This sentence was a bit cute: "Waymo has received our pilot permit allowing for commercial operations at San Francisco International Airport." Yeah, that kind of pilot.
I really had to read through it twice to make sure they were just talking about car taxis picking up travelers, rather than some kind of prototype pilotless commuter helicopter or something.
Cool, I wonder if this means they will finally start letting foreign visitors also use the app. I'm an American living abroad now for many years, and I was initially super excited to try Waymo in LA and SF this summer when I visited with my family. Unfortunately they only make the iPhone app available via the US app store, and while I actually have a US credit card that I could have in theory used to make the switch, Apple makes it an absurd pain to change your region as they require you to both a) cancel any existing subscription AND b) wait until they all expire. Most tourists have it worse as they have no option to even switch in theory.
As a European, I can’t help but feel a bit sad that we’re missing out on the driverless side of things. It seems like most of the meaningful deployments are happening in the US (Waymo, Cruise).
I’d really like to see either a Waymo competitor emerge in Europe, or even Waymo themselves operating here. The regulatory environment is obviously more complex, but it’d be great if we didn’t end up years behind on something this transformative.
Cars of any sort, self-driving or otherwise, do not solve traffic any more than Uber does because you need to have enough of them to get everyone to and from work at basically the same time. Trains are the only way to address traffic. Trains are self-driving. Europe already has the better self-driving system. It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.
If trips that require a car are prohibitively expensive (in money, time or convenience) without owning a car, more people will own a car. Once you own a car, it's often much easier to use it for trips that you would otherwise do without a car.
Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B using a self driving car service, will reduce the number of people who own a car and thus the number of car trips.
Trains will fairly unreliably take you from one place that is not your home, to another place, which is not where you want to go, at a time that is probably not exactly when you wanted to arrive. Freedom of movement is incredibly important, and trains are very rigid in this aspect.
I think self-driving cars can still be beneficial even if they don’t help with traffic problems. They shouldn’t require so much parking in desirable areas (a separate problem cars cause), for example, and they could have a big impact on the lives of some disabled people.
As mostly a cyclist (I drive roughly 10% of my transport, the rest is biking and transit), my experience with self-driving cars is that I feel much safer riding in front of them. They're less likely to pass dangerously close to me to drive past me, they're less likely to tailgate me, they're also less likely to just drive me into the door zone, sidewalk, or a parked car. I'm a very confident cyclist but I suspect newer, more skittish cyclists would agree.
If you can restrict certain roads to autonomous cars (or heavily limit the number of non-autonomous cars) then you don't need to build as much bicycle infrastructure (a buffered lane is probably all you need, as opposed to bollards or true grade separation) and I can guarantee you more folks will feel comfortable riding bikes. This is aside from how frequently human-driven cars end up colliding with, damaging, or blocking non-grade-separated forms of transit.
> It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.
I do bike advocacy so this kind of rhetorical gotcha can make me feel good and hit the upvote button but in reality city councils and other elected officials are mostly people skeptical of the benefits of bicycling, worried that buses/trains would place too high a tax burden on their constituents, or deep down convinced in their lizard brain that Americans are too carpilled to ever do anything else. If you can change this by running for your local council, do it!
Don't get me wrong, we need more bike infrastructure and we needed it yesterday. But anything helps. I'd love to see certain corridors of SF be restricted to transit, autonomous vehicle, and cyclist usage only. Market is already only for transit and cyclists so there's precedent.
This gets brought up a lot but I think it's missing some key points.
1) Being driven around is the best transportation mode for most of the US. It's very comfortable, private, fast, and point-to-point. It stops working well at very high density, but that level of density is only seen in a few places in the US. I'd like more people to live in dense areas but for the foreseeable future self-driving vehicles are going to be the best solution for most trips in the US.
2) At very high densities it's true that cars can move fewer people per hour per 10-foot lane than other modes and so you run into congestion. But that's measured with the current vehicle fleet and human drivers. With high autonomous vehicle penetration you could implement congestion pricing that encourages high throughput vehicle design. That means private vehicles that are much much smaller (think Isetta-like design) that can follow at very short distances. Along with the elimination of on-street parking we could see a many-fold increase in road throughput.
