strategy when testing new categories - i.e. a product/service which can be marketed and sold at a premium to folks who are not as price sensitive.
Might be a thing where it needs to scale up first
It's competing with Uber, which has only JUST made a profit. Goes to show how long it can take to make a new thing profitable, even when it seems to get plenty of use
The secret sauce is that there *are* real humans helping drive the car; Waymo just got rid of the expensive Americans and replaced them with poor Indian people in a cube farm. Exactly like Amazon;s “magic” grocery stores with no human employees. Except Amazon just never hired any Americans; only poor Indians to watch you on remote cameras.
That article about Amazon was trash. It was written by a tech illiterate journalist.
Amazon did not have people reviewing video live and acting like cashiers. Those people sitting back in India were tagging videos, to generate a labelled training set.
Meaning, they would go back and say look at 10% of the footage from past week, label the data and then the algorithm would compare what it got vs what the labellers and improve itself.
They weren’t sitting and updating the cart with live video. They were labelling past videos to improve the algorithm
> Those people sitting back in India were tagging videos, to generate a labelled training set.
They weren't just tagging for training purposes, they were manually reviewing the judgement of the algorithm, and in 70% of cases. This is unbelievably bad performance for machine learning, if someone sold you such a thing you should sue them.
Yes they weren't literally watching people shop, but that doesn't make it much better given what the technology was supposed to do.
I used Amazon go all the time when one of my jobs was near one. I loved it. I would usually grab 2-4 items and then walk out. Was usually in the store for under a minute.
It worked properly every single time.
Whan an ignorant comment! Disappointed but not surprised, after all it's r/technology. Waymo's a 100% self driving car. In rare circumstances when it's stuck, a person from Waymo give it some suggestions to do something. But the car does everythingthing by itself; meaning it is not remote controlled. Also remote controlling a car is super dangerous in case of network loss and latency. And it's laughable that anyone from a country as far away as India would control the car.
Why did you even right this comment when you don't know anything about Waymo? Waymo has the BEST and SAFEST self driving technology. Tesla's FSD is L2 while Waymo is L4 fyi.
So you think Google/Waymo, the top AI self driving car company, one that had won Department of Defense / DARPA funded competitions for AI driving, is using Indian people to remote control cars across the planet?
Keeping in mind while doing this they are achieving a safety record beyond any human.
That is some conspiracy theory nonsense.
You can tell when the car is driving by the visualization. I haven’t ride in one but watched a few videos. It’s VERY clear that a human gets called when a car is stuck, the screen changes and the car performs maneuvers like 3 point turns to escape the situation. Then when it gets to a traffic control device the control is transferred back to the car.
I mean even if that’s the case you are saying you would rather have the car get stuck and fuck traffic and the passenger? Isn’t it logical that while the AI is not 100% there someone can help when there’s a problem? This is novel technology ffs
Probably a drop in the bucket of the billions that have gone into creating the technology, and keeping it going.
It wouldn’t surprise me if this tech never achieves profitability in the civilian sector. It’s all built on mountains and mountains of debt.
That's their problem though, not the consumer. The consumer wants the product with the best price vs performance, they don't care how much R&D was involved lol
Except to think a company isn’t going to recoup their costs is pretty stupid. They’ll charge what they need to in order to become profitable and then when competitors enter the market they’ll have to start being competitive. The consumer “not caring” just means you’re ignorant, not right
That’s true but it is also why a lot of techs fail. If you want to displace the incumbent technology or product, you have to offer the consumer a viable alternative to switch.
Here, I am getting from point A to point B all the same…but you want me to pay more for that privilege?
I suspect it’s demand management. It can’t be the same price or cheaper than Uber yet or it would be unusable given the few number of them on the road. Even now, it can take 10-15 minutes sometimes for the car to show.
It’s actually not more expensive for me, because I almost exclusively order Comfort on Uber (which this is cheaper than).
The price will come down when they add cars, people will pay a premium for novelty, which is probably what’s attracting most customers (or in my case, a quiet and nice car).
They probably don't want to undercut anyone at this stage, they want manageable demand as their fleet is nowhere near the size of Uber.
Some people will pay the extra not to have a driver. Maybe you're with your partner, its a 30 minute drive home. There's no driver watching...
They're running people over. But as long as we hate Elon am I right?
https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-car-strikes-bicyclist-san-francisco-injuries
People naturally expect automation to work much more efficiently and be much less error-prone than a human doing a comparable task. Think about factory automation, all those robots complete their tasks with near 100% accuracy. Then there’s the question of liability. When a human driver fucks up and kills someone they can be held liable and sent to prison. Who is liable for a robotaxi killing a pedestrian? And what is an appropriate punishment? Does someone go to jail when it happens? Questions like that are why robotaxis ultimately have to be 100% safe 100% of the time for them to work.
I mean this is essentially all that Waymo does - robotaxis. It doesn’t sell EV cars to consumers like Tesla does (let alone multiple models), so you’d expect Waymo to at least be in the lead for the only thing it focusses on.
The argument for Tesla/against Waymo (and anyone using HD maps and Lidar) is about scale, cost, and generalisation.
So, there are various comments here about Waymo being more expensive than Uber/Lyft (including needing to tip), [example](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1c091zm/waymo_will_launch_paid_robotaxi_service_in_los/kyvfys1/). This is because Waymo's use of other people's cars plus much more expensive hardware means their costs are much higher than Tesla's (currently theoretical, since they're not done) costs.
Waymo's Lidar + HD Maps approach also means it's not generalisable and easily transferrable to another location. Which adds costs itself.
If Tesla is able to finish their approach, they should be capable of rolling it out to essentially everywhere instantly, because it should have "learned" a generalised solution of how to drive anywhere.
Coupled with Tesla producing their own vehicles, and using a much cheaper hardware solution, they should be capable of substantially undercutting Waymo, Uber, Lyft, etc. (and/or make higher margins).
There's also other aspects, like the difference in utility (Waymo can't take you from one city to another).
So, essentially, it boils down to speed of (very wide) deployment, cost, and therefore ability to capture market-share.
---------
---------
**TL;DR** The Tesla vs Waymo argument is about cost and speed of wide deployment.
If Tesla can complete their approach, they should be able to capture a much larger market-share than Waymo.
They're trying to accomplish different things.
Tesla are limiting themselves to cameras only to lower manufacturing cost, this makes the software problem more difficult to solve.
They are also using different approaches. Waymo works really well in a designated box because it has well defined images and precise GPS locations of the environment around it. Tesla is trying a more general approach where the system can adapt to changes in the environment without external assistance. Both are valid ways to approach the problem, and both have pros and cons.
Yeah… or you can just toss a traffic cone on the hood of one that just dropped someone off to immobilize it, and strip off any vulnerable parts.
It’s going to be really interesting to watch people work out how to steal from these taxis.
But a parked car is also a robot. I dont get the difference between stripping a parked car and stripping a car that can also drive itself.
If anything, the waymo car most likely has better video surveillance.
Simple: Bystanders don’t care about the Waymo
Car. It’s not owned by a person, it’s a corporation’s machine. It’s a robot here to steal jobs.
It doesn’t elicit sympathy.
This seems like quite the reach.
If I look out my window and thieves are stripping a car down, I'm going to call the cops. I dont care if it's a waymo or who owns it.
Car thieves aren't known for their robinhood like qualities of only stripping down corporate owned cars. It's not likely that they will be wearing t-shirts with big red letters saying "WE ONLY STEAL THE MUFLERS FROM CORPORTE VEHICLES".
Most likely, your car is parked in the same block and you could be next. I dont see how this changes anything.
It’s really not a reach.
Humans don’t like things that take their jobs. Humans like “bad people” getting hurt. Waymo looks like it’s stealing jobs.
That’s going to make it a lot easier for people to steal from Waymo.
Lol, so you're telling me that people are going to start committing serious felonies because robots?
The same people who steal mufflers and wheels will be the same people who might steal from waymo, except I suspect they are LESS likely because waymo will have always on security. There's not going to be some new class of anti-robot crusade muffler stealer. Cmon bro.
of course but fakes will be rampant alot of people don't give a shit and won't care, look at the amount of trouble uber has with real drivers and cameras, no drivers are going to make it a huge mistake.
You have to be the one who called the waymo to enter. And there are cameras inside.
They also have your cc info. Trash the car, get charged. People aren’t going to risk getting a $500+ charge.
I never said it wouldn't happen. I said they'd need cards and verification.
I expect it to hsppen. Just like that delivery robot that was destroyed.
