Took my first Waymo in Austin, TX last weekend and it did not go well. Was supposed to be a 9 minute drive, then randomly it tells us the ride has been 'slightly extended' to 45 minutes. Customer support dropped us off at a restaurant and said sorry. We ordered a human Uber.
Honestly the last thing I thought would happen would be that it would get lost. I thought maybe it would get confused on the road, but it drove better than most human drivers.
I used them all the time when I lived in LA and they worked great. I didn't have a single bad experience. In general they were much more pleasant than having a human Uber, but that's just my opinion.
I went to Austin a few months ago and half the interchanges weren't on Google Maps because they were built so recently. In the week I was there I think they finished building a new one near my hotel.
I wonder how reliant self-driving cars are on unchanging road infrastructure.
I’ve seen them around in London - they are incredibly slow. There’s no way they’ll succeed here - speed is important for getting around.
This is what happens when people who live in a bubble automatically assume what works there must scale and make economic sense to the rest of the world.
There's no way their slowness is going to make a difference in London. I would have thought the real problem is that they'll just get completely stuck at places where you have to be a bit aggressive to make any progress at all. They don't really have that in America.
That and cyclists/pedestrians can be kind of anywhere at any time. Again not a quite the same in America.
They get stuck in LA as it is which is pretty chill for a major American city all things considered.
They're just really cautious and do need an extra 10s to think sometimes, and there's a lot of driving scenarios that don't allow that much time to decide to go or not. The biggest culprit seems to be unprotected intersections with the potential for human/bike crossing, which includes driveways which they insist on using for dropoffs (even when they're obviously not public driveways), which they then take a very long time to leave.
Really? Bad luck, I have literally never had that happen! What time was this? Because Austin is closing down 35 in the evening and it is just doing crazy things to traffic. Maybe it was that?
I happened to drive past 2 of them in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. One was making a left turn into an alley, another was on the otherwise of the road so I never got to see how they actually drove but I giddily squealed like a happy pig rolling in the mud WAYMO! as I tried explaining to my shocked wife wtf was going on. It's been so long since I've had this feel of wonder when seeing technology.
I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.
I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.
They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.
What metrics would you accept for you not to consider it an alpha test? Because they've been running in Phoenix, Az since April, 2017, and have been offering rides to the general public in San Francisco since June 2024. It doesn't handle Boston winters, it doesn't handle torrential rain, but it's a bit past "alpha" stage.
Alpha <- I should've put that in quotes, I suppose. My tolerance level is lower than yours, that's cool, but I am not getting into these things nor any robot drone choppers or planes. I can barely trust my HDA2 (ADAS) in my Ioniq 5 to not steer me into a rail guard.
Ok, v 0.85? Just the thought of testing these things on public roads, no matter when it happened, doesn't sit well with me in any way. I am not a Luddite, quite the opposite, there is just something off about the whole concept.
Took a few last year on a trip to San Francisco and it felt like the future. It's not lost on me that enshittification will take its toll, the fleet will get nastier over time, prices will increase, etc. I'm also torn about more money being given to mega corporations. But purely from a service-enjoyment and technology-appreciation point of view it was amazing!
How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?
I get the idea that you no longer need a driver for a cab, but in my mind all that means is there's an unemployed former cab driver who is explicitly worse off now. The likelihood of that person having tons of great options to go do now that they aren't burdened by driving a cab is pretty low imo?
There's probably a name for this somewhere, some kind of automation paradox that makes "society" better but many individuals lives worse.
As an individual it's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about it though
I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.
Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.
This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.
Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.
The truth is we don't know. Anyone who can answer that question will be rich.
But actually, what I've commonly heard from immigrants from developing countries is not having their certifications recognised. What was once a surgeon/lawyer/accountant is now forced to do menial labour. So maybe that's one problem to consider solving.
When my parents were my age, there were almost no jobs working with distributed systems or robotics and the relative standard of living was much worse than what I have been able to attain at a similar age and level of education.
My grandparents performed jobs that now are rarely performed in the US due to there being better jobs for those qualified to perform them.
I am much happier working with AI and distributed systems than as a carpenter or steel mill foreman like my grandfathers. Everybody on my father's side of the family had these white marks all over their forearms from molten metal splashing on them and burning them as they worked.
This is only possible because of technological progress. It creates new jobs.
My grandfather was a sailor, then cook. Father drives a taxi. Mom is a seamstress. Stepdad worked at the same factory for 65 years. As I was coming of age in the 90s, they chastised me for spending all my time in front of the computer. Yet here I am still sitting in front of one, making more money than they could've ever imagined.
> But, as a whole, the entire population's pay goes a lot farther since no one has to pay drivers to drive them around anymore
They still have to pay the Waymo though, it didn't become free. :/
You're kidding yourself if you think autonomous taxis will be cheaper in the long run just because they don't pay a driver.
They will outcompete human drivers on cost and once they are dominant they will raise prices. This has happened every other time human labor was replaced too. It is practically the Silicon Valley playbook.
The cost to take a picture today and keep it on your phone is not more expensive than it was when you had to get them developed in a darkroom.
The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.
The cost to buy and sell financial instruments today through Robinhood or similar products is not more than when you had to have a broker to place orders for you.
The cost to find vast amounts of information through search engines is negligible today. To do so previously would take immense amounts of time, effort, and money parsing through encyclopedias is the information even existed at the time.
The cost to print a few drafts of a memo today requires a single session typing into Microsoft word and then printing to your office printer. Previously you had to pay a typist to put together multiple drafts for you.
On autonomous vehicles:
Yes they will absolutely be cheaper, as long as a complete monopoly is avoided. It's not just that you don't have to pay the driver. You also will have vastly lower insurance rates due to how safe they are. Maintenance costs will be lower due to economies of scale when fleet operators can have the car deliver itself to a dedicated massive maintenance facility.
> The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.
Now you just have to maintain multiple subscriptions to streaming services so you can watch the movie you want. $22/month for Hulu, $27/month for Netflix, Amazon Prime where you pay for the privilege of paying to rent some movies.
So you might be able to watch more with your subscription, but the nexus isn't quite that simple.
Pretty sure a DoorDash driver now gets paid better than a 19th century farmer inflation adjusted? Over a single lifetime, there are no guarantees because there's too many variables, but civilization-ally, the progress seems to always hold up.
If the number of jobs automated approaches 100%, then either what small proportion that is left is still sufficient to pay people, whether because the number of jobs in absolute terms is still large, say by the creation of new types of work, or because of reduction in working hours, or mass unemployment eventually forces some form of redistribution.
Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.
Unfortunately the gains of automation will not become our post scarcity utopia, instead they will be consumed by the new AI overhead and we remain in a regime of scarcity. AI will reshape all our processes and societies, that is where the gains will go.
> Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.
When I look around me I see a society that I think would happily have jackboots round up excess labor and execute us rather than redistribute money fairly
Well, I didn't say I'm confident that society won't allow it to become a problem. But I don't think a society that triggers mass unemployment and poverty at the same time will remain like that for long before it'd face uprisings. A society like that would also face the problem that without people having money they have no customers.
If you redistribute money evenly, how would you get anyone to do anything?
If you gave everyone $10k a month UBI, who is going to change your tire? How much you have to pay them to go to work if they get $10k while sitting at home?
If a town has a lack of apartments, how much will an apartment cost if a young couple has $20k a month to spend?
The scenario we are discussing is one where "the number of jobs automated approaches 100%", so the point would be that it is explicitly a situation where most people are not needed in the job market.
> If you redistribute money evenly, how would you get anyone to do anything
Currently, people need money to pay for necessities like food and shelter. Therefore either money is redistributed somehow or people have jobs to earn money, or we change the paradigm entirely to something else
We cannot have both no wealth redistribution AND replace all labour with automation without really messing this system up
The vast majority of people used to be farmers; I am glad to live in a future where farming jobs have largely been automated away.
With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.
Don't get me wrong on this, I love driving.. the right car. But, most of the time, driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world. I guess you could argue that some commuters (who aren't driving themselves) don't exactly fill that time with the most productive things but thats a separate issue.
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
I enjoy driving for pleasure and often go for days long drives. Driving back and forth to work however is definitely a chore. It sounded fun at first, I get to do something I enjoy doing before work, how bad could it be?
Turns out, spend a couple hours on the road everyday and you'll quickly get sick of podcasts or ebooks. You can't stop to look up details or check out the code/math/design because you're driving. You can't really do anything else too because you really should be focusing your attention on the road.
totally agree but aside from the joy of driving, which I genuinely appreciate, most of my driving is of the kind (commuting, sat in traffic) where id like the driving bit to be taken away and any number of alternatives presented. Also sleeping is essential. Productivity is surely about what you do when you are awake, the problem with driving is that it demands constant attention so surely that has to make it (equally to anything else that requires constant attention) the most unproductive activity there is (initial caveat aside)
I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.
> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.
> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.
> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.
I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.
A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.
It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.
This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area.
It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.
"Endangering" is an exaggeration based on what actually occurred it seems. What the car did was technically in violation of traffic regulations but it was careful to not hit anybody or cause significant damage to people's property as it did so. This is essentially no different than a careful driver ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) a sign restricting them from entering an area, but still driving through the area successfully without doing any harm. Technically, traffic rules were broken, by mistake (an algorithmic one most likely) in this case, but there were no lasting effects.
People make mistakes like that all the time, and sometimes they still get ticketed for that kind of thing, and other times they get a simple warning or don't get any form of rebuke at all. How many of us have never accidentally gone into a one-way traffic lane from the opposite side and managed to still drive through and get back on track without killing or maiming anybody? It's unlikely anybody would get charged with a crime for this, nor should they over a simple mistaken rule violation that did no harm.
A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].
When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
I happened to be in that area of West Portal on that fateful day (damn you, Noe Valley Bakery!) I did not see it happen, but went to see what that noise was all about. The images of that scene from that day still haunt me; they are very vivid. It was a terrible, terrible accident and may that old witch Mary Lau spend an eternity in hell.
> Two years ago, the family of four was on their way to the San Francisco Zoo with their two young children when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
I'm sure per mile driven, there is an "acceptable death rate", but should we atleast wait till the autonomous cars are on the board to make that a priority?
How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?
There are drive-by-wire cars on the road.
ABS systems can disable breaks.
If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?
Just to be clear: there are humans choosing to have the car operate. That's not just semantics. Responsibility lies with the people making the choice to cause a system to operate.
If people act with gross negligence, then yes, we should arrest them. How that is defined may depend on a variety of factors, though, and is something that already has relevant case law in related fields.
Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.
> nothing happened to the lead designer (Moisseiff) or engineer (Eldridge)
It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time. We don't jail aircraft engineers when they make a mistake because just sending people to jail doesn't work as well as encouraging them to co-operate ex post facto so the root cause can be identified.
>It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time.
Poe's law strikes again. Of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail, or most software engineers would have spent some time behind bars by now. However it's entirely unclear whether @CountHackulus meant "of course autonomous car engineers should be jailed, just as if an engineer signed off on faulty plans" (which to be fair, also happens), or is just repeating my joke with bridges.
I think the bigger lesson from what you say isn't so much about Waymo or this topic generally but to always remember that forums like HN are not reliable reporters of reality: they can only give you an indication of who was moved to say something and an indication of what they want you to believe... true or not.
I'm sure you were already aware of that, but its easy to forget that and think you're dealing with something more real.
