I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around. They seem to have a mix of robotaxis (like the ones pictured) and decked out Toyota Highlanders that look like Waymos but not as well "packaged", though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.
Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.
Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
I remember once going on the way back a work trip on a whim, and regretting not checking that the weather was >100 degrees. That step outside was an oven.
It's also kind of far and inconvenient to get to. It's like the inverse of those shuttles that take you from the arrivals loop of the airport to the ass end of the casino loading dock of your hotel (and 10 other hotels. So, unlike Uber, not even remotely worth it).
Interestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.
What's not precise is road work closures, special event closures, detours due to event parking, random traffic patterns during various times of day and random signal availability for both gps and cellular due to massive buillding and parking garages. The randomness of it all is pretty crazy to me if they figure it out.
>> though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
If by robotaxi you mean the vehicles used in the tesla test in Austin and now in the bay area, they are just regular model y with an emergency "stop so you don't kill me button" on the right side. They have a special version of the software that is unreleased. The current model Y's / "robotaxi" have all the regular hardware, including pedals and steering wheel and sensors. If you search, you can even find cases during the Austin Texas where the safety drier gets into the driver seat in a few situations.
We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
The front-to-back symmetry is interesting. It may cause some confusion for other drivers, in some limited circumstances, when they can't tell which way the vehicle is facing.
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
I routinely had 8+h drives in the rear-facing seat of my family's circa 1970 Plymouth Satellite station wagon growing up. Completely unsafe, and very boring, but I don't recall barfing.
My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
Both, plus absence of seat belts. Rear facing with no head support is a good way to snap your neck if you are wearing a belt, but because we weren’t, we’d probably be flying forward to the windshield.
Yay! A tiny minuscule bit of my code is riding on these. While I no longer work there, I am absolutely thrilled at this milestone
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
These little front-back symmetric buses (as well as engineering-outfitted minivans) are pretty common in the mission in SF as well. I see them all the time in a very small (four or so blocks around 16th and folsom where my pottery studio is) area, but I think they're all still just test driving.
As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.
The pricing wave Waymo went through is interesting.
After the limited access you’d often find them offering same or cheaper rides than Uber/Lyft. People tried them and realized they arrive without the whiplash you get from a start/stop Tesla uber in SF, no smells, no weird interactions. Every person we talked to prefers the Waymo even with its quirks and getting stuck sometimes.
Now waymo is 3x uber every time I check it.
I’ve gotten rides across the city for $6 on Uber, not sure what driver is making any money at that rate. Per hour you’re much better off working at In and out.
I poked around on their site and read the press releases; Zoox seems to be limited to only pickups and dropoffs at a few set locations.
> Simply open the Zoox app to take a ride from several destinations on and around the Strip.
This puts it dramatically behind Waymo where I can walk out on any block in the coverage area and tell it to take me to any other block in the coverage area, not to mention Uber and Lyft.
I'm sure Zoox can improve this, but right now it resembles a self-driving shuttle more than a taxi service.
A lot of the more interesting things in Vegas are off the Strip, like Omega Mart or downtown. I was just there this year and after less than a day I saw no reason to be on the Strip.
A self-driving individual shuttle with preset stops that can integrate into existing roadways is a huge step forward and would be very useful in many urban locations.
I disagree wholeheartedly. I think the most useful thing about robotaxis is that you can count on them to pay attention and react within a given timeframe and that speed limits will either be expanded greatly, eliminated or calculated as a function of the capabilities of the individual hardware in question rather than our best guess as to how an average person would probably react. I'm looking forward to driverless cars careening about at 200+ mph because they can actively communicate and coordinate with traffic around them in order to do so safely.
I'd be terrified if we allow them to go really fast. They have software and sensor faults, the Teslas are just regular teslas without redundant hardware. They don't have extra sensors, they don't have two sets of their HW4 hardware. If there is a fault the driver has to immediately take over. They can't handle rain well, snow etc. FSD is interesting but it's not nearly ready to be a near fulltime driver. Waymo is much more advanced and experienced but I don't want to see them driving at high speeds. Maybe after 10 years of exp with reundant hardware and software.
I don't like the idea of them doing 200+ mph anywhere near me, but the Musk idea of them doing high speeds along dedicated tunnels would be quite cool if they could make it work.
Speed doesn't matter at all in city driving on regular roads. Going from 35mph to 25mph doesn't materially affect the trip time.
Think about SF, its size is (famously) around 7 by 7 miles. So it'd take 12 minutes to cross (as the bird flies) from one side to another at 35 mph and 17 minutes at 25mph. Which is completely unrealistic, because real travel times are dominated by traffic lights and congestion.
This calculation changes only when we're talking about long-distance travel on freeways. But honestly, I expect that fast long-distance trains with seamless transfer to self-driving taxis would be a better idea.
Reminds me of the .gif floating around years ago showing an intersection with cars blowing through it in both directions while very intentionally just missing other cars.
You're talking about long highway trips? Parent is probably talking local trips, where 200+ mph is never going to be safe, and would not even be useful.
no thanks, I don't fancy dodging 120mph robots when I'm crossing the road, or breathing in the extra pollution that this would create (even if its an EV!)
It's part of discussions around hypothetical futures where everything is self-driving and the vehicles communicate with each other to form dense convoys on places like freeways where there aren't pedestrians.
I certainly haven't heard any mainstream suggestions that self-driving taxis ought to drive faster than humans in spaces they share with human drivers and human pedestrians.
yes, but no. Yes, they'll do it for now. No, once they're as normal as humans, they'll definitely be tweaked to maximize profit. And that will include as much speeding as risk/reward dictates.
So yeah, they'll do the same thing as humans eventually.
A company that systematically speeds is a nice fat piggybank for governments wanting a little extra money in their budget or a political win. These vehicles are logging their current locations and speeds constantly against a map of known speed limits. It's much easier for a government to request those records and assess a fine than go after individual motorists with politically unpopular measures like speed traps and traffic cameras.
He means that robotaxi companies will make more money if they can fit more 'rides' into a given period. It won't be long before some mba big brain figures out lobbying for increased speed limits will do just that.
So we're describing a hypothetical problem a decade or more out in respect of a technology evolving so quickly a significant fraction of people still don't even believe it's real.
Its because using the fact that robotaxis follow "logic" excludes they from the same risk taking as humans ignores the bootstrap that will happen and the inhetent shittification we see with all capitalism meets social programming.
I expect robots to run at 120mph only when it is safe. Meaning I can safely cross the road, if they are going 120mph it is because they have correctly figured out I'm not going to cross the road in front of them.
I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around, we actually got stuck behind one trying to make a right turn onto LV Boulevard (the strip) and seemed to be far to cautious.
What's interesting is that about 80% Tesla's entire valuation is FSD and Optimus, and the underlying assumption with FSD is that it'll magically turn on for all Tesla's in a day and they'll have a monopoly and extract all the profit needed for that valuation. Apart from any comparisons with Waymo, I suspect self-driving will broadly follow other AI tech, where we'll see a proliferation of competitive self-driving tech on the heels of first movers. Local protectionism will also probably play a big role in this.
I would bet against the imminent commodification of autonomous vehicle technology. Way too early. No consensus on the technology approach.
Here's a speculative but plausible take: Zoox and Waymo are both products of cloud computing and data gathering giants. Maybe that's the important factor.
Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Pony.ai, Baidu's Apollo, Argo.ai and Aurora all have/had very similar approaches to the technology. Tesla is the major outlier and they haven't accomplished much in spite of the hype.
I don't want to split hairs but I think the focus on sensors misses the point. There's a lot of diversity in terms of other on-board hardware, software architecture, and the role of geospatial data in the AV system.
It's a product area that is very far from being able to horizontalize. Waymo Driver is going to run on Waymo hardware for a long time to come. Toyota is supposedly trying to use Waymo technology for personal vehicles. I expect adapting it will take years. The software is nothing like an app running on an operating system. All of these systems probably require years of effort to move them to a different hardware platform.
>There's a lot of diversity in terms of other on-board hardware, software architecture, and the role of geospatial data in the AV system
I'm curious to know where you get information on stuff like this. The Google self-driving car project was fairly transparent in the early days but since things have gotten competitive everybody is pretty tight-lipped about the particulars of what they're doing.
It's a small industry and people talk. You can also infer more about the systems from the bits that are public and/or reasonable.
Unfortunately, information ages quickly. Stuff that Waymo published about their architecture only a few years ago is now wildly out of date.
That said, diversity is decreasing. Most players are standardizing on relatively similar hardware platforms using nvidia compute, with connectivity heavily focused around ethernet as opposed to older buses.
There's a lot of information about these systems out there. Waymo has has described in detail how their remote monitoring works. It doesn't rely on perfect connectivity. It doesn't rely on low latency. It can't even steer the vehicle remotely. It can tell the vehicle what it's next move should be. But all of the processing to get it to where the remote monitor thinks it should go is in the vehicle. It's details like this that distinguish between a demo and a product.
I make TikTok's about technology and project management. Elon's management style has been, some might say, a running gag in my videos, so I am more tuned into these topics than your average bear.
Tesla employees are using LiDAR in secret to gather training data, because they will get fired by Elon if he finds out. Tesla is in the business of blatant self sabotage.
