> These cars are literally unsupervised.

Unsupervised in what sense? There's internal cameras that are periodically checked. Weight and seatbelt sensors that give alerts if a passenger is or puts objects in the drivers seat, or if too many individuals get in the car.

I'd be shocked if a similar or greater level of observability doesn't also exist outside the car.

Uber started as off duty black car drivers doing gig work. Those were the default right? The random guy with a car gig was rolled out as uberx later?

But I'm completely with you on the unsupervised part. People doing all sorts of things back there that an ML might not identify. Now if they hire an army remotely to monitor, I guess that could scale because of wage disparities.

Well it's because as Uber expanded and had to desperately fight for its margins, it started to lower its standards for UberX. Before, cars had to be fairly new and in a relatively good condition. Now it's no longer the case.

You have ID of who was in the car and when, and a 'report' button in the app for the next passenger. Easy enough, if something is reported you have the choice to wait for the next one while the trashed car goes to be cleaned or ride anyway at a discount if you solve it yourself - e.g: put the trash in a bag in the boot of the car. After N reports attributed to you, you get banned.

Motor vehicles are gross and dirty, that's why I ride a bicycle.

Organic, manual, hand-driven authentic vintage driving experience (before it was cool, of course).

Regardless of whether the Waymo is supervised, they're brand-new cars, of course they'll be cleaner.

Might actually cut down on the contingent who leave trash or other debris because they believe a person will be cleaning after them.

I know, I know. We can dream.

Careening into dystopia one questionably clean Uber at a time

Self-driving + self-cleaning cars obviously.

Life is just a giant story we tell ourselves. This is no different. Who knows what tomorrow's story will tell!

>What do you think comes next?

Public transport, hopefully.

When I rode in one, admittedly a long time ago when cruise was still operating in sf too, the waymo car pulled over for a firetruck. However, the firetruck was merely crossing the road we were on and it was 3 streets away. And the waymo pulled into a bus stop to do this. The safety driver had to nudge it back into traffic.

The possibility of "character" is always my biggest dread when getting into a taxi or an Uber.

I just want to get from point A to point B without having to make small talk or delicately navigate a political discussion with a stranger. A stranger who both controls the vehicle and, in the case of Uber/Lyft, will be giving me a rating at the end of the ride.

My AIs have no character, I demand my Roomba show a little passion when cleaning.

From my (hopefully) neutral point of view I think Waymo running a red traffic light is the worst of all and most likely will end up in a disaster.

For huge metropolitan cities for examples London, Istanbul, Delhi, Tokyo, Jakarta or Sao Paulo running a red traffic with a car can most probably cause fatal accidents. I am now more than convinced that level 5 autonomous driving cannot be achieved in my lifetime, and much better efforts should be better directed toward non-invasive highly accurate early detection of high mortality diseases like CVDs and efforts for properly mitigating climate changes.

The biggest problem with cleaning is that compared to Uber where there's a human driver, the autonomy factor will almost certainly lead to more people fucking shit up simply because they can. Look at anything else that goes unattended in the public way: ebikes, delivery bot things, scooters... nasty combo of "I want to fuck with The Man" and "haha nobody is here watching I don't need to be as careful with my messy sandwich"

I imagine the cars all head to some centralized location for cleaning and whatever other maintenance. That probably makes cleaning a very economic, factory-like procedure. Beats something like Uber where drivers have to bring their cars to a car wash or whatever (although presumably the Uber drivers aren't being paid to wash the cars because they aren't employees, so the unpaid labor there gives Uber an advantage).

I wonder if they'd ever offer riders a discount for taking trash out that was left behind by other riders. They could even include a vacuum and give people a couple bucks off for cleaning it out during/after their ride.

I think eventually they’ll just make a car (like Zooks is) without all the messy crud (steering wheel etc) and with fixed, waterproof seats and such. It will be designed for automatic cleaned by driving into a depot and being hosed down.

Think of those self-cleaning toilets.

Every rider’s identity is known. That’s going to play a huge role in how people treat them.

> Presumably this requires humans to physically clean periodically.

That's a good robotics project. All the cars are the same. The cars do not have any objects inside that belong to the occupants and should stay. So robotic interior vacuuming could be quite practical, as a station in the car wash. A vision system can inspect for damage and route that car to the maintenance line.

Let me introduce you to WayGlo. They pivot to automated car cleaners...

