Waymo One is now open to everyone in San Francisco

I highly recommend everyone try it out if you're in SF. It's an incredibly smooth and sure ride. The cars are really nice too (Jaguar I-Pace electric cars), clean and spacious.

The first time you ride in one, it feels truly sci-fi. But within 5 minutes, you're almost bored of it - that's how good it is. If I had to choose between an Uber of questionable cleanliness and driver temperament and a Waymo with a slightly longer wait and slightly more fare, I'd choose the Waymo every time.

(I have no affiliation with Waymo, Google or any related industry - it's just an amazing service!)

Living here for the last 10 years, it's been jarring how just in the last few years, driverless taxis went from "it'll never happen" to "is this the default now?"

The Waymos are genuinely good drivers. I look forward to taking them every time.

Genuine question ->

- Elon (and his pro-analysts) heavily weight the future of the co's valuation on their ability to deploy a taxi network and has been promising it just around corner for years

- Alphabet via Waymo seems to have "solved" robotaxis for city-proximity driving and has deployed as a business.

Beyond the obvious "reality distortion field" argument is Tesla actually in a position to win here due to their manufacturing capability / current deployment of Tesla's?

Disclaimer - I am an Alphabet & Tesla shareholder

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Add freeways and airport rides, both of which they are very close to doing, Waymo will become much more of a complete service and a true Uber/Lyft replacement.

In a year's time, we could genuinely see them operating at scale in 6-8 major cities (SF, Phoenix, LA, Austin and new cities), especially with their new dedicated robotaxi from Zeekr. A possible hold up would be China import tariffs imposed by the US government.

This is both amazing and horrifying. I'm actually confident this automation will save lives. Well of course any system can fail, Uber drivers are often distracted by 30 things, they're fiddling with the app, on personal calls, while navigating tricky traffic situations.

However I predict within a decade or so we're going to get to a point where gig work is no longer feasible. It'll take a bit of trickery, but I'm sure you could have restaurants opt in to putting their own food in the backseat of these. And then as a consumer you would just get your own food from the car .

So think about every delivery driver, and every Uber driver, and many other gig workers. All of these people are going to be out of work very soon. Plus tons of creatives will be replaced by AI. AI will reduce the need for junior software engineers .

I don't think the modern economy is ready for this. If I had one wish, it would be to at least decouple employment from health care. As is, let's say you have a serious illness that requires you to resign or otherwise not have employment for an extended period of time. You're now stuck with a serious illness and no health care. Depending on the state unless you're a child or parent you're not qualifying for Medicare period.

Has anyone figured out, who exactly gets sued when one of these Waymo's hits someone.

Couple of anecdotal data points from a new rider. Here's the first time rider spiel they give you [1]. Overall experience is pretty polished. It's handled some tricky situations with confidence like this left hand turn from a two way stop on the inside of a blind curve [2]. Then other times it drives like the most cautious newbie driver. Maybe it didn't like me being so closed to the road, but this time it awkwardly failed to pull close enough on pickup [3]. Definitely got some stink eye from drivers trying to squeeze by.

[1] https://photos.app.goo.gl/apNmS7JNbQ4Cau8dA

[2] https://photos.app.goo.gl/JdUYkTYkJJZYmUt99

[3] https://photos.app.goo.gl/USvznpWqRrY3fnqL9

While it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to human driven taxis, it’s remarkable that Waymo will like reach 50 million passenger only miles this year. And will surpass 100 million passenger only miles sometime in 2025.

With that much data the safety case should become very clear.

I remember almost 10 years ago, maybe 8 i first saw one of these up in the city. It was parked and the technician was outside of it with an ipad, and i happened to strike up a conversation with the gentleman. I was just curious and at first he was remarkably cagey, i was quite confused and just continued to be friendly and express hope for the projects success and for automation in general.

I got the feeling that man had been accosted many times by angry locals and I may have been the first to give a word of encouragement, he was very polite after the initial tension wore away and he felt my shared enthusiasm. He must have been one of the early engineers, I had never seen or heard the name waymo but I was aware google had been competing in the level 1/2 dessert tests.

The man was very friendly and i was surprised how his behavior must be a reflection of society's view towards technical automation. Seeing the videos of people kicking food delivery robots and now my own tendency to flip off elon musks tesla cameras all these years later I am starting to get why he was nervous.

Cheers to the future I suppose, but hopefully the future has less cars and more walkable cities.

Can they drive over steam yet? https://www.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1dm3cqf/se...

