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!)

What do you think comes next? 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.

I'd be curious to know how this monitoring scales over time.

I’m not sure how you could make that work. People that eat Indian food step in and it might get set off, so people will cry racism. You drive next to a particular industrial plant, etc..

Unsupervised in the sense that there's no driver there to clean the car when it gets dirty. At the same time, presumably part of the odor of an uber comes from the driver, so that helps. I wonder if waymos roll down the window (weather permitting) between riders, to air it out. Might be dangerous at a red light, since people could throw stuff in or even dive in through open windows.

Why do you think they need to? These cars go to a centralize location every night, I would assume, and cleaning at scale can happen. How often do you think an Uber driver cleans their car in comparison?

The main problem with Uber/taxi quality is that the responsibility for cleanliness is on individual drivers, with widely varying results as a natural outcome. In fact a lot of problems with Ubers and taxis is downstream from the ownership and responsibility model.

The advantage of something like Waymo is that the responsibility is now on Waymo itself.

Worth noting that this is a problem in other lines of business: it's harder to ensure quality in franchises vs. stores operated directly by the brand. The more independent parties you have in the mix the more incentives become misaligned and the fewer levers you have available to ensure compliance to some standard.

This also isn't impossible to solve with human drivers, because ultimately this isn't a technological problem but an organizational one. Livery car services where drivers are employees (as opposed to independent owner-operators contractors) can centralize cleaning and training, and have more means to ensure compliance to a standard.

The "downside" of such a model is that there are many more laws to ensure you can't shovel your own expenses onto the employee.

What do you think is more likely to get vandalized - a room with a human sitting in it, or a room with a camera watching it?

I worked as a house attendant in an upscale hotel for years. Let me tell you from experience: a shockingly high percentage of people trash and damage their rooms. Not the majority, but enough to keep staff busy every day.

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.

Quickly going through CCTV footage from a ride to catch "unusual things" takes much less time than driving. Even if somebody had to watch the entire ride at 1x speed and just one ride at a time, there's no need to do it when the car is idle or driving to pick up the next passenger. You can also hire a lot less watchers than you have drivers, because a surge in demand in one city can be serviced by watchers in many other cities. There's no need for night shifts either, you can make everybody work 9-to-5 in whatever timezone they're at.

This problem is orthogonal to selfdriving.

I know, I know. We can dream.

"We collect usage data that includes trip history, buttons or links you click on our mobile app, in-vehicle interfaces, wait times for our vehicles, and other actions you take with our products and services"

"We collect information about your location in a few different ways. When you take a trip, we collect the pickup and drop-off location and details about the vehicle’s route."

"We may also use your information to personalize services, advertisements, content, and features, communicate with you including marketing (which you can opt out of), service, and account messages, or communicate other information we think will be of interest to you "

"We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active."

"Waymo will not disclose your personal information with a third party unless one of the following applies: ...

- We're involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale or transfer of some or all of our assets

- In some cases to help us tailor ads and offers to your interests as detailed in the U.S. state law requirements section

- Comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request ... "

https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840#zippy=%2Cinf...

You joke, but I've heard more than one argument about how self-driving cars will drastically improve traffic because, for inter-city travel, they will be able to drive very close together on the highway in a long convoy, leaving almost no space between cars...

If you're driving long distance, you get the advantages of a train, but door-to-door, with no scheduling conflicts and no egregious stop times. If your destination is 5 minutes away, it's still a car.

Leaving proper gaps (which next to nobody reading this will be familiar with!) allows for cars to cross, or even merge.

So, what you are asserting and that cannot be true at the same time. So, my conclusion is that whatever you think you know here is probably wrong.

As for people that recently got their drivers license. I'm pretty sure that demographic is over-represented in the statistics of who drives the least safely, traffic fatalities, etc. Also insurers and rental car agencies have policies that reflect those cold, hard statistics. It will be interesting to see what they do when level 5 starts happening (probably sooner rather than later). My guess is that they'll charge people extra for the privilege of taking control of the car as they are far more likely to damage the vehicle and otherwise cause trouble.