Competing anecdata: Yesterday I was running downtown and a Waymo stopped for me at a green light because it wasn't sure if I was gonna jaywalk (jayrun?). Only once I stood still for a few seconds did it continue to make its turn.

This was in a turn-left-only intersection with a separate pedestrian light. Maybe the Waymo got confused and thought I also had green.

I think it’s legal to enter an intersection on yellow and exit on red in CA. Thats why.

Human drivers speed up to avoid red, and yay you avoided red but the suddenly higher speed is far more dangerous for everyone around.

Anecdata to say I've been in a Waymo and had it run a red.

I would like to see video of an equivalent incident.

> So smooth they apparently opt to blow red lights instead of stopping abruptly.

Surprised traffic lights aren't updated to communicate with cars directly. Why not have traffic lights broadcast 'stop' message along with turning red?

I suspect traffic lights, roads and cities will have to be updated to work with driverless cars.

Have also nearly been hit as a pedestrian by a Waymo. I also last week saw a Waymo blow through a yellow-red very aggressively, so I think the downvotes on above comment are intensely biased.

Not so difficult to add this feature with the help of human like voice and LLM backend.

> Just saying that there’s magic out there that’s not technological.

Dark magic too, I've been on one too many rides where the driver insists on monologuing on topics that range from detestable (politics) to alarming (the driver was armed, and had picked me up from the airport)

Yeah, I've ridden with two cool drivers with history degrees, one jazz musician from Ethiopia, and one who I'd already met elsewhere. Zero interest in riding in a Waymo. (Disclaimer: Alphabet shareholder)

While they pick up in almost every location the drop off is sometimes "close by" like 3min walk to final destination (the app tells you in advance tho so you can decide to order or not). This is quite annoying sometimes and I picked uber instead.

https://waymo.com/blog/2022/02/utilizing-key-point-and-pose-....

They are starting to obstruct bike lanes just like Ubers, I’ve seen this happen 3-4 times and it’s documented here: https://sfba.social/@SafeStreetRebel/112634004752866771

Years ago they were very respectful and conservative of basic road markings but clearly they have now ‘expanded capabilities’

No. Yes. Yes. Waymo's have been taught to handle construction and emergency signals. Waymo's can follow hand directions from a cop in the street.

I've taken 38 Waymo rides so far. Every one of them has been very clean, cleaner than the average Uber ride.

Potentially. But, with each driver exercising quality control over their own vehicles, the actual result will likely vary from hitting as good or better a standard to being worse. The Waymo standards, thus far, are pretty high, so I would expect on average Uber/Lyft/Etc. would fair worse on average.

Waymo's have cameras inside the car to make sure the vehicles are clean: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819

One of the worst parts of the Uber experience is the smell of the driver. Especially those that put on heavy cologne or perfumes.

No one but they have to return to base to recharge pretty quickly, whereupon someone can clean and tidy them.

Because of safety concerns or because you like the idea that in principle humans should be driving?

In other words, what kind of safety metrics do you think would be necessary to change your mind?

If in N years 90% of your peers use self-driving cars, and the only accidents you hear about are in the news about people you don't know, would that change your feelings about safety?

I'll hazard a guess: because Uber drivers are sometimes willing to stop for a minute in an illegal spot to park to do a quick pick up or drop off, and Waymos are never willing to do that (presumably).

Fwiw there is a checkbox if you want to absolutely minimize walking. It'll often do things like drive around the block so you don't have to cross the street yourself.

One thing I actually think is really cool about the Waymo ux (full disclosure, I work for Google but not Waymo) is how it elevates the pickup/dropoff locations to feel like more of a first class feature (compared to just typing in an address and your Uber driver dropping you off in the general area).

I don't think I've ever had to walk more than 30 feet to a pickup location, but I have had it drop me off at the nearest cross street (usually on streets where it would've had to double park in front of my exact drop-off location)

Human taxi drivers are okay parking illegally to do pick-ups/drop-offs, and we as a society usually tolerate that, as long as they're quick about it.

But Waymo probably isn't comfortable telling its cars to park in many illegal parts of streets, even if it's going to be quick. Partially because determining which illegal parking jobs are socially acceptable vs unacceptable is a hard determination for a robot to make.

One thing that really impressed me about riding Waymo is that when you start to open the door, it'll give really good warnings if you're potentially opening the door into traffic. Even specifying if there's a passing car/bike/scooter

It's us in the EU who are having the sacrifice though. As we're left behind economically and technologically as a load of octogenarian bureaucrats decide to ban genetic engineering, AI, etc.