I think self-driving targets a problem that doesn't really exist. The issue isn't that the act of driving is a laborious task, it's simply the amount of time spent in a car, which FSD doesn't address.
FSD isn't a complete product. Somehow they got away with selling an early beta for thousands of dollars. Zoox, despite an objectively odd priority on building a purpose built vehicle, became a generally available product ahead of FSD. That should be shameful.
Too much time spent inside may be a problem, but FSD turns car cabins into rooms. If we're inside already, a room with a destination is often better than a stationary one.
Now to start a tangent, what's the easier problem to solve: FSD, or a robust public transport system? Moving rooms have always been around in the form of trains, busses, streetcars etc...
Turns out, we have an answer to this: Self driving is easier. By a lot. It's not even close. No entrenched interests trying to block your infrastructure plans by claiming that your rail line passes through the territory of some flightless owl, no need to be called racist for cutting through the cheapeast land in the city to build out rails, no need to dig tunnels for subways. No need to overcome class prejudices where the middle class don't want to ride BART with the naked dude with a needle behind his ear.
To people outside the Bay, self driving might still seem like some far-off future tech. I can tell you that the future is already here. I haven't used an Uber in the last 3 years because I will always pick Waymo instead.
Fair enough. I will ask, how many billions have been spent in not only FSD but the car infrastructure that makes room for FSD investment?
I'm being slightly fanatical, but if our priorities were not car-centric in the 50's, do you think we would have spent more, or less money over the last 70 years on the transportation economy?
You're assigning decades of infrastructure costs to AVs, none of which was done with the intention of supporting them. They'd work fine on 1950s roads.
The global AV industry has taken roughly as much funding as California HSR has on its own, and less than what HSR will need to finish.
I've been doing public transit advocacy for my entire adult life. I've worked in the AV industry somewhat less than that. My advocacy has produced a couple of bike lanes and bus stops, contrasted against 3 AV launches.
I'd love to build more public transit, but experience tells me that the most effective thing I can do to support my community is AVs.
I do agree that it's not the panacea some people are hoping but true self-driving would change the experience for many people from a couple hours a day of not doing anything other than listen to music / podcasts / audiobooks to being able to do real work if they have things which can be done a laptop. Since multiple generations have been moving further out to car-only suburbs, I think that'd be very popular even if it's still not as nice as having a shorter commute.
It absolutely targets a problem that exists. Even in places with pretty great public transit, there is some demand for taxis/Uber/etc. Oftentimes even moreso, because if I don't need a car for 90% of trips, I might not have a car at all. So I use an Uber or a taxi when a certain trip demands it.
By far the worst part about said Ubers and Taxis is the driver. They're an unpredictable element in a situation where I greatly appreciate predictability. Unlike my parents, I didn't grow up with staff, so I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
> It absolutely targets a problem that exists. Even in places with pretty great public transit, there is some demand for taxis/Uber/etc. Oftentimes even moreso, because if I don't need a car for 90% of trips, I might not have a car at all. So I use an Uber or a taxi when a certain trip demands it.
This says nothing about self driving cars
> So I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
I don't mean to be harsh, but, get over it? We live in a service economy. Do you feel the same way about the barista taking your coffee order?
> Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
I don't like the assumption you're making that Waymos are the only solution to ubers, taxis or driving yourself. Well designed and well working public transportation (Which is doable and exists in the world) is far cheaper and far more predictable than any form of car-based transportation.
Not only that, but you're not responding to my actual argument. The annoying part of driving is not the act of driving, it's the time spent in your commute.
> I don't like the assumption you're making that Waymos are the only solution to ubers, taxis or driving yourself. Well designed and well working public transportation (Which is doable and exists in the world) is far cheaper and far more predictable than any form of car-based transportation.
I very literally did not make that assumption. I pointed out, in a sentence you quoted yourself, that public transit can drastically reduce the amount of point-to-point personal transportation an individual wants or needs. However, sometimes, you really can't beat the convenience of "I am at point A, I want to be at point B, and I don't want to deal with a series of stops and transfers to get there". Maybe your starting or ending point is an unusual location. Maybe it's an unusual time of day. Maybe you're wearing a tuxedo or a cast and don't want to do the amount of walking public transit normally requires.
In any case, point-to-point transit is sometimes worth the expense. And when it is, self-driving taxis are fantastic. Compared to driving myself, I don't have to commit at least 75% of my attention to not killing myself or others. I can just read a book, or watch a movie, or do the morning crossword. Compared to taxis or Uber, I don't need to deal with a driver.
Point-to-point is also the only option when you get way out of the city and no form of public transportation is work-able. If you live in the actual middle of nowhere, with miles between homes' driveways, and dozens of miles between residential areas and the nearest store, you're never going to get trains or bus stops that cover everyone's home.
This specific bet is very targeted, but we do absolutely have commerciallly available self-driving cars in 2025 in several cities, and the list of cities is rapidly expanding.
An 8-10 year delay from expectations is not too bad all things considered.
I was just there last weekend and saw them everywhere. My buddy asked about it and I'd never heard of the company before. They're definitely distinctive.
Seems like robotaxis are getting ready for a big expansion, I see Waymos all over Orlando even though they don't offer service here.
Congrats to the team! It's no small feat to launch to the public in this space, and from the amount of testing I've seen Zoox doing it certainly seems like they've put in the work. Best of luck!
I like these futuristic little carriages. They're certainly useful in some scenarios but I hope to see something similar but obviouly bigger for public trasnportation.
“From immersive shows and world-class dining to major sporting events and luxury shopping, there is something special for everyone.” – an interesting way to describe Las Vegas.
I feel like robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025. I very well could be wrong (I think I am) but that's the vibes I'm getting from the robotaxis industry right now.
In the US, there's a good chance that AVs will become dominant in 10 years time. In China, it's all but guaranteed.
Apollo One has already launched service in the UAE and is expected to launch in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of the year. They're also expected to start testing in several European countries by the end of the year. The question I have at this point is, will only China benefit from launching this new global industry, or will the US manage to also be competitive on a global scale?
I now see their development vehicles all over the valley, whereas previously if I was near the Strip that's the only region I would see them in.
This valley has congestion issues pretty much all day everywhere, plus a traffic light management protocol that results in very long light cycles.
Many of us when coming to a red light where there are multiple lanes and traffic is light, will make a point to not stop in the right lane when there is no right turn only lane. This is so people who are making a right turn can make a right on red instead of waiting for a green.
Zoox does not do this.
Sometimes there is not quite enough space between vehicles to get into a lane while cars are stopped at a light, such as getting into a left turn lane. Often, some light taps on the horn (or even just sitting with the turn signal) will result in drivers pushing up tight to let you into the left turn lane.
Zoox does not do this.
Zoox will change lanes many times for no apparent reason, making drivers think it is turning right or left at the next intersection, but it does not turn.
As best I can tell, Zoox has issues with pedestrians. I think that the operator (in the test vehicle) takes over when pedestrians are present, because so far I always see them operating the steering wheel when there are pedestrians.
As a driver, I don't like any of the automated drivers because I feel there is a thing that can do serious damage and nobody is accountable. These are all owned by corporations whose sole accountability will be financial, nothing more, while drivers are held to both financial a punitive accountability.
Further, these are all mega-conglomerates for whom there is no real regard for the destruction their property causes. They are politically connected, so will never lose their operating license. The are funded by the largest investors mankind has ever known. Nobody in these organizations has any respect for morals or ethics, instead fostering a system that promotes psychopaths.
I don't want them here. I haven't spoken to anyone who lives here that wants them here.
Waymo has been a good actor in every way I can think of so far. They're transparent, their expansion is cautiously paced, and their safety record exceeds that of human drivers. I'm not sure what more we could ask for. Tesla on the other hand seems determined to put cars on the road ASAP and just hope for the best, but local regulatory hurdles seem to have stopped them for the most part. Zoox, from what I can tell, is taking the Waymo approach.
> Waymo has been a good actor in every way I can think of so far. They're transparent, their expansion is cautiously paced, and their safety record exceeds that of human drivers. I'm not sure what more we could ask for. Tesla on the other hand seems determined to put cars on the road ASAP and just hope for the best, but local regulatory hurdles seem to have stopped them for the most part. Zoox, from what I can tell, is taking the Waymo approach.
> you sound pretty entitled and have a set of "rules" that aren't traffic rules.
> i'm glad we will have robot cars to keep folks like you in your place. you aren't entitled to make the rules of the road.
Nobody is required to be polite and considerate while using a shared resource, and if your opinion prevails, we will, indeed, have a cold, heartless society.
It is mildly interesting to me that you interpret being polite and considerate as "rules". I made no such claim.
I do find it rather belittling to claim I feel "entitled" - perhaps you could refrain from this level of discourse or go to one of the places more appreciative of adolescent behavior.
heartless society is when someone has to wait at a red light for a few more seconds. and yes, enumerating a set of silly non-law "rules" you expect drivers on the road to follow is the definition of entitlement.
> heartless society is when someone has to wait at a red light for a few more seconds. and yes, enumerating a set of silly non-law "rules" you expect drivers on the road to follow is the definition of entitlement.