And obviously one of the points Waymo is trying to make with their press release is that they are already safer. It's a press release of course and not the same as cold hard facts. And you make a fair point about self reporting. But it suggests the obvious notion that computers are getting pretty good at not crashing into stuff (or people). I find that entirely unsurprising, BTW. It does not seem like a particularly hard problem.

When that driver is sober and alert and paying attention. Which I'm sure is at least 90% of the time.

If I'm coming back from a party, or an ER visit, or being 95 years old, I may not be in that 90%.

one waymo was perfect, the other ran a red light then stopped in the intersection diagonally across two lanes of traffic until the light turned green. didn't endanger anyone but felt awkward!

on the cab ride to SFO my driver kept falling asleep and veering into the next lane, i tried talking with him to keep him awake but it was clear he'd been driving all morning and was exhausted.

the cab ride from memphis international was interesting, the cab was falling apart, driver was nice but he tried to convert me to christianity for the last ten minutes of the ride.

the waymos will end up safer but totally devoid of character.

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.

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.

I’m sure the account agreement is going to require you to to accept being charged egregious bills for damaging or dirty-ing the cabin

The keyword there being "some". If an account is tied to the person, recourse for negligent/malicious behavior can be applied, but that only works if there's an account to add the penalty to.

On Waymo's part, requiring an account to use the service would be in the benefit of the service as a whole.

At some point, the people who tent to leave a mess in Waymos just... won't be allowed to ride in Waymos any more.

Starting to sound a bit like a credit system or some other dystopian shit show. You do something dumb, drunk while in college and you're cut off...sounds amazing.

But for some people, a fine is just the cost of doing the thing. And for every bad actor you ban, there's another bad actor willing to take their place.

Sure you can pay in cash at the end if you want.

But you can't get a room in the first place without a credit card, even if they never charge it.

(I mean I'm sure there are some exceptions somewhere, but generally speaking, no, cash isn't sufficient.)

A friend of mine works night audit in a rough part of the valley. As soon as he says the magic words 'we require a major credit card or a $300 deposit', they immediately hang up.

Think of those self-cleaning toilets.

I totally agree we will start to see very specific driverless designs that are very easy to clean.

Either that, or Johnny Cabs. I'm easy.

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.

source: I commute by skateboard in SF daily. Just yesterday an empty Waymo cruised straight through a fresh red, narrowly missing my entry into the crosswalk.

But don't get me started on what I've seen human drivers do on the same streets. Just annoyed that Waymo's aren't better.

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

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

Also, when Waymos get confused on surface streets, they can just stop. Can't really do that on a freeway.

Of course, if you have an accident there, you piss off a whole lot more people than you would on a surface street.

Freeways in CA aren't the worst in the country (lookin at you, TX), but they're still not easier than surface streets, especially during off-peak hours.

Can you expand a bit on why you feel freeway driving is "easier"? the only thing i can think of is you're much less likely to get into a head-on[0] collision.

[0] apply directly

See CVC 21209(a):

No person shall drive a motor vehicle in a bicycle lane established on a roadway pursuant to Section 21207 except as follows:

(1) To park where parking is permitted.

(2) To enter or leave the roadway.

(3) To prepare for a turn within a distance of 200 feet from the intersection.

Whether this translates to Waymos smelling like meth or fentanyl when you get in them thanks to the previous rider remains to be seen. Or just needles, foil, or used condoms left behind. They record video, so Google could close the person's account so they won't be able to book Waymos with that account again, so we'll end up having to see how hard it is to create new accounts to use Waymo on to ban nuisance riders.

It's not a loaded question to ask what a person means when they introduce a term.

> The types of people are those who would assault others on some fashion.

That's a tautology. Nobody knows if a person fits the type of person who would assault someone, until after they've gone and assaulted someone.

/s

I agree with your point about the approach to the argument, but I think google has enough info to make a way to vet passengers by identifying if you are likely to trash a vehicle.