3) At even higher density levels the same congestion pricing mechanism would encourage people to use microbuses that would operate similarly to Uber Pool. Compared to today's busses they would have equal or greater throughput, be point-to-point or nearly point-to-point, dynamically routed, cheaper to operate and faster.
4) At the very highest density levels it's true that nothing can match the throughput of the subway. As others have mentioned, AVs are a great way to connect people to the subway. Many trips intersect with the highest density urban core for only a fraction of the journey. More people would take the subway if they knew they could get to and from the stations easily and quickly. AVs let you mix-and-match transport modes more easily.
Cities should start engaging with vehicle manufacturers to start getting these high density vehicle designs worked on and figure out the congestion pricing mechanism to properly incentive their rollout.
Bicycles are another way to address traffic, because they take up so little room and can be essentially free and often more convenient for shorter trips. Of course that means you have to have bicycle infrastructure where you don't have to run serious risks to your life every 3-5 minutes during your journey.
Trains are not panacea some people here keep thinking they are. You would need to have train stops every few hundred meters changing it into some city subway or tram, interconnected with dense and fast local public transport.
I live in Switzerland, the place for trains, efficiency and its small and dense, an ideal situation right. Tons of people use trains every day, tons of people also bike for closer distances in good warmish weather but still highways are chock full and getting fuller every year. Public transport for out-of-city commuters is simply slower, often much slower.
This morning I was considering taking a motorbike to a train station that is 5km away, then 40 mins trains and 10 minute walk to work. I took the car instead for a change, I was faster despite having to cross the very center of bottlenecked and car-hostile big city (Geneva) in top rush hour. 65 mins door-to-door via public transport vs 45 in car. That's one way, meaning 40 minutes of my private life daily saved that I can spend ie with my kids and not staring in the phone or out of window.
Normally I take the motorbike if weather permits, if not I take the public bus to the train, adding additional 15 minutes each way. That sucks pretty badly. I doubt other countries have this figured out better, and not everybody can or wants to live in city centers, especially when raising small kids. We did it for 10 years, had a work commute of 5mins via escooter, but I rather have current commute and live and raise kids in small commune next to wild forest and vineyards than that.
All above is usually much worse in many parts of US.
Trains still don't solve last mile transport for most people (even in places with robust transit systems)
Self driving cars might not solve traffic problems but they could greatly reduce them. Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.
Do I really care about traffic if I’m not the one driving in it? I guess if you’re looking at highly disproportionate delays but I really wouldn’t care about traffic otherwise.
I disagree that self-driving won't reduce traffic, at least from the perspective a Virginia resident. Commuting into D.C. is in theory very quick, except for when there are crashes. Crashes double the commute time, and there's _always_ a crash. This is pretty much the only source of traffic in my area. I think the primary benefit of self-driving would be lowering the crash rate, and as a side effect traffic.
Cars as a shared service (shuttles, Uber, Waymo) absolutely solve traffic compared to personal vehicles. Shared cars have much higher utilization and require a lot less space.
I agree that trains are a fantastic way to move large groups of people, but a world with more shared cars (which may be brought about faster with Waymo) is a good thing for most cities.
They replace taxis and potentially postal and trucking applications in future.
It’s certainly not a replacement for mass transit. US is sparsely populated compared to Europe and mass transit don’t work as well in the suburbia. That said, I do see many transit oriented development in SF Bay Area where high density buildings are being built near transit stations.
The elephant in the room is rideshare commuting is for extremely rich people. Who else can afford the probably $75+ a day it costs on a two way commute?
Yes, driverless does not solve any real problem. When I come from work, I still have to sit in a car. Yes, I can work instead of drive, but that's only in theory because in practice the G-forces won't allow me to.
A robot cook, however, __would__ solve a practical problem for me.
Anyway, this whole approach is not even solving first-world problems (many families struggle to pay for a car), but it's solving the upper-1% of first-world problems, maybe. Except those people can afford to pay drivers who are now out of a job. So yes, what is this even solving??
USA is huge.
This is happening in a small part of the USA in a very limited fashion.
It's not like the USA has driverless cars everywhere, 99.9% of the population never saw one.