Many of the traffic lights in this valley are more than 5 minutes per cycle. You are completely naive to the facts of the discussion you have entered.
Please quote my above comment where I stated my expectations of all drivers.
This form of sophistry is not recommended in text-based discussions.
> oh the humanity, maybe on the order of a few minutes. that changes nothing. we should be inconveniencing human drivers more, if anything.
> that you feel obligated to use words like "sophistry" tells me everything i need to know about you.
You are evaluating one traffic light in a long series of traffic lights. At this moment, the grocery store is 2.8 miles and 17 minutes from my house. This is a typical short trip in this valley. Everyone complains about the congestion and terrible drivers (who, BTW, will not be replaced by self-driving cars). Driving here sucks, and self-driving cars make it just that much worse.
That you naively make assumptions and express opinions from these assumptions tells me everything I need to know about you.
hmm all of my assumptions have been wildly correct and you are just further confirming it. good stuff my dude. sorry you choose a place like that to live. sounds miserable.
i'll be sure to wave at the other drivers next time i'm in town in a zoox or waymo and then go back to doing literally anything else than driving.
> hmm all of my assumptions have been wildly correct and you are just further confirming it. good stuff my dude. sorry you choose a place like that to live. sounds miserable.
> i'll be sure to wave at the other drivers next time i'm in town in a zoox or waymo and then go back to doing literally anything else than driving.
If you're trying to imply Vegas is
and easy place to drive.. Well I suggest trying it. It's a nightmare of 6-8 lane mega streets , multi tier traffic junctions, and high seed limits with poor signage and markings.
The absolute worst I have seen was teeing into The Strip at the old Stardust Hotel. The Stardust was two blocks long, ten stories high, and covered in neon. And somewhere in the middle of that wall of neon was one little light that was either red, yellow, or green. The light was not brighter than the neon.
Plus drivers in vehicles that are total beaters with no tags, no insurance, and don't give a darn about anything and will sideswipe your car without flinching.
Insurance IIRC is 3 highest in the nation. I'm paying $3000 per year with max limits full coverage and this is lower than most people I talk to.
That doesn’t do anything except let the taxi go out of service until someone cleans it - assuming that it would identify vomit without waiting for customers to complain after they sit in it.
It does one better, it holds the passenger who created the mess accountable for the cost and then drops them off the service. You get some bad actors, but you can quickly weed them out.
Doesn't change the service outage piece, but it will get better.
That being said, your key point - people can do what they want in this thing and no one can really stop them, does stand.
this is a trivial problem, same way rental car companies solved it:
1. operator or computer vision detects dirt in salon
2. route the autonomous vehicle to contracted carwash
3. return car back to service
4. charge customer for the cleanup
Zoox is a subsidiary Amazon since 2019, if that's what you mean. If you mean software/hardware - they are full stack, i.e. they didn't buy this as prebuilt from say Waymo and slap a Zoox sticker on it.
It's worth asking because we are expecting Uber and even some car manufacturers to be full wrapper companies with zero ability to standup and support their own technology with regards to this.
The CEO of Uber claims that Waymo vehicles complete more rides per day than 99% of human Uber drivers. They work 24/7 minus charging and cleaning time. If that 99th percentile number holds up, Waymo serves the same number of customers with a small fraction of the number of vehicles.
Tiredness is a big one. I was driven by a guy who had worked nonstop for a whole weekend. It was one of the most terrifying drives of my life. I had to tell him to park and sleep outside my house, or else I would report him to Uber.
> slow (especially because USians oppose optimal stop spacing) and dirty
It’s slow because it must solve for many possible routes. Cabs are point to point. A rideshared cab, moreover, knows ex ante where its customer is going and, in a city, where its next customer is.
> Why wouldn't they just take a taxi driven by a human?
Because the humans in New York, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco frequently cancel rides, get lost, drive unsafely, pitch me on their religion and smell. (They also must be tipped, at which point the Waymo is the same price or cheaper than the human-driven ride.)
When I have the option of a robotaxi, I pay a premium for it. It’s novel. It’s fun. But most importantly, it’s safe, punctual and comfortable. Otherwise, I'm fine taking a human-driven car. Having more options makes those cities a better experience.
I'm sitting in the back of a Lyft car right now... I had to prompt the driver via a phone call to actually try to pick me up at the designated airport pickup spot (you know, where the app has me go), he spent 10 minutes trying to get out of the airport parking lot because he didn't seem to have a ticket, and now his constant pumping of the gas peddle in the sluggish Los Angeles traffic is challenging even my ironclad resistance to motion sickness.
How I wish I was in a Waymo right now! I've never had remotely such a poor experience in a SF robotaxi.
Uber and Lyft took a shit in their mess kits by making their north stars advertised wait time on hail.
This caused them to increase the driver pool beyond the point of competence. That, in turn, required degrading customer service to the point that if I actually need help I have to use the flow that says I was in an accident or raped.
Waymo is neat as a robotaxi. But the reason it wins is they seized the nationwide premium market, a beachhead Uber (and paradoxically also Lyft) left undefended.
Okay but OP wasn't suggesting it solves for ALL people who can't drive. Reducing human driving is a massive safety win (if they can continue to be safer than human drivers)
Hopefully some genius will figure out a way of joining lots of these together into a 'gigapod'. That might have enough capacity to actually work at city scale.
I am getting so unbelievably tired of this smug comment. It reeks of reddit spam.
We all know trains would be nice. Unless you have some plan to rework our government into something that will allow for innovation here, then I prefer to see progress, even if it's not ideal.
> getting so unbelievably tired of this smug comment
It's a dumb comment. But I find it interesting in how it reveals opportunities to leverage bridging expertise.
The infamous Dropbox comment [1] illustrated the complete lack of domain knowledge in marketing, sales and generally how non-tech people work that was commonplace among coders. A lot of people made a lot of money, and made a lot of other peoples' lives better, but bridging that gap.
This bus meme, on the other hand, illustrates a complete lack of domain knowledge around marketing and, in all likelihood, how governments and public transit work in the real world.
Strip and Las Vegas from pure numbers POV are perfect for trains. However, it's also a place where you want to be in your private space with your friends rather than 20 other strangers, just for the sake of vibes.
However, before that problem is solved, maybe solve mass-transit from the airport to the strip first?
I don't think the idea was trains at all. I think the idea was, if we're going to have N of them driving down The Strip, it would be more efficient to join them physically together than to have them maintain normal inter-car spacing.
And that could work, if the car in front can communicate power/brake/turn commands to the cars in the chain. And if you could dynamically drop cars out of the middle when needed. And if you could dynamically add cars when they're neighboring and going the same way. All those could be tricky, but they seem quite solvable.
I understand that you're being glib about buses or trains, but the driver is a large part of the operating costs of a bus, and additionally driverless buses might make more frequent but smaller buses more economical.
There are driverless light rails already, and there are cities that have built dedicated streets for buses which would be the first place I’d try actual driverless vehicles.
The reductive "you just invented $existing_thing" framing is so tiresome.
There are so very many opportunities for a better surface transport system than buses. Dynamic routing and scheduling, capacity somewhere between a city bus and a taxi, and potentially better economies of scale all make this far more appealing than what exists today.
Also – and I know acknowledging this will not go over well in some circles – requiring an app and a credit card will go a long way toward keeping riders of a certain disposition off the vehicles. No, it's not a perfect proxy for who will and won't make riding unpleasant or unsafe, but riders will intuitively understand it even if they don't want to think about it, and it will make a difference.
> There are so very many opportunities for a better surface transport system than buses. Dynamic routing and scheduling, capacity somewhere between a city bus and a taxi, and potentially better economies of scale all make this far more appealing than what exists today.
Anyone who knows something about transit already knows this is false. the idea has been tried and failed for hundreds of years. What people want is predictable transit that is there when they want to go and gets people places in a reasonable amount of time. Nobody cares about other stops.
People hate dynamic routing because it means they never arrive at the same time and in turn they can't use transit at all unless they plan to arrive way too early. Most trips are time sensitive, that isn't just the trip time, but also they have to be someplace at a specific time.
People hate dynamic scheduling because it means they can't take spontaneous trips. They can't be late for their planned trip. They will miss the bus once in a while because something didn't go to plan.
What people want is predictable routes that run so often they don't need to look at a schedule. They can figure out how to navigate it. Places people want to be will figure out those routes and location where it is easy to get to.
Okay, what people really want is Star Trek style teleportation. The point is to be someplace fast, not the journey. This is impossible though, so we compromise. the best compromise for transit is frequent systems that run predictable routes.
For some, but the reports I've seen suggest that for many it was just a cheaper Uber, but customers complained and stopped using it if they actually functioned as a dynamic pool. They could stop for someone who was already on the way, but they could go very far out of the way to pick people up before people complained.
An automated van that has roughly regular routes but goes slightly out of its way to pick up/drop off people would be a good middle ground between taxis and buses —- not unlike Jeepnys in the Philippines.
No, it is a terrible middle ground. They work only for people who are okay with being late to a meeting once in a while, or people who are okay with arriving far too early and then waiting once they get there. People who value their time want something predictable so they can arrange their time around things they understand.
This meme about self-driving cabs being glorified busses reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment. It’s technically correct. But it misses the social context so entirely that it, when you realise it’s being seriously said, becomes farce.