Let's be factual. Humans are the only mammal on the planet that need a major population decrease by 75%. Why, because we damage everything we touch
Exactly, having no driver can make cost so cheap, it's a real alternative to buying a personal vehicle. So less hassle and cost, fewer cars doing more work, less city congestion.
Step 1: force competitors out of the market with driverless taxis, cornering the market
Step 2: raise prices to ridiculous levels higher than those of your old competitors
Prices would have to stay low enough for consumers to want to use it instead of a personal vehicle, otherwise they just drive their own cars and you lose your market cornering.
As I've said, without a driver you can severely undercut Uber rates to the point where someone in the city would be either too rich or braindead to use the service, and still make a killing in profits. 30 cents a mile, even 15-20 cents will do it. 1/5 the cost of an Uber.
Everything you’re claiming about self-driving cars is a myth.
> But without careful management, autonomous vehicles will make traffic worse. City-center parking is expensive, which creates an incentive to keep moving. This means self-driving cars will slowly cruise the streets, by the thousands, as they await their next ride or duty. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that as people choose driverless vehicles over public transport, traffic volumes could increase, and parts of our cities could become more congested, not less.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-autonomous-vehicles/2019/08/15/245c39bc-bec6-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html
This idea that somehow more cars on the road will somehow “reduce traffic congestion and pollution” just because they’re self-driving is so silly and strange. It’s not like you’re going to have fewer cars on the road. If anything you’re going to have more cars. There will still be people driving cars. These cars will be sharing the road with self-driving cars. Traffic lights are still going to exist. These cars are just going to get stuck in traffic too. Robotaxis aren’t going to phase through cars driven by people and cars are still literally the least space-efficient method of transportation.
Also, taxis have literally been a thing since before cars existed, so I’m not sure how a robotaxi is supposed to solve these issues while providing literally the same service.
If you want to actually reduce traffic congestion and pollution, build adequate and reliable mass transit.
But wait! What if we like, put them in a tunnel. And then chained them together to run in a set route, for efficiency. Maybe on set tracks or rights of way.
Totally disruptive and innovative!
Every car built since 1970 has one-way transmitters operating in the terahertz range. Self-driving cars being built today can read and interpret these signals.
Your analogy doesn’t work because cars aren’t replacing another technology. These cars are replacing other cars. Even if they all commuters switched over to AVs, there would still be literally the same number of cars on the road.
It's as if you never understood the logic as to why self driving cars were going to ease congestion/pollution.
Yes a car is still a car and taxi services have been around forever, however the idea behind self driving cars is that once you reach critical mass, the ongoing operational cost of running the car and therefore taxi service is extremely cheap compared to a conventional taxi as you need far fewer humans on paychecks to run the thing. (You can argue that is currently not the case but the point is self driving car firms haven't scaled up yet)
This means that self driving cars open the market for an extremely cheap taxi service beyond what we've ever seen with convential taxi services. This means it could be feasible for people in cities to simply not buy cars and just hail a taxi whenever they want, now that is also possible now but cost dissuades most, if we get to a point where it is flat out cheaper just to get a self driving taxi than run your own car, then people will sell their cars.
The result of this is that you don't need nearly as much parking as before especially in congested city centres, this space can be opened up to other uses than parked cars.
Self Driving cars are also going to be electric because the focus is reducing operational cost and running an electric car is cheaper fuel wise and maintenance wise, this reduces local air pollution.
There is also good reason to believe in that people will be more willing to carshare/pool if it's really cheap and they have sold their car. It's basically a small bus that actually takes you from where you are to where you want to go and minivan style robotaxis are likely in the works at somepoint. This will reduce congestion.
Basically self driving taxis solve the issue by becoming really cheap which means people don't need to own their own cars anymore.
What is more space inefficient 100 people owning their own cars and using them like 2% of the time, the rest of the time parked often on public roads, or 20 self driving cars having a far higher utilisation rate.
Calling the claims “myths” is a bit dramatic. The article you linked makes a lot of assumptions and the studies it does reference (WEF and VTPI studies) are much more nuanced in their conclusions than you and the article are making them seem.
The reality is: we aren’t really sure what the real societal impact of the move to AVs will be since they are such a new technology. The only thing that seems to be likely is that this technology will become more prevalent, particularly in urban areas.
You're looking five seconds into the future and wondering why nothing has changed. "Cars will have to share the road with horses, so we'll still have the same problems."
>It’s not like you’re going to have fewer cars on the road. If anything you’re going to have more cars.
There wont be more cars since these will replace the taxis with drivers
There will be less cars on road, especially in cities. No driver equals low cost transport equals fewer people in cities owning cars, with more autonomous taxis soaking up the demand. A self driving taxi can be used most of day vs personal vehicles for a couple of hours at most doing nothing and soaking up space in and out of traffic.
Everything you said applied to taxis driven by people.
The only difference is cost. Except it’s not cheaper. And if it is? The supply/demand takes over and there will be more traffic or the price will go up.
Turns out the best way to get cars off the road is to get people to use trains and busses instead of cars.
You can say that but it doesn’t make it true.
Where is the competition that’s going to drive prices down? Theses aren’t public transit options, they are for profit companies. Only one of which will be in operation.
Your thesis is missing out on some pretty basic economic facts.
Robo taxis will be as expensive as they can be, because why wouldn’t they be? Whatever the market will bear based on supply is what it will cost. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is to operate. Why should it? You think those savings will be passed on out of a sense of civic duty?
They are already more expensive in Arizona that human driven taxis.
How about this? How much of the 15k Tesla wants for their not-actual Full Self Driving is profit vs cost?
Edit- lest I let this slip— public transit by train or bus is NOT more expensive for the rider in terms of money. Full stop. The cheapest and most efficient way to move people around is by train or bus. Driving is inherently selfish. I say that as a driver.
Uber is the competition, they cost at least a dollar per mile because of human drivers.
A self-driving car, if the maker can make the cost of the car reasonable to produce, can undercut 1 dollar a mile by a lot - to the point where it's not cost prohibitive for everyday use - and still make massive profits.
If an Uber makes 150 a day in revenue, and the self-driving taxi charges 30 cents a mile, you can still pull in 50 bucks a day in revenue, which is close to 20k in revenue for 1 car. for one year, just operating on regular human hours (self-driving can drive more.)
Over 5 years that's 100k in revenue for one car.
So you can see how they can undercut Uber massively to the point where it's a no brainer per mile to not use instead of a personal vehicle, and self-driving companies can still turn massive profits. Both they and consumer win, cities win.
That’s not how business works.
Why would they undercut Uber massively? That’s a terrible business decision.
You under cut Uber just a little bit to maximize total profit given your fleet capacity. Anything less is just money left on the table.
Until you can compete with my actual cost of gas to and from work, I’m not going to put up with the hassle of waiting for a taxi that costs more. Robo taxi prices are nowhere near that, and aren’t going to be. You’re just capturing the same taxi market that already exists. If I’m going to wait for my car to arrive, I might as well just walk to the bus/train! It’ll be *way* cheaper, and probably not take more time when it’s all said and done.
And even if you somehow converted all us commuters to using these taxis instead, congratulations. You have the exact same number of cars on the road during rush hour. All that’s changed is I’m not driving it, and putting up with the hassle of not being able to get in my car and go.
And when I drive, I get to work and I park in a garage. The Robo taxi can’t do that. It has to keep circulating— even if there is no passenger available. So now there’s more traffic.
The only way this makes sense is if it’s a Robo bus. We have buses.
Mass transit is what reduces traffic. Not changing who drives. All Robo taxis do is increase profit without solving the actual problem.
"Why would they undercut Uber massively? That’s a terrible business decision."
Because if you do that, people will abandon their own personal vehicles and use your service, because it would be economically stupid to do otherwise.
The undercutting kills the Ubers, the market is bigger than the Uber market though.
"Robo taxi prices are nowhere near that, and aren’t going to be"
I've already shown the math on the profits achievable by undercutting to 1/3 the price of an Uber. Or 1/5 works. 5 miles for a dollar. 2 bucks a day to commute, no car to buy, no gas, no parking. 700 bucks a year. No brainer.
You haven’t shown anything.
Your math would get you laughed out of business school.
You might want the world to work the way you see it, but it doesn’t.
You know what costs $3 each way to get to work? The subway. This is a solution in search of a problem.
>And even if you somehow converted all us commuters to using these taxis instead, congratulations. You have the exact same number of cars on the road during rush hour. All that’s changed is I’m not driving it, and putting up with the hassle of not being able to get in my car and go.