I'd guess Waymo covers 5% now. San Francisco, San Jose, Los Angeles, Austin, and Phoenix are ~10% of US population. Waymo service areas don't cover all of those cities.
Considering tourism and people living just outside service areas who see them but don't get to use them (which includes me sadly) I would not be surprised if 10% of population had seen at least one.
>pilots of self-driving taxi- and bus-like services will be brought forward by a year to spring 2026, attracting investment and making the UK one of the world leaders in this technology
European cities have lots of taxis. Same with Asian cities. They will obviously have AVs in the future. I'm not sure why you think they should be mutually exclusive with transit.
Many American cities don't have the population density to make metros and trams economically viable. And those few cities that do have comparable density (New York, Chicago, namely) do have metros.
Public infrastructure has high overhead costs, and low population density means there isn't enough ridership to make it viable.
American public transit construction costs are now ridiculous in terms of both money and political capital. Even somewhere as sprawled as San Jose now requires well over 1b/mi to build a subway under; BART could've acquired an entire autonomous driving company for the cost of the Silicon Valley extension.
> I’d really like to see either a Waymo competitor emerge in Europe, or even Waymo themselves operating here
I think you’ll see American and Chinese self-driving kit in Europe once it matures. It’s just easier to iterate at home, so while the technology advances that’s where it will be.
What do you think degrowth and decline means? Vibes and essays?
It's not just driverless cars either - delivery drones (e.g. in China), a lot of health tech (as they have more check-ups in the USA), Starlink, Neuralink, a space programme, etc.
I think navigating European roads is a massive step more difficult than US cities. They've got wide lanes and a really strict grid layout generally. At least in the European cities I'm familiar with we have much narrower lanes, residential areas with parking turning 2 lanes into 1, old towns, and layouts that are completely unpredictable. Maybe I'm wrong but I think this is the bigger hurdle than regulation.
Maybe there just not enough interest? After all there is good public transportation (especially rail), increasing biking habits and just loving the driving experience.
In Switzerland the Airport has 28 trains per hour that connect it directly to almost every part of the country. In addition to that there is a tram line and many bus lanes.
But I guess in SF they can take a taxi that might be a little cheaper because the company operating it is fine with losing 100s of millions a year.
I don’t think wages in europe are high enough to sustain this model business very well. When you track waymo deployment its in placed where plenty of high income price insensitive people are to be found.
I feel the opposite. Self driving cars seem like a meme because driving is fun and trains are better. If either of those premises is not true in your geolocation then self driving is not the solution either.
One thing you are missing out on: mandatory loud (97 to 112 db) 1000 Hz audible beep when the vehicle reversing, oh so slowly, such as at the recharging station. Also, constant shop vac five horsepower vacuum cleaner sound. BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM
Oh wait, you thought those would be in the middle of nowhere? Nope.
It is not mandatory that backup alarms be 97 to 112 db. They only need to be "above the surrounding noise level". The loud beeping alarms were installed on most vehicles because most of them operated at loud constructions sites, so needed to be louder than that. it was easier to just buy the loud model to CYA, even if it was a delivery truck. They also don't need to 1000 Hz or to actually beep. White noise backup alarms are allowed, and in use in many delivery trucks now, and make a sound attenuated above 4000 Hz, which is much more localized and dissipates over much shorter distances. Waymo could absolutely have installed 85dB white noise alarms but chose to install 112dB beeping alarms. This is not a regulation problem.
Don't worry, we're missing out on a lot of "progress" on this side of the ocean thanks to Trump's dislike of wind farms and RFK Jr's whole anti-vaxxer thing
I'm surprised and incredibly impressed at this announcement. It seems trivial, but the general feeling in the industry has been that SF would fight tooth and nail against robotaxis at SFO.
Most likely both agreements had been in negotiations for a while and not something they just pulled together last week in response to SJC, although it's possibly they could have used it as leverage (hey we've talking to SJC ...)
Recent changes in the composition of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (i.e. Peskin being out of government) may have something to do with it being easier than expected.
The setup at SFO is currently quite annoying (Lyft/Uber require you to walk 5 mins to the garage roof, and drivers need to park/wait 5-10 mins away, so there's always a substantial delay). Taxis get the privileged parking spot immediately outside arrivals, but if it's busy you might still need to wait a bit.