> way these are pushed as "solutions to cities and traffic" make making fun of the too easy
It's funny. It's also dumb. An observation can be both at the same time--it's a cornerstone of humor. What it isn't is fundamentally true or revealing.
> their entire social context is "never encounter another human as you go from A to B"
Nope. It's recognising that humans have diverse and varying needs for interaction and privacy.
I like to dine out, even alone. That doesn't make everyone who eats at home alone an idiot. (That doesn't mean I can't make jokes about it. But they shouldn't be mistaken for truth.)
> What it isn't is fundamentally true or revealing.
Well, they are not a solution to transport problems, or to traffic jams.
Yes, they can be complementary to other types of transportation. Yes, companies will enshittify them beyond measure if/when they reach a certain proportion of cars.
> It's recognising that humans have diverse and varying needs for interaction and privacy.
No. I don't think this was even uttered by any of these companies.
> they are not a solution to transport problems, or to traffic jams
Nor to world hunger.
> companies will enshittify them beyond measure
A hypothetical applicable to every mode of transit, private and public.
> don't think this was even uttered by any of these companies
Things can be true without being in a corporate press release. (Also, you're the one who originally argued these services' "entire social context is 'never encounter another human as you go from A to B'." If not being in a press release is an argument against one, it 's an argument against the other.)
Though, in this case, it has been said: "Waymo gives you your own personal space to focus on more meaningful things" [1].
These companies literally hail themselves as "future of transportation".
> A hypothetical applicable to every mode of transit, private and public.
These are private companies looking for profit. These are not hypotheticals given what is happening to other cars and car manufacturers.
> Also, you're the one who originally argued these services' "entire social context is 'never encounter another human as you go from A to B'."
These are literally robo taxis. A taxi is literally a car that is taking you from A to B. And they are also removing the driver from them. Oh, and don't forget the existing of things like Boring Co. which exists almost solely to undermine public transport.
Their intended future is nothing but endless roads with isolated vehicles going from A to B. There's no other "social context".
The route share option, which does sound like a minibus/dollar van, is interesting.
I've tried the current basic share option and it's not great, and I say that as someone who used pre-pandemic UberPool. You typically don't save much off a standard UberX ride, it's only available for exactly one person, the arrival estimates are wildly optimistic, and if the other rider isn't in the car they seem to never be ready when you get to their pickup location.
It's unfortunately, but the current pricing model seems to attract passengers who really don't want to be paying for an Uber but at least this way they can save a couple of bucks, which means they're typically in a stressful situation. Very different vibe from the old, social and wildly cheap UberPool, but that probably was never sustainable.
Putting aside their merit as urban transport, robotaxis can completely solve transportation in less dense areas, something no train can accomplish. It will be particularly valuable to the aging populations in a lot of small towns and rural areas.
The fact that there isn't a rail line from the airport to the strip is wild. It would simplify travel for tourists dramatically, and get a lot of hotel shuttles and taxis off the street. There's a reason why even cities with bad public transit usually have a line to the airport, and it's wild that Las Vegas doesn't have one.
"The strip" isn't one place. It's several miles long. It's not walkable for people with luggage. To do what you propose, you'd have to not just build it to the strip, but along the strip, which is a whole different problem. There's not a lot of space to build a rail line there. It would have to be a block or two away at best. And then, well, the stuff on the other side of the strip is now three blocks away. For people with luggage. In 105 degree heat in August, or in sandstorms, or sometimes in snow.
> and get a lot of hotel shuttles and taxis off the street.
No it wouldn't. Those hotel shuttles and taxies are ideal for anyone with luggage as you don't have to carry your own heavy bags with you. The train doesn't want those people slowing things down for everyone as they get all their bags on/off the train.
Airport lines are a good idea because many thousands of people work at airports and thus don't have luggage. They are also useful for travelers taking a short trip and thus don't have much packaged. However Vegas as a vacation destination is expected to have a lot of people with luggage and less people who are light travelers.
Once tourists drop their bags in their room they should be using transit for every trip until it is finally time to return to the airport.
I'd argue that tourists are the main untapped market in terms of transportation on the strip. Workers and residents might already be familiar with the public transport that exists, but most visitors would probably rather get a private car at the exact time they need it (going to the exact place they want to go) rather than figure out the bus schedule. That's proven by the fact that lots of people grab Ubers/similar to get around there.
Of all the places to try a gimmick, Vegas is the right place.
You managed to come off as condescending, smug and a zealot in one sentence. Bravo. I imagine this stems from not meeting strong town criteria because you aren't forced to share a seat with a stranger or some similar nonsense
Better than a tax that will take you on long route to your destination to get more money out of you. I don’t know how many times that has happened to me in Vegas. Had one drive downtown when I was going from Aria to Mandalay.
I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around. They seem to have a mix of robotaxis (like the ones pictured) and decked out Toyota Highlanders that look like Waymos but not as well "packaged", though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
Vegas is an interesting place to launch IMO (and I believe they only operate in/around the strip). On the one hand all they really have to navigate is the strip which is just one giant straight road. But on the other hand most casinos on the strip have their entrances in the back and once you get off the strip and try to go up to one of these casinos it's a maze of roads. But that only speaks to the technical hurdles, I'm sure a big part of the calculus is that Vegas is very much a "novelty" kind of place and folks are much more likely to give it a shot when there.
Certain road hazards are a much bigger issue on the strip than most roads. Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles. It looks like the initial service area is tiny but if Zoox handles those cases well it's a solid technical achievement and bodes well for expansion.
> Pedestrians frequently walk into traffic, and cars regularly stop illegally and swerve in front of other vehicles
Have you been to San Francisco or LA?
Trust me, strip is much worse than LA and SF. People just forget most societal norms there.
Vegas is also good for many other reasons: year round good weather, lots of tourists in need of taxi services, too hot to walk, too drunk to drive, etc…
#1 place cabbies have tried to scam me. #2 being Boston. Uber is such a blessing
"Sorry my card reader isn't working, cash only."
"Oh, sorry, I don't carry cash. Better luck next time man!"
"Oh it just started working."
San Francisco, too. I'm so glad for Uber.
One downside to Uber in Vegas is that airport pickups happen in some hot parking garage far from the terminals.
I remember once going on the way back a work trip on a whim, and regretting not checking that the weather was >100 degrees. That step outside was an oven.
It's also kind of far and inconvenient to get to. It's like the inverse of those shuttles that take you from the arrivals loop of the airport to the ass end of the casino loading dock of your hotel (and 10 other hotels. So, unlike Uber, not even remotely worth it).
Interestingly Vegas is the only place I will use a cab over Uber or Lyft or (preferably) Waymo. Using the Curb app to pay electronically you avoid most of the BS with cash and "their card machine being broken", and once you've done it a few times you know the actual correct routes between places.
Baltimore was infamous for this when I lived there 15 years ago.
Also good from the tourist cities perspective. Self driving cars are absolutely a tourist attraction.
It still snows in Vegas from time to time. Also, sandstorms are not great for visibility.
Both of which are considerably more rare than snow in Chicago or rain in Seattle.
The Highlanders are testing vehicles: https://zoox.com/journal/autonomous-zoox-testing-vehicle
It may be a maze of roads to the backs of casinos, but it's still a small maze of roads. I would expect the mapping of it to be very precise by now.
What's not precise is road work closures, special event closures, detours due to event parking, random traffic patterns during various times of day and random signal availability for both gps and cellular due to massive buillding and parking garages. The randomness of it all is pretty crazy to me if they figure it out.
AWS Re:Invent is in December, so it's also a good time to show it off to potential evangelists (they've been teasing it for years).
>> though in my personal experience I saw far more of the Highlanders than the custom robotaxis and all of them seemed to have a driver behind the wheel.
The robotaxis have a steering wheel? I thought they had campfire seating with 2 backward facing seats.
I think that comment meant that the Highlanders have drivers.
Zoox calls the person in the self-driving test cars an "operator".
If by robotaxi you mean the vehicles used in the tesla test in Austin and now in the bay area, they are just regular model y with an emergency "stop so you don't kill me button" on the right side. They have a special version of the software that is unreleased. The current model Y's / "robotaxi" have all the regular hardware, including pedals and steering wheel and sensors. If you search, you can even find cases during the Austin Texas where the safety drier gets into the driver seat in a few situations.
We don't really know what a special robotaxi hardware would look like.
It looks like this, and it launched to the public today in Vegas, that's why this is news.
https://zoox.com/know-your-ride
The front-to-back symmetry is interesting. It may cause some confusion for other drivers, in some limited circumstances, when they can't tell which way the vehicle is facing.
It appears, based on my study of the footage on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIRW8bfy4kE, that it could possibly switch which side is the front and the back by just changing the color of the lights. With RGB LEDs that would be pretty easy to do. But my question is, when would that be useful?
It would be neat that it could pull into a driveway and then leave in "reverse", but that doesn't seem like it'd come up that often for a robotaxi.
The back wheels look like they can steer. That's useful for parking in tight spaces.
They can switch sides. They showed a demo of pulling into a parking space then driving straight out.
I wonder if there are barf bags for the backwards-facing passengers.