Congrats on your breakthroughs in writing laws.

Sitting in traffic in a taxi or your own car sucks either way. Public transportation is the only sustainable solution.

Highly recommend people read how Waymo's fleet response works before throwing out phrases like "remote drivers take over cars": https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/

If you could rent/purchase a vehicle without a steering wheel, would you not want there to be someone available who can help out when the system runs into trouble? As long as there is no driver in the car, does it matter how it drives? Is that not just an irrelevant implementation detail that has no bearing on your passenger experience?

Where did you get this information? There are definitely people ready to respond to any requests from the car or passenger when they come up, but I've never read anything to indicate that each ride is actively monitored by a person.

The waymo I took on Sunday didn't have a driver.

> HD Mapping is great when it's accurate and available. But it requires a ton of data and constant updating, or the car will get "lost," and realistically will never be implemented in general, at best in certain cities.

Waymo have said time and again they don’t rely on maps being 100% accurate to be able to drive. It's one of the key assumptions of the system. They use it as prior knowledge to aid in decision making. If they got "lost" whenever there was a road change, they wouldn't be successfully navigating construction zones in San Francisco as we've seen in many videos.

They can also do constant updates because the cars themselves are able to detect road changes, self update maps and rollout changes to the entire fleet. See https://waymo.com/blog/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...

At this point, the whole “HD maps are not practical” is just a trope perpetuated by the Tesla community for years.

> Reliance on HD Mapping gets you to "robotaxis" quicker and easier, but it doesn't and likely cannot scale.

If you can make the unit economics work for a large quantity of individual cars, mapping is a small fixed cost.

I agree that it's not economical to map every city and road in the US, since you need to generate revenue from every mapped road and city. So you can think of HD maps as amounting to building roads. They will be built in lucrative places. Cruise and Waymo won't make money from putting taxis in nowhere Arkansas, so they don't need to map it.

> the current limiting factor is not what the car sees or knows but what it does with that information. It is unclear how or why HD mapping would help them at that point.

That's simply untrue. All the hard stuff continues to be reliability and sensor gated. Cruise and Waymo have amazing sensors and even they struggle with sensor range, sensor reliability, model performance on tail cases, etc. For example, at night these cars typically do not have IR or Thermal sensing. They are relying on the limited dynamic range of their cameras + active illumination + hoping laser gets enough points / your object is reflective enough. Laser perception also hits limits when lasers shine on small objects (think: skinny railroad arm). Cars also have limits with regard to interpreting written signs, which is a big part of driving.

Occlusions are still public enemy #1. Waymo killed a dog. Cruise crashed into a fire truck coming out of a blind intersection even though their sensors saw the truck within 100ms.

LiDAR and HD mapping together are supremely useful, even if you don't drive with it, for enabling you to simulate accurately. You cannot simulate reliably while guessing at distances and locations. HD maps let you use visual odometry to localize, and distance measurements grounded in physics backstop the realism of your simulation at least in terms of the world's shape.

Tesla lacks the ability to resim counterfactuals with confidence since they don't have HD ground truth. There are believers at the company that maybe you could make "good enough" ground truth from imagery alone but that in and of itself is a huge risk, and it's what skipping steps looks like. Most in the industry agree that barring a major change in strategy they just have no way to regression test their software to the level of reliability required for L4 / no human supervision.

> The only selling point of FSD (Supervised) is that it (can) work "everywhere."

I seem to recall Musk saying in the last couple years that "full self driving will basically require AGI." This appeared to me to be extremely honest and accurate, though I believe that in the moment he was trying to promote the idea that Tesla was an AGI company.

Does anyone happen to remember when he said that?

> requires a ton of data

Not a problem for Google, right?

> constant updating

I guess the cars can and will update the mapping in real time ?

> at best in certain cities

If mapping a city is possible, so it's mapping a highway, even easier.

If cars do update the maps themselves, they require might just a couple of human-driven passes of the standard WWaymo cars on a highway to generate the maps.

The obvious question here is "why not both". Use mapping data where you can, LIDAR and other sensors where you can, and visual cameras when you must. There's no reason to limit yourself to just one input type. Elon claims that, sure, but it doesn't seem like a given at all.

I’ve watched Waymos navigate the Tenderloin. It doesn’t get any more random than that.

Tbh I love my experience with Uber. I know people who don't own a car because they think it's cheaper to use Uber. But you're right - I am an above-average driver.

