I have been riding Waymo around LA for over a year with no issues. To me, it's just an Uber with an invisible driver, and more predictable experience.
Riding it is now a mundane experience, and that's a marvel in itself. Every time I'm forced to get an Uber in another city (or do airport rides as Waymo doesn't do pickups/dropoffs in LAX yet), I feel like I went 5 years back in time.
My Tesla has FSD and that has gotten progressively better the last few updates, however Waymo still feels ahead. I can truly "relax" in a Waymo, where FSD still makes me uneasy at times, like I'm supervising a teenage driver.
It's been a consistently excellent experience for me in both SF and LA.
The cars are well maintained and clean inside and out.
They are very careful and considerate drivers.
They navigate complex and ambiguous situations with unprotected turns, pedestrians, bicyclists, double-parked cars, construction zones and narrow streets.
They're better than Uber in every respect.
And I dare say I think they're now a safer and more capable driver than I am, at least within their designated operating territories.
I've been taking Waymo in LA for about half a year now, and I love it and it's a great party trick (always pick up my dates in one lmao), but a handful of times it's (a) accidentally blocked traffic and gotten incessantly honked at (kind of hilarious considering there's no driver), and (b) went the wrong way on a one-way back alley and got stuck when a lady was going the opposite direction lol. Again, kinda funny when she started honking, got out of the car, and realized there's no driver. In the latter case, we actually had support call us in the car.
I think if there's something weird/bad going on, someone manually takes over (but not sure if that's confirmed or not). Still a cool experience, but the real world is a lot more complicated than it first seems.
Even with all that, it definitely feels like the future.
It's exciting to see Waymo and self driving technology in general doing well, but the analysis on the broader implications fell flat for me. Claims about improving commutes or being more effective than mass transit need to be substantiated - there's a ton of stuff out there on traffic engineering, mass transit, and urban planning that can help perform these sorts of analyses.
Some thoughts:
* For the purposes of transit efficiency, self driving cars are very similar to Ubers. They have a low passenger density (being a regular car), and once the passengers disembark, they still take up space on the road with 0 passengers. Better experience and lower costs will basically just induce more demand over more efficient mass transit options. If you imagine everyone at a bus stop ordering an Uber, or have ever seen the flurry of Ubers after a big event, it's clear why self driving isn't really addressing the core issue.
* You can't really make direct cost comparisons to the infrastructure costs of bus lanes or subways like that. Infrastructure is ungodly expensive in the US, yes, but there are very well understood reasons to make dedicated bus lanes and subways: they don't compete with cars on the road. They're high density transit options, so having more reliable service will impact a lot more people (and reduce car congestion on the road!) A rideshare service is wholly unprepared to deal with the transit demands of a larger city, and imagining that we'd replace existing mass transit options with it is silly.
* I don't really understand the point about suburbs. You can already get that experience today by ordering an Uber to and from work. If there's more demand, it's just going to make traffic even worse while promoting more suburban sprawl.
1) With superior scale, the utilization of each Waymo approaches 100%. "Empty rides" going to a new pickup spot become more and more rare because they immediately get a ride close-by.
2) I think you underestimate the case for shared rides. Any Waymo with >= 2 passengers is reducing congestion, not adding. When you consider small bus-shuttles, e.g. 6 or 12 or 18 seats, it gets even more impactful.
3) The point with suburbs is that they become more accessible when the price point comes down. If you have a 45-minute commute to drive yourself, an Uber might cost you $60, which would be prohibitive. If a seat in a carpooled Waymo costs only $5 or $10, the incentives and customer behavior change significantly.
That’s is unsubstantiated utopia (from you POV). People do not have uniformly distributed locations for starting and ending routes. There are concentrations of where people work, live, go to restaurants, schools, etc. More so if you are assuming suburban homes. The direction of routes also have very strong biases.
You very strongly and, again, unsubstantially overestimate shared rides. Shared rides could already be happening at scale with a human driver and are not. There is nothing about self-driving tech that solves any urbanistic, social or economic barrier to shared rides. Also, a shared ride negates most of the benefits of self driving cabs. You are not alone in the confined space, you are sharing with others, others that will likely be more intrusive than a professional driver. The vehicle will not be as clean, as comfortable, as silent, etc.
About commute getting cheaper seems a pipe dream. There is nothing in the self driving tech remotely indicating that a currently $60 ride will cost $5 with self driving cars.
In order for a bus to actually be an efficient mass transit option, it has to be used.
Buses on regular roads create a "shadow" that affects other vehicles behind it and reduces 2 lanes in one direction to an efficiency of much less than 2 lanes, due to stops and starts. And except for peak usage times outside of a few major US cities, I would argue it is a net congestion creator rather than congestion reducer. A bus has the same effect as 10 or 15 cars, from my observation; so if there are less than 15 people on a bus, it's worse.