Last week there were two separate posts, one said "AI is not a tool" and the other one said "AI is a tool." Even though that logically covers all possibilities, somehow the vast majority of comments in both were negative or contradicting. My takeaway is that comments aren't a very representative sampling of how people actually feel.
anecdotal but waymo was flawless. zenlike music. safe driving. Vs recent uber getting a lot of invasive personal questions from drivers, weird smells, only reason chose is it was half of waymos cost. Even at double the cost might just chose waymo next time.
I learn this each time Apple releases a product. New iPhones could be $500, 10x the speed, half the weight and full week battery life and a fringe loud group will post and upvote some dumb complaint.
i had a funny first experience where the lidar got super lost on a bush, but it did a uie around the block and pulled in from the other side, and from there the experimence was that it was the best driver ive ever seen
It's not just you. My family gets around on foot, bike and transit, but occasionally we find the most practical way to get somewhere we want to go is by car. Having more options to get a ride is very welcome.
From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.
There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.
I note the Toronto announcement cites job creation in the very first sentence. I live near another snowy city where Waymo has been teased, but has yet to have any significant presence:
Will be interesting how it handles the tougher climate conditions.
Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos. Those Roadster jets may finally make a smooth ride throughout the whole of the city possible.
You are confusing predictable continuous low level noise for sheer chaos. The chaotic potential Montreal has in winter, and it uses, is spectacular. The fact that it is so unpredictable in exercising this merely contributes to the problem.
I find the anarchist traffic of developing world cities to be more aligned with natural game theory principles than proscriptive protocols. For a computer it may be simpler.
Waymo freezes up when car in front of it decides to turn and show blinker last minute and line next to it is empty.
Which is weird because humans would take a few seconds to check the line and switch it, while Waymo already knows its empty and not taking an advantage of it.
I was thinking this too - my guess is the cars simply wouldn't offer rides on days with really poor conditions.
Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.
This could still be a problem. Human drivers are still available on these days today, and if services like Waymo take over and theres less Uber (et al) drivers, then we'll have no support on the worst days.
Maybe, but I'd expect a good chunk of rideshare traffic still ends up leaving the city, which AFAIK Waymos still won't do.
My understanding is Uber etc. charge and pay based on demand, so if that means the (fewer) human drivers are that much more expensive on snowy days then so be it. If it's a blizzard and Uber fares work out to $100/h I'd be very surprised if drivers couldn't be found.
Toronto gets snow! Do any other cities they operate in get snow?
So much of winter driving is knowing what is blocked by ice and snow, what snow is probably safe to pass, and navigating around piles of ice and snow that become temporary obstacles.
Granted Toronto gets much less accumulation than a city like Montréal.
They have a limited presence in New Orleans, mostly rolling around the French Quarter and Uptown. The roads look bombed out in parts of Uptown, maybe not the absolute worst anywhere but it's close.
Yeah, I've seen them going around. The last one I saw at Jackson Square looked like the safety driver was driving. This is probably the worse urban environment for Waymo to be. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the roads or the people dancing in the streets (as well as mules, pedicabs, wacky bikes, scooters, drunk people and all of the wonderful chaos). Not looking forward to them becoming operational here.
Laughs in Montreal. Over here, the cones surround you, mug you and leave you naked holding nothing but a steering wheel in the middle of the street. _Then_ you fall into a pothole. During a snowstorm. BTW, your car is already in a container headed for Africa.
They've been mapping, or whatever they do, Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and it was pretty funny watching the cars navigate around massive snow piles last winter. Curious to see how the rollout goes here. <Insert popcorn emoji.>
I'll giddily await the moment when a Waymo gets swallowed by a random sinkhole.
I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.
>> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.
Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.
I wouldn't say Montréal is more dangerous, but it is 100% more complicated for drivers. There are so many variables that change suddenly. A road is fully plowed and salted, you turn right and everything turns to shit with tons of snow on the ground. You keep going, suddenly there's ice *underneath* a layer of snow so the car starts skidding, and the plow's going the other way trying not to swallow your car whole.
You're talking about one variable I'm familiar with, but it's one variable. With snow cover in a plain, you just drive much slower and turn on your hazards.
The most complicated scenario, imho, is getting on and off a car ferry. Dark. Wet. Pedestrians. Dogs. No sidewalks. Flashing lights and lots of signs, most of which have nothing to do with car traffic. Lines on the road which you ignore in favor of following hand gestures. Then dramatic up/down ramps followed by parking way too close to other cars. And it is all in a metal box where GPS fails and internal systems are thrown off by ship movements.
There are very few reasons why a Waymo should get on a ferry. It can take you to the ferry and then you can get another transportation (maybe even a Waymo!) when you disembark.
I had a similar thought from my time living in Alaska. half the year there aren't any lines on the road other than the occasional tracks from the previous car that drove on it, and that's if the wind is low. It's not unusual to have half the road covered in a foot or two of snow from a drift. Humans can see them and usually avoid them, but it involves strategically using the oncoming lane. Would be interesting to see the nav system deal with that!
Ya, all mountains get names. Passes only get names if the are legendary, usually for dramatic views or as highpoints between geographic areas. If a pass has a name, drivers should expect dramatic weather changes between one side and the other.
on the other hand, montreal doesn't allow right on red, and instead has an extremely strongly planned traffic grid including priority right turns. Not much ambiguity in the prescribed traffic patterns.
It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).
I wonder how this will handle streetcars. It's illegal to pass a streetcar with the doors opening. There's a flashing signal on the vehicle, but it seems like a fairly important local difference. I hope it won't take a pedestrian death to get that sort of thing looked at.
No it's quite dissimilar. Streetcars in Toronto travel in mixed traffic in the middle lanes and deposit passengers into the right lane of traffic, which is expected to stop behind the open doors. What happens if the right lane is occupied by stopped traffic? You have to sit and wait while the passengers do their thing around the hopefully-attentive driver of the stopped vehicle.
Being in mixed traffic, streetcars are easily blocked by disabled vehicles or straight-up idiots. The time between launch and one of these things sperging out and blocking streetcars will be measured in minutes.
They can already handle the streetcars in SF which sometimes let people out in weird places, although I don't know if it's the same as Toronto. It seems like it would be easy to update them to stop for the open doors if that's what they're supposed to do. They're pretty good at detecting when people might cross in front of them even if there's nobody in their way yet.
FWIW I've never been to Toronto but legally I could go there and drive without knowing about this particular rule. If it's something unique to the area and has the potential for danger I'd be more worried about people than robots.
I've never been to SF, but looking up some pictures and info, it looks like it's the same rules. You can't pass it at certain moments, and need to be prepared to stop for people getting on and off.
The main difference is going to be scale and the chaos that brings. You see a LOT of streetcars in Toronto. For a huge chunk of downtown, it's the main subway-ish transit option. Some of the lines are on a 5min frequency, others are every ~10min or so, with some segments having 2-3 lines on it. I've seen them get backed up before an intersection, and open doors for passengers before they even reach the stop haha. I've personally hood-surfed over cars that got into the lane between the streetcar and the stop quite a few times, and sometimes it really isn't their fault.
The signal on the rear-end [1] is awful. There's a blurb saying "DO NOT PASS OPEN DOORS" which is clear enough, but there's also a sign that illuminates when the doors are open and it's NOT a stop sign. It's this do-not slashed circle with a picture of a stick figure seemingly walking into traffic. I think there's a reading of that symbol from well-meaning tourists that says "Attention boarding passengers, don't run into traffic". I could see that freaking out a waymo without a little bit of custom code.
It obviously makes sense to have begun this autonomy journey in much easier cities. It'll be interesting to see the incremental improvements as they navigate how to handle everything that winter does to driving. I hope the plan isn't, "just stop operating for five months." Also a bit of a jerk, I am, but I'm looking forward to the funny videos.
A bit off topic, but I've been a Waymo booster for a minute here, as you can see in my comment history, but here in LA their pricing has jumped the shark a bit. Yesterday it quoted me > $10/mile for a short, < 5 miles trip. That was the return trip after I had a less expensive price of around $6/mile to the original destination (still pricey!).
I have zero insight into their pricing mechanism, but I was getting in the car coming back from, no exaggeration, one of the most expensive cities on the planet and so if I was Waymo I would probably price that ride pretty aggressively based on the location alone. Then you throw in all the other data points Google has about its users and I had my first "fuck me" moment where dynamic pricing really slapped me in the face (I've seen it firsthand with the airlines but Waymo is particularly insidious because of the use of my Google history).
And of course I'm aware Waymo has to price high while they're fleet-constrained or folks are going to be waiting forever for a car, but I hope they don't get too content with the absurd margin at $10+/mile. They will be tempted to do just that and so instead of flooding the market with fleet decide they'll put just enough cars in service to maximize profit instead of going for market share (of all riders I mean). But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.
> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.
And that's how it should be.
(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)
Waymo can come up with some extraordinarily high prices at times. Sometimes it may cost $4-$5 to get me to church, very early in the morning (a 3-mile, 10 minute ride.) Sometimes, it can cost $25+ to get me home from church at peak times, like Saturday evenings.
On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening.
Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand.
I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.
I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It
has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how
he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info
sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they
not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging
going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far
outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must
get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)
Munich has been a long-standing operational base for many US companies in EU, so they might try just a pilot, but it's not only waymos I see here, also some bmw self-driving test vehicles, also nvidia(?) test vehicles etc. And trust me as a ukrainian myself I know what people think about orange man both here and back there. And europeans are largely sceptical about US companies not because of him but mostly because they're just american.
Oh there's going to be opinions, for sure. This is the high cost, zero returns portion though. They aren't trying to go live until 2028. In a way, it becomes a bargaining chip if they've spent all this money on mapping/testing Toronto and want to start operating in earnest. Though, ideally by 2028 we don't have to behave as low and as transactionally as the current American regime.
Canada has two official languages: Canadian English and Canadian French. This satisfies both the English-speaking population and the French-speaking population. As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
> As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
Last time I was in Vancouver I noticed more signs with translations in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh than French...
However that might be because I am an anglophone from Ontario and my mind filters out the French language on signs if an English equivalent is present.
No, you were probably right. About the only French in Vancouver is in federal facilities: so, in practice, the airport and some parts of the port that nobody in the general public would ever go to.
Generally no. Some provinces officially operate in both English and French but some do not.
For a press release from a private company operating in Ontario there is no legal requirement to publish in both languages. Some companies might do so anyway if they have operations that are regulated by the federal government and/or they just want the goodwill.
Imported products have to meet Federal packaging laws, which do require both languages.
This really depends on the context, but in general bilingualism is only required for the public sector and adjacent things (such as federal standards around food packaging). A private company like Waymo certainly does not need to send out a press release in English and French.
It is more complex than that. Quebec (Montreal) has additional laws over and above the national laws, often requiring that French text be bigger/longer/more prominent than the English text.
There was also controversy over proper names v. descriptions. "Macdonalds" is a proper name but should "Burger King" be translated to "Burger Roi"?
Still plenty of cars/taxis in Europe and Waymo is much safer than human drivers. IMO legislating against them is legislating against safety. As a pedestrian I feel far safer around Waymo than human drivers.
It'll be interesting to see how Waymo cars handle snow covering the road markings and road edges, and people flocking to new emergent lanes that do not correspond to the painted lines on the road, and people parking well into the road because of snow piles, etc, etc.
In theory, Waymo should have a very up to date map of lanes and should be able to very precisely triangulate where it is, so with snow covered road markings it may still do better than humans.