I've been wondering for a while why Waymo can't offer a semi-managed solution to SFO to dynamically manage load, have just the right volume of cars inbound, maximize parking utilization, etc. with all of the nice intelligence that an app-based system would enable.
It feels like you should be able to have a buffer of cars waiting right at the curbside, and automatically refill that buffer on short notice depending on observed or predicted demand.
As an Uber rider, I actually love the SFO setup. The walk is short enough, there's actually enough space even during most busy times that there's no crazy honking of drivers trying to get in or out of the pickup zone.
Compare that to the mess that is Uber pickups at JFK, where you have big delays _and_ very poor traffic controls in and out of the pickup zones.
>I've been wondering for a while why Waymo can't offer a semi-managed solution to SFO to dynamically manage load, have just the right volume of cars inbound, maximize parking utilization, etc. with all of the nice intelligence that an app-based system would enable.
Uber could in theory do all those same things too, right?
To some extent, but I think it’s easier to have fully automated buffering if you physically control the cars. Eg you can have backup vehicles parked indefinitely nearby if you want, whereas there will always be some unpredictable churn from human drivers eg unexpectedly clocking off.
No idea if these are first-order effects in practice.
counter point, I love the taxi setup, I wander out, no pre-planning, walk across the street with my headpones on and get in a car, my company pays for it. I suually pay more on uber or lyft, and it's faster and I don't do anything but walk from the plane to the car
I did this in Eastern Europe one time, ended up being made to pay 60€ for a ride that's 10€ on a ridesharing app (even with the "licensed taxi" option...) When there's reasonable price controls it is convenient though
Waymo got approval for SJC last week. That probably accelerated approval for SFO, which had been stalling. Nice.
When they get clearance to drop people off at the main terminals, that will be more convenient. Pickup at the terminals is harder. There will be a need for a staging area somewhere in the parking structures.
Few major airports I've been to allow Uber/Lyft anywhere near the pickup area, so many fliers are already accustomed to walking a quarter mile or so to their rideshare. But their inability to use the drop-off area is a new inconvenience, and I can see it limiting the appeal.
Waymo will probably get access to the drop-off area after a while. One step at a time seems to be the Waymo way.
Waymo at airports could work really well with automatic dispatching. They already have an app running in the customer's phone. It should be aware of when someone with a reservation gets off an airplane, and how close they're getting to the pickup point. With good coordination, as the customer heads to the arrival lanes, a Waymo pulls out of short-term parking and heads for the meeting point.
A few more years, and humanoid robots will put the luggage in the trunk.
It’s wild that $goog is so undervalued (p/e 27) given Alphabet owns Waymo in addition to everything else, and yet Tesla is so overvalued (p/e 243!!!) despite zero Robotaxis in the near (or far) future and lackluster sales.
Goes to show empty promises and fraudulent showmanship sell better than actual working products that people use.
GOOGL is up like 25% over the last few weeks after they resolved the DoJ lawsuit about Search bundling. Clearly there were some investors who thought that was a material risk to the business.
Tesla is clearly a meme stock though, and an example of how the market can say irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
If you buy Alphabet stock you're betting on the whole company doing well.
Google makes around $300B a year. Uber's entire business makes around $50B and that took a decade. Waymo would have to become a major business to move Alphabet's stock price in the near term.
Considering Waymo is very likely losing money, experiment very slowly with scaling up, and still raising billions in private capital outside Google... idk. Doesn't seem as simple as buy $goog in 2025.
I think Waymo has huge potential for being much larger than Uber - people are willing to pay more compared to ordinary uber drive just to avoid dealing with taxi drivers and tech will only get cheaper.
Don’t forget that Waymo will always be a much lower margin business than search! Setting aside the decades of R&D expense, those cars require purchasing, maintenance, warehousing, etc.
I don’t think Waymo is very likely a losing money experiment. I give them a 50% chance to be successful within the next 10 years. Successful being that self-driving cars are able to operate in 50% of the world/terrain types/region types, probably within another 10 years to scale up.