Part of the reason that buses have wraps or tinted windows is so you can't see how few people are riding on it.
At least the Waymo is not moving and not on the road when not in use.
Peak usage times are obviously what matters for congestion
> I would argue it is a net congestion creator rather than congestion reducer
I think buses even outside of peak hours are usually net congestion removers... but if you want them to be congestion removers during peak times, you also need to offer service during other times.
Yeah, bus systems suck. People avoid buses because they have unreliable schedules, and dedicated bus lanes are intended to improve that. Putting every rider on a bus into their own dedicated rideshare car isn't really going to improve things, though...
> In fact, this might bring American public transportation to a leapfrog moment. Many pundits have lamented that developing cities elsewhere have “leapfrogged” the US on public transportation — building subways and rail networks that put ours to shame. Over a hundred years ago, we built first-generation public transit.15 Over the last forty years, other countries built second-generation public transit. Now we have the opportunity as a nation to lead the world on third-generation public transit, and in that course develop products and expertise that can be exported.
This is quite the stretch. Even in the best case scenario, Waymos won’t beat well run public transit lines in dense cities, especially in east and south asia.
This piece is way too optimistic about Waymo. They’ve mastered a couple of cities over many years. To do that for more cities would require just as much time. It’s conceivable that ride share will continue to exist until that happens, which is likely several decades.
I’m not sure I agree with this. Autonomous cooperative cars would convoy in dynamic flocks in a way that does point to point transit with a lot of the advantages of trains (in that a major advantage of trains is they don’t congest). This would actually have a significant advantage over every other type of transit. Even having a modest percent of all cars on the roads cooperative autonomous vehicles using basic control theory to relieve congestion would aid the entire cities traffic (there have been several studies proving this).
> Autonomous cooperative cars would convoy in dynamic flocks in a way that does point to point transit with a lot of the advantages of trains
The main advantages of trains are:
* Dedicated right of way - which you cant't get with cars.
* High route capacity - even a unrealistic 10x improvement still doesn't compete with trains. At 2x it's worse than busses.
* Cheap running & maintenance costs - doubtful running costs are similar, certainly not maintenance.
Trains do however congest, you get that a lot in the USA when you don't have dedicated passenger lines.
> Even having a modest percent of all cars on the roads cooperative autonomous vehicles using basic control theory to relieve congestion would aid the entire cities traffic (there have been several studies proving this).
There have also been several studies into something called induced demand. The result of reducing car traffic is that more people choose to drive, resulting in more car traffic. The only way to actually reduce traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
Flocking may well be an improvement over the status quo, but it fundamentally can’t be nearly as efficient as busses due to simple geometry: cars physically take up a space.
But even then, that assumes that you assign the cost of building the infrastructure to public transit (or the public). Now if Waymo makes up a significant portion of overall traffic, why should the public pay for the cost of building the infrastructure, i.e. the roads?
> Waymo becomes most interesting as an alternative to public transit.
I really wonder what this looks like logistically, when you realize how inefficient it is for everyone to be in their own individual Waymo during rush hour.
The obvious first step is:
> Many people who currently drive themselves would probably be happy to carpool in a self-driving vehicle if it’s reliable and easy
But if it's a 4-person vehicle, I'm not sure that's enough -- that's still a lot of vehicles clogging bridges and tunnels. And if you get to 12-person self-driving minibuses, it feels like too much time picking up and dropping people off if you're trying to stick to one vehicle.
So I kind of wonder if there will be intermediate ~20-person self-driving buses to bring people in and out of cities, that respond instantly to demand?
So in the suburbs, you take an 8-minute individual Waymo that brings you to a perfectly timed Waymo Bus that you wait 3 minutes for, get on with 19 other people for 42 minutes, everybody gets off at the same point at the edge of downtown, and everybody gets into carpooling individual Waymos already waiting, so you take 7 mimnutes to get to your office, dropping off 2 people along the same route you would have taken anyways.
But the buses don't have fixed routes or stops or timetables -- they just aggregate the demand along the common long corridors. Essentially replacing light commuter rail.
The article estimates that the vehicles cost $200k based on Cruise's reported numbers in 2023 for vehicles produced in previous years.
Reporting often misses just how quickly vehicle costs have dropped. When I started in the industry, vehicle costs often exceeded $500k. Almost everyone I'm aware of today is targeting sub-$100k.
It's interesting to me that the author hadn't previously considered that self driving cars would feel different. My first experiences in an Uber were very memorable, the drivers are so much more aggressive than I am. I kept thinking "they drive like an asshole so I don't have to" because it felt so much like I was being driven by my teenage self.