Sometimes when the snow builds up, the safest driving is to be in the “lane” made by heavy travel that blows the snow to the sides. Staying in the real lane would make for hard and likely dangerous driving.
No argument or anything here, just saying what I think is an interesting nuance as someone who has spent a lot of life driving in snowy places.
I’m in Denver now and it’ll be really interesting to see how these things handle the effects of a real storm. If I had to make a guess it would be that they’ll all just stop driving for a day or two.
Do you understand that what you have said, this behavior of using the absolute true position of the lanes when all the human drivers are using a different emergent from snow-paths lane, will cause accidents? Doing the "right" thing is wrong when it is different from what humans all do.
Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".
Toronto is embroiled in partisan politicking around bike lanes. The provincial premiere is overriding city council to have them removed, which is what I suspect is the motivation behind the parent comment.
You will never stop hearing about this until they are restored. Also enjoy your very slow commute with all the bikes now legally required to ride in the car lane and block you.
Winter is the real test here. Worked on lidar perception for a bit and falling snow throws returns everywhere, plus once the lane lines are under slush everyone just drives in the ruts the car ahead made. Curious how they handle those unofficial lanes.
As a driver in places where it snows... I'm curious about how it will handle:
1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.
2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.
3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)
4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")
5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).
> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.
True. But don't most people drive in the tracks of the car ahead? I know when it snows people sometimes make a three-lane highway into a two-way "rut railway" road, and make do.
They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.
I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?
Parent is referring to snow in the environment, not on the lidar itself.
When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
Street parking in the core makes what would be a manageable amount of snow into a disaster like 2 weeks a year minimum because plows can't get down older streets.
It had hands free operation (still needed someone in the seat to control the plow) and lane assist in whiteout conditions when the outside edge of the lane had a cliff (much worse than driving into the ditch).
> This project is one of the first real-world applications derived from PATH/Caltrans research in the area of automated vehicle control. A modified snowblower with add-on sensors, actuator, computer and driver interfaces was developed, and initial field tests were conducted along the 8 guardrail sections between Kingvale and Soda Springs on the shoulders of Interstate-80 near Donner Summit.
> Various lateral sensing and referencing technologies were investigated for this
application; what was found was that machine vision does not penetrate snow, and that
the GPS system does not provide sufficient reliability under possible multipath and
blockage scenarios. A magnetic-marker-based sensing system was chosen for the initial
implementation primarily because of its high reliability and accuracy (better than 1 cm) under all weather conditions. The mountainous highway I-80 near Donner Summit (close to Lake Tahoe) was chosen to be the first field test site. In 2001, magnets were installed along the eastbound and westbound guardrails of I-80, at 4 feet apart and 4 feet away from the guardrail. Binary coding of the magnetic markers was designed (north pole up vs. south pole up) to provide information about guardrail characteristics, such as the shoulder side (right or left of the blower) and the end of guardrail. Eight sections of the guardrail were equipped with magnets for the initial feasibility operations with a total length of 1.46 km (0.9 mile) between Soda Springs and Kingvale.
The problem is not plowing the streets, it is moving the snow away from the streets. After heavy snowfalls, plows create huge piles that block a significant part of the road. This is a difficult problem that simply takes a lot of resources to address.
That's one of the reasons lidar will prove to be a dead end for this application. It's a temporary enabling technology on the path to the simpler multiple camera based solution.
No, in the limit where everyone has lidar they end up stepping on each other too. Being a totally passive sensor system is a major benefit for mass deployment, on top of the cost advantages.
Lidar is cool when you want to get a point cloud from a fixed location, or dealing with perfectly uniform surfaces (which cars don't because humans can't do this either), but beyond that there are better ways to do things.
Camera's can't see in the dark. There is no perfect sensor. Waymo relies multiple sensor modalities: Cameras, Lidar, ultrasonics, radar, gps, inertial measurement units.
In addition to vision, humans have proprioception and kinesthesia, hearing, inner ear receptors for balance, a sense of touch, sense of smell. We use all of these sensory inputs when we drive. And even then humans get into lots of accidents.
How do you use your sense of smell to help you drive? I can't smell anything outside my car thanks to the air filter.
The real answer is very simple: safe drivers slow down to adapt to poor conditions (including visibility). Lidar might reduce how much it needs to slow down but I don't think it will be eliminated because you can't drive with only lidar.
> How do you use your sense of smell to help you drive?
I smell smoke before I see it. Useful if there's a forest fire up ahead.
Burning rubber or smoke from the engine is an indicator of a mechanical issue.
> you can't drive with only lidar.
Nobody said you could. This is a strawman.
Tesla stans are the only ones trying to convince everyone you can only drive with cameras. Everyone else is pretty united on the usefulness of multiple inputs.
Didn't mean it in that way. I meant a car with camera+lidar would realistically still slow down because of the reduced camera visibility.
> Tesla stans are the only ones trying to convince everyone you can only drive with cameras. Everyone else is pretty united on the usefulness of multiple inputs.
Ignore them. The latest Model S and X have radar again, but possibly unused right now, so they are probably going to roll that out in a refresh of the 3 and Y eventually.
Some of you downvoted-to-dead this from another poster ("Hi, I'm Nelson" from Technologists for Democracy); new user who had low karma, so it's dead in the thread.
I frankly think it's a legit POV, and I'm also local to this, so I'm going to use my own much higher karma to post it again:
I think there are legitimate concerns in promoting American BigTech as provider of infrastructure/services in Toronto. Concerns about data collection, about technological autonomy, and local employment.
I fail to see any unique argument in this. That is to say you can replace Ontario with San Jose and it'll all work.
> Digital sovereignty and privacy is at stake.
This is the most strongest argument, and luckily that's the first one. Many ways to solve this so not really a big problem.
> Ontarians’ jobs risk being outsourced
What jobs are being displaced by driverless cars? The best argument here is uber drivers are going to be affected. Who would you rather drive you at 3am if you're a drunk woman? An uber driver or Waymo?
> Public transit could lose riders
What is the goal here? The goal is to move people efficiently and decrease the reliance on human driving, which can cause deaths. Public transportation is vital but again, there are times when subway / buses wont work.
Also, if public transit is a major concern, shouldnt we be asking Uber (see point #2) to go away?
The last two points are super generic, it isnt even worth discussion.
It's not. Waymo was using human-driven cars to collect data in NYC for a while, but their permit expired and they no longer operate at all in New York.
I understand the issue of technical power, mind you, but I don't
really see how US companies expanding into Canada is a good idea
as long as a hostile orange individual keeps on potty-mouthing
Canadians.
No, the rest of us will continue trading without the US. Its not giving in, its ignoring the billionaires that are buys favors and not buying from their companies.
You sure about that? My friends and colleagues outside the US are awful pissed that US gen pop let/lets this happen.
They’re encouraging their leaders to route around 300 million Muricans as they see no collective action in response to threats to global trade they rely on.
And argue ok if US institutions and zeitgeist are "fuck yall we're America" well again 300 million are really at the whim of 8 billion.
Not sure the typical Mr Rogers naive optimism "we're America!" is gonna get the US through after 10 years of this (Biden admin effort was binned just months after Trump 2.0 took off so it effectively didn't matter; Jimmy Carter 2.0). That's just copium, blind faith in what Adam Smith called "the invisible hand" he later came to realize was a mistake to believe existed
What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Do you know any minors that had the police called on them mid ride by a RoboTaxi company becuase the taxi AI though the minor had guns. Yeah Waymo did that.
For your Women's safety POV. just because now youre alone in the car doesn’t really mean you are alone. You are under constant remote surveillance.
Regarding the meter broke issue. So you'd rather have corporate price fixing. Because that’s what Waymo is doing. The fleet size is same but the costs are going up.
And when a giant tech company is a service provided and rule maker , you don't really have a choice left.
The Support Team checked in on the live internal video after being alerted, and the Support Team saw firearms, so they alerted law enforcement, who arrested the children, for possession of actual guns.
What does a 1-driver taxi compared to a 2-drivers taxi offer apart from fewer taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?
The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.
Well, some long-haul coaches have two drivers to allow them to switch-out for safety but keep the passengers and bus moving. Of all the things to get excited about, I don't understand why reducing the labor costs for corporates is one. Improving transportation instead would benefit us all, for example with better road design and mixed/integrated transport systems.
Buses / Trams are the best use of this tech since not only is a high percentage of the cost the driver but they also drive the same predictable routes and not all over the place.
There are issues though. If you remove the staff from the bus you will need to handle some particularly unruly passengers in a different way. Currently the driver just stops until that person leaves or gets police / special constables involved.
Where are you getting this number?
Imagination is free but to execute the imagination is not. So yes, it depends on the imagination of the person who owns the tech AI company not your imagination.
And what is the cost of replacing the driver with the hardware/software and the servicing cost. and the operators in Philippines that are remotely working ?
If you've ever seen bus drivers in NYC, it's genuinely impressive how they manage to weave a giant box through the chaos. I'm not sure that self-driving tech will be able to replace them anytime soon.
This would be interesting for my native Kansas City though. There's a severe shortage of buses and it's much simpler driving conditions. Could be a game changer.
Cost of driver replaced with cost of what ? how do you sustain that cost and dose it cost more than the driver ? One liner sounds cool but please back it up with something.
You can just go around a stopped bus (obviously not a school bus). And if the streets are so narrow that you can't, then you definitely won't like the traffic of all those bus riders driving their own cars.
> frees up people to do more important things than drive you around
Like what?
They still need a paycheck. What do you think the outcome of a bunch of unemployed taxi drivers is going to be? What other low skill career is going to absorb them?
We're really rapidly approaching a "automate too many jobs for the remainder of the job market to absorb" situation imo and It's hard for me to imagine it going very well for anyone.
It obeys the rules of the road and kills many fewer people - 0 killed in 250M miles. Driving a machine is something people are not good enough at frankly.
> What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs?
One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.
I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.
But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.
Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.
Of the robotaxis in Austin, I've only used Waymo, but have used it fairly extensively. So far I have noticed:
- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,
- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,
- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),
- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,
- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,
- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.
There are three major disadvantages right now:
- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,
- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,
- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.
HackerNews is a bubble in itself. Most people here cannot relate to a person who drives a cab for a living and is having a real tangbile crisis seeing how these tech companies are eating up their livelihood. Switching jobs for a taxi driver is not the same as switching jobs or career as a software coolie.
No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.
They keep announcing new cities, but do they really follow up and actually launch there? I remember a couple of years ago they announced NYC as a market, but I don't think they're fully launched in NYC yet.
Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver behind the wheel) in NYC.
Yeah, if its OK to discriminate on the basis of the immutable characteristics of the Gender class, it should be OK to discriminate based on other characteristics as well.
Its very bigoted and regressive that you can be charged a 'cover' just because you have the wrong genitalia and belong to the wrong gender. I don't see how that's any better then charging a cover because someone has the 'wrong' skin color.
Of course, we have very bigoted courts here in the US that consistently rule to discriminate against men. I promise you if people respond to this comment it will be to argue how discrimination against men is justified and should continue.
I don't understand why you think anyone is supporting sexism...
Saying "Think of the women" as you say "think of the children" as a blanket statement can be malicious. Reasoning requires hard data, not evoking feelings.