Uber making 50B, probably means Uber is paying drivers around 200B or higher. So that is Waymo’s potential revenue in the long term as it releases in most ride share markets. I think it’s under 1B revenue now, which just shows how much growth ahead is possible. Even if we think Uber will be at least 50% market share in the coming decade, at least 100X growth is left for Waymo. This also completely ignores Waymo creating latent demand, which is wholly possible. I would for example trust a Waymo to drop my kids everyday over an Uber.
but if they're google's products how would they cannabalize ads biz. would revenue not just shift? or do you believe ai search will be overly adopted but not as profitable?
I believe TSLA also represents their humanoid robot segment with some questionable addressable market definitions done by investment analysts. I believe it’s overvalued but they are a forcing function for the other tech companies to push ahead
Waymo is a small portion of Alphabets business, while cars are a massive portion of Tesla's. If waymo was seperated out from Alphabet maybe it's p/E would be that high.
Because some people read beyond headlines and realize that Tesla will most likely dominate with Robotaxi. Their traditional consumer vehicle revenue could pale in comparison. And Optimus could be another order of magnitude larger.
That’s the optimistic bull case. It’s not impossible.
Tesla will be able to scale Robotaxi much quicker than Waymo can scale.
Why? In principle the basic Waymo technology could be adapted to work on any modern vehicle. They aren't dependent on Jaguar manufacturing capacity to scale up.
Overvalued by traditional (PE) means. I've ridden in Waymo (50+) and Austin Robotaxis (12). Tesla has Waymo beat in terms of human-like feel, interior features (sync to your own Spotify, Youtube, etc). When Tesla removes the passenger seat monitor, scaling will happen much faster than Waymo... Tesla just received the initial license for driverless Robotaxi in Nevada. Tesla also produces more Robotaxi-capable Model Ys in ~6 hours as Waymo has cars in service (in total).
Tesla's self-driving technology is a joke compared to Waymo's and the Tesla brand is extremely toxic now. I see from your other comments that you're big on Tesla (own several and have a son who works there) but as an unbiased observer I cannot fathom them winning this market.
I drove for Uber/Lyft back in 2020 and let me tell you, SFO is a nightmare. I missed a turn once and had a passenger trying to make a flight furious at me. I quickly figured out there were a group of drivers who specialized in SFO and amatuers like me should avoid the place. When Waymo announced San Jose I thought ok, that makes sense because SJC is easy, but SFO? Wow, I'm impressed. I hope it goes to plan.
Nothing more rewarding than a company working hard and seeing real-world, first of its kind results in action. Makes me feel giddy about a company again like peak tech back in the 2010 era.
Congrats to the Waymo team, I’m sure this was a huge milestone internally.
Readit News
I really had to read through it twice to make sure they were just talking about car taxis picking up travelers, rather than some kind of prototype pilotless commuter helicopter or something.
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I’d really like to see either a Waymo competitor emerge in Europe, or even Waymo themselves operating here. The regulatory environment is obviously more complex, but it’d be great if we didn’t end up years behind on something this transformative.
Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B using a self driving car service, will reduce the number of people who own a car and thus the number of car trips.
Trains are all very well but they've been around nearly 200 years and have yet to bring on a traffic free utopia.
If you can restrict certain roads to autonomous cars (or heavily limit the number of non-autonomous cars) then you don't need to build as much bicycle infrastructure (a buffered lane is probably all you need, as opposed to bollards or true grade separation) and I can guarantee you more folks will feel comfortable riding bikes. This is aside from how frequently human-driven cars end up colliding with, damaging, or blocking non-grade-separated forms of transit.
> It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.
I do bike advocacy so this kind of rhetorical gotcha can make me feel good and hit the upvote button but in reality city councils and other elected officials are mostly people skeptical of the benefits of bicycling, worried that buses/trains would place too high a tax burden on their constituents, or deep down convinced in their lizard brain that Americans are too carpilled to ever do anything else. If you can change this by running for your local council, do it!
Don't get me wrong, we need more bike infrastructure and we needed it yesterday. But anything helps. I'd love to see certain corridors of SF be restricted to transit, autonomous vehicle, and cyclist usage only. Market is already only for transit and cyclists so there's precedent.