But also -- I've been thinking about what it would be like to have nobody driving for over a decade, ever since the promise of self driving cars became a popular topic here on HN. I still really want to own one - once they're good enough to get rid of any interior controls and face the front seats backwards with a gaming table in the middle. If board game day could also have a destination dinner, I would pay a lot of money for that car.
Credit to the author for pointing out the public transit aspect of Waymo. In the same way that mobile phones and solar are allowing the developing world to skip a big middle step of fixed infrastructure, Waymo could allow cities to skip (or eliminate) expensive and limited use rail networks.
In the US (outside of possibly NYC) existing rail transit isn't especially money or time efficient. Trains require expensive dedicated right of way and don't take you directly from where you are to where you want to be. Trains are also highly susceptible to delays because they can rarely circumvent obstructed tracks. A single sick or disruptive passenger can delay hundreds of people. Waymo vehicles take you from exactly where you are to where you want to be on existing roads and can alter their route in the case of obstacles.
Broadly speaking, I agree with the article. This has the potential to leapfrog mass transit as well as Uber. But how the Waymo model develops is probably unknowable right now. Will there be a variety of Waymo vehicle purpose-built for Waymo? Will Waymo become a bus service on heavily traveled routes? Or will iit becomme a kind of franchise where the transit agency is responsible for the vehicles and Waymo becomes a white-label enabling technology or are bus routes going to be obsoleted by right-sized privately owned Waymo "mini busses" with dynamic capacity and pick up/drop off on demand?
My guess is that Google will try to get out of the business of owning the vehicles and make Waymo an enabling technology. But there is a lot of experimentation to be done before anything other than how Waymo has evolved to become part of what Waymo does.
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Riding it is now a mundane experience, and that's a marvel in itself. Every time I'm forced to get an Uber in another city (or do airport rides as Waymo doesn't do pickups/dropoffs in LAX yet), I feel like I went 5 years back in time.
My Tesla has FSD and that has gotten progressively better the last few updates, however Waymo still feels ahead. I can truly "relax" in a Waymo, where FSD still makes me uneasy at times, like I'm supervising a teenage driver.
The cars are well maintained and clean inside and out.
They are very careful and considerate drivers.
They navigate complex and ambiguous situations with unprotected turns, pedestrians, bicyclists, double-parked cars, construction zones and narrow streets.
They're better than Uber in every respect.
And I dare say I think they're now a safer and more capable driver than I am, at least within their designated operating territories.
I think if there's something weird/bad going on, someone manually takes over (but not sure if that's confirmed or not). Still a cool experience, but the real world is a lot more complicated than it first seems.
Even with all that, it definitely feels like the future.
Remote agents give the cars "advice" or label objects, but the car is free to not believe them. There's no actual remote control.
If the advice is not enough, roadside assistance goes and drives the car manually.
Interesting. Are you sure they aren't honking at you? I think your framing might be right but I'm not totally sure
Some thoughts:
* For the purposes of transit efficiency, self driving cars are very similar to Ubers. They have a low passenger density (being a regular car), and once the passengers disembark, they still take up space on the road with 0 passengers. Better experience and lower costs will basically just induce more demand over more efficient mass transit options. If you imagine everyone at a bus stop ordering an Uber, or have ever seen the flurry of Ubers after a big event, it's clear why self driving isn't really addressing the core issue.
* You can't really make direct cost comparisons to the infrastructure costs of bus lanes or subways like that. Infrastructure is ungodly expensive in the US, yes, but there are very well understood reasons to make dedicated bus lanes and subways: they don't compete with cars on the road. They're high density transit options, so having more reliable service will impact a lot more people (and reduce car congestion on the road!) A rideshare service is wholly unprepared to deal with the transit demands of a larger city, and imagining that we'd replace existing mass transit options with it is silly.
* I don't really understand the point about suburbs. You can already get that experience today by ordering an Uber to and from work. If there's more demand, it's just going to make traffic even worse while promoting more suburban sprawl.
1) With superior scale, the utilization of each Waymo approaches 100%. "Empty rides" going to a new pickup spot become more and more rare because they immediately get a ride close-by.
2) I think you underestimate the case for shared rides. Any Waymo with >= 2 passengers is reducing congestion, not adding. When you consider small bus-shuttles, e.g. 6 or 12 or 18 seats, it gets even more impactful.
3) The point with suburbs is that they become more accessible when the price point comes down. If you have a 45-minute commute to drive yourself, an Uber might cost you $60, which would be prohibitive. If a seat in a carpooled Waymo costs only $5 or $10, the incentives and customer behavior change significantly.