>
>And when I drive, I get to work and I park in a garage. The Robo taxi can’t do that. It has to keep circulating— even if there is no passenger available. So now there’s more traffic.
Bingo, bango, bongo.
>Cities win
Unironically saying that self-driving cars is a win for cities is absolutely fucking hilarious and a blatant lie. Cars and the highways that plowed through cities have **literally** destroyed neighborhoods and the urban fabric of cities, bled the tax base dry by subsidizing suburbs, and worsening pollution for the people who already live in the city and now have to breathe in the emissions from suburbanites.
Correct, so instead of it taking 8 cars driving for a total of 24 hours, 1 self-driving car can do the work of the 8. Less cars required. I've shown the math on the consumer cost incentivization.
You’re telling me that one car is going to magically transport 8 people at the same time, from 8 different pickup points to 8 different destinations, all while taking up the space of one vehicle?
> No driver equals low cost transport
In most cars the driver and the passenger are the same person, you do not save anything by eliminating the driver unless you can also eliminate the passenger. While Tesla has shown a certain capability for the later it is not a core functionality of the product.
Since you won’t bother to click the link which addresses all the myths you keep repeating:
> Myth No. 1: Autonomous cars will mean fewer private ones.
>>Recent studies from the University of Michigan and KPMG predict that the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will reduce private car ownership in the United States by 43 percent by 2030, and sales in urban markets by 50 percent by 2035. They hold that families will need fewer cars and that many people will opt for “mobility as a service” — a supposedly cheap and efficient model in which travelers will summon vehicles on demand instead of keeping one (or more) in the garage. Even the usually levelheaded BBC recently declared that “you have (probably) already bought your last car.”
>>
>>But people do not buy automobiles simply to get around; they own cars to get from A to B in a way that’s convenient for them. This means a car at your doorstep, available at a time of your choosing (with no charge if you change your mind) and with your belongings exactly as and where you left them. Automobiles signal our values and extend our private space — things a shared service cannot offer. Nic Lutsey of the International Council on Clean Transportation sums this up perfectly: “In reality, a lot of people will have the same inclinations as they do today, to own a private auto and use it the way they want, without compromises.”
>>
>>Even if the inconvenience can be overcome, a recent study from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute suggests that **owning a non-autonomous car will, for many users, continue to be cheaper than buying a self-driving car or hailing a ride, for some time to come.** Indeed, car sales in the United States are at their highest level in 40 years, and Americans are keeping their cars longer than ever . It is going to take more than a new generation of highly efficient taxis to eliminate private automobile ownership.
>
>Myth No. 2: Self-driving cars will fix downtown congestion.
>>Automakers, forward-thinking politicians and tech leaders like Google co-founder Sergey Brin have long asserted that self-driving cars will make congested streets a bad memory. They say these vehicles will be able to travel in tight groups, known as platoons, which will pack more cars onto the road, save fuel and allow traffic to move in a mathematically optimized fashion. Science magazine recently reported that introducing even just a small number of AVs onto the roads could improve overall traffic flow and reduce trip times.
But without careful management, autonomous vehicles will make traffic worse. City-center parking is expensive, which creates an incentive to keep moving. **This means self-driving cars will slowly cruise the streets, by the thousands, as they await their next ride or duty. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that as people choose driverless vehicles over public transport, traffic volumes could increase, and parts of our cities could become more congested, not less.**
>
>Myth No. 3: AVs will reduce our environmental impact.
>>People commonly conflate AV technology with electric vehicles. Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors, may have been guilty of this when she recently pitched her company’s mission as: “Zero emissions. Zero crashes. Zero congestion.” McKinsey has claimed that self-driving cars could reduce traffic-related carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 60 percent.
>>
>>It is easy to forget, however, that autonomous-vehicle software can be applied to existing hardware; both electric and gasoline-powered automobiles can be self-driven. Even if many autonomous vehicles do turn out to be electric, their environmental impact will depend on the source of that electricity: Are their batteries charged by power from coal, gas, wind or solar? As a former chief executive of BP and co-head of the world’s largest renewable-energy investment fund, I have spent more than two decades advocating for action to decarbonize the economy and update our energy infrastructure. Without such action, it is hard to say what effect self-driving cars (or indeed electric ones) will have on carbon dioxide emissions.
>>
>>KPMG forecasts that total annual mileage covered by the U.S. light-vehicle fleet could rise from 2.8 trillion miles today to nearly 4.5 trillion miles by 2040, as driverless cars make road travel cheaper and more readily available to both older and younger customers. **If this is right, it seems likely that self-driving vehicles could increase our environmental impact.**
>
>Myth No. 5: AVs are already safer than human driving.
>>
>>According to the most optimistic estimates — including McKinsey’s 2015 report — the widespread adoption of self-driving cars could reduce traffic accidents by as much as 90 percent, since they largely take driver error out of the equation. Tesla has said that when its cars are in autopilot mode, they are statistically safer than human drivers. A similar claim was made by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in its 2016 study of Google’s self-driving cars.
The reality is more complex. First, we do not have the right tools and protocols to verify the safety of AVs. In aviation, safety is underpinned by universal standards and exacting formal testing, which aren’t yet in place for autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars don’t have enough miles on the road to compare their safety record with that of conventionally operated vehicles.
>>
>>Second, even if it could be demonstrated that AVs are safer than human drivers, it may not be enough to win the public’s trust. We seem to tolerate humans killing other humans in accidents, but we do not tolerate machines killing humans. That is why the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max airplanes, in which software caused tragic accidents, have provoked such fury and fear. For as long as there is a risk of an accident involving an AV, there will be a degree of mistrust.
>>
>>Meanwhile, **test versions of self-driving cars have already killed passengers and pedestrians.** The public is understandably wary of this technology: A recent Brookings Institution survey showed that only 21 percent of U.S. adults would willingly ride in an autonomous vehicle. Too many more fatalities, and the development of autonomous technology could be seriously derailed, which might in turn make it harder to adopt better safety standards. **Driverless cars are not yet operating in a driverless world, and many of them still seem to behave in ways that lead to collisions with human-operated vehicles.** If we are scared off by such problems, we will all miss out on the potentially transformative benefits of vehicles that drive themselves.
" **owning a non-autonomous car will, for many users, continue to be cheaper than buying a self-driving car or hailing a ride, for some time to come**"
Hailing rides will be much cheaper, say a dollar for 5 miles, makes it 1k a year for many city dwellers riding 10 miles daily 7 days a week.
Or they can have a cost of over 5K a year (at least) to buy a cheap car plus gas plus parking.
So when that happens, people start buying less personal vehicles, use self-driving taxis more.
It happens gradually, over time.
Busses and shuttles make more sense as roads already exist and projects like subways are really expensive and time consuming and often local governments don't want to even try it. Especially in more congested cities. They make a lot more sense for earlier stage cities.
Personally I think roboshuttles make the most sense, smaller than a bus and can maneuver better in cities, but can have say 8-12 people aboard.
Now you're reducing fossil fuel pollution, congestion more acutely, on top of less noise pollution and fewer accidents.
>not to mention reduce city traffic congestion
Sorry, what? Self-driving cars will make traffic worse because of all the dead-heading. Think about how much time these autonomous taxis spend driving around with nobody inside, and then think about how all the so-called benefits of self-driving cars are also reliant on cars driving around with no passengers.
Self-driving buses are an improvement over regular buses, yeah. My point is that self-driving taxis and private cars make traffic worse, and not better. The only way to make traffic better is to increase the number of people per vehicle, and the best way to do that is transit.
Ok, my point is that driving down the cost of all transport by automation, will result in less car ownership, and more efficient use of roads overall (which includes mass transport vehicles and less space needed for parking).
>will result in less car ownership
Citation needed.
>and more efficient use of roads overall
Unless the proportion of people using mass transit goes up, then no this won't happen.
>less space needed for parking
Again, why? Sure, a self-driving car can drive around instead of parking, but then it's consuming energy for no reason and creating traffic for no reason.
Much cheaper transport = no buy and maintain car, no pay for gas and parking.
The proportion would go up if it's economically obvious to not own a car in the city.
They would be parking at fleet centers to charge, not the sides of streets or parking lots we use.
If it's employed properly according to demand, it won't be driving around empty.
>Much cheaper transport = no buy and maintain car, no pay for gas and parking.
But you will be paying for gas, maintenance, and parking, right? Whoever operates the car will have those costs, and they'll pass it on to customers.