Not today. Not next year, either. And calling taxi service that dangerous is an exageration. Preference enhanced by that type of comments would be more accurate
I guess? I was on a date with someone and we took an uber back to her place after a concert, and she mentioned off-hand afterward that had I not been there she would have just walked... even though it would have been over an hour on foot, it just wasn't worth the risk after multiple bad/creepy experiences taking carshares home late at night.
Maybe it's a bit like cops: they're not all bad, but the system is kind of set up so that bad ones thrive and good ones burn out. It's going to be a particularly kind of person who is willing to spend their late Friday night driving drunk people home from the club, and honestly if you're a vulnerable person, maybe the guy most willing to do that job is the one you least want as your particular driver.
Fair. There is no reason to not believe you. Women are more vulnerable than men.
Still, calling the service dangerous without any backing, by some report in addition to annecdata, is offensive, and only does a service to the provider, however well meaning the deduction may be.
Whether this is one of those "we accept some number of school shootings cause gun freedoms are just so great" issues or not is I guess its own matter for debate. But the fact that this happens, and then as dudes we get to discuss it at arms length on the internet and opine about whether "99% of trips completed without incident" is reason to dismiss it all out of hand may help explain why an individual woman getting home from the bar might choose to walk or take waymo vs getting in a cab and risk joining the unlucky 1%.
The link you posted leads to the lyft report. The incidents we are talking about, vulnerable groups, is at worst 1/800,000 which corresponds to Touching
1% Is a gross exageration if you go by this article / document.
Since you mentioned weapons: Robotaxis will have a social cost, and in Canada that is important in a way not seen in the US. Unlike weapons, there will be not much discussion about robo-everything.
Surveilling on women without their knowledge and then using that footage as you like is dangerous too. Tech companies are famous for their ethics. Letting women get into a cab controlled by an overseas driver seems dangerous too.
I'm not sure if I buy this, it seems like it's a bit of a turtles-all-the-way-down discussion. Like a vulnerable person ordering a taxi also has a phone, which is the ultimate surveillance endpoint, and opens them up to potential abusive behaviour from employees of their phone maker, their telco, and every app they have on there, including the rideshare ones which by necessity have precise location and other permissions.
At the end of the day, a man driving them home and knowing their home address while right there is a much more immediate and specific point of threat than "I'm being surveilled while I travel in a Google-controlled robotaxi".
Also, like it or hate it, but Google actually has a pretty decent track record with protecting their customers from their own employees. Gmail and gsuite content stays private, and there are enough protections in place to satisfy insurance companies, medical institutions, banks, and even governments. If a Waymo kidnapped or killed someone under the control of an overseas remote operator, it would be national news and congressional hearings; a person getting assaulted by a cab driver is nowhere near that level.
I just don't think "but Google/Waymo bad too" is a reason to poo poo someone feeling more comfortable sitting alone in a robotaxi than sitting alone in a cab or an uber.
Took my first Waymo in Austin, TX last weekend and it did not go well. Was supposed to be a 9 minute drive, then randomly it tells us the ride has been 'slightly extended' to 45 minutes. Customer support dropped us off at a restaurant and said sorry. We ordered a human Uber.
Honestly the last thing I thought would happen would be that it would get lost. I thought maybe it would get confused on the road, but it drove better than most human drivers.
I used them all the time when I lived in LA and they worked great. I didn't have a single bad experience. In general they were much more pleasant than having a human Uber, but that's just my opinion.
Super weird! I've been using Waymo's regularly for 3 years now, couple of times a week and this has never happened.
I’ve definitely been in Waymos that take forty minutes compared to an Uber’s 10 to fifteen because they use very circuitous routes.
A lot of that is Waymos not taking highways, but that's changing.
I went to Austin a few months ago and half the interchanges weren't on Google Maps because they were built so recently. In the week I was there I think they finished building a new one near my hotel.
I wonder how reliant self-driving cars are on unchanging road infrastructure.
There's something about the Uber-hailed Waymos that makes them so much worse than regular Waymos IMO.
This is some crazy mental gymnastics.
I’ve seen them around in London - they are incredibly slow. There’s no way they’ll succeed here - speed is important for getting around.
This is what happens when people who live in a bubble automatically assume what works there must scale and make economic sense to the rest of the world.
Average driving speeds in London are already very low. How can they possibly be sufficiently slower as to be noticeable?
There's no way their slowness is going to make a difference in London. I would have thought the real problem is that they'll just get completely stuck at places where you have to be a bit aggressive to make any progress at all. They don't really have that in America.
That and cyclists/pedestrians can be kind of anywhere at any time. Again not a quite the same in America.
We'll see I guess.
They get stuck in LA as it is which is pretty chill for a major American city all things considered.
They're just really cautious and do need an extra 10s to think sometimes, and there's a lot of driving scenarios that don't allow that much time to decide to go or not. The biggest culprit seems to be unprotected intersections with the potential for human/bike crossing, which includes driveways which they insist on using for dropoffs (even when they're obviously not public driveways), which they then take a very long time to leave.
Really? Bad luck, I have literally never had that happen! What time was this? Because Austin is closing down 35 in the evening and it is just doing crazy things to traffic. Maybe it was that?
Did it think it needed to take a very out of the way route?
The perfect driving equivalent of AI slop
I happened to drive past 2 of them in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. One was making a left turn into an alley, another was on the otherwise of the road so I never got to see how they actually drove but I giddily squealed like a happy pig rolling in the mud WAYMO! as I tried explaining to my shocked wife wtf was going on. It's been so long since I've had this feel of wonder when seeing technology.
I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.
I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.
They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.
I am not. They can alpha test elsewhere.
What metrics would you accept for you not to consider it an alpha test? Because they've been running in Phoenix, Az since April, 2017, and have been offering rides to the general public in San Francisco since June 2024. It doesn't handle Boston winters, it doesn't handle torrential rain, but it's a bit past "alpha" stage.
Alpha <- I should've put that in quotes, I suppose. My tolerance level is lower than yours, that's cool, but I am not getting into these things nor any robot drone choppers or planes. I can barely trust my HDA2 (ADAS) in my Ioniq 5 to not steer me into a rail guard.
They've been used in San Fran and LA and other large markets for years now. In what way are they still "alpha testing"?
Ok, v 0.85? Just the thought of testing these things on public roads, no matter when it happened, doesn't sit well with me in any way. I am not a Luddite, quite the opposite, there is just something off about the whole concept.
Can you talk about what, or is it just a feeling that you have?
Lizard-brain aversion/fear, and that these things' network will be hacked. I am not a lab rat.
Took a few last year on a trip to San Francisco and it felt like the future. It's not lost on me that enshittification will take its toll, the fleet will get nastier over time, prices will increase, etc. I'm also torn about more money being given to mega corporations. But purely from a service-enjoyment and technology-appreciation point of view it was amazing!
How is it you guys feel like the future is better when humans don't do things for themselves like driving?
I get the idea that you no longer need a driver for a cab, but in my mind all that means is there's an unemployed former cab driver who is explicitly worse off now. The likelihood of that person having tons of great options to go do now that they aren't burdened by driving a cab is pretty low imo?
There's probably a name for this somewhere, some kind of automation paradox that makes "society" better but many individuals lives worse.
As an individual it's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about it though
I think it absolutely sucks for the cab driver, but I think it's a huge win for safety overall. Drunk driving, tired driving, distracted driving - if we can make those a thing of the past it makes the world safer.
Personally, I work hard to minimize my car usage in general but they're something society is absolutely enamored with, so if we need to have cars around we could at least get rid of the drivers.
This is called the lump of labor fallacy. When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.
Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.
The past does not repeat.
IMHO jobs were far less specialized in the past. Working in a factory is not that different from working in a kitchen or laying tile.
Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?
The truth is we don't know. Anyone who can answer that question will be rich.
But actually, what I've commonly heard from immigrants from developing countries is not having their certifications recognised. What was once a surgeon/lawyer/accountant is now forced to do menial labour. So maybe that's one problem to consider solving.
"When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs"
Never as good pay and many end up on the system.
When my parents were my age, there were almost no jobs working with distributed systems or robotics and the relative standard of living was much worse than what I have been able to attain at a similar age and level of education.
My grandparents performed jobs that now are rarely performed in the US due to there being better jobs for those qualified to perform them.
I am much happier working with AI and distributed systems than as a carpenter or steel mill foreman like my grandfathers. Everybody on my father's side of the family had these white marks all over their forearms from molten metal splashing on them and burning them as they worked.
This is only possible because of technological progress. It creates new jobs.
Same.
My grandfather was a sailor, then cook. Father drives a taxi. Mom is a seamstress. Stepdad worked at the same factory for 65 years. As I was coming of age in the 90s, they chastised me for spending all my time in front of the computer. Yet here I am still sitting in front of one, making more money than they could've ever imagined.
Society progresses whether or not you want it.
But, as a whole, the entire population's pay goes a lot farther since no one has to pay drivers to drive them around anymore.
Living standards would be a lot worse today if we still had to pick crops in the field by hand.
> But, as a whole, the entire population's pay goes a lot farther since no one has to pay drivers to drive them around anymore
They still have to pay the Waymo though, it didn't become free. :/
You're kidding yourself if you think autonomous taxis will be cheaper in the long run just because they don't pay a driver.
They will outcompete human drivers on cost and once they are dominant they will raise prices. This has happened every other time human labor was replaced too. It is practically the Silicon Valley playbook.
The cost to take a picture today and keep it on your phone is not more expensive than it was when you had to get them developed in a darkroom.
The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.
The cost to buy and sell financial instruments today through Robinhood or similar products is not more than when you had to have a broker to place orders for you.
The cost to find vast amounts of information through search engines is negligible today. To do so previously would take immense amounts of time, effort, and money parsing through encyclopedias is the information even existed at the time.
The cost to print a few drafts of a memo today requires a single session typing into Microsoft word and then printing to your office printer. Previously you had to pay a typist to put together multiple drafts for you.
On autonomous vehicles:
Yes they will absolutely be cheaper, as long as a complete monopoly is avoided. It's not just that you don't have to pay the driver. You also will have vastly lower insurance rates due to how safe they are. Maintenance costs will be lower due to economies of scale when fleet operators can have the car deliver itself to a dedicated massive maintenance facility.
> The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.
Now you just have to maintain multiple subscriptions to streaming services so you can watch the movie you want. $22/month for Hulu, $27/month for Netflix, Amazon Prime where you pay for the privilege of paying to rent some movies.
So you might be able to watch more with your subscription, but the nexus isn't quite that simple.
Pretty sure a DoorDash driver now gets paid better than a 19th century farmer inflation adjusted? Over a single lifetime, there are no guarantees because there's too many variables, but civilization-ally, the progress seems to always hold up.
I always hear people saying this but when? the 70s the 60s? that’s your golden age?
> When jobs get automated, almost always, people find other jobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Yes yes I'm aware of the fallacy
It's obviously not the whole picture though. When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?
If the number of jobs automated approaches 100%, then either what small proportion that is left is still sufficient to pay people, whether because the number of jobs in absolute terms is still large, say by the creation of new types of work, or because of reduction in working hours, or mass unemployment eventually forces some form of redistribution.
Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.
Unfortunately the gains of automation will not become our post scarcity utopia, instead they will be consumed by the new AI overhead and we remain in a regime of scarcity. AI will reshape all our processes and societies, that is where the gains will go.
> Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.
When I look around me I see a society that I think would happily have jackboots round up excess labor and execute us rather than redistribute money fairly
So I wish I had your optimism
Well, I didn't say I'm confident that society won't allow it to become a problem. But I don't think a society that triggers mass unemployment and poverty at the same time will remain like that for long before it'd face uprisings. A society like that would also face the problem that without people having money they have no customers.