This is so so huge and one where a tech ten years ago had an incredible interest and since then the companies started folding and only waymo survived. That's vision..10x

Do these need a significant amount of local infrastructure (parking, charging, etc) specific to Waymo that would make them moving into a new city (Austin is next) a big investment? Like will there need to be a big Waymo fleet center/office built in each city?

I'm not sure if these park and someone plugs them in or what, who maintains the actual Jaguars, etc.

Can't wait to never have to drive a car again.

I'm always struct by how much more slowly driverless cars has been deployed than what I expected when the first won the darpa grand challenge. I guess I understand the need for caution. By the time this goes nationwide, I expect it will be pretty damned solid.

For anyone else curious about the exact service area: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en

I haven't taken a ride in one of those yet, what does it feel like?

The big hope to me is the idea of cheap, cheap rides due to the lack of labor expenses, tipping and eventually gas. I don't see how that happens if there isn't competition, but I don't see how it doesn't happen if there are competing companies that can offer a similar service.

You can definitely feel the fear from Tesla's competition recently, just ahead of Tesla's robotaxi unveil on 8/8 :)

* Uber CEO dumps $70 million of shares this week

* Google tries to steal the Tesla's media thunder by opening Waymo to everyone

* GM brings in new leadership to revitalize Cruise

* Rivian gets a huge cash injection

Does Uber regret shutting down its autonomous efforts? The problem has emerged as a tractable one. Or were they just too far behind and the capital expenditures too high to even remotely consider continuing? Does Uber exist in ten years?

How long before you have to stop and spend 5 minutes in a store on your route? Google is an advertising business, and can now literally drive traffic to your store.

Does this mean the self-driving cars are finally here?

Where next?

How much do these cost? Is it cheaper then uber/lyft, taxis? Muni? That would be pretty crazy

The app is not available in my region (EU). But I visit SF from time to time. What should I do?

Let the robotaxi wars begin!

i drove for uber around 7 years ago. it was the first time that i experienced first-hand a mass delusion. more on that later though. at the time i had just read the first samples of GTP output from openai and i immediately understood that we were probably going to experience an explosion of AI progress. and it weighed on me because i was afraid that the economic disruption caused by the resulting automation would ruin my life. i remember sitting in my car thinking that its completely pointless because they are just going to automate ubers… so today is a funny day for me because this really is the death of human uber drivers in SF, even if generative AI isnt at play here. that day has come where people who need a job to tide them over for a few years wont be able to drive ubers. one less option.

driving an uber costs about 20 cents per mile accounting for everything including gas, maintenance, replacement, insurance. including tips you are often paid around a dollar per mile. its just dead simple math. the idea that ubers lose money is a mass delusion fueled by outrage culture, echo chambers and the media. i made tons of money doing it. im screaming into the void and it wont change anyones mind

I dont get why anyone cheers shit like this. It just takes jobs away from more people. You will just get more homeless and drug addicted people. And more rich techies. And it will make no difference to the rider - they get where they need to be either way. It's just another bit wealth transfer from poor to rich. Yet this is cheered.

What are the odds. I'm in SF this week for work and joined the waitlist last night. lol.

They solved the wrong problem. I still have to sit in a car for 30 minutes after work. If instead they made a robotic chef cook, that would actually save me 30 minutes every day.

I can't imagine this turning out well if there is any social media movement around these cars. It's reminding me of that one robot travelling across the country which ended up getting destroyed by some people.

Comments are really underestimating Tesla FSD in here. As an owner and user of FSD, it's scary how quickly their new Neural Net version is improving. There's a reason Elon and other internal Tesla engineers are so bullish on it, they've seen the data on 12.5 and beyond. Once their 100,000 GPU cluster is complete this year, how many iterations until FSD is comparable to Waymo? One year? Maybe 3 years?

The reason Waymo should be worried is because once FSD hits that "crossing", a flick of a switch at Tesla and 3-8 million robo taxis could hit the market all at once. For comparison, Waymo has around 1,000 cars.

It's cool what Waymo's doing, but as an actual FSD user it's plainly obvious "vision only" will work, which does not bode well for all the other car companies + waymo.

Is much known about the science behind Waymo? I am impressed that the cars can operate autonomously in real life when I see them around me. At the same time, they have an enormous number of sensors like multiple spinning LIDARs (?). I also read that they have to map everything ahead of time to be able to operate in an area. That seems a bit like cheating to me. It may work and may even be valuable to customers, but it doesn’t seem like as big a breakthrough as achieving autonomy with the same sensors as humans.