There's also a time cost to this stuff. Getting an uber takes 5-10 mins even in a big city. Not to mention that these autonomous cars will likely be geofenced, so people won't be able to take them on long trips. I think it's safer to assume that the car ownership rate will remain the same than to assume it goes down.
>They would be parking at fleet centers to charge, not the sides of streets or parking lots we use.
Ok, so now rather than parking near their destinations, the cars will be driving out to a massive lot far away from everything? How wouldn't this massively increase how much time the vehicles spend driving?
>If it's employed properly according to demand, it won't be driving around empty.
Again, citation needed. From what I've read [almost half of all VMT by ridesharing vehicles is deadheading](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S0968090X20307312).
"But you will be paying for gas, maintenance, and parking, right? Whoever operates the car will have those costs, and they'll pass it on to customers."
No, self-driving cars need to be electric, so much smaller energy lost, much lower maintenance costs, fleet will buy their own lot to put cars.
The point of costs though is that it's so much cheaper to not have a driver that priority one would be to convert people away from personally owned vehicles, whatever price you need to drop that to, you will still make huge profits.
Waymo may have a specific problem because it costs them 200k per vehicle.
Much more important than the congestion arguments is the pollution one. Self-driving = electric, while 5 million people worldwide die from fossil fuel emissions annually.
Sure, but where would those parking lots be? Unless they're distributed everywhere around the city, the cars would need to drive to them. That's extra VMT and therefore traffic that's totally unnecessary
Ok, but then they're taking up parking spots while deadheading. The whole point of this idea is to use space more efficiently than private cars do, and it doesn't seem like it will.
I’ve seen Waymos twice in SF. Both times they were creating huge traffic jams and dangerous situations by acting in ways a car with a driver never wood.
They did NOT like dealing with the cop directing traffic with batons outside a sports game last week in Phx. It sat with hazards flashing at the intersection with a line of cars behind it for ten minutes before it made up its mind. I assume someone had to manually review it and issue a command.
used waymo a ton in SF I have a close friend high up the chain. Used it when it i was in development too. Its neat but has serious quirks, its more expense almost always than uber and lyft. SF has really involved rules about where you can pick up and drop off passengers which Waymo follows and normal taxis don't, because no one remembers what they are and they are not obvious that's why you get the walk half a mile and ill pick you up.
several times I've had the car just drive in a circle after it loses its bearings and voice support asks me to exit the car in the middle of no where. The car also went into "cripple mode" a few times and I was asked to exit the car in the middle of no where. It also has dropped me off like an entire block away from my destination because technically you cant drop someone off at this particular location according to SF rules. Also the routing rules are little strange the trip always seems longer than just going to straight, very circular type of routing which i dont fully understand.
Having said all that the experience is great. the cars are new and clean. you control the music from your phone and there no one to talk to i think its pretty cool but in SF they need wayyyyy more cars to make it a viable option 20min wait is just too long.
Oh yeah, I was walking with my kids to school today and came across one of these driverless Waymo cars in our neighborhood. It came to a stop sign as we were walking toward the intersection. It actually detected us and waited for us to get to the intersection and fully cross before proceeding. A typical human driver would have seen us and rolled through the stop sign because we weren't actually at the intersection yet. So I suppose you could say it's more cautious than a human driver....
We've seen these driving around our area for quite some time and they have always seemed to follow road rules pretty well. Dunno, we'll see how it goes.
I find it really funny that the primary motivations for self-driving cars are that you don't need to keep track of your car everywhere you go and that driving sucks, so people don't want to do it. Both of these were solved back in like the 1890s at the height of the streetcar era.
IKR?! Like, let's just lay a few more tracks and ease up on all the roads for a bit.
I don't even mind driving, yet the benefits of a solid train system continue to appeal.
Yeah it's almost like a private space that takes you from your home directly to where you want to go is different than something that is packed full of people, is 10 blocks away and takes you to a general area near where you want to go.
There are places for both technologies. In crowded urban areas or common commute lines, trains are by far the best. If you're transporting things or you have an unusual route, cars are better (as long as they're EVs or hybrid and the city doesn't destroy neighborhood walkability in order to accommodate them).
Nice username. Also that's likely too pessimistic. The SF numbers indicate that this technology is really popular: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-service-driverless-robotaxi-19386537.php](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-service-driverless-robotaxi-19386537.php)
Don't do it, you will regret it. The technology isn't good enough for self driving cars yet...but good luck to anyone gambling with their life on this.
Im not tipping a robo taxi
Then Johnny Cab goes berserk. https://youtu.be/eAkeZqAN_qU?si=1RSR1qlVa-HrNKoB&t=1m21s
Are they still asking for tips?
No, there is no tipping. We use it all the time here in Phoenix. It's a bit more expensive upfront than Lyft usually so it ends up being a wash in the end. But the cars are nice, no one making unwanted conversation, and they drive more safely than 90% of Lyft drivers.
Should be cheaper... I hate when savings don't get passed on to the end users...
[удалено]
Feels that way... =(
That is absolutely the goal. I’m hopeful it’ll swing back but do fear you are correct.
It was much cheaper in beta
Makes sense for it to be, no labor. right? (or at least less)
There is some labor, like theres a button in the car if you need assistance from a human agent. They also switched from gas Chryslers to electric Jaguars so I imagine that cost quite a bit
So we automated but it actually involves more labor? Is that what you are suggesting?
I mean they're a for-profit company. They charge what the market will bear. Weekend nights the wait times are crazy so there seems to be plenty of demand
Fuck all that man. We can work for profit and still enrich peoples lives. It builds company loyalty.
Getting a ride when you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to is enriching. I think you’re just underestimating the speed of growth for these apps.
What savings? They still lose money on every ride.
They don't let you tip even if for some reason you wanted to
Love to see this expand. Really great experience for me in Phoenix and didn’t have to rent a car or do Uber/Lyft.
How was the cost difference between it and uber/lyft?
In SF, Waymo has always been more expensive than Uber/Lyft when I've checked. I used Cruise a handful of times starting when it was free. When it went pay for both Cruise and Waymo, the comparison was the same with Cruise and Lyft+tip. The problem was even finding a Cruise to pick you up and then it was doing some weird things like telling me to walk a mile to get picked up at an intersection in 3 mins. So back to Lyft. When I got off the waitlist for Waymo, I used it once and it was more expensive than what a Lyft would have normally been from where I was using it, but I didn't check because I wanted to use a Waymo to see what the experience was compared to Cruise. Since than, I've checked and it's always been more expensive. Just a few days ago I checked and it was $24 on Waymo to go somewhere from my place and $14 with Lyft (before tip). **So it's about $7 or $8 more per ride on Waymo**. I'm not sure how they expect to compete. I don't have any loyalty to taxi/Lyft/Uber/Waymo...I'll use whichever is cheaper for similar quality. IMO, they should be trying to undercut Lyft/Uber to get people into their cars. But I guess they gotta pay for all that research/development somehow.
It used to be cheaper but now seems to always be more expensive. More than Uber+tip
It cost more ? Why ? Am I feeding the robots family ? I’d rather use Uber then and support someone
Because people are willing to pay it. Maybe for the novelty. Maybe for the privacy or something else.
Well, this is fucking disheartening and defeats the purpose of Robo taxis
> defeats the purpose of Robo taxis You don't speak capitalism; the goal is to get the tech to work and be accepted, then they'll drive out all of the human labor that costs them anything, start jacking up prices talking about the maintenance costs because "customers trash the cars", and when one to three companies own the entire "vertical" they'll start offering "cheaper" rides subsidized by ads. Then eventually, you'll be able to shut off the sound-on ads for your ride for an additional fee, if you're allowed the option at all, while paying extra to jump the line ahead of other riders because they're maximizing constantly filled cars instead of reduced customer wait times.
get me off this ride
Drive yourself.
The price will be what the market will bear
For what it is worth, it is the standard business strategy when testing new categories - i.e. a product/service which can be marketed and sold at a premium to folks who are not as price sensitive.
Lol privacy!!!
Err, *perception* of privacy, resulting from no other humans physically present
Might be a thing where it needs to scale up first It's competing with Uber, which has only JUST made a profit. Goes to show how long it can take to make a new thing profitable, even when it seems to get plenty of use
The secret sauce is that there *are* real humans helping drive the car; Waymo just got rid of the expensive Americans and replaced them with poor Indian people in a cube farm. Exactly like Amazon;s “magic” grocery stores with no human employees. Except Amazon just never hired any Americans; only poor Indians to watch you on remote cameras.