> *”because they immediately get a ride close-by”
That’s is unsubstantiated utopia (from you POV). People do not have uniformly distributed locations for starting and ending routes. There are concentrations of where people work, live, go to restaurants, schools, etc. More so if you are assuming suburban homes. The direction of routes also have very strong biases.
You very strongly and, again, unsubstantially overestimate shared rides. Shared rides could already be happening at scale with a human driver and are not. There is nothing about self-driving tech that solves any urbanistic, social or economic barrier to shared rides. Also, a shared ride negates most of the benefits of self driving cabs. You are not alone in the confined space, you are sharing with others, others that will likely be more intrusive than a professional driver. The vehicle will not be as clean, as comfortable, as silent, etc.
About commute getting cheaper seems a pipe dream. There is nothing in the self driving tech remotely indicating that a currently $60 ride will cost $5 with self driving cars.
Most of the dedicated bus lanes I've seen were once open to all vehicles, but later restricted. Some were built specifically for busses, but not many.
Buses on regular roads create a "shadow" that affects other vehicles behind it and reduces 2 lanes in one direction to an efficiency of much less than 2 lanes, due to stops and starts. And except for peak usage times outside of a few major US cities, I would argue it is a net congestion creator rather than congestion reducer. A bus has the same effect as 10 or 15 cars, from my observation; so if there are less than 15 people on a bus, it's worse.
Part of the reason that buses have wraps or tinted windows is so you can't see how few people are riding on it.
At least the Waymo is not moving and not on the road when not in use.
Peak usage times are obviously what matters for congestion
> I would argue it is a net congestion creator rather than congestion reducer
I think buses even outside of peak hours are usually net congestion removers... but if you want them to be congestion removers during peak times, you also need to offer service during other times.
Even triple the space usage, is leas than what you claim to observe. What is your methodology for determining this?
This is quite the stretch. Even in the best case scenario, Waymos won’t beat well run public transit lines in dense cities, especially in east and south asia.
This piece is way too optimistic about Waymo. They’ve mastered a couple of cities over many years. To do that for more cities would require just as much time. It’s conceivable that ride share will continue to exist until that happens, which is likely several decades.
The main advantages of trains are:
* Dedicated right of way - which you cant't get with cars.
* High route capacity - even a unrealistic 10x improvement still doesn't compete with trains. At 2x it's worse than busses.
* Cheap running & maintenance costs - doubtful running costs are similar, certainly not maintenance.
Trains do however congest, you get that a lot in the USA when you don't have dedicated passenger lines.
> Even having a modest percent of all cars on the roads cooperative autonomous vehicles using basic control theory to relieve congestion would aid the entire cities traffic (there have been several studies proving this).
There have also been several studies into something called induced demand. The result of reducing car traffic is that more people choose to drive, resulting in more car traffic. The only way to actually reduce traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
https://humantransit.org/2012/09/the-photo-that-explains-alm...
I really wonder what this looks like logistically, when you realize how inefficient it is for everyone to be in their own individual Waymo during rush hour.
The obvious first step is:
> Many people who currently drive themselves would probably be happy to carpool in a self-driving vehicle if it’s reliable and easy
But if it's a 4-person vehicle, I'm not sure that's enough -- that's still a lot of vehicles clogging bridges and tunnels. And if you get to 12-person self-driving minibuses, it feels like too much time picking up and dropping people off if you're trying to stick to one vehicle.
So I kind of wonder if there will be intermediate ~20-person self-driving buses to bring people in and out of cities, that respond instantly to demand?
So in the suburbs, you take an 8-minute individual Waymo that brings you to a perfectly timed Waymo Bus that you wait 3 minutes for, get on with 19 other people for 42 minutes, everybody gets off at the same point at the edge of downtown, and everybody gets into carpooling individual Waymos already waiting, so you take 7 mimnutes to get to your office, dropping off 2 people along the same route you would have taken anyways.
But the buses don't have fixed routes or stops or timetables -- they just aggregate the demand along the common long corridors. Essentially replacing light commuter rail.
Reporting often misses just how quickly vehicle costs have dropped. When I started in the industry, vehicle costs often exceeded $500k. Almost everyone I'm aware of today is targeting sub-$100k.
But also -- I've been thinking about what it would be like to have nobody driving for over a decade, ever since the promise of self driving cars became a popular topic here on HN. I still really want to own one - once they're good enough to get rid of any interior controls and face the front seats backwards with a gaming table in the middle. If board game day could also have a destination dinner, I would pay a lot of money for that car.
My guess is that Google will try to get out of the business of owning the vehicles and make Waymo an enabling technology. But there is a lot of experimentation to be done before anything other than how Waymo has evolved to become part of what Waymo does.