1) Being driven around is the best transportation mode for most of the US. It's very comfortable, private, fast, and point-to-point. It stops working well at very high density, but that level of density is only seen in a few places in the US. I'd like more people to live in dense areas but for the foreseeable future self-driving vehicles are going to be the best solution for most trips in the US.
2) At very high densities it's true that cars can move fewer people per hour per 10-foot lane than other modes and so you run into congestion. But that's measured with the current vehicle fleet and human drivers. With high autonomous vehicle penetration you could implement congestion pricing that encourages high throughput vehicle design. That means private vehicles that are much much smaller (think Isetta-like design) that can follow at very short distances. Along with the elimination of on-street parking we could see a many-fold increase in road throughput.
3) At even higher density levels the same congestion pricing mechanism would encourage people to use microbuses that would operate similarly to Uber Pool. Compared to today's busses they would have equal or greater throughput, be point-to-point or nearly point-to-point, dynamically routed, cheaper to operate and faster.
4) At the very highest density levels it's true that nothing can match the throughput of the subway. As others have mentioned, AVs are a great way to connect people to the subway. Many trips intersect with the highest density urban core for only a fraction of the journey. More people would take the subway if they knew they could get to and from the stations easily and quickly. AVs let you mix-and-match transport modes more easily.
Cities should start engaging with vehicle manufacturers to start getting these high density vehicle designs worked on and figure out the congestion pricing mechanism to properly incentive their rollout.
I live in Switzerland, the place for trains, efficiency and its small and dense, an ideal situation right. Tons of people use trains every day, tons of people also bike for closer distances in good warmish weather but still highways are chock full and getting fuller every year. Public transport for out-of-city commuters is simply slower, often much slower.
This morning I was considering taking a motorbike to a train station that is 5km away, then 40 mins trains and 10 minute walk to work. I took the car instead for a change, I was faster despite having to cross the very center of bottlenecked and car-hostile big city (Geneva) in top rush hour. 65 mins door-to-door via public transport vs 45 in car. That's one way, meaning 40 minutes of my private life daily saved that I can spend ie with my kids and not staring in the phone or out of window.
Normally I take the motorbike if weather permits, if not I take the public bus to the train, adding additional 15 minutes each way. That sucks pretty badly. I doubt other countries have this figured out better, and not everybody can or wants to live in city centers, especially when raising small kids. We did it for 10 years, had a work commute of 5mins via escooter, but I rather have current commute and live and raise kids in small commune next to wild forest and vineyards than that.
All above is usually much worse in many parts of US.
- The trains often aren't running (and there may not be the volume of passengers to justify running them)
- The road are empty so traffic isn't really an issue
Self driving cars might not solve traffic problems but they could greatly reduce them. Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.
Well, I'm in Europe and it ain't here. Waymo can't get here fast enough.
Cars as a shared service (shuttles, Uber, Waymo) absolutely solve traffic compared to personal vehicles. Shared cars have much higher utilization and require a lot less space.
I agree that trains are a fantastic way to move large groups of people, but a world with more shared cars (which may be brought about faster with Waymo) is a good thing for most cities.
It’s certainly not a replacement for mass transit. US is sparsely populated compared to Europe and mass transit don’t work as well in the suburbia. That said, I do see many transit oriented development in SF Bay Area where high density buildings are being built near transit stations.
And how do you get to the train when it's too far to walk and you're not a cyclist?
A robot cook, however, __would__ solve a practical problem for me.
Anyway, this whole approach is not even solving first-world problems (many families struggle to pay for a car), but it's solving the upper-1% of first-world problems, maybe. Except those people can afford to pay drivers who are now out of a job. So yes, what is this even solving??
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Moia (Volkswagen) in Hamburg https://www.moia.io/en
Mercedes autonomous driving https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovations/product-innovati...
There's some self driving tech being developed in Europe, but AFAIK nothing is at the current deployment level of Zoox or Aurora, let alone Waymo.
Considering tourism and people living just outside service areas who see them but don't get to use them (which includes me sadly) I would not be surprised if 10% of population had seen at least one.
Europe could do the same but they have other priorities.