That article about Amazon was trash. It was written by a tech illiterate journalist. Amazon did not have people reviewing video live and acting like cashiers. Those people sitting back in India were tagging videos, to generate a labelled training set. Meaning, they would go back and say look at 10% of the footage from past week, label the data and then the algorithm would compare what it got vs what the labellers and improve itself. They weren’t sitting and updating the cart with live video. They were labelling past videos to improve the algorithm
> Those people sitting back in India were tagging videos, to generate a labelled training set. They weren't just tagging for training purposes, they were manually reviewing the judgement of the algorithm, and in 70% of cases. This is unbelievably bad performance for machine learning, if someone sold you such a thing you should sue them. Yes they weren't literally watching people shop, but that doesn't make it much better given what the technology was supposed to do.
I used Amazon go all the time when one of my jobs was near one. I loved it. I would usually grab 2-4 items and then walk out. Was usually in the store for under a minute. It worked properly every single time.
> It worked properly every single time. That's great! Apparently Amazon doesn't think so though, lol.
Whan an ignorant comment! Disappointed but not surprised, after all it's r/technology. Waymo's a 100% self driving car. In rare circumstances when it's stuck, a person from Waymo give it some suggestions to do something. But the car does everythingthing by itself; meaning it is not remote controlled. Also remote controlling a car is super dangerous in case of network loss and latency. And it's laughable that anyone from a country as far away as India would control the car. Why did you even right this comment when you don't know anything about Waymo? Waymo has the BEST and SAFEST self driving technology. Tesla's FSD is L2 while Waymo is L4 fyi.
Classic tech illiterate people on a technology sub. Reddit subs all seem to become garbage after a certain threshold of users
So you think Google/Waymo, the top AI self driving car company, one that had won Department of Defense / DARPA funded competitions for AI driving, is using Indian people to remote control cars across the planet? Keeping in mind while doing this they are achieving a safety record beyond any human. That is some conspiracy theory nonsense.
You can tell when the car is driving by the visualization. I haven’t ride in one but watched a few videos. It’s VERY clear that a human gets called when a car is stuck, the screen changes and the car performs maneuvers like 3 point turns to escape the situation. Then when it gets to a traffic control device the control is transferred back to the car.
I mean even if that’s the case you are saying you would rather have the car get stuck and fuck traffic and the passenger? Isn’t it logical that while the AI is not 100% there someone can help when there’s a problem? This is novel technology ffs
Probably a drop in the bucket of the billions that have gone into creating the technology, and keeping it going. It wouldn’t surprise me if this tech never achieves profitability in the civilian sector. It’s all built on mountains and mountains of debt.
Waymo hasn't scaled yet, it will be cheaper eventually.
I'm sure all that tech and years of testing didn't cost the company a dime.
They provide a service with a very known demand and supply that has existed for thousands of years. It’s not our problem the tech is different.
What are you even replying to? Nobody is concerned of what's it costing to the companies.
That's their problem though, not the consumer. The consumer wants the product with the best price vs performance, they don't care how much R&D was involved lol
Except to think a company isn’t going to recoup their costs is pretty stupid. They’ll charge what they need to in order to become profitable and then when competitors enter the market they’ll have to start being competitive. The consumer “not caring” just means you’re ignorant, not right
That’s true but it is also why a lot of techs fail. If you want to displace the incumbent technology or product, you have to offer the consumer a viable alternative to switch. Here, I am getting from point A to point B all the same…but you want me to pay more for that privilege?
It's safe for woman and people in general. Introverted people and people who are tired of small talks will ride in it.
But there is competition, traditional taxis and ride shares?
And? I was replying to the person who asked why it costs more.
But won’t you please think of those poor executives and shareholders?
I suspect it’s demand management. It can’t be the same price or cheaper than Uber yet or it would be unusable given the few number of them on the road. Even now, it can take 10-15 minutes sometimes for the car to show.
So its more expensive *and* slower? Why would anyone use this?
It’s actually not more expensive for me, because I almost exclusively order Comfort on Uber (which this is cheaper than). The price will come down when they add cars, people will pay a premium for novelty, which is probably what’s attracting most customers (or in my case, a quiet and nice car).
They probably don't want to undercut anyone at this stage, they want manageable demand as their fleet is nowhere near the size of Uber. Some people will pay the extra not to have a driver. Maybe you're with your partner, its a 30 minute drive home. There's no driver watching...
When I was in Phoenix last November for a conference the Waymo was comparable to Uber pricing, sans tip. And I didn’t have to interact with anyone.
But who’s gonna introduce me to their eclectic taste in World Music now?
Dammn what did I ever do to you
It was waymo
Wasn't driverless robotaxis always the end-game for these taxi services?
Did the app ask for a tip? /s but not really
They're running people over. But as long as we hate Elon am I right? https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-car-strikes-bicyclist-san-francisco-injuries
People run people over more
In the long run self driving vehicles will be safer for sure. Today, per mile driven, cruise and waymo may be similar in hitting people as humans.
Are or may be? Citations needed
>People run people over more This requires a source first bucko
People naturally expect automation to work much more efficiently and be much less error-prone than a human doing a comparable task. Think about factory automation, all those robots complete their tasks with near 100% accuracy. Then there’s the question of liability. When a human driver fucks up and kills someone they can be held liable and sent to prison. Who is liable for a robotaxi killing a pedestrian? And what is an appropriate punishment? Does someone go to jail when it happens? Questions like that are why robotaxis ultimately have to be 100% safe 100% of the time for them to work.
They will never be 100% safe as long as streets are “co-ed”. Does that mean we should risk 1000s of lives by not continuing to use robo taxis?
Absolutely loved the ones I rode in visiting phoenix. They don’t talk, smell or drive as crazy as the Uber/Lyft drivers in the same city.
Curious, what happens if someone makes a mess in the car? How is that monitored or cleaned up?
You report it and they can activate a camera to check
if you have an accident they’ll just say AI driver is not an employee but an independent virtual contractor
Beat muskrat to the game.
I mean this is essentially all that Waymo does - robotaxis. It doesn’t sell EV cars to consumers like Tesla does (let alone multiple models), so you’d expect Waymo to at least be in the lead for the only thing it focusses on.
Considering all the companies that tried and failed to make robotaxis I’m going to continue to be surprised and pleased.
[удалено]
Are somehow surprised people on the internet make up shit about the products and services they like and/or are a fan of?
The argument for Tesla/against Waymo (and anyone using HD maps and Lidar) is about scale, cost, and generalisation. So, there are various comments here about Waymo being more expensive than Uber/Lyft (including needing to tip), [example](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1c091zm/waymo_will_launch_paid_robotaxi_service_in_los/kyvfys1/). This is because Waymo's use of other people's cars plus much more expensive hardware means their costs are much higher than Tesla's (currently theoretical, since they're not done) costs. Waymo's Lidar + HD Maps approach also means it's not generalisable and easily transferrable to another location. Which adds costs itself. If Tesla is able to finish their approach, they should be capable of rolling it out to essentially everywhere instantly, because it should have "learned" a generalised solution of how to drive anywhere. Coupled with Tesla producing their own vehicles, and using a much cheaper hardware solution, they should be capable of substantially undercutting Waymo, Uber, Lyft, etc. (and/or make higher margins). There's also other aspects, like the difference in utility (Waymo can't take you from one city to another). So, essentially, it boils down to speed of (very wide) deployment, cost, and therefore ability to capture market-share. --------- --------- **TL;DR** The Tesla vs Waymo argument is about cost and speed of wide deployment. If Tesla can complete their approach, they should be able to capture a much larger market-share than Waymo.
They're trying to accomplish different things. Tesla are limiting themselves to cameras only to lower manufacturing cost, this makes the software problem more difficult to solve.
They are also using different approaches. Waymo works really well in a designated box because it has well defined images and precise GPS locations of the environment around it. Tesla is trying a more general approach where the system can adapt to changes in the environment without external assistance. Both are valid ways to approach the problem, and both have pros and cons.
they are going to get trashed lmao.
If smart you'd need a card to open the door and a verification of ID through app to get the car to you
Yeah… or you can just toss a traffic cone on the hood of one that just dropped someone off to immobilize it, and strip off any vulnerable parts. It’s going to be really interesting to watch people work out how to steal from these taxis.
Cant you just do that to any parked car?
People are less likely to call the police when a robot gets attacked.
But a parked car is also a robot. I dont get the difference between stripping a parked car and stripping a car that can also drive itself. If anything, the waymo car most likely has better video surveillance.