If you redistribute money evenly, how would you get anyone to do anything?
If you gave everyone $10k a month UBI, who is going to change your tire? How much you have to pay them to go to work if they get $10k while sitting at home?
If a town has a lack of apartments, how much will an apartment cost if a young couple has $20k a month to spend?
The scenario we are discussing is one where "the number of jobs automated approaches 100%", so the point would be that it is explicitly a situation where most people are not needed in the job market.
> If you redistribute money evenly, how would you get anyone to do anything
Currently, people need money to pay for necessities like food and shelter. Therefore either money is redistributed somehow or people have jobs to earn money, or we change the paradigm entirely to something else
We cannot have both no wealth redistribution AND replace all labour with automation without really messing this system up
This seems pretty obvious to me?
> When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?
When was that? Or hypothetical? Why would that be and not that new jobs being created?
The vast majority of people used to be farmers; I am glad to live in a future where farming jobs have largely been automated away.
With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.
Don't get me wrong on this, I love driving.. the right car. But, most of the time, driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world. I guess you could argue that some commuters (who aren't driving themselves) don't exactly fill that time with the most productive things but thats a separate issue.
>driving is one of the most unproductive things a human can do in the modern world
Agreed. So lets build dense cities and efficient mass public transit, right? ...Right?
I think this oversimplifies life and realities.
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
I enjoy driving for pleasure and often go for days long drives. Driving back and forth to work however is definitely a chore. It sounded fun at first, I get to do something I enjoy doing before work, how bad could it be?
Turns out, spend a couple hours on the road everyday and you'll quickly get sick of podcasts or ebooks. You can't stop to look up details or check out the code/math/design because you're driving. You can't really do anything else too because you really should be focusing your attention on the road.
totally agree but aside from the joy of driving, which I genuinely appreciate, most of my driving is of the kind (commuting, sat in traffic) where id like the driving bit to be taken away and any number of alternatives presented. Also sleeping is essential. Productivity is surely about what you do when you are awake, the problem with driving is that it demands constant attention so surely that has to make it (equally to anything else that requires constant attention) the most unproductive activity there is (initial caveat aside)
It's because women, late at night, intoxicated, don't need to get into the car of a strange man, and get assaulted.
Waymo experience in San Francisco has always been awesome for me as a passenger.
I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving. Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime. Absolutely stupid for a city or state government to approve autonomous systems in their municipalities without first enacting very strict and very punitive laws around these systems. This goes for surveillance, sidewalk delivery bots, and especially driverless cars.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
> I live in Denver, Colorado. A Waymo drove into a farmers market. Luckily, no one was hurt. I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.
> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.
> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.
> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.
[0]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/waymo-drives-through-denver-farm...
I disagree with this. I'm okay with permissive permitting of self driving (it seems to be much safer according to their own studies, which I am willing to skeptically accept), but where I agree is being permitted should not give you any special rights when it comes to avoiding civil (criminal?) liability.
A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.
>Luckily, no one was hurt.
It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.
This exactly. The car didn't drive into people: it followed a vendor truck into a place it shouldn't have gone, apparently slowly exited the area.
It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.
> drove into a farmer's market
> wasn't...endangering people
There's a bit of a disconnect there.
"Endangering" is an exaggeration based on what actually occurred it seems. What the car did was technically in violation of traffic regulations but it was careful to not hit anybody or cause significant damage to people's property as it did so. This is essentially no different than a careful driver ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) a sign restricting them from entering an area, but still driving through the area successfully without doing any harm. Technically, traffic rules were broken, by mistake (an algorithmic one most likely) in this case, but there were no lasting effects.
People make mistakes like that all the time, and sometimes they still get ticketed for that kind of thing, and other times they get a simple warning or don't get any form of rebuke at all. How many of us have never accidentally gone into a one-way traffic lane from the opposite side and managed to still drive through and get back on track without killing or maiming anybody? It's unlikely anybody would get charged with a crime for this, nor should they over a simple mistaken rule violation that did no harm.
The first comment is like saying I drove into a building when I entered my garage.
A self driving car can drive places it isn't supposed to be while ALSO very carefully avoiding colliding with anything.
Were you standing on top of the car at the time?
> I assume a human doing this would be charged with reckless driving.
I would be shocked if that was the case.
A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].
When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
[1]:https://abc7news.com/post/80-year-old-san-francisco-driver-k...
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLLkGaKX7NI
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8gMd9XZJyg
I happened to be in that area of West Portal on that fateful day (damn you, Noe Valley Bakery!) I did not see it happen, but went to see what that noise was all about. The images of that scene from that day still haunt me; they are very vivid. It was a terrible, terrible accident and may that old witch Mary Lau spend an eternity in hell.
>A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail.
And that's an easy case to prosecute too, because the driver clearly broke laws beyond just "crashing into people":
>when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
> Two years ago, the family of four was on their way to the San Francisco Zoo with their two young children when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
Horrifying. Life is short, enjoy what you have.
> is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
Why?
Process A is killing 40,000 people per year.
Process B has killed none to do the same job.
I'm sure per mile driven, there is an "acceptable death rate", but should we atleast wait till the autonomous cars are on the board to make that a priority?
How is that different from a malfunction of human-operated car?
There are drive-by-wire cars on the road. ABS systems can disable breaks.
If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?
Did you want the cops to arrest the car?
Just to be clear: there are humans choosing to have the car operate. That's not just semantics. Responsibility lies with the people making the choice to cause a system to operate.
So we should start arresting engineers and executives?
If people act with gross negligence, then yes, we should arrest them. How that is defined may depend on a variety of factors, though, and is something that already has relevant case law in related fields.
Executives, definitely yes. One person should be responsible for automated systems and services. The CEO is the most logical choice.
Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction, start legal proceeding against the company. Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.
> Immediately stop all Waymo's in the jurisdiction
When we start taking idiot drivers' licenses away, sure. Otherwise this is a silly overreaction with a calculable cost in human lives.
>Someone signed off on software/hardware that lacked sufficient protections, find out who.
Crashed prod? Straight to jail.
Bridge collapsed? Straight to jail.
not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_Narrows_Bridge_(1940) nothing happened to the lead designer (Moisseiff) or engineer (Eldridge)
> nothing happened to the lead designer (Moisseiff) or engineer (Eldridge)
It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time. We don't jail aircraft engineers when they make a mistake because just sending people to jail doesn't work as well as encouraging them to co-operate ex post facto so the root cause can be identified.
>It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time.
Poe's law strikes again. Of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail, or most software engineers would have spent some time behind bars by now. However it's entirely unclear whether @CountHackulus meant "of course autonomous car engineers should be jailed, just as if an engineer signed off on faulty plans" (which to be fair, also happens), or is just repeating my joke with bridges.
> of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail
You'd be surprised at how many intelligent people really do want this.
Exactly, people on HN want new laws passed every time Cloudflare goes down for 5 minutes
To be fair, Cloudflare is near or at the point where they should be regulated as a utility.
Sure, but it's not a cop's job to perform legal proceedings.
Are you referring to the actual case mentioned here, where a car passed slowly through a market and... that was all what happened?
Aren’t waymos actually much safer and have less incidents per mile compared with human drivers? (Yes, they are and yes they do)
A driver's license suspension would be sufficient, say for six months or so?
Depends on the circumstances, if it's a mechanical issue without an obvious cause neither the car or driver gets suspended.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...
What do you believe is the correct course of action for law enforcement to take in this situation?
https://apnews.com/article/robot-germany-sexual-assault-colo...
Can you extend that to this situation?
> Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime.
This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.
When I read these threads, I sometimes wonder if I was the only person to have a positive/unproblematic experience with Waymo
Was excited to take a Waymo, loved the entire experience, would extra love it when they reenable highway usage in LA.
I think the bigger lesson from what you say isn't so much about Waymo or this topic generally but to always remember that forums like HN are not reliable reporters of reality: they can only give you an indication of who was moved to say something and an indication of what they want you to believe... true or not.
I'm sure you were already aware of that, but its easy to forget that and think you're dealing with something more real.
i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias
Last week there were two separate posts, one said "AI is not a tool" and the other one said "AI is a tool." Even though that logically covers all possibilities, somehow the vast majority of comments in both were negative or contradicting. My takeaway is that comments aren't a very representative sampling of how people actually feel.
Waymo is an unbelievably fantastic product IMO.
anecdotal but waymo was flawless. zenlike music. safe driving. Vs recent uber getting a lot of invasive personal questions from drivers, weird smells, only reason chose is it was half of waymos cost. Even at double the cost might just chose waymo next time.
People on forums will complain about everything!
I learn this each time Apple releases a product. New iPhones could be $500, 10x the speed, half the weight and full week battery life and a fringe loud group will post and upvote some dumb complaint.
i had a funny first experience where the lidar got super lost on a bush, but it did a uie around the block and pulled in from the other side, and from there the experimence was that it was the best driver ive ever seen
I use Waymo as my primary transport whenever I'm in SF and have yet to have a single bad experience.
Same, used them exclusively last time I was in SF and it was absolutely perfect.
It's not just you. My family gets around on foot, bike and transit, but occasionally we find the most practical way to get somewhere we want to go is by car. Having more options to get a ride is very welcome.
From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.
There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.
Same here. Waymos have been cheaper and safer than Ubers and Lyfts for me here in SF.
I used it in Atlanta, it was great. HN people hate everything.
I note the Toronto announcement cites job creation in the very first sentence. I live near another snowy city where Waymo has been teased, but has yet to have any significant presence:
https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/
There apparently is a concerted effort to deny Waymo the legislative changes it needs, driven by a concern about job loss:
https://autonomousboston.com/massachusetts/waymo-opposition
Will be interesting how it handles the tougher climate conditions.
Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos. Those Roadster jets may finally make a smooth ride throughout the whole of the city possible.
Describing Montreal as "sheer chaos" only makes sense in the north American context. Karachi and other such cities are actually chaos.
At least in Toronto traffic they’ll mostly be capped at 10km/h, doubt they’ll have any high speed collisions with the terrible traffic here lol.
You are confusing predictable continuous low level noise for sheer chaos. The chaotic potential Montreal has in winter, and it uses, is spectacular. The fact that it is so unpredictable in exercising this merely contributes to the problem.
Freezing rain, for example. My god.
I find the anarchist traffic of developing world cities to be more aligned with natural game theory principles than proscriptive protocols. For a computer it may be simpler.
Self driving is all tactics and no strategy. Waymo would freeze solid when confronted with several hundred motor-scooters and dozens of tuk-tuks.
Waymo freezes up when car in front of it decides to turn and show blinker last minute and line next to it is empty.
Which is weird because humans would take a few seconds to check the line and switch it, while Waymo already knows its empty and not taking an advantage of it.
I was thinking this too - my guess is the cars simply wouldn't offer rides on days with really poor conditions.
Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.
This could still be a problem. Human drivers are still available on these days today, and if services like Waymo take over and theres less Uber (et al) drivers, then we'll have no support on the worst days.
Maybe, but I'd expect a good chunk of rideshare traffic still ends up leaving the city, which AFAIK Waymos still won't do.
My understanding is Uber etc. charge and pay based on demand, so if that means the (fewer) human drivers are that much more expensive on snowy days then so be it. If it's a blizzard and Uber fares work out to $100/h I'd be very surprised if drivers couldn't be found.