Granted in my work I've never made the attempt to smell fentanyl, but it isn't one with a reputation of having an odor. I assume you mean the smell of recreational users of fentanyl.

The funniest (or not if you’re not from SF) was a guy boarding a full bus with a 7 foot long dining table with the legs attached, arguing and threatening anyone who protested. Eventually he dropped the thing on someone’s foot and starting an altercation which delayed everyone by 15 mins.

The way this will manifest is the drunk idiot who'll puke all over the car. The bored asshole who carves his initials in the seat. The edgelord who gets their jollies out of destroying other people's stuff.

Good chance you had some in the original group as well, but early adopters are usually mostly people who deeply understand tech. Once that falls away, you have a less thorough understanding of tech, and a very surprised realization that booking something under your name that has cameras all over will likely result in you being held accountable for what you did. But after you did it.

How that'll play out in the long run is anyone's guess. If Waymo maintains rigorous enforcement and the courts actually play along, it might just work out. It's still going to be capital-intensive because we seem to have created a world where being a major asshole in public without consequences is kind of an entitlement people expect to have, and Waymo will need a very strong "yeah, not here" vibe to prevent that. Which requires a number of high-profile incidents.

Yes, the subtext of the question likely was "are you discriminating against the poor!?" If it was indeed, the answer to that question is "no, the ride pricing will do that".

This isn't about "commoners". It's that any large group of people contains assholes, assholes restrain themselves depending on circumstances, and the new users might well lack that understanding.

It's fundamentally not about "commoners", but about a knowledge-based restraint falling away. (As for the "commoners", you might also want to read the last part of my comment, instead of outraging)

Sometimes it's worth not worrying about problems too far in advance.

Since you mention Uber, I can definitely see in my city how the quality of cars decreased and they started using almost inclusively cheap immigrants who realistically couldn't pass a drivers exam in my country and have on multiple occasions driven into wrong directions/ran red lights etc.

Also, Waymo isn't even Google. You might accuse me of overstating this, but truthfully they operate as a different company.

There are schemes where undocumented immigrants ask someone to activate their account on their behalf. In practice, the person giving you a ride could be literally anyone.

Don't they? Allowing messier, older, and less pleasant cars would increase the supply of drivers, allowing Uber to place lower bids on those drivers, lower their prices, increase volume and revenue, and increase profit.

Hard for me to imagine this being a widespread problem. Probably about as much problem as there is with something similar happening in the elevator of a private building.

Subject has no recourse to appeal and is banned from life including his ancestors and spawns"

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)

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 am blind. General statistics and adoption rate in my peer group (sighted coworkers) are not representative for me at all. None of these datapoint give a good indication how much I am (as a visually non-participating pedestrian) in danger.

Given my life experience, it is safe to assume nobody really thought about blind people. I am regularily tripping over (and hurting myself with) badly placed bicycles. I am assuming a high percentage of these bicycle owners are well-meaning, green-voting people. However, their political and/or personal attitude doesn't help people like me at all, we still get hurt on a regular basis, and nobody talks about it. I would be surprised if this changed with AVs.

Not sure if was legal or not for the Waymo to stop there, but given that Waymo stops take quite a bit longer than stops with Uber/Lyft (as it takes a while for the car to continue driving) this was one of the worst places possible to stop. Especially as there would have been space available right after the crossing next to Walgreens.

See CVC 22400(a):

No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, becauseof a grade, or in compliance with law.

No person shall bring a vehicle to a complete stop upon a highway so as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the stop is necessary for safe operation or in compliance with law.

I’ve had to walk a few times near steep hills, I was wondering if partly it was due to the angle of approach and the sensor view being blocked so they avoid the area?

Double parking is legal (in some cases) in California, but this wouldn’t be allowed under any reasonable interpretation.

I’ve also seen Waymos double parked on both sides of the street, which blocks other cars from going around them.

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)

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.

We are way too aggressive with allowing self-driving cars on our roads. Companies are incapable of building a toaster without bugs, our banking apps are a burning garbage dumpster fire, and yet we somehow think it will be different this time?