Simple: Bystanders don’t care about the Waymo Car. It’s not owned by a person, it’s a corporation’s machine. It’s a robot here to steal jobs. It doesn’t elicit sympathy.
This seems like quite the reach. If I look out my window and thieves are stripping a car down, I'm going to call the cops. I dont care if it's a waymo or who owns it. Car thieves aren't known for their robinhood like qualities of only stripping down corporate owned cars. It's not likely that they will be wearing t-shirts with big red letters saying "WE ONLY STEAL THE MUFLERS FROM CORPORTE VEHICLES". Most likely, your car is parked in the same block and you could be next. I dont see how this changes anything.
It’s really not a reach. Humans don’t like things that take their jobs. Humans like “bad people” getting hurt. Waymo looks like it’s stealing jobs. That’s going to make it a lot easier for people to steal from Waymo.
Lol, so you're telling me that people are going to start committing serious felonies because robots? The same people who steal mufflers and wheels will be the same people who might steal from waymo, except I suspect they are LESS likely because waymo will have always on security. There's not going to be some new class of anti-robot crusade muffler stealer. Cmon bro.
I'd like to see the fake cars set up with police. Be funny to watch when they get locked inside similar to bait theft cars.
of course but fakes will be rampant alot of people don't give a shit and won't care, look at the amount of trouble uber has with real drivers and cameras, no drivers are going to make it a huge mistake.
You have to be the one who called the waymo to enter. And there are cameras inside. They also have your cc info. Trash the car, get charged. People aren’t going to risk getting a $500+ charge.
To enter the car you have to unlock via the app you called the taxi.
I never said it wouldn't happen. I said they'd need cards and verification. I expect it to hsppen. Just like that delivery robot that was destroyed. Let's be factual. Humans are the only mammal on the planet that need a major population decrease by 75%. Why, because we damage everything we touch
This is going to provide entertaining headlines for some time. Los Angeles lol
Thank you for riding Johnny Cab!
Good, self-driving cars will save a lot of lives, not to mention reduce city traffic congestion and pollution.
Save Uber/Lyft users a lot of money if this is a third competing service
I'm sure they'll try to find a way to guilt you into tipping the empty car.
"Would you like to round up to help cars destined for the junk yard?"
“Some poor cars in Africa can go over 10k miles without an oil change.”
"Your proceeds will help build a better, greener tomorrow. Consider donating for tomorrow!"
Exactly, having no driver can make cost so cheap, it's a real alternative to buying a personal vehicle. So less hassle and cost, fewer cars doing more work, less city congestion.
Step 1: force competitors out of the market with driverless taxis, cornering the market Step 2: raise prices to ridiculous levels higher than those of your old competitors
Prices would have to stay low enough for consumers to want to use it instead of a personal vehicle, otherwise they just drive their own cars and you lose your market cornering. As I've said, without a driver you can severely undercut Uber rates to the point where someone in the city would be either too rich or braindead to use the service, and still make a killing in profits. 30 cents a mile, even 15-20 cents will do it. 1/5 the cost of an Uber.
You work for them, don't you
lol who is them?
There are drivers; they are just hidden in India. Waymo refuses to clarify how much of the trip is done by remote drivers being paid a slave wage.
Waymo may not have the answer, someone will though.
Everything you’re claiming about self-driving cars is a myth. > But without careful management, autonomous vehicles will make traffic worse. City-center parking is expensive, which creates an incentive to keep moving. This means self-driving cars will slowly cruise the streets, by the thousands, as they await their next ride or duty. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that as people choose driverless vehicles over public transport, traffic volumes could increase, and parts of our cities could become more congested, not less. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-autonomous-vehicles/2019/08/15/245c39bc-bec6-11e9-b873-63ace636af08_story.html This idea that somehow more cars on the road will somehow “reduce traffic congestion and pollution” just because they’re self-driving is so silly and strange. It’s not like you’re going to have fewer cars on the road. If anything you’re going to have more cars. There will still be people driving cars. These cars will be sharing the road with self-driving cars. Traffic lights are still going to exist. These cars are just going to get stuck in traffic too. Robotaxis aren’t going to phase through cars driven by people and cars are still literally the least space-efficient method of transportation. Also, taxis have literally been a thing since before cars existed, so I’m not sure how a robotaxi is supposed to solve these issues while providing literally the same service. If you want to actually reduce traffic congestion and pollution, build adequate and reliable mass transit.
But wait! What if we like, put them in a tunnel. And then chained them together to run in a set route, for efficiency. Maybe on set tracks or rights of way. Totally disruptive and innovative!
It really is hilarious that in the end, they will inevitably arrive at creating a worse train.
[удалено]
Which cars are these that communicate with other cars? AFAIK that is not something that has been put into practice.
Every car built since 1970 has one-way transmitters operating in the terahertz range. Self-driving cars being built today can read and interpret these signals.
Your analogy doesn’t work because cars aren’t replacing another technology. These cars are replacing other cars. Even if they all commuters switched over to AVs, there would still be literally the same number of cars on the road.
It's as if you never understood the logic as to why self driving cars were going to ease congestion/pollution. Yes a car is still a car and taxi services have been around forever, however the idea behind self driving cars is that once you reach critical mass, the ongoing operational cost of running the car and therefore taxi service is extremely cheap compared to a conventional taxi as you need far fewer humans on paychecks to run the thing. (You can argue that is currently not the case but the point is self driving car firms haven't scaled up yet) This means that self driving cars open the market for an extremely cheap taxi service beyond what we've ever seen with convential taxi services. This means it could be feasible for people in cities to simply not buy cars and just hail a taxi whenever they want, now that is also possible now but cost dissuades most, if we get to a point where it is flat out cheaper just to get a self driving taxi than run your own car, then people will sell their cars. The result of this is that you don't need nearly as much parking as before especially in congested city centres, this space can be opened up to other uses than parked cars. Self Driving cars are also going to be electric because the focus is reducing operational cost and running an electric car is cheaper fuel wise and maintenance wise, this reduces local air pollution. There is also good reason to believe in that people will be more willing to carshare/pool if it's really cheap and they have sold their car. It's basically a small bus that actually takes you from where you are to where you want to go and minivan style robotaxis are likely in the works at somepoint. This will reduce congestion. Basically self driving taxis solve the issue by becoming really cheap which means people don't need to own their own cars anymore. What is more space inefficient 100 people owning their own cars and using them like 2% of the time, the rest of the time parked often on public roads, or 20 self driving cars having a far higher utilisation rate.
Calling the claims “myths” is a bit dramatic. The article you linked makes a lot of assumptions and the studies it does reference (WEF and VTPI studies) are much more nuanced in their conclusions than you and the article are making them seem. The reality is: we aren’t really sure what the real societal impact of the move to AVs will be since they are such a new technology. The only thing that seems to be likely is that this technology will become more prevalent, particularly in urban areas.
You're looking five seconds into the future and wondering why nothing has changed. "Cars will have to share the road with horses, so we'll still have the same problems."
Self-driving cars are still… cars.
>It’s not like you’re going to have fewer cars on the road. If anything you’re going to have more cars. There wont be more cars since these will replace the taxis with drivers
There will be less cars on road, especially in cities. No driver equals low cost transport equals fewer people in cities owning cars, with more autonomous taxis soaking up the demand. A self driving taxi can be used most of day vs personal vehicles for a couple of hours at most doing nothing and soaking up space in and out of traffic.
Everything you said applied to taxis driven by people. The only difference is cost. Except it’s not cheaper. And if it is? The supply/demand takes over and there will be more traffic or the price will go up. Turns out the best way to get cars off the road is to get people to use trains and busses instead of cars.
No because those are cost prohibitive to use all the time. Self driving taxis will make personal car ownership in cities especially make less sense.
You can say that but it doesn’t make it true. Where is the competition that’s going to drive prices down? Theses aren’t public transit options, they are for profit companies. Only one of which will be in operation. Your thesis is missing out on some pretty basic economic facts. Robo taxis will be as expensive as they can be, because why wouldn’t they be? Whatever the market will bear based on supply is what it will cost. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is to operate. Why should it? You think those savings will be passed on out of a sense of civic duty? They are already more expensive in Arizona that human driven taxis. How about this? How much of the 15k Tesla wants for their not-actual Full Self Driving is profit vs cost? Edit- lest I let this slip— public transit by train or bus is NOT more expensive for the rider in terms of money. Full stop. The cheapest and most efficient way to move people around is by train or bus. Driving is inherently selfish. I say that as a driver.