London Taxis have been configured this way since at least the 1950s and people don't seem to have any problem with it?
I routinely had 8+h drives in the rear-facing seat of my family's circa 1970 Plymouth Satellite station wagon growing up. Completely unsafe, and very boring, but I don't recall barfing.
My sister and I would pass the time folding up a piece of paper and each of us got to draw part of a person without seeing what the other had drawn. Sort of like visual madlibs.
Congratulations, you don't have motion sickness. I think that post was referring to those who do.
For those people, rear-facing seats can exacerbate motion sickness. See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00036...
> rear-facing seat of my family's circa 1970 Plymouth Satellite station wagon growing up. Completely unsafe,
I am curious: Unsafe because a " 1970 Plymouth Satellite" or because "rear-facing seat"?
Both, plus absence of seat belts. Rear facing with no head support is a good way to snap your neck if you are wearing a belt, but because we weren’t, we’d probably be flying forward to the windshield.
https://www.automobile-catalog.com/img/pictonorzw/plymouth/1...
Looking at that picture, I see belts, but I do not recall those belts and suspect they were deeply wedged into the seat and forgotten about.
Plenty of transit all around the world has backwards-facing seats.
Yes but usually you know which seats will be rear-facing.
Yay! A tiny minuscule bit of my code is riding on these. While I no longer work there, I am absolutely thrilled at this milestone
1. Congratulations everyone! Yay!
2. I absolutely recommend Zoox as a great place to work. Believes me, I’ve sampled many jobs, Zoox is up there with Google in terms of what the experience feels like in my experience.
3. Yay again!
These little front-back symmetric buses (as well as engineering-outfitted minivans) are pretty common in the mission in SF as well. I see them all the time in a very small (four or so blocks around 16th and folsom where my pottery studio is) area, but I think they're all still just test driving.
As a waymo user, I'm looking forward to a little more competition in the market. I quite like waymo, but driving price down woudl be great.
The pricing wave Waymo went through is interesting. After the limited access you’d often find them offering same or cheaper rides than Uber/Lyft. People tried them and realized they arrive without the whiplash you get from a start/stop Tesla uber in SF, no smells, no weird interactions. Every person we talked to prefers the Waymo even with its quirks and getting stuck sometimes. Now waymo is 3x uber every time I check it. I’ve gotten rides across the city for $6 on Uber, not sure what driver is making any money at that rate. Per hour you’re much better off working at In and out.
I think it's just demand driven pricing. Ever since they went GA in LA I see them doing pick-ups and drop-offs all the time from my windows.
I see riders in them occasionally. I think they must be open for employee rides.
I poked around on their site and read the press releases; Zoox seems to be limited to only pickups and dropoffs at a few set locations.
> Simply open the Zoox app to take a ride from several destinations on and around the Strip.
This puts it dramatically behind Waymo where I can walk out on any block in the coverage area and tell it to take me to any other block in the coverage area, not to mention Uber and Lyft.
I'm sure Zoox can improve this, but right now it resembles a self-driving shuttle more than a taxi service.
The main issue in this case is that LV strictly dictates rideshare pickup/dropoff locations on the strip.
A lot of the more interesting things in Vegas are off the Strip, like Omega Mart or downtown. I was just there this year and after less than a day I saw no reason to be on the Strip.
Sure, but most tourists are simply on the strip.
A self-driving individual shuttle with preset stops that can integrate into existing roadways is a huge step forward and would be very useful in many urban locations.
The most useful thing I expect from robotaxis is speed regulations.
What's considered normal for humans, driving higher than the speed limits, will not for automatic cars.
Yes! And it's not just about traffic safety-regulating roads overall becomes simpler.
A robotaxi doesn’t care where it can or can’t drive. It just follows graph search and speed limits.
That means we can design cities around how we want them to look, instead of bending everything around today’s messy car infrastructure.
I disagree wholeheartedly. I think the most useful thing about robotaxis is that you can count on them to pay attention and react within a given timeframe and that speed limits will either be expanded greatly, eliminated or calculated as a function of the capabilities of the individual hardware in question rather than our best guess as to how an average person would probably react. I'm looking forward to driverless cars careening about at 200+ mph because they can actively communicate and coordinate with traffic around them in order to do so safely.
I'd be terrified if we allow them to go really fast. They have software and sensor faults, the Teslas are just regular teslas without redundant hardware. They don't have extra sensors, they don't have two sets of their HW4 hardware. If there is a fault the driver has to immediately take over. They can't handle rain well, snow etc. FSD is interesting but it's not nearly ready to be a near fulltime driver. Waymo is much more advanced and experienced but I don't want to see them driving at high speeds. Maybe after 10 years of exp with reundant hardware and software.
I don't like the idea of them doing 200+ mph anywhere near me, but the Musk idea of them doing high speeds along dedicated tunnels would be quite cool if they could make it work.
(Musk 6 years ago saying it's happening https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8X8NdcV7Wc It hasn't yet of course)
Speed doesn't matter at all in city driving on regular roads. Going from 35mph to 25mph doesn't materially affect the trip time.
Think about SF, its size is (famously) around 7 by 7 miles. So it'd take 12 minutes to cross (as the bird flies) from one side to another at 35 mph and 17 minutes at 25mph. Which is completely unrealistic, because real travel times are dominated by traffic lights and congestion.
This calculation changes only when we're talking about long-distance travel on freeways. But honestly, I expect that fast long-distance trains with seamless transfer to self-driving taxis would be a better idea.
> Going from 35mph to 25mph
...dramatically reduces likelihood and consequences of a crash
Reminds me of the .gif floating around years ago showing an intersection with cars blowing through it in both directions while very intentionally just missing other cars.
You're talking about long highway trips? Parent is probably talking local trips, where 200+ mph is never going to be safe, and would not even be useful.
I'm reminded of this prescient scene from the movie Logan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAwc1XIOFME
Although eventually I imagine self driving cars will be able to go considerably faster than human driven cars in lots of places.
no thanks, I don't fancy dodging 120mph robots when I'm crossing the road, or breathing in the extra pollution that this would create (even if its an EV!)
I think you misinterpreted, OP meant that robots will respect the rules, which humans typically don't, e.g. driving at 50 where the limit is 30.
in which case I apologise :)
I've seen plenty of robotaxi huckers advocate for speed limits 'appropriate for robot response times'
I haven't.
It's part of discussions around hypothetical futures where everything is self-driving and the vehicles communicate with each other to form dense convoys on places like freeways where there aren't pedestrians.
I certainly haven't heard any mainstream suggestions that self-driving taxis ought to drive faster than humans in spaces they share with human drivers and human pedestrians.
> I've seen plenty of robotaxi huckers advocate for speed limits 'appropriate for robot response times'
Where?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45201394
I think maybe robotaxis should have speed limits appropriate for driving into trees and fire trucks.
yes, but no. Yes, they'll do it for now. No, once they're as normal as humans, they'll definitely be tweaked to maximize profit. And that will include as much speeding as risk/reward dictates.
So yeah, they'll do the same thing as humans eventually.
A company that systematically speeds is a nice fat piggybank for governments wanting a little extra money in their budget or a political win. These vehicles are logging their current locations and speeds constantly against a map of known speed limits. It's much easier for a government to request those records and assess a fine than go after individual motorists with politically unpopular measures like speed traps and traffic cameras.
Yawn, same as humans and speed traps.
> that will include as much speeding as risk/reward dictates
Speeding can usually be brushed off as carelessness. Where it can’t, we charge it more harshly.
A robot programmed to speed serves a jury mens rea on a plate.
He means that robotaxi companies will make more money if they can fit more 'rides' into a given period. It won't be long before some mba big brain figures out lobbying for increased speed limits will do just that.
> lobbying for increased speed limits
So we're describing a hypothetical problem a decade or more out in respect of a technology evolving so quickly a significant fraction of people still don't even believe it's real.
Its because using the fact that robotaxis follow "logic" excludes they from the same risk taking as humans ignores the bootstrap that will happen and the inhetent shittification we see with all capitalism meets social programming.
I expect robots to run at 120mph only when it is safe. Meaning I can safely cross the road, if they are going 120mph it is because they have correctly figured out I'm not going to cross the road in front of them.
I have a good sense of what Waymo and Tesla’s capabilities are, but not Zoox. Can anyone here clue me in on how Zoox compares?
Zoox is funded by Amazon and is built from the ground up to be a robotaxi fleet with a custom car. There is no steering wheel afaik.
Announcement: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/innovation/zoox-headquarter...
> Zoox is funded by Amazon
Amazon owns it, not just funded them.
> There is no steering wheel afaik
Maybe the control is in a remote centre then
It's a robot. It's driving itself, not being driven by a human.
I was just in Vegas and saw these rolling around, we actually got stuck behind one trying to make a right turn onto LV Boulevard (the strip) and seemed to be far to cautious.
Were they to cautious or is the typical driver far too aggressive?
Why not both?
I didn't write an exclusive or...
https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2025/02/03/2024-disen... says it's about 40% as good as a Waymo if you use disengagement as a metric.
They are the second company to launch robotaxi services in the US.
Cruise was technically second, for whatever that's worth (apparently not much).
Did they actually launch? I thought the incident occurred during testing.