Compounded by the fact in winter basically everyone will be going to the airports at least twice to escape, which drives demand.
Basically if the planes are flying the robotaxis will need to work.
Same thing when people tout how FSD is basically "done"... and talk about their anecdotes driving around SoCal and such.
Don't hear many anecdotes about FSD in Pittsburgh on a night in January...
Toronto gets snow! Do any other cities they operate in get snow?
So much of winter driving is knowing what is blocked by ice and snow, what snow is probably safe to pass, and navigating around piles of ice and snow that become temporary obstacles.
Granted Toronto gets much less accumulation than a city like Montréal.
Denver also gets snow. Waymo has been open to the public for rides from Sept 2026 in Denver. And they started test drives in Sept 2025 I believe
They have a limited presence in New Orleans, mostly rolling around the French Quarter and Uptown. The roads look bombed out in parts of Uptown, maybe not the absolute worst anywhere but it's close.
Yeah, I've seen them going around. The last one I saw at Jackson Square looked like the safety driver was driving. This is probably the worse urban environment for Waymo to be. I'm not sure how they're going to handle the roads or the people dancing in the streets (as well as mules, pedicabs, wacky bikes, scooters, drunk people and all of the wonderful chaos). Not looking forward to them becoming operational here.
Denver just launched ahead of a supposed "Super El Nino" winter. We'll see what happens.
Pothole observed. Diverting around pothole -
pothole observed. Diverting a-
pothole observed. d-
pothole.
po-
You have crashed into a cone.
Laughs in Montreal. Over here, the cones surround you, mug you and leave you naked holding nothing but a steering wheel in the middle of the street. _Then_ you fall into a pothole. During a snowstorm. BTW, your car is already in a container headed for Africa.
That or the random homeless person who decides to cross the road randomly.
You’re either dodging construction site, homeless people, or just sitting in traffic.
Recursion depth limits exceeded
They've been mapping, or whatever they do, Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and it was pretty funny watching the cars navigate around massive snow piles last winter. Curious to see how the rollout goes here. <Insert popcorn emoji.>
I'll giddily await the moment when a Waymo gets swallowed by a random sinkhole.
I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.
>> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.
Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.
I wouldn't say Montréal is more dangerous, but it is 100% more complicated for drivers. There are so many variables that change suddenly. A road is fully plowed and salted, you turn right and everything turns to shit with tons of snow on the ground. You keep going, suddenly there's ice *underneath* a layer of snow so the car starts skidding, and the plow's going the other way trying not to swallow your car whole.
You're talking about one variable I'm familiar with, but it's one variable. With snow cover in a plain, you just drive much slower and turn on your hazards.
The most complicated scenario, imho, is getting on and off a car ferry. Dark. Wet. Pedestrians. Dogs. No sidewalks. Flashing lights and lots of signs, most of which have nothing to do with car traffic. Lines on the road which you ignore in favor of following hand gestures. Then dramatic up/down ramps followed by parking way too close to other cars. And it is all in a metal box where GPS fails and internal systems are thrown off by ship movements.
> Dark
Headlights of cars in various states, and some drivers think they have them fully on when they don't.
There are very few reasons why a Waymo should get on a ferry. It can take you to the ferry and then you can get another transportation (maybe even a Waymo!) when you disembark.
Yeah, I regularly drive from Saskatchewan to BC in the winter.
I'm generally enthusiastic for electric vehicles, but batteries and FSD don't really work in a 12 hour blizzard at -40. Doesn't match my use case. :)
I had a similar thought from my time living in Alaska. half the year there aren't any lines on the road other than the occasional tracks from the previous car that drove on it, and that's if the wind is low. It's not unusual to have half the road covered in a foot or two of snow from a drift. Humans can see them and usually avoid them, but it involves strategically using the oncoming lane. Would be interesting to see the nav system deal with that!
(well, there is Mont Real, for which the city is named... But I'll agree it's not much of a mountain.)
Mont Royal. There's no such Mont Réal.
Ya, all mountains get names. Passes only get names if the are legendary, usually for dramatic views or as highpoints between geographic areas. If a pass has a name, drivers should expect dramatic weather changes between one side and the other.
on the other hand, montreal doesn't allow right on red, and instead has an extremely strongly planned traffic grid including priority right turns. Not much ambiguity in the prescribed traffic patterns.
"montreal doesn't allow right on red".
That is not uniformly true throughout the metro area, especially in the major burbs.
There are no right turns on red on the Island of Montreal.
There is no chaos there, just traffic jams.
> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.
The ultimate test would be Cairo or Mumbai or Lagos :-)
I remember the traffic in Cairo (1970s).
It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).
I'm curious about those half cars. So they start with a perfectly good car and cut off the back? Is that to carry more cargo or something?
I suspect the frame rotted.
I was just a kid, so point of view was limited.
Not much snow in any of these, or occluded vision. Which drivers seem to struggle with, a lot.
Just traffic conflicts to the Nth power and bad/unmarked infrastructure.
I wonder how this will handle streetcars. It's illegal to pass a streetcar with the doors opening. There's a flashing signal on the vehicle, but it seems like a fairly important local difference. I hope it won't take a pedestrian death to get that sort of thing looked at.
They handle school buses which have a similar mechanism, so I would hope it's already a solved problem.
No it's quite dissimilar. Streetcars in Toronto travel in mixed traffic in the middle lanes and deposit passengers into the right lane of traffic, which is expected to stop behind the open doors. What happens if the right lane is occupied by stopped traffic? You have to sit and wait while the passengers do their thing around the hopefully-attentive driver of the stopped vehicle.
Being in mixed traffic, streetcars are easily blocked by disabled vehicles or straight-up idiots. The time between launch and one of these things sperging out and blocking streetcars will be measured in minutes.
They can already handle the streetcars in SF which sometimes let people out in weird places, although I don't know if it's the same as Toronto. It seems like it would be easy to update them to stop for the open doors if that's what they're supposed to do. They're pretty good at detecting when people might cross in front of them even if there's nobody in their way yet.
FWIW I've never been to Toronto but legally I could go there and drive without knowing about this particular rule. If it's something unique to the area and has the potential for danger I'd be more worried about people than robots.
I've never been to SF, but looking up some pictures and info, it looks like it's the same rules. You can't pass it at certain moments, and need to be prepared to stop for people getting on and off.
The main difference is going to be scale and the chaos that brings. You see a LOT of streetcars in Toronto. For a huge chunk of downtown, it's the main subway-ish transit option. Some of the lines are on a 5min frequency, others are every ~10min or so, with some segments having 2-3 lines on it. I've seen them get backed up before an intersection, and open doors for passengers before they even reach the stop haha. I've personally hood-surfed over cars that got into the lane between the streetcar and the stop quite a few times, and sometimes it really isn't their fault.
The signal on the rear-end [1] is awful. There's a blurb saying "DO NOT PASS OPEN DOORS" which is clear enough, but there's also a sign that illuminates when the doors are open and it's NOT a stop sign. It's this do-not slashed circle with a picture of a stick figure seemingly walking into traffic. I think there's a reading of that symbol from well-meaning tourists that says "Attention boarding passengers, don't run into traffic". I could see that freaking out a waymo without a little bit of custom code.
[0] (All red lines are streetcars) https://cdn.ttc.ca/-/media/Project/TTC/DevProto/Images/Home/...
[1] https://blogto-production2-baselayer-display.blogto.com/arti...
You mean the same school busses they had a NHTSA investigation spun up over passing while they shouldn't, leading to a recall?
https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-...
Yes - the ones where they fixed the software to behave appropriately around them.
It obviously makes sense to have begun this autonomy journey in much easier cities. It'll be interesting to see the incremental improvements as they navigate how to handle everything that winter does to driving. I hope the plan isn't, "just stop operating for five months." Also a bit of a jerk, I am, but I'm looking forward to the funny videos.
A bit off topic, but I've been a Waymo booster for a minute here, as you can see in my comment history, but here in LA their pricing has jumped the shark a bit. Yesterday it quoted me > $10/mile for a short, < 5 miles trip. That was the return trip after I had a less expensive price of around $6/mile to the original destination (still pricey!).
I have zero insight into their pricing mechanism, but I was getting in the car coming back from, no exaggeration, one of the most expensive cities on the planet and so if I was Waymo I would probably price that ride pretty aggressively based on the location alone. Then you throw in all the other data points Google has about its users and I had my first "fuck me" moment where dynamic pricing really slapped me in the face (I've seen it firsthand with the airlines but Waymo is particularly insidious because of the use of my Google history).
And of course I'm aware Waymo has to price high while they're fleet-constrained or folks are going to be waiting forever for a car, but I hope they don't get too content with the absurd margin at $10+/mile. They will be tempted to do just that and so instead of flooding the market with fleet decide they'll put just enough cars in service to maximize profit instead of going for market share (of all riders I mean). But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Joining you at your "off topic" table, I think it is interesting how the words "jump the shark" have moved from the idea of a sort of loss of coherence in plotlines (writers are checked out) to a general term for a decrease in quality.
> But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.
And that's how it should be.
(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)
Waymo can come up with some extraordinarily high prices at times. Sometimes it may cost $4-$5 to get me to church, very early in the morning (a 3-mile, 10 minute ride.) Sometimes, it can cost $25+ to get me home from church at peak times, like Saturday evenings.
On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening.
Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand.
I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.
Saw a Waymo test car in Munich recently. Guess they will start operations in EU from here soon.
London too, I believe.
I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)
Munich has been a long-standing operational base for many US companies in EU, so they might try just a pilot, but it's not only waymos I see here, also some bmw self-driving test vehicles, also nvidia(?) test vehicles etc. And trust me as a ukrainian myself I know what people think about orange man both here and back there. And europeans are largely sceptical about US companies not because of him but mostly because they're just american.
I would imagine Canadians aren't going to want an American company replacing their drivers atm...
Google employs thousands of people in Canada...
Oh there's going to be opinions, for sure. This is the high cost, zero returns portion though. They aren't trying to go live until 2028. In a way, it becomes a bargaining chip if they've spent all this money on mapping/testing Toronto and want to start operating in earnest. Though, ideally by 2028 we don't have to behave as low and as transactionally as the current American regime.
Some of the damage is permanent.
Curious how early they're announcing this. Service won't begin until 2028.
Because people will see the training vehicles?
The second half of the post in Canadian French is a nice touch.
Canada has two official languages: Canadian English and Canadian French. This satisfies both the English-speaking population and the French-speaking population. As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
> As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
Last time I was in Vancouver I noticed more signs with translations in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh than French...
However that might be because I am an anglophone from Ontario and my mind filters out the French language on signs if an English equivalent is present.
No, you were probably right. About the only French in Vancouver is in federal facilities: so, in practice, the airport and some parts of the port that nobody in the general public would ever go to.
In New Brunswick (officially bilingual), most signs are bilingual.
The official language is Zesty Mordant.
I believe that bilingualism is required by law. Many US product packages have repeats of the information in french.
Generally no. Some provinces officially operate in both English and French but some do not.
For a press release from a private company operating in Ontario there is no legal requirement to publish in both languages. Some companies might do so anyway if they have operations that are regulated by the federal government and/or they just want the goodwill.
Imported products have to meet Federal packaging laws, which do require both languages.
Ontario has a large French population
This really depends on the context, but in general bilingualism is only required for the public sector and adjacent things (such as federal standards around food packaging). A private company like Waymo certainly does not need to send out a press release in English and French.