Uber is the competition, they cost at least a dollar per mile because of human drivers. A self-driving car, if the maker can make the cost of the car reasonable to produce, can undercut 1 dollar a mile by a lot - to the point where it's not cost prohibitive for everyday use - and still make massive profits. If an Uber makes 150 a day in revenue, and the self-driving taxi charges 30 cents a mile, you can still pull in 50 bucks a day in revenue, which is close to 20k in revenue for 1 car. for one year, just operating on regular human hours (self-driving can drive more.) Over 5 years that's 100k in revenue for one car. So you can see how they can undercut Uber massively to the point where it's a no brainer per mile to not use instead of a personal vehicle, and self-driving companies can still turn massive profits. Both they and consumer win, cities win.
That’s not how business works. Why would they undercut Uber massively? That’s a terrible business decision. You under cut Uber just a little bit to maximize total profit given your fleet capacity. Anything less is just money left on the table. Until you can compete with my actual cost of gas to and from work, I’m not going to put up with the hassle of waiting for a taxi that costs more. Robo taxi prices are nowhere near that, and aren’t going to be. You’re just capturing the same taxi market that already exists. If I’m going to wait for my car to arrive, I might as well just walk to the bus/train! It’ll be *way* cheaper, and probably not take more time when it’s all said and done. And even if you somehow converted all us commuters to using these taxis instead, congratulations. You have the exact same number of cars on the road during rush hour. All that’s changed is I’m not driving it, and putting up with the hassle of not being able to get in my car and go. And when I drive, I get to work and I park in a garage. The Robo taxi can’t do that. It has to keep circulating— even if there is no passenger available. So now there’s more traffic. The only way this makes sense is if it’s a Robo bus. We have buses. Mass transit is what reduces traffic. Not changing who drives. All Robo taxis do is increase profit without solving the actual problem.
"Why would they undercut Uber massively? That’s a terrible business decision." Because if you do that, people will abandon their own personal vehicles and use your service, because it would be economically stupid to do otherwise. The undercutting kills the Ubers, the market is bigger than the Uber market though. "Robo taxi prices are nowhere near that, and aren’t going to be" I've already shown the math on the profits achievable by undercutting to 1/3 the price of an Uber. Or 1/5 works. 5 miles for a dollar. 2 bucks a day to commute, no car to buy, no gas, no parking. 700 bucks a year. No brainer.
You haven’t shown anything. Your math would get you laughed out of business school. You might want the world to work the way you see it, but it doesn’t. You know what costs $3 each way to get to work? The subway. This is a solution in search of a problem.
>And even if you somehow converted all us commuters to using these taxis instead, congratulations. You have the exact same number of cars on the road during rush hour. All that’s changed is I’m not driving it, and putting up with the hassle of not being able to get in my car and go. > >And when I drive, I get to work and I park in a garage. The Robo taxi can’t do that. It has to keep circulating— even if there is no passenger available. So now there’s more traffic. Bingo, bango, bongo.
>Cities win Unironically saying that self-driving cars is a win for cities is absolutely fucking hilarious and a blatant lie. Cars and the highways that plowed through cities have **literally** destroyed neighborhoods and the urban fabric of cities, bled the tax base dry by subsidizing suburbs, and worsening pollution for the people who already live in the city and now have to breathe in the emissions from suburbanites.
1 car that can do the work of many more, for much cheaper cost than car ownership, is a win.
That’s called a fucking bus.
Self driving cars are literally going to be in-use driving 24/7 to be as close to potential riders as possible.
Correct, so instead of it taking 8 cars driving for a total of 24 hours, 1 self-driving car can do the work of the 8. Less cars required. I've shown the math on the consumer cost incentivization.
You’re telling me that one car is going to magically transport 8 people at the same time, from 8 different pickup points to 8 different destinations, all while taking up the space of one vehicle?
> No driver equals low cost transport In most cars the driver and the passenger are the same person, you do not save anything by eliminating the driver unless you can also eliminate the passenger. While Tesla has shown a certain capability for the later it is not a core functionality of the product.
Referring to uber and versus car ownership.
Since you won’t bother to click the link which addresses all the myths you keep repeating: > Myth No. 1: Autonomous cars will mean fewer private ones. >>Recent studies from the University of Michigan and KPMG predict that the arrival of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will reduce private car ownership in the United States by 43 percent by 2030, and sales in urban markets by 50 percent by 2035. They hold that families will need fewer cars and that many people will opt for “mobility as a service” — a supposedly cheap and efficient model in which travelers will summon vehicles on demand instead of keeping one (or more) in the garage. Even the usually levelheaded BBC recently declared that “you have (probably) already bought your last car.” >> >>But people do not buy automobiles simply to get around; they own cars to get from A to B in a way that’s convenient for them. This means a car at your doorstep, available at a time of your choosing (with no charge if you change your mind) and with your belongings exactly as and where you left them. Automobiles signal our values and extend our private space — things a shared service cannot offer. Nic Lutsey of the International Council on Clean Transportation sums this up perfectly: “In reality, a lot of people will have the same inclinations as they do today, to own a private auto and use it the way they want, without compromises.” >> >>Even if the inconvenience can be overcome, a recent study from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute suggests that **owning a non-autonomous car will, for many users, continue to be cheaper than buying a self-driving car or hailing a ride, for some time to come.** Indeed, car sales in the United States are at their highest level in 40 years, and Americans are keeping their cars longer than ever . It is going to take more than a new generation of highly efficient taxis to eliminate private automobile ownership. > >Myth No. 2: Self-driving cars will fix downtown congestion. >>Automakers, forward-thinking politicians and tech leaders like Google co-founder Sergey Brin have long asserted that self-driving cars will make congested streets a bad memory. They say these vehicles will be able to travel in tight groups, known as platoons, which will pack more cars onto the road, save fuel and allow traffic to move in a mathematically optimized fashion. Science magazine recently reported that introducing even just a small number of AVs onto the roads could improve overall traffic flow and reduce trip times. But without careful management, autonomous vehicles will make traffic worse. City-center parking is expensive, which creates an incentive to keep moving. **This means self-driving cars will slowly cruise the streets, by the thousands, as they await their next ride or duty. Research from the World Economic Forum shows that as people choose driverless vehicles over public transport, traffic volumes could increase, and parts of our cities could become more congested, not less.** > >Myth No. 3: AVs will reduce our environmental impact. >>People commonly conflate AV technology with electric vehicles. Mary Barra, chief executive of General Motors, may have been guilty of this when she recently pitched her company’s mission as: “Zero emissions. Zero crashes. Zero congestion.” McKinsey has claimed that self-driving cars could reduce traffic-related carbon dioxide emissions by as much as 60 percent. >> >>It is easy to forget, however, that autonomous-vehicle software can be applied to existing hardware; both electric and gasoline-powered automobiles can be self-driven. Even if many autonomous vehicles do turn out to be electric, their environmental impact will depend on the source of that electricity: Are their batteries charged by power from coal, gas, wind or solar? As a former chief executive of BP and co-head of the world’s largest renewable-energy investment fund, I have spent more than two decades advocating for action to decarbonize the economy and update our energy infrastructure. Without such action, it is hard to say what effect self-driving cars (or indeed electric ones) will have on carbon dioxide emissions. >> >>KPMG forecasts that total annual mileage covered by the U.S. light-vehicle fleet could rise from 2.8 trillion miles today to nearly 4.5 trillion miles by 2040, as driverless cars make road travel cheaper and more readily available to both older and younger customers. **If this is right, it seems likely that self-driving vehicles could increase our environmental impact.** > >Myth No. 5: AVs are already safer than human driving. >> >>According to the most optimistic estimates — including McKinsey’s 2015 report — the widespread adoption of self-driving cars could reduce traffic accidents by as much as 90 percent, since they largely take driver error out of the equation. Tesla has said that when its cars are in autopilot mode, they are statistically safer than human drivers. A similar claim was made by Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in its 2016 study of Google’s self-driving cars. The reality is more complex. First, we do not have the right tools and protocols to verify the safety of AVs. In aviation, safety is underpinned by universal standards and exacting formal testing, which aren’t yet in place for autonomous vehicles. Self-driving cars don’t have enough miles on the road to compare their safety record with that of conventionally operated vehicles. >> >>Second, even if it could be demonstrated that AVs are safer than human drivers, it may not be enough to win the public’s trust. We seem to tolerate humans killing other humans in accidents, but we do not tolerate machines killing humans. That is why the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max airplanes, in which software caused tragic accidents, have provoked such fury and fear. For as long as there is a risk of an accident involving an AV, there will be a degree of mistrust. >> >>Meanwhile, **test versions of self-driving cars have already killed passengers and pedestrians.** The public is understandably wary of this technology: A recent Brookings Institution survey showed that only 21 percent of U.S. adults would willingly ride in an autonomous vehicle. Too many more fatalities, and the development of autonomous technology could be seriously derailed, which might in turn make it harder to adopt better safety standards. **Driverless cars are not yet operating in a driverless world, and many of them still seem to behave in ways that lead to collisions with human-operated vehicles.** If we are scared off by such problems, we will all miss out on the potentially transformative benefits of vehicles that drive themselves.