I don't think they ever went beyond a closed beta to select individuals.
They did, Cruise had paid rides for the public for a short while.
They had paid rides for the public.
What's interesting is that about 80% Tesla's entire valuation is FSD and Optimus, and the underlying assumption with FSD is that it'll magically turn on for all Tesla's in a day and they'll have a monopoly and extract all the profit needed for that valuation. Apart from any comparisons with Waymo, I suspect self-driving will broadly follow other AI tech, where we'll see a proliferation of competitive self-driving tech on the heels of first movers. Local protectionism will also probably play a big role in this.
I would bet against the imminent commodification of autonomous vehicle technology. Way too early. No consensus on the technology approach.
Here's a speculative but plausible take: Zoox and Waymo are both products of cloud computing and data gathering giants. Maybe that's the important factor.
>No consensus on the technology approach
Waymo, Cruise, Zoox, Pony.ai, Baidu's Apollo, Argo.ai and Aurora all have/had very similar approaches to the technology. Tesla is the major outlier and they haven't accomplished much in spite of the hype.
I don't want to split hairs but I think the focus on sensors misses the point. There's a lot of diversity in terms of other on-board hardware, software architecture, and the role of geospatial data in the AV system.
It's a product area that is very far from being able to horizontalize. Waymo Driver is going to run on Waymo hardware for a long time to come. Toyota is supposedly trying to use Waymo technology for personal vehicles. I expect adapting it will take years. The software is nothing like an app running on an operating system. All of these systems probably require years of effort to move them to a different hardware platform.
>There's a lot of diversity in terms of other on-board hardware, software architecture, and the role of geospatial data in the AV system
I'm curious to know where you get information on stuff like this. The Google self-driving car project was fairly transparent in the early days but since things have gotten competitive everybody is pretty tight-lipped about the particulars of what they're doing.
It's a small industry and people talk. You can also infer more about the systems from the bits that are public and/or reasonable.
Unfortunately, information ages quickly. Stuff that Waymo published about their architecture only a few years ago is now wildly out of date.
That said, diversity is decreasing. Most players are standardizing on relatively similar hardware platforms using nvidia compute, with connectivity heavily focused around ethernet as opposed to older buses.
There's a lot of information about these systems out there. Waymo has has described in detail how their remote monitoring works. It doesn't rely on perfect connectivity. It doesn't rely on low latency. It can't even steer the vehicle remotely. It can tell the vehicle what it's next move should be. But all of the processing to get it to where the remote monitor thinks it should go is in the vehicle. It's details like this that distinguish between a demo and a product.
I make TikTok's about technology and project management. Elon's management style has been, some might say, a running gag in my videos, so I am more tuned into these topics than your average bear.
Tesla employees are using LiDAR in secret to gather training data, because they will get fired by Elon if he finds out. Tesla is in the business of blatant self sabotage.
Wasn't Zoox bought by Amazon only a few years ago?
There is already a proliferation of self driving tech in various stages of readiness, especially if you include Chinese companies.
I think self-driving targets a problem that doesn't really exist. The issue isn't that the act of driving is a laborious task, it's simply the amount of time spent in a car, which FSD doesn't address.
> The issue isn't that the act of driving is a laborious task
Said like someone who doesn't have elderly parents, and doesn't plan to age…
FSD is not being marketed as an aide for elderly people or those with disabilities, it's being marketed as a panacea for all driving related problems
FSD isn't a complete product. Somehow they got away with selling an early beta for thousands of dollars. Zoox, despite an objectively odd priority on building a purpose built vehicle, became a generally available product ahead of FSD. That should be shameful.
Too much time spent inside may be a problem, but FSD turns car cabins into rooms. If we're inside already, a room with a destination is often better than a stationary one.
This is true.
Now to start a tangent, what's the easier problem to solve: FSD, or a robust public transport system? Moving rooms have always been around in the form of trains, busses, streetcars etc...
Turns out, we have an answer to this: Self driving is easier. By a lot. It's not even close. No entrenched interests trying to block your infrastructure plans by claiming that your rail line passes through the territory of some flightless owl, no need to be called racist for cutting through the cheapeast land in the city to build out rails, no need to dig tunnels for subways. No need to overcome class prejudices where the middle class don't want to ride BART with the naked dude with a needle behind his ear.
To people outside the Bay, self driving might still seem like some far-off future tech. I can tell you that the future is already here. I haven't used an Uber in the last 3 years because I will always pick Waymo instead.
Fair enough. I will ask, how many billions have been spent in not only FSD but the car infrastructure that makes room for FSD investment?
I'm being slightly fanatical, but if our priorities were not car-centric in the 50's, do you think we would have spent more, or less money over the last 70 years on the transportation economy?
You're assigning decades of infrastructure costs to AVs, none of which was done with the intention of supporting them. They'd work fine on 1950s roads.
The global AV industry has taken roughly as much funding as California HSR has on its own, and less than what HSR will need to finish.
I've been doing public transit advocacy for my entire adult life. I've worked in the AV industry somewhat less than that. My advocacy has produced a couple of bike lanes and bus stops, contrasted against 3 AV launches.
I'd love to build more public transit, but experience tells me that the most effective thing I can do to support my community is AVs.
I do agree that it's not the panacea some people are hoping but true self-driving would change the experience for many people from a couple hours a day of not doing anything other than listen to music / podcasts / audiobooks to being able to do real work if they have things which can be done a laptop. Since multiple generations have been moving further out to car-only suburbs, I think that'd be very popular even if it's still not as nice as having a shorter commute.
It absolutely targets a problem that exists. Even in places with pretty great public transit, there is some demand for taxis/Uber/etc. Oftentimes even moreso, because if I don't need a car for 90% of trips, I might not have a car at all. So I use an Uber or a taxi when a certain trip demands it.
By far the worst part about said Ubers and Taxis is the driver. They're an unpredictable element in a situation where I greatly appreciate predictability. Unlike my parents, I didn't grow up with staff, so I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
> It absolutely targets a problem that exists. Even in places with pretty great public transit, there is some demand for taxis/Uber/etc. Oftentimes even moreso, because if I don't need a car for 90% of trips, I might not have a car at all. So I use an Uber or a taxi when a certain trip demands it.
This says nothing about self driving cars
> So I'm not used to simply pretending this person I'm sharing a space with doesn't exist. Instead, I need to navigate the fuzzy line between courtesy and service.
I don't mean to be harsh, but, get over it? We live in a service economy. Do you feel the same way about the barista taking your coffee order?
> Waymos have none of this shit. They're clean, show up when they say they will, I can play my own music, adjust the air conditioning, and have obnoxious conversations with my friends. They drive safely, and, as a cherry on top, they're cool as hell.
I don't like the assumption you're making that Waymos are the only solution to ubers, taxis or driving yourself. Well designed and well working public transportation (Which is doable and exists in the world) is far cheaper and far more predictable than any form of car-based transportation.
Not only that, but you're not responding to my actual argument. The annoying part of driving is not the act of driving, it's the time spent in your commute.
> I don't like the assumption you're making that Waymos are the only solution to ubers, taxis or driving yourself. Well designed and well working public transportation (Which is doable and exists in the world) is far cheaper and far more predictable than any form of car-based transportation.
I very literally did not make that assumption. I pointed out, in a sentence you quoted yourself, that public transit can drastically reduce the amount of point-to-point personal transportation an individual wants or needs. However, sometimes, you really can't beat the convenience of "I am at point A, I want to be at point B, and I don't want to deal with a series of stops and transfers to get there". Maybe your starting or ending point is an unusual location. Maybe it's an unusual time of day. Maybe you're wearing a tuxedo or a cast and don't want to do the amount of walking public transit normally requires.
In any case, point-to-point transit is sometimes worth the expense. And when it is, self-driving taxis are fantastic. Compared to driving myself, I don't have to commit at least 75% of my attention to not killing myself or others. I can just read a book, or watch a movie, or do the morning crossword. Compared to taxis or Uber, I don't need to deal with a driver.
Point-to-point is also the only option when you get way out of the city and no form of public transportation is work-able. If you live in the actual middle of nowhere, with miles between homes' driveways, and dozens of miles between residential areas and the nearest store, you're never going to get trains or bus stops that cover everyone's home.
FSD should address safety - humans are bad drivers even when they are sober and not overtired.
This being Vegas, they should make it possible to bet that you'll
- get lost
- be late
- collide with a moving car
- collide with stationary object
- run over a pedestrian (bonus for multiple!)
They could install a roulette wheel or slot machine in the cab to be in keeping with Vegas.
You can always do some sports betting on your phone while your getting driven around.
It should coerce you to go to a club where it can get you a special deal.
Just about a year and a half too late for https://longbets.org/712/
Although from the article, it sounds like this might not be servicing a wide enough area to win the bet even if the time was extended a couple years.
no the bet is lost on every count
1 it's not fully autonomous, there's a remote operator
2 not a wide enough service area as defined in the bet
3 it's a pilot program, also excluded in the bet
4 it's also a year late and the bet is very much still lost
lol but we're going to have self driving cars by 2015 guys!
This specific bet is very targeted, but we do absolutely have commerciallly available self-driving cars in 2025 in several cities, and the list of cities is rapidly expanding.