The main factor though is that California appears poised to hand them a monopoly.

> They have several phases before they open fully: safety driver no passenger testing, safety drivers with employee passengers, driverless with employee passengers, limited rollout to paid passengers under NDA, wider rollout but with waitlist, and finally getting rid of the waitlist.

It's certainly true that they need to do a bunch of extensive mapping for each city, but I don't think we should expect their roll-out speed in later cities to be as slow as the first couple of cities. Most of the stuff they are learning in the initial roll-out will generalize to other location; it's not all city-specific learning.

As a potential customer, Waymo's careful approach seems much more appealing to me. I don't want to ride in a move fast and break things robotaxi when it's snowing in Chicago.

I don’t think every city is a brand new learning experience, there will definitely be takeaways that will speed up deployments in new cities. Plus, a lot of these deployments can happen in parallel so seeing them come online in 20 places at a time simultaneously doesn’t seem extraordinary.

Could you point me to this episode, please?

Tesla definitely has lower costs, but what they don't have is a car that can drive itself.

They only have a car that can drive with a human partner behind the wheel who's ready at any second to take over and prevent it from crashing.

You are assuming Tesla is anywhere close to the capabilities of Waymo. Ignoring Elon and his history of hyping things far beyond reality, Tesla does not appear to have the equipment, data, or organizational culture to achieve what Waymo has done.

Waymo doesn't have to convince its vehicle owners to let strangers ride in their car unsupervised.

Yes there can be cleaning fees and vetting, but all it takes is one or two people puking in your Tesla, and you'll have no interest in providing a Robotaxi for Musk's Mission.

Tesla seem stuck-ish to me. They do have some incremental improvements each year, but even after several years of development, their cars want to randomly run into parked cars and other stationary obstacles on a frequent basis. We're not talking about edge cases, your cars shouldn't be regularly trying to hit a concrete wall after this much engineering effort.

Waymos do occasionally screw up, but if they did it as much as Tesla's FSD, it'd be chaos in the streets in SF, so it seems like it must be fairly infrequent.

Tesla is willing to sell to people who will pay $$$ for a self driving car. Waymo isn't. That's probably more important for now. Taxi drivers don't earn that much, and have some advantages AI can't easily replace (able to help with luggage, use petrol stations etc). Replacing them requires undercutting them which in turn means you can't generate a ton of revenue from that. Yet Waymo's business model, such that it is, has put them many billions into the red already. I wonder if anyone has done some ROI calculations and if so how long it'd take. The LIDARs alone would require a huge number of trips just to pay them off, then you have the cars, the decade+ of enormously high software development salaries... if Waymo were another YouTube where it could hide amongst Google's other profitable businesses that'd be one thing. As a separate business with its own accountings, how long will it take until it's turned a profit?

Remember that the passenger cars are not the only thing that can scale; if you can automate the mapping and data preparation part of the process sufficiently, you may even be able to reduce it to mostly a matter of driving a few sensor cars around for a few weeks; maybe even cars that are adapted versions of your normal taxi vehicles, but with a human driver behind the wheel while you are mapping.

I would imagine that while Waymo's mapping efforts have been very human effort-intensive so far, they will be looking at developing this automatic map-making capability as a high priority for rolling out new cities. Scaling the rate of expansion is then mostly a matter of throwing hardware and compute at the problem.

Really, you can't repeat this point enough. Tesla has zero experience in autonomous operation. Their vehicle has not ever driven itself any distance, under any circumstances. There is no reason to believe their software is on the cusp of a sudden improvement. They simply release new major version numbers that have different sets of flaws.

You are correct, Waymo has not solved the economics of robotaxis yet. However Waymo does have a huge head start on the solution. Waymo has been able to manage their scale growth to manage the cost of finding these solutions. It seems like a competitor that hasn't had that will have to pay a lot more to catch up.

Tesla doesn't even have a single autonomous vehicle yet...

They have driving assist that people still measure in 'number of times I had to grab the wheel'.

> Larry/Sergei left Waymo at a limbo state because they don't think in terms of economics, just coolness.

Larry/Sergei didn't create the Cybertruck

> it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars

Why not? They only do the integration, and traditional car and electronics manufacturers have solved the scaling problems long ago.