0. https://restofworld.org/2025/robotaxi-waymo-apollo-go/
>pilots of self-driving taxi- and bus-like services will be brought forward by a year to spring 2026, attracting investment and making the UK one of the world leaders in this technology
Waymo (though a technical marvel) is a bandaid over our inability to build and maintain public infrastructure. Be sure to cherish what you’ve got.
Public infrastructure has high overhead costs, and low population density means there isn't enough ridership to make it viable.
You must realize that, at some point, self-driving cars will be ubiquitous. Maybe not for 50 years, but they will be.
What you’re actually saying is “I’m virtue-signaling with Europe because that’s what the cool kids do”
Subways don’t solve last-mile problems or trucking.
I think you’ll see American and Chinese self-driving kit in Europe once it matures. It’s just easier to iterate at home, so while the technology advances that’s where it will be.
It's not just driverless cars either - delivery drones (e.g. in China), a lot of health tech (as they have more check-ups in the USA), Starlink, Neuralink, a space programme, etc.
I don't know about other countries, but Spain will probably be one of the last ones to get it, thanks to the Uber-powerful (heh) taxi driver lobby
But I guess in SF they can take a taxi that might be a little cheaper because the company operating it is fine with losing 100s of millions a year.
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My personal use of a car has declined pretty dramatically the past few years. Trains are pretty good here in the UK.
Because they are.
Across Europe you can randomly encounter a major town with a taxi cartel still blocking rideshares, as if its 2012
Oh wait, you thought those would be in the middle of nowhere? Nope.
https://www.karmactive.com/waymo-charging-noise-blasts-112-d...
https://x.com/agarwal/status/1966365908085125384
I've been wondering for a while why Waymo can't offer a semi-managed solution to SFO to dynamically manage load, have just the right volume of cars inbound, maximize parking utilization, etc. with all of the nice intelligence that an app-based system would enable.
It feels like you should be able to have a buffer of cars waiting right at the curbside, and automatically refill that buffer on short notice depending on observed or predicted demand.
Compare that to the mess that is Uber pickups at JFK, where you have big delays _and_ very poor traffic controls in and out of the pickup zones.
Uber could in theory do all those same things too, right?
No idea if these are first-order effects in practice.
When they get clearance to drop people off at the main terminals, that will be more convenient. Pickup at the terminals is harder. There will be a need for a staging area somewhere in the parking structures.
Waymo at airports could work really well with automatic dispatching. They already have an app running in the customer's phone. It should be aware of when someone with a reservation gets off an airplane, and how close they're getting to the pickup point. With good coordination, as the customer heads to the arrival lanes, a Waymo pulls out of short-term parking and heads for the meeting point.
A few more years, and humanoid robots will put the luggage in the trunk.
Few major airports have Waymo at all. Phoenix has allowed pick-up at the airport for ages. (EDIT: Never mind.)
Goes to show empty promises and fraudulent showmanship sell better than actual working products that people use.
Tesla is clearly a meme stock though, and an example of how the market can say irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Google makes around $300B a year. Uber's entire business makes around $50B and that took a decade. Waymo would have to become a major business to move Alphabet's stock price in the near term.
Considering Waymo is very likely losing money, experiment very slowly with scaling up, and still raising billions in private capital outside Google... idk. Doesn't seem as simple as buy $goog in 2025.
Otherwise I agree Tesla is a bit of a meme stock.
If Waymo is a rounding error to GOOG, it's basically a rounding error to Tesla's implied valuation.
So what is Tesla valued in then?
Clearly not car sales, profit, and especially growth in either of those segments.
xAI is supposed to be where all the AI is.
Where is it?
Meanwhile, for Waymo, a good chunk of it is profit (after the fixed cost of the vehicle, of course).
If you get a great deal on your house and then massively overpay for some avocados, the latter's going to barely move your overall wealth.
If I create a shuttle bus service for my neighborhood and call it the "Space Shuttle", I am not operating a space shuttle.
And only last week did they even open up the waitlist to non-influencers.
That’s the optimistic bull case. It’s not impossible.
Tesla will be able to scale Robotaxi much quicker than Waymo can scale.
This is a huge jump, possibly still 5+ years away.
They literally moved that monitor to the driver's seat! Progress, indeed.
Congrats to the Waymo team, I’m sure this was a huge milestone internally.