An 8-10 year delay from expectations is not too bad all things considered.
Is the remote operator actually driving under normal conditions, or do they just step in during an exigent circumstance?
The latter, there's an article about this particularly [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/09/03/technology/zo...
The latter.
I was just there last weekend and saw them everywhere. My buddy asked about it and I'd never heard of the company before. They're definitely distinctive.
Seems like robotaxis are getting ready for a big expansion, I see Waymos all over Orlando even though they don't offer service here.
I worked in Chandler, AZ when Waymo started testing their cars, so it's funny that I don't really think much about them at this point.
Congrats to the team! It's no small feat to launch to the public in this space, and from the amount of testing I've seen Zoox doing it certainly seems like they've put in the work. Best of luck!
I like these futuristic little carriages. They're certainly useful in some scenarios but I hope to see something similar but obviouly bigger for public trasnportation.
They seem idle as last mile transport - taking people to the offices after using the Caltrain for example.
We are getting so close to the Total Recall taxi.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yueCu8z7l4g
“From immersive shows and world-class dining to major sporting events and luxury shopping, there is something special for everyone.” – an interesting way to describe Las Vegas.
Curious, what happens to those car accident attorneys if/when these become ready for the wild.
Those would be useful in Tesla's tunnel system.
It's not Tesla's
I feel like robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025. I very well could be wrong (I think I am) but that's the vibes I'm getting from the robotaxis industry right now.
> robotaxis are just electric bikes and scooters of 2025
Ubiquitous, and life changing for the millions of people who use them daily?
Deployed recklessly, inevitably cluttering our pavements, filling our canals amoung other antisocial externalities that taxpayers get the bill for?
No way will that happen with how expensive robotaxis are to make
In the US, there's a good chance that AVs will become dominant in 10 years time. In China, it's all but guaranteed.
Apollo One has already launched service in the UAE and is expected to launch in Singapore and Malaysia by the end of the year. They're also expected to start testing in several European countries by the end of the year. The question I have at this point is, will only China benefit from launching this new global industry, or will the US manage to also be competitive on a global scale?
> that's the vibes I'm getting from the robotaxis industry
…what does this mean? Are vibes another way of saying you feel like it without evidence?
Would you like to be more specific with your analogy?
Why does it need a moronic design? We’ve already spent 100 years perfecting car design for crash resistance. Why are there no crumple zones?
https://zoox.com/journal/crash-testing
I now see their development vehicles all over the valley, whereas previously if I was near the Strip that's the only region I would see them in.
This valley has congestion issues pretty much all day everywhere, plus a traffic light management protocol that results in very long light cycles.
Many of us when coming to a red light where there are multiple lanes and traffic is light, will make a point to not stop in the right lane when there is no right turn only lane. This is so people who are making a right turn can make a right on red instead of waiting for a green.
Zoox does not do this.
Sometimes there is not quite enough space between vehicles to get into a lane while cars are stopped at a light, such as getting into a left turn lane. Often, some light taps on the horn (or even just sitting with the turn signal) will result in drivers pushing up tight to let you into the left turn lane.
Zoox does not do this.
Zoox will change lanes many times for no apparent reason, making drivers think it is turning right or left at the next intersection, but it does not turn.
As best I can tell, Zoox has issues with pedestrians. I think that the operator (in the test vehicle) takes over when pedestrians are present, because so far I always see them operating the steering wheel when there are pedestrians.
As a driver, I don't like any of the automated drivers because I feel there is a thing that can do serious damage and nobody is accountable. These are all owned by corporations whose sole accountability will be financial, nothing more, while drivers are held to both financial a punitive accountability.
Further, these are all mega-conglomerates for whom there is no real regard for the destruction their property causes. They are politically connected, so will never lose their operating license. The are funded by the largest investors mankind has ever known. Nobody in these organizations has any respect for morals or ethics, instead fostering a system that promotes psychopaths.
I don't want them here. I haven't spoken to anyone who lives here that wants them here.
Waymo has been a good actor in every way I can think of so far. They're transparent, their expansion is cautiously paced, and their safety record exceeds that of human drivers. I'm not sure what more we could ask for. Tesla on the other hand seems determined to put cars on the road ASAP and just hope for the best, but local regulatory hurdles seem to have stopped them for the most part. Zoox, from what I can tell, is taking the Waymo approach.
> Waymo has been a good actor in every way I can think of so far. They're transparent, their expansion is cautiously paced, and their safety record exceeds that of human drivers. I'm not sure what more we could ask for. Tesla on the other hand seems determined to put cars on the road ASAP and just hope for the best, but local regulatory hurdles seem to have stopped them for the most part. Zoox, from what I can tell, is taking the Waymo approach.
Why change the topic to safety?
[flagged]
> you sound pretty entitled and have a set of "rules" that aren't traffic rules.
> i'm glad we will have robot cars to keep folks like you in your place. you aren't entitled to make the rules of the road.
Nobody is required to be polite and considerate while using a shared resource, and if your opinion prevails, we will, indeed, have a cold, heartless society.
It is mildly interesting to me that you interpret being polite and considerate as "rules". I made no such claim.
I do find it rather belittling to claim I feel "entitled" - perhaps you could refrain from this level of discourse or go to one of the places more appreciative of adolescent behavior.
heartless society is when someone has to wait at a red light for a few more seconds. and yes, enumerating a set of silly non-law "rules" you expect drivers on the road to follow is the definition of entitlement.
> heartless society is when someone has to wait at a red light for a few more seconds. and yes, enumerating a set of silly non-law "rules" you expect drivers on the road to follow is the definition of entitlement.
Many of the traffic lights in this valley are more than 5 minutes per cycle. You are completely naive to the facts of the discussion you have entered.
Please quote my above comment where I stated my expectations of all drivers.
This form of sophistry is not recommended in text-based discussions.
oh the humanity, maybe on the order of a few minutes. that changes nothing. we should be inconveniencing human drivers more, if anything.
that you feel obligated to use words like "sophistry" tells me everything i need to know about you.
> oh the humanity, maybe on the order of a few minutes. that changes nothing. we should be inconveniencing human drivers more, if anything.
> that you feel obligated to use words like "sophistry" tells me everything i need to know about you.
You are evaluating one traffic light in a long series of traffic lights. At this moment, the grocery store is 2.8 miles and 17 minutes from my house. This is a typical short trip in this valley. Everyone complains about the congestion and terrible drivers (who, BTW, will not be replaced by self-driving cars). Driving here sucks, and self-driving cars make it just that much worse.
That you naively make assumptions and express opinions from these assumptions tells me everything I need to know about you.
hmm all of my assumptions have been wildly correct and you are just further confirming it. good stuff my dude. sorry you choose a place like that to live. sounds miserable.
i'll be sure to wave at the other drivers next time i'm in town in a zoox or waymo and then go back to doing literally anything else than driving.
> hmm all of my assumptions have been wildly correct and you are just further confirming it. good stuff my dude. sorry you choose a place like that to live. sounds miserable.
> i'll be sure to wave at the other drivers next time i'm in town in a zoox or waymo and then go back to doing literally anything else than driving.
You will remain free to be self-righteous.
the solution for self-driving cars is obviously for everyone to move to a gridded city in the desert
If you're trying to imply Vegas is and easy place to drive.. Well I suggest trying it. It's a nightmare of 6-8 lane mega streets , multi tier traffic junctions, and high seed limits with poor signage and markings.
The absolute worst I have seen was teeing into The Strip at the old Stardust Hotel. The Stardust was two blocks long, ten stories high, and covered in neon. And somewhere in the middle of that wall of neon was one little light that was either red, yellow, or green. The light was not brighter than the neon.
Plus drivers in vehicles that are total beaters with no tags, no insurance, and don't give a darn about anything and will sideswipe your car without flinching.
Insurance IIRC is 3 highest in the nation. I'm paying $3000 per year with max limits full coverage and this is lower than most people I talk to.
do these things self-clean? a free private shuttle service along the strip sounds like a bunch of private vomit-pods on wheels.
there are cameras inside, and they can see who made a mess inside the car
That doesn’t do anything except let the taxi go out of service until someone cleans it - assuming that it would identify vomit without waiting for customers to complain after they sit in it.
It does one better, it holds the passenger who created the mess accountable for the cost and then drops them off the service. You get some bad actors, but you can quickly weed them out.
Doesn't change the service outage piece, but it will get better.
That being said, your key point - people can do what they want in this thing and no one can really stop them, does stand.
this is a trivial problem, same way rental car companies solved it:
Waymo has contracted with car rental companies to provide cleaning and inspection services.
Vomit AT BEST
Where is a comprehensive test demonstration and rating by an insurance and federal agency?
Utterly disturbing announcements and rollouts like this aren't prominently linked with comprehensive testing videos.
"We're a tech company, just trust us"
The only thing I like about this is the potential to make Tesla look bad.
If only they had a website
https://zoox.com/journal/crash-testing
That's a crash test.
Do you think I care about the people IN the car?
Self-driving is about the safety of the people OUTSIDE of the car.
How do we know this isn’t just an autonomous vehicle wrapper company?