"The cost of building Tesla FSD = 1/100 * cost of building Waymo FSD

The cost of delivering Tesla FSD = 1/10 * cost of delivering Waymo FSD"

This seems like one of the key assumptions, but is not proven out at all because Tesla does not even have a level 4 vehicle. So the cost of delivering one comparable to waymo is infinite right now!

Your other key assumption is "Waymo can never get to the scale of Tesla (it can never buy 5 Million FSD cars, while Tesla is delivering them every 2 years)".

Both the assertion in the first part and the second part seem like super-strange assumptions, and not obviously true at all, yet are also critical to your analysis.

Waymo could get to the scale of tesla. It may or may not be too expensive to do. It could in fact, buy 5 million FSD cars. It may or may not be too expensive to do.

"Mathematically, Tesla has an upper hand over Waymo and it'll play out as that."

Or you know, if needed, Waymo could change?

It's funny to watch someone say "this one company will be able to adapt in every possible way to it's advantage, and nobody else can or will"

That almost never happens.

Your retort is then that you are getting downvoted because of anti-musk hate.

Have you considered that maybe you just don't have that good of an argument instead, and that your comment comes off as more of a tesla fanboy (regardless if you are) than a useful contribution?

I could write the literal opposite comment of what you did, in favor of Waymo. That would not be a useful contribution either for the same reasons.

Tesla is still stuck at Level 3 while Waymo has been operating at level 4 for years.

If Tesla does manag to jump straight from level 3 to level 5, they have a chance to compete, but that seems unlikely. They also might move to level 4 and be able to expand level 4 coverage faster, but that still remains to be seen.

Waymo has years of experience with the other hard part of self driving taxis: actually picking up and dropping off people without a human driver.

Anti-musk partisanship frustrates me, but I suspect it is your fan-boy talking points that drive the downvotes of your comment

Airport rides in Phoenix are always available, but apart from the hours you note, Waymo drops riders off at the 24th or 44th Street Sky Train locations.

Freeway driving is more straightforward in many ways compared to urban driving, but the problem is that the impact of screwing up is a LOT more severe.

If you screw up at typical speeds in SF, probably nobody will die. On a freeway, odds are a lot higher.

If a car is confused in an urban area, stopping in the middle of the street isn't 100% safe, but it's not super dangerous, whereas stopping in the middle of freeway suddenly is obviously extremely dangerous.

> That is: the sensors cannot see far enough ahead to react comfortably when going above N miles-per-hour. That might be a dated understanding of the issue though...

It's more of a challenge when your stopping distance is low (more problematic for trucking than it is for TaaS vehicles since trucks are so damn heavy).

I suspect some challenges are risks like tailgater collisions and high-stakes lane changes at speed, and even more problematic is just profitability (what if your cars are tied up in traffic jams, what if they don't have enough charge left to make a long round trip, etc).

I meant airport rides to the terminal at all hours of the day.

Waymo is already giving driverless freeway rides to employees in Phoenix, so I don’t agree that it’s far away. It’s definitely a different challenge though.

The issue is not a confusing road network, it's that Waymos require a modicum of grace in other drivers to operate. They aren't super aggressive, they'll defer to pedestrians and other drivers, they drive safely.

That I think is where they'll find problems when expanding to locales with less than conscientious drivers.

Boston resident here seconding this.

I am not artificially intelligent and Boston’s streets are a fuckshow.

They’re testing in DC and giving media rides there. So DC is a candidate too.

When the option is a choice between going possibly hungry for the day, you and your family, and not going hungry then that is not called financial illiteracy.

It's quite feasible. The cost structure only permits those e-bike riders in SF to do it reasonably. But it's feasible.

A lot of people depend on those job to survive. We need some type of off-ramp if we're going to just wipe out a large section of the economy .

I've worked horrible jobs before, and I needed the money to survive. Not everyone can write Ruby code and make 300k a year.

1:1 remote human monitoring would not scale from a unit economics perspective, and even if they did that, the remote operators can't drive the car, only offer small feedbacks. So the car is really driving itself.

The safety story is an interesting one. Companies like Cruise and Waymo are not forthcoming with their incident data. They share infrequently and through spreadsheets that do not capture every incident. It's pretty ass, and I'd be wary of trusting their self-reported data. I imagine their insurance companies have slightly better data than the gov't, but even then maybe not.

> Except that they have remote humans monitoring every vehicle so the whole thing is an illusion

I think this argues the opposite of what you think it does.

Monitoring != driving and if you had humans pesudo driving, the experience would be insanely bad cuz the human would be interjecting way too much.