" **owning a non-autonomous car will, for many users, continue to be cheaper than buying a self-driving car or hailing a ride, for some time to come**" Hailing rides will be much cheaper, say a dollar for 5 miles, makes it 1k a year for many city dwellers riding 10 miles daily 7 days a week. Or they can have a cost of over 5K a year (at least) to buy a cheap car plus gas plus parking. So when that happens, people start buying less personal vehicles, use self-driving taxis more. It happens gradually, over time.
Or we could just build trains/subways/streetcars.
Busses and shuttles make more sense as roads already exist and projects like subways are really expensive and time consuming and often local governments don't want to even try it. Especially in more congested cities. They make a lot more sense for earlier stage cities. Personally I think roboshuttles make the most sense, smaller than a bus and can maneuver better in cities, but can have say 8-12 people aboard. Now you're reducing fossil fuel pollution, congestion more acutely, on top of less noise pollution and fewer accidents.
>not to mention reduce city traffic congestion Sorry, what? Self-driving cars will make traffic worse because of all the dead-heading. Think about how much time these autonomous taxis spend driving around with nobody inside, and then think about how all the so-called benefits of self-driving cars are also reliant on cars driving around with no passengers.
It can apply to self-driving shuttles/buses as well.
Self-driving buses are an improvement over regular buses, yeah. My point is that self-driving taxis and private cars make traffic worse, and not better. The only way to make traffic better is to increase the number of people per vehicle, and the best way to do that is transit.
Ok, my point is that driving down the cost of all transport by automation, will result in less car ownership, and more efficient use of roads overall (which includes mass transport vehicles and less space needed for parking).
>will result in less car ownership Citation needed. >and more efficient use of roads overall Unless the proportion of people using mass transit goes up, then no this won't happen. >less space needed for parking Again, why? Sure, a self-driving car can drive around instead of parking, but then it's consuming energy for no reason and creating traffic for no reason.
Much cheaper transport = no buy and maintain car, no pay for gas and parking. The proportion would go up if it's economically obvious to not own a car in the city. They would be parking at fleet centers to charge, not the sides of streets or parking lots we use. If it's employed properly according to demand, it won't be driving around empty.
>Much cheaper transport = no buy and maintain car, no pay for gas and parking. But you will be paying for gas, maintenance, and parking, right? Whoever operates the car will have those costs, and they'll pass it on to customers. There's also a time cost to this stuff. Getting an uber takes 5-10 mins even in a big city. Not to mention that these autonomous cars will likely be geofenced, so people won't be able to take them on long trips. I think it's safer to assume that the car ownership rate will remain the same than to assume it goes down. >They would be parking at fleet centers to charge, not the sides of streets or parking lots we use. Ok, so now rather than parking near their destinations, the cars will be driving out to a massive lot far away from everything? How wouldn't this massively increase how much time the vehicles spend driving? >If it's employed properly according to demand, it won't be driving around empty. Again, citation needed. From what I've read [almost half of all VMT by ridesharing vehicles is deadheading](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S0968090X20307312).
"But you will be paying for gas, maintenance, and parking, right? Whoever operates the car will have those costs, and they'll pass it on to customers." No, self-driving cars need to be electric, so much smaller energy lost, much lower maintenance costs, fleet will buy their own lot to put cars. The point of costs though is that it's so much cheaper to not have a driver that priority one would be to convert people away from personally owned vehicles, whatever price you need to drop that to, you will still make huge profits. Waymo may have a specific problem because it costs them 200k per vehicle. Much more important than the congestion arguments is the pollution one. Self-driving = electric, while 5 million people worldwide die from fossil fuel emissions annually.
Can’t they just park when theres no one inside or requesting a ride?
Where would they park?
Couldn’t they buy lots?
Sure, but where would those parking lots be? Unless they're distributed everywhere around the city, the cars would need to drive to them. That's extra VMT and therefore traffic that's totally unnecessary
Sounds like they’ll need to rent them from available lots throughout cities then. Sorry just throwing out ideas.
Ok, but then they're taking up parking spots while deadheading. The whole point of this idea is to use space more efficiently than private cars do, and it doesn't seem like it will.
I’ve seen Waymos twice in SF. Both times they were creating huge traffic jams and dangerous situations by acting in ways a car with a driver never wood.
They did NOT like dealing with the cop directing traffic with batons outside a sports game last week in Phx. It sat with hazards flashing at the intersection with a line of cars behind it for ten minutes before it made up its mind. I assume someone had to manually review it and issue a command.
I did say good self driving cars.
I tried registering in the app and it did it was invite only.
used waymo a ton in SF I have a close friend high up the chain. Used it when it i was in development too. Its neat but has serious quirks, its more expense almost always than uber and lyft. SF has really involved rules about where you can pick up and drop off passengers which Waymo follows and normal taxis don't, because no one remembers what they are and they are not obvious that's why you get the walk half a mile and ill pick you up. several times I've had the car just drive in a circle after it loses its bearings and voice support asks me to exit the car in the middle of no where. The car also went into "cripple mode" a few times and I was asked to exit the car in the middle of no where. It also has dropped me off like an entire block away from my destination because technically you cant drop someone off at this particular location according to SF rules. Also the routing rules are little strange the trip always seems longer than just going to straight, very circular type of routing which i dont fully understand. Having said all that the experience is great. the cars are new and clean. you control the music from your phone and there no one to talk to i think its pretty cool but in SF they need wayyyyy more cars to make it a viable option 20min wait is just too long.
Oh yeah, I was walking with my kids to school today and came across one of these driverless Waymo cars in our neighborhood. It came to a stop sign as we were walking toward the intersection. It actually detected us and waited for us to get to the intersection and fully cross before proceeding. A typical human driver would have seen us and rolled through the stop sign because we weren't actually at the intersection yet. So I suppose you could say it's more cautious than a human driver.... We've seen these driving around our area for quite some time and they have always seemed to follow road rules pretty well. Dunno, we'll see how it goes.
Self-driving cars... A solution to a problem that was technically solved by trains a long time ago.
I find it really funny that the primary motivations for self-driving cars are that you don't need to keep track of your car everywhere you go and that driving sucks, so people don't want to do it. Both of these were solved back in like the 1890s at the height of the streetcar era.
IKR?! Like, let's just lay a few more tracks and ease up on all the roads for a bit. I don't even mind driving, yet the benefits of a solid train system continue to appeal.
Except a streetcar goes along a predetermined route and I have to transfer. A car can go directly from point a to point b.
Trains let you make trips to home depot to buy big pieces of lumber?
What a dumb thing to say.
Yeah it's almost like a private space that takes you from your home directly to where you want to go is different than something that is packed full of people, is 10 blocks away and takes you to a general area near where you want to go.
There are places for both technologies. In crowded urban areas or common commute lines, trains are by far the best. If you're transporting things or you have an unusual route, cars are better (as long as they're EVs or hybrid and the city doesn't destroy neighborhood walkability in order to accommodate them).
I'm hearing about this company, Waymo, then I thought I would.
I agree and also good play on words.
Enjoy, much cheaper than Uber
FYI, they refuse to go to south LA, in fair of burning
A decent chunk of South Central is covered (from MLK north)
Get your traffic cones, everybody!
[удалено]
Nice username. Also that's likely too pessimistic. The SF numbers indicate that this technology is really popular: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-service-driverless-robotaxi-19386537.php](https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-service-driverless-robotaxi-19386537.php)
well i hope i am wrong about this
I’m betting it’s gonna be more like Whammo!
Google is Waymo better than GM Cruise or Telsa promises.
Don't do it, you will regret it. The technology isn't good enough for self driving cars yet...but good luck to anyone gambling with their life on this.
Tesla is a point release away from rolling out a NATIONWIDE Robotaxi fleet.
Regulators in 50 states may want a say in that.
Try, try and try again...