It is more complex than that. Quebec (Montreal) has additional laws over and above the national laws, often requiring that French text be bigger/longer/more prominent than the English text.
There was also controversy over proper names v. descriptions. "Macdonalds" is a proper name but should "Burger King" be translated to "Burger Roi"?
They'll have to translate their whole site. That's usually how Canadian releases are used; it forces companies to make their operations multilingual.
A legally required one, natch.
This give me hope that other snowy midwestern cities are right around the corner.
You can see their planned locations on the map here https://waymo.com/
Includes St Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Minneapolis etc.
I’ve seen Waymo cars driving around Minneapolis lately.
Edinburgh next please!
I'd rather we left that car dependency enabler to the yanks thank you very much
Yeah, driverless cars are like something out of a sci-fi film. Modern tech like this is not going to fit with the aesthetics of European cities.
You can walk or cycle... Modern bikes are light and pretty fast too.
We need regulation to ensure they don't come here.
Still plenty of cars/taxis in Europe and Waymo is much safer than human drivers. IMO legislating against them is legislating against safety. As a pedestrian I feel far safer around Waymo than human drivers.
Spoken like a true Waymo lobbyist.
IMO legislating for them is legislating against humans , their jobs, their families .
Spoken like a true luddite. These newfangled power looms are going to be a disaster for the handloom weavers and croppers!
It'll be interesting to see how Waymo cars handle snow covering the road markings and road edges, and people flocking to new emergent lanes that do not correspond to the painted lines on the road, and people parking well into the road because of snow piles, etc, etc.
In theory, Waymo should have a very up to date map of lanes and should be able to very precisely triangulate where it is, so with snow covered road markings it may still do better than humans.
Sometimes when the snow builds up, the safest driving is to be in the “lane” made by heavy travel that blows the snow to the sides. Staying in the real lane would make for hard and likely dangerous driving.
No argument or anything here, just saying what I think is an interesting nuance as someone who has spent a lot of life driving in snowy places.
I’m in Denver now and it’ll be really interesting to see how these things handle the effects of a real storm. If I had to make a guess it would be that they’ll all just stop driving for a day or two.
Do you understand that what you have said, this behavior of using the absolute true position of the lanes when all the human drivers are using a different emergent from snow-paths lane, will cause accidents? Doing the "right" thing is wrong when it is different from what humans all do.
2028 arrival date.
I'd rather have bike lines :(
Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".
Bike lines don't send Canadian money to a startup in the USA so I guess bike lines don't have financial means to lobby the government.
I'd 100% rather bike around a Waymo than a human driver.
Toronto is embroiled in partisan politicking around bike lanes. The provincial premiere is overriding city council to have them removed, which is what I suspect is the motivation behind the parent comment.
I'd rather not have any roads people can walk.
It'd be good to have more bike lanes, and waymo-type transport being used as a part of a public transport ecosystem rather than just pure taxi.
both?
both!
The bike lanes are being removed by our conservative government. So not both :(
I'm sure disabled or elderly people would agree with you.
Please, not this shit again.
Ford is already removing bike lanes.
Tax dollars to put in bike lanes, and then tax dollars to remove them.
You will never stop hearing about this until they are restored. Also enjoy your very slow commute with all the bikes now legally required to ride in the car lane and block you.
Yes, this shit again. Rolling more steel boxes through the city is not the answer.
Winter is the real test here. Worked on lidar perception for a bit and falling snow throws returns everywhere, plus once the lane lines are under slush everyone just drives in the ruts the car ahead made. Curious how they handle those unofficial lanes.
As a driver in places where it snows... I'm curious about how it will handle:
1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.
2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.
3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)
4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")
5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).
---
Tangent for the "how do you handle lanes when you can't see any" ... old school approach: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/833362
> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.
https://ahmct.ucdavis.edu/advanced-snow-plow
> 1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible
Forget unplowed snow. Often in Calgary where I live there's no lane markers visible under the snow for months at a time, even if it's plowed regularly
When all an account posts is claims of first-hand experience with various unrelated technologies, the strategy becomes a bit too obvious: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hncbw02z5a&next=5009...
True. But don't most people drive in the tracks of the car ahead? I know when it snows people sometimes make a three-lane highway into a two-way "rut railway" road, and make do.
They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.
Yep, full launching in Denver just recently as well.
I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?
I have zero idea about lidar operational capabilities, but can you heat them to stop snow and ice from piling up?
Parent is referring to snow in the environment, not on the lidar itself.
When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
Damn, you guys have it hard over there
You get used to it. I tried FSD (latest version) last winter in those conditions and it had no issues. Waymo shouldn't have any issues with it either.
Street parking in the core makes what would be a manageable amount of snow into a disaster like 2 weeks a year minimum because plows can't get down older streets.
Sounds like someone needs to develop an autonomous snowblower for narrow streets.
California did back in the '90s.
https://path.berkeley.edu/automation/development-advanced-ro...
It had hands free operation (still needed someone in the seat to control the plow) and lane assist in whiteout conditions when the outside edge of the lane had a cliff (much worse than driving into the ditch).
https://path.berkeley.edu/automation/development-advanced-ro...
> This project is one of the first real-world applications derived from PATH/Caltrans research in the area of automated vehicle control. A modified snowblower with add-on sensors, actuator, computer and driver interfaces was developed, and initial field tests were conducted along the 8 guardrail sections between Kingvale and Soda Springs on the shoulders of Interstate-80 near Donner Summit.
https://path.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/develop...
> Various lateral sensing and referencing technologies were investigated for this application; what was found was that machine vision does not penetrate snow, and that the GPS system does not provide sufficient reliability under possible multipath and blockage scenarios. A magnetic-marker-based sensing system was chosen for the initial implementation primarily because of its high reliability and accuracy (better than 1 cm) under all weather conditions. The mountainous highway I-80 near Donner Summit (close to Lake Tahoe) was chosen to be the first field test site. In 2001, magnets were installed along the eastbound and westbound guardrails of I-80, at 4 feet apart and 4 feet away from the guardrail. Binary coding of the magnetic markers was designed (north pole up vs. south pole up) to provide information about guardrail characteristics, such as the shoulder side (right or left of the blower) and the end of guardrail. Eight sections of the guardrail were equipped with magnets for the initial feasibility operations with a total length of 1.46 km (0.9 mile) between Soda Springs and Kingvale.
The problem is not plowing the streets, it is moving the snow away from the streets. After heavy snowfalls, plows create huge piles that block a significant part of the road. This is a difficult problem that simply takes a lot of resources to address.
Afaik the already do this. But another problem is that falling snowflakes reflect lidar pulses and heating doesn't help in that case
that's in the FAQ. They say they have sensor cleaning tech. But they aren't launching until 2028 so 2 winters of testing should tell.
They will also need mother nature to co-operate. Last winter was brutal in terms of snow, we barely had any snow the year before that!
They linked to https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... discussing the snow mitigations all the way from software down to the built-in heaters on the sensors.
That's one of the reasons lidar will prove to be a dead end for this application. It's a temporary enabling technology on the path to the simpler multiple camera based solution.
Best approach would be to use both lidar and cameras. They compliment each other
No, in the limit where everyone has lidar they end up stepping on each other too. Being a totally passive sensor system is a major benefit for mass deployment, on top of the cost advantages.
Lidar is cool when you want to get a point cloud from a fixed location, or dealing with perfectly uniform surfaces (which cars don't because humans can't do this either), but beyond that there are better ways to do things.
“Good morning, LIDAR! You’re looking positively radiant today!”
“Why, thank you, Camera! You are doing a wonderful job of seeing everything in your FOV!”
“Ahh, you are very flattering, LIDAR! It’s an endearing quality in you, for sure!”
LIDAR: blushes
Camera's can't see in the dark. There is no perfect sensor. Waymo relies multiple sensor modalities: Cameras, Lidar, ultrasonics, radar, gps, inertial measurement units.
Also microphones. Don’t forget the (external) microphone sensors.
Cars don't drive in the dark. Roads are usually lit. And every car has its own lights for seeing where you are driving.
Interstate highways and local roads are generally unlit outside of urban areas. But in fairness, Waymos don't operate in those places anyway.
> Roads are usually lit
Not always. Definitely not all freeways.
> And every car has its own lights for seeing where you are driving
Not always far enough. Especially at freeway speeds on unlit freeways.
So how can humans do it?
If humans don't have lidar but can drive it's an existence proof of the viability of that approach.
In addition to vision, humans have proprioception and kinesthesia, hearing, inner ear receptors for balance, a sense of touch, sense of smell. We use all of these sensory inputs when we drive. And even then humans get into lots of accidents.
Lidar is superhuman vision.
How do you use your sense of smell to help you drive? I can't smell anything outside my car thanks to the air filter.
The real answer is very simple: safe drivers slow down to adapt to poor conditions (including visibility). Lidar might reduce how much it needs to slow down but I don't think it will be eliminated because you can't drive with only lidar.
> How do you use your sense of smell to help you drive?
I smell smoke before I see it. Useful if there's a forest fire up ahead.
Burning rubber or smoke from the engine is an indicator of a mechanical issue.
> you can't drive with only lidar.
Nobody said you could. This is a strawman.
Tesla stans are the only ones trying to convince everyone you can only drive with cameras. Everyone else is pretty united on the usefulness of multiple inputs.
> Nobody said you could. This is a strawman.
Didn't mean it in that way. I meant a car with camera+lidar would realistically still slow down because of the reduced camera visibility.
> Tesla stans are the only ones trying to convince everyone you can only drive with cameras. Everyone else is pretty united on the usefulness of multiple inputs.
Ignore them. The latest Model S and X have radar again, but possibly unused right now, so they are probably going to roll that out in a refresh of the 3 and Y eventually.
Humans can't do it safely during a proper blizzard. (Toronto doesn't really get proper blizzards, though).
Just in time for the bike lane removals /s
Some of you downvoted-to-dead this from another poster ("Hi, I'm Nelson" from Technologists for Democracy); new user who had low karma, so it's dead in the thread.
I frankly think it's a legit POV, and I'm also local to this, so I'm going to use my own much higher karma to post it again:
https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/
I think there are legitimate concerns in promoting American BigTech as provider of infrastructure/services in Toronto. Concerns about data collection, about technological autonomy, and local employment.
I fail to see any unique argument in this. That is to say you can replace Ontario with San Jose and it'll all work.
> Digital sovereignty and privacy is at stake.
This is the most strongest argument, and luckily that's the first one. Many ways to solve this so not really a big problem.
> Ontarians’ jobs risk being outsourced
What jobs are being displaced by driverless cars? The best argument here is uber drivers are going to be affected. Who would you rather drive you at 3am if you're a drunk woman? An uber driver or Waymo?
> Public transit could lose riders
What is the goal here? The goal is to move people efficiently and decrease the reliance on human driving, which can cause deaths. Public transportation is vital but again, there are times when subway / buses wont work.
Also, if public transit is a major concern, shouldnt we be asking Uber (see point #2) to go away?
The last two points are super generic, it isnt even worth discussion.
Not convinced with the approach here.
I doubt they’ll cut it in Toronto traffic. What’ll they do when going west by DVP and lakeshore, only a human can effectively navigate that space
It’s doing Manhattan, it’ll be fine.
It's not. Waymo was using human-driven cars to collect data in NYC for a while, but their permit expired and they no longer operate at all in New York.
