from Hacker News

Yes, there are more driverless Waymos in S.F

by eklitzke on 7/30/24, 4:28 PM with 55 comments

• by stopachka on 7/30/24, 5:16 PM

  I rode my first Waymo last weekend. It's _significantly_ better than an Uber. You get an almost 'white-glove' experience getting inside. Then, you have complete privacy. I could get work done in the car guilt-free. I was very surprised with the experience

• by zactato on 7/30/24, 6:39 PM

  The best thing about waymos is the screen that shows the machine vision and object identification. It sees all the cars, bikes, pedestrians, buses in a full 360 degree circle around the vehicle. It can make good predictions about what each one is doing.

  This visual makes it clear how much better it is at driving than humans. There aren't blind spots, it stops at stop signs, it doesn't dangerously speed around corners.

  Human drivers create a lot of dangers for pedestrians and cyclists in the city.

• by fishtoaster on 7/30/24, 5:04 PM

  "Waymo operates about 300 driverless cars in the city, up from the roughly 250 robotaxis it used to start commercial service last August."

  Sounds like a relatively small increase in actual cars over the last year despite a significant increase in use of those cars.

• by klooney on 7/30/24, 5:06 PM

  I wonder how far they are from profitability on a cost per ride basis. The biggest long term risk to self driving cars is probably that number being unreachable.

  The super expensive base vehicles don't help either. They need lidar hats for the Kia Forte or whatever

• by lucianbr on 7/30/24, 5:10 PM

  I am curious how much support staff this fleet has, and how much work they do. The article mentions nothing about that.

• by Jyaif on 7/30/24, 5:09 PM

  You have to read carefully the article to extract the information. This is like the opposite of journalism.

  tldr:

  * 903,000 vehicle miles traveled during commercial driverless ride-hailing in May (57% increase from April).

  * Waymo increased from 250 taxis last August to 300 in May.

  So there's almost no new taxis, the increase comes from an increased utilization of the fleet.

• by tlhunter on 7/30/24, 6:04 PM

  Waymo isn't going to revolutionize transportation until it costs less than an Uber or Lyft. Right now it's just a novell way for high salaried folks to get around or to show off when family is in town. In my experience it's been 25-50% costlier than the competition.

  Sure, there are a lot of engineers to pay, but the same applies to Uber and Lyft.