Wait ... isn't this Google? Aka a US company?
I understand the issue of technical power, mind you, but I don't really see how US companies expanding into Canada is a good idea as long as a hostile orange individual keeps on potty-mouthing Canadians.
Google already has quite a large office in Toronto.
Maybe we'll end up cancelling whatever contract Waymo got and give them a secret payout amount like we did for Starlink.
>hostile orange individual
Orange guy may make news, but Canada has greater problems from within.
So your response to asocial, xenophobic politicians is give them what they want?
"I will show that America first President who wants to fracture global trade...by arguing for fracturing global trade."
That gen pops tune changed with the political climate just like big corp previously going on about left wing shit is stunning
Ya'll are just LARPing what you watch on TV and read online
No, the rest of us will continue trading without the US. Its not giving in, its ignoring the billionaires that are buys favors and not buying from their companies.
You sure about that? My friends and colleagues outside the US are awful pissed that US gen pop let/lets this happen.
They’re encouraging their leaders to route around 300 million Muricans as they see no collective action in response to threats to global trade they rely on.
And argue ok if US institutions and zeitgeist are "fuck yall we're America" well again 300 million are really at the whim of 8 billion.
Not sure the typical Mr Rogers naive optimism "we're America!" is gonna get the US through after 10 years of this (Biden admin effort was binned just months after Trump 2.0 took off so it effectively didn't matter; Jimmy Carter 2.0). That's just copium, blind faith in what Adam Smith called "the invisible hand" he later came to realize was a mistake to believe existed
Absolutely sick. Again they are using minimal job creations and people with diseases to push their job-killing, inhumane surveillance devices.
Shouldn't Waymo be renamed into ASIC, "American Super Intelligence Car"?
Toronto is already on Lake America (approved by Google). Maybe bring out the traffic cones or get another trucker protest.
What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Do you know any women who have had drivers act inappropriately towards them? Or drivers who pretend the meter is broken and try to charge more?
There are lots of reasons somebody might prefer a driverless car and lots of reasons somebody might prefer a human driver. Why not have a choice?
Do you know any minors that had the police called on them mid ride by a RoboTaxi company becuase the taxi AI though the minor had guns. Yeah Waymo did that.
For your Women's safety POV. just because now youre alone in the car doesn’t really mean you are alone. You are under constant remote surveillance.
Regarding the meter broke issue. So you'd rather have corporate price fixing. Because that’s what Waymo is doing. The fleet size is same but the costs are going up.
And when a giant tech company is a service provided and rule maker , you don't really have a choice left.
So it sounds like you agree with me in that different people have different concerns and it's good that there are options out there.
> the taxi AI though[sic] the minor had guns
That is not what happened.
The Support Team checked in on the live internal video after being alerted, and the Support Team saw firearms, so they alerted law enforcement, who arrested the children, for possession of actual guns.
How is that wrong or bad?
What does a 1-driver taxi compared to a 2-drivers taxi offer apart from fewer taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.
Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?
The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.
Well, some long-haul coaches have two drivers to allow them to switch-out for safety but keep the passengers and bus moving. Of all the things to get excited about, I don't understand why reducing the labor costs for corporates is one. Improving transportation instead would benefit us all, for example with better road design and mixed/integrated transport systems.
30-35% of the cost of running a city bus is the driver.
Imagine what cities could do with 50% higher bus frequency or more bus routes.
Buses / Trams are the best use of this tech since not only is a high percentage of the cost the driver but they also drive the same predictable routes and not all over the place.
There are issues though. If you remove the staff from the bus you will need to handle some particularly unruly passengers in a different way. Currently the driver just stops until that person leaves or gets police / special constables involved.
Where are you getting this number? Imagination is free but to execute the imagination is not. So yes, it depends on the imagination of the person who owns the tech AI company not your imagination.
And what is the cost of replacing the driver with the hardware/software and the servicing cost. and the operators in Philippines that are remotely working ?
> Where are you getting this number?
Previous discussion on this topic on HN. I don't feel like searching for it now, you are welcome to.
I don't know what you're saying about imagination.
If you've ever seen bus drivers in NYC, it's genuinely impressive how they manage to weave a giant box through the chaos. I'm not sure that self-driving tech will be able to replace them anytime soon.
This would be interesting for my native Kansas City though. There's a severe shortage of buses and it's much simpler driving conditions. Could be a game changer.
If you remove the cost of the driver, smaller buses become more viable.
Cost of driver replaced with cost of what ? how do you sustain that cost and dose it cost more than the driver ? One liner sounds cool but please back it up with something.
> how do you sustain that cost
What does that mean?
> dose it cost more than the driver ?
No. That's the whole reason the field of self-driving exists. It will become cheaper than the driver.
> One liner sounds cool but please back it up with something
I don't feel like looking for links right now. You can disagree with my opinion and move on.
But, Waymo removed the driver and it's not cheaper than Uber, correct?
I thought that was because of the cost of the hardware. I could be wrong though.
Have more buses blocking traffic?
"You aren't in traffic. You are traffic."
As a driver, you should want cheaper buses. More bus riders = fewer other cars on the road.
Other cars don't stop in traffic for 30 seconds every other block to take on/discharge passengers.
You can just go around a stopped bus (obviously not a school bus). And if the streets are so narrow that you can't, then you definitely won't like the traffic of all those bus riders driving their own cars.
Ok except apparently Waymo is more expensive than human-driven alternatives.
And you think that'll always be true?
- frees up people to do more important things than drive you around.
- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.
- obeys traffic rules
> frees up people to do more important things than drive you around
Like what?
They still need a paycheck. What do you think the outcome of a bunch of unemployed taxi drivers is going to be? What other low skill career is going to absorb them?
We're really rapidly approaching a "automate too many jobs for the remainder of the job market to absorb" situation imo and It's hard for me to imagine it going very well for anyone.
Safety. Waymos are safer for passengers and pedestrians than human-driven cars.
It obeys the rules of the road and kills many fewer people - 0 killed in 250M miles. Driving a machine is something people are not good enough at frankly.
IMO it's a safer and more comfortable passenger experience
Road safety. Personal safety. A consistent experience.
> What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs?
One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.
A more uniform experience across taxi rides.
I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.
But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.
Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.
Of the robotaxis in Austin, I've only used Waymo, but have used it fairly extensively. So far I have noticed:
- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,
- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,
- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),
- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,
- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,
- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.
There are three major disadvantages right now:
- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,
- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,
- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.
HackerNews is a bubble in itself. Most people here cannot relate to a person who drives a cab for a living and is having a real tangbile crisis seeing how these tech companies are eating up their livelihood. Switching jobs for a taxi driver is not the same as switching jobs or career as a software coolie.
No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/23/cruise-waymo-spent-million...
New York is still holding on but I dont know how long it can. https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-new-york-city-political-ro...
They keep announcing new cities, but do they really follow up and actually launch there? I remember a couple of years ago they announced NYC as a market, but I don't think they're fully launched in NYC yet.
Earlier this year, Waymo had a permit to test 8 autonomous vehicles with safety drivers in NYC. The permit was not renewed [1]. Waymo can no longer drive autonomously (even with a safety driver behind the wheel) in NYC.
[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...
Waymo is great. But I don’t want it in my town. More money and data for Google. No improvement to my local public transport.
A lot of women want it along with the ability to order Uber/Lyft from women drivers only.
Fair point, Uber has a female driver mode now.
Doesn’t change my desire for better public transport though.
What about race or religious preference too?
Yeah, if its OK to discriminate on the basis of the immutable characteristics of the Gender class, it should be OK to discriminate based on other characteristics as well.
Its very bigoted and regressive that you can be charged a 'cover' just because you have the wrong genitalia and belong to the wrong gender. I don't see how that's any better then charging a cover because someone has the 'wrong' skin color.
Of course, we have very bigoted courts here in the US that consistently rule to discriminate against men. I promise you if people respond to this comment it will be to argue how discrimination against men is justified and should continue.
Cathering to racism now? /s ?
But sexism is OK?
I don't understand why you think anyone is supporting sexism...
Saying "Think of the women" as you say "think of the children" as a blanket statement can be malicious. Reasoning requires hard data, not evoking feelings.
Maybe fix underlying social problem instead of forcing more crap that tries to patch the absolute terrible state?
That's a very different problem that probably has a generational timetable.
Letting women get home safely with a robot driver is a thing that can happen today.
Not today. Not next year, either. And calling taxi service that dangerous is an exageration. Preference enhanced by that type of comments would be more accurate
I guess? I was on a date with someone and we took an uber back to her place after a concert, and she mentioned off-hand afterward that had I not been there she would have just walked... even though it would have been over an hour on foot, it just wasn't worth the risk after multiple bad/creepy experiences taking carshares home late at night.
Maybe it's a bit like cops: they're not all bad, but the system is kind of set up so that bad ones thrive and good ones burn out. It's going to be a particularly kind of person who is willing to spend their late Friday night driving drunk people home from the club, and honestly if you're a vulnerable person, maybe the guy most willing to do that job is the one you least want as your particular driver.
Fair. There is no reason to not believe you. Women are more vulnerable than men. Still, calling the service dangerous without any backing, by some report in addition to annecdata, is offensive, and only does a service to the provider, however well meaning the deduction may be.
It's definitely not nothing, and the numbers bear that out: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59008000
Whether this is one of those "we accept some number of school shootings cause gun freedoms are just so great" issues or not is I guess its own matter for debate. But the fact that this happens, and then as dudes we get to discuss it at arms length on the internet and opine about whether "99% of trips completed without incident" is reason to dismiss it all out of hand may help explain why an individual woman getting home from the bar might choose to walk or take waymo vs getting in a cab and risk joining the unlucky 1%.
The link you posted leads to the lyft report. The incidents we are talking about, vulnerable groups, is at worst 1/800,000 which corresponds to Touching
https://assets.ctfassets.net/q8mvene1wzq4/4jxkFTH5YCQK8T96ST...
1% Is a gross exageration if you go by this article / document.
Since you mentioned weapons: Robotaxis will have a social cost, and in Canada that is important in a way not seen in the US. Unlike weapons, there will be not much discussion about robo-everything.
Surveilling on women without their knowledge and then using that footage as you like is dangerous too. Tech companies are famous for their ethics. Letting women get into a cab controlled by an overseas driver seems dangerous too.
Lets not hide profits behind women's safety.
I'm not sure if I buy this, it seems like it's a bit of a turtles-all-the-way-down discussion. Like a vulnerable person ordering a taxi also has a phone, which is the ultimate surveillance endpoint, and opens them up to potential abusive behaviour from employees of their phone maker, their telco, and every app they have on there, including the rideshare ones which by necessity have precise location and other permissions.
At the end of the day, a man driving them home and knowing their home address while right there is a much more immediate and specific point of threat than "I'm being surveilled while I travel in a Google-controlled robotaxi".
Also, like it or hate it, but Google actually has a pretty decent track record with protecting their customers from their own employees. Gmail and gsuite content stays private, and there are enough protections in place to satisfy insurance companies, medical institutions, banks, and even governments. If a Waymo kidnapped or killed someone under the control of an overseas remote operator, it would be national news and congressional hearings; a person getting assaulted by a cab driver is nowhere near that level.
I just don't think "but Google/Waymo bad too" is a reason to poo poo someone feeling more comfortable sitting alone in a robotaxi than sitting alone in a cab or an uber.
Where's the profit in that?