Zoox is a subsidiary Amazon since 2019, if that's what you mean. If you mean software/hardware - they are full stack, i.e. they didn't buy this as prebuilt from say Waymo and slap a Zoox sticker on it.
It's worth asking because we are expecting Uber and even some car manufacturers to be full wrapper companies with zero ability to standup and support their own technology with regards to this.
I don't know that. Perhaps in aggregate, we don't either.
Surely somebody working there would be reading this.
This whole robotaxi thing is so stupid.
Insightful
How so? You realize there are people who cannot legally drive for whom a robotaxi is a life changing achievement?
Why wouldn't they just take a taxi driven by a human? Or a bus (also driven by a human)?
The CEO of Uber claims that Waymo vehicles complete more rides per day than 99% of human Uber drivers. They work 24/7 minus charging and cleaning time. If that 99th percentile number holds up, Waymo serves the same number of customers with a small fraction of the number of vehicles.
> take a taxi driven by a human?
expensive, sometimes they sexually harass/assault the passengers, sometimes the drivers are also dangerously tired
> Or a bus (also driven by a human)?
slow (especially because USians oppose optimal stop spacing) and dirty, no door-to-door air conditioning, not separated from poor people
Tiredness is a big one. I was driven by a guy who had worked nonstop for a whole weekend. It was one of the most terrifying drives of my life. I had to tell him to park and sleep outside my house, or else I would report him to Uber.
> slow (especially because USians oppose optimal stop spacing) and dirty
It’s slow because it must solve for many possible routes. Cabs are point to point. A rideshared cab, moreover, knows ex ante where its customer is going and, in a city, where its next customer is.
> Why wouldn't they just take a taxi driven by a human?
Because the humans in New York, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco frequently cancel rides, get lost, drive unsafely, pitch me on their religion and smell. (They also must be tipped, at which point the Waymo is the same price or cheaper than the human-driven ride.)
When I have the option of a robotaxi, I pay a premium for it. It’s novel. It’s fun. But most importantly, it’s safe, punctual and comfortable. Otherwise, I'm fine taking a human-driven car. Having more options makes those cities a better experience.
I'm sitting in the back of a Lyft car right now... I had to prompt the driver via a phone call to actually try to pick me up at the designated airport pickup spot (you know, where the app has me go), he spent 10 minutes trying to get out of the airport parking lot because he didn't seem to have a ticket, and now his constant pumping of the gas peddle in the sluggish Los Angeles traffic is challenging even my ironclad resistance to motion sickness.
How I wish I was in a Waymo right now! I've never had remotely such a poor experience in a SF robotaxi.
Uber and Lyft took a shit in their mess kits by making their north stars advertised wait time on hail.
This caused them to increase the driver pool beyond the point of competence. That, in turn, required degrading customer service to the point that if I actually need help I have to use the flow that says I was in an accident or raped.
Waymo is neat as a robotaxi. But the reason it wins is they seized the nationwide premium market, a beachhead Uber (and paradoxically also Lyft) left undefended.
Why wouldn't they just take a carriage pulled by a horse?
So your issue is that it is not being driven by a person?
human taxi is waste of human capital
The people I know who can’t legally drive also need help getting into the car, so a robotaxi would be a kick in the teeth.
Blind people cannot legally drive, but they manage to enter/exit vehicles just fine.
Now do the people I know
Okay but OP wasn't suggesting it solves for ALL people who can't drive. Reducing human driving is a massive safety win (if they can continue to be safer than human drivers)
Protect the typewriters!
Hopefully some genius will figure out a way of joining lots of these together into a 'gigapod'. That might have enough capacity to actually work at city scale.
I am getting so unbelievably tired of this smug comment. It reeks of reddit spam.
We all know trains would be nice. Unless you have some plan to rework our government into something that will allow for innovation here, then I prefer to see progress, even if it's not ideal.
> getting so unbelievably tired of this smug comment
It's a dumb comment. But I find it interesting in how it reveals opportunities to leverage bridging expertise.
The infamous Dropbox comment [1] illustrated the complete lack of domain knowledge in marketing, sales and generally how non-tech people work that was commonplace among coders. A lot of people made a lot of money, and made a lot of other peoples' lives better, but bridging that gap.
This bus meme, on the other hand, illustrates a complete lack of domain knowledge around marketing and, in all likelihood, how governments and public transit work in the real world.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
Strip and Las Vegas from pure numbers POV are perfect for trains. However, it's also a place where you want to be in your private space with your friends rather than 20 other strangers, just for the sake of vibes.
However, before that problem is solved, maybe solve mass-transit from the airport to the strip first?
I don't think the idea was trains at all. I think the idea was, if we're going to have N of them driving down The Strip, it would be more efficient to join them physically together than to have them maintain normal inter-car spacing.
And that could work, if the car in front can communicate power/brake/turn commands to the cars in the chain. And if you could dynamically drop cars out of the middle when needed. And if you could dynamically add cars when they're neighboring and going the same way. All those could be tricky, but they seem quite solvable.
Perhaps maybe we add common places where it regularly stops and you can get on/off?
I understand that you're being glib about buses or trains, but the driver is a large part of the operating costs of a bus, and additionally driverless buses might make more frequent but smaller buses more economical.
There are driverless light rails already, and there are cities that have built dedicated streets for buses which would be the first place I’d try actual driverless vehicles.
The reductive "you just invented $existing_thing" framing is so tiresome.
There are so very many opportunities for a better surface transport system than buses. Dynamic routing and scheduling, capacity somewhere between a city bus and a taxi, and potentially better economies of scale all make this far more appealing than what exists today.
Also – and I know acknowledging this will not go over well in some circles – requiring an app and a credit card will go a long way toward keeping riders of a certain disposition off the vehicles. No, it's not a perfect proxy for who will and won't make riding unpleasant or unsafe, but riders will intuitively understand it even if they don't want to think about it, and it will make a difference.
> There are so very many opportunities for a better surface transport system than buses. Dynamic routing and scheduling, capacity somewhere between a city bus and a taxi, and potentially better economies of scale all make this far more appealing than what exists today.
Anyone who knows something about transit already knows this is false. the idea has been tried and failed for hundreds of years. What people want is predictable transit that is there when they want to go and gets people places in a reasonable amount of time. Nobody cares about other stops.
People hate dynamic routing because it means they never arrive at the same time and in turn they can't use transit at all unless they plan to arrive way too early. Most trips are time sensitive, that isn't just the trip time, but also they have to be someplace at a specific time.
People hate dynamic scheduling because it means they can't take spontaneous trips. They can't be late for their planned trip. They will miss the bus once in a while because something didn't go to plan.
What people want is predictable routes that run so often they don't need to look at a schedule. They can figure out how to navigate it. Places people want to be will figure out those routes and location where it is easy to get to.
Okay, what people really want is Star Trek style teleportation. The point is to be someplace fast, not the journey. This is impossible though, so we compromise. the best compromise for transit is frequent systems that run predictable routes.
The Uber Pool, now UberX Share thing was quite good.
For some, but the reports I've seen suggest that for many it was just a cheaper Uber, but customers complained and stopped using it if they actually functioned as a dynamic pool. They could stop for someone who was already on the way, but they could go very far out of the way to pick people up before people complained.
An automated van that has roughly regular routes but goes slightly out of its way to pick up/drop off people would be a good middle ground between taxis and buses —- not unlike Jeepnys in the Philippines.
No, it is a terrible middle ground. They work only for people who are okay with being late to a meeting once in a while, or people who are okay with arriving far too early and then waiting once they get there. People who value their time want something predictable so they can arrange their time around things they understand.
You might be onto something. Don't stop that train of thought. Keep going.
We can called it a "Beneficial Usage Service" or BUS, for short.
This meme about self-driving cabs being glorified busses reminds me of the infamous Dropbox comment. It’s technically correct. But it misses the social context so entirely that it, when you realise it’s being seriously said, becomes farce.
Is the context that using buses are for poors?
The way these are pushed as "solutions to cities and traffic" make making fun of the too easy.
> But it misses the social context
Funny how their entire social context is "never encounter another human as you go from A to B"
> way these are pushed as "solutions to cities and traffic" make making fun of the too easy
It's funny. It's also dumb. An observation can be both at the same time--it's a cornerstone of humor. What it isn't is fundamentally true or revealing.
> their entire social context is "never encounter another human as you go from A to B"
Nope. It's recognising that humans have diverse and varying needs for interaction and privacy.
I like to dine out, even alone. That doesn't make everyone who eats at home alone an idiot. (That doesn't mean I can't make jokes about it. But they shouldn't be mistaken for truth.)
> What it isn't is fundamentally true or revealing.
Well, they are not a solution to transport problems, or to traffic jams.
Yes, they can be complementary to other types of transportation. Yes, companies will enshittify them beyond measure if/when they reach a certain proportion of cars.
> It's recognising that humans have diverse and varying needs for interaction and privacy.
No. I don't think this was even uttered by any of these companies.
Waymo claims to be committed to safety: https://waymo.com/about/
Tesla: stress and safety https://www.tesla.com/fsd
Zoox: purpose-built taxi shaping the future of transportation https://zoox.com/about
> they are not a solution to transport problems, or to traffic jams
Nor to world hunger.
> companies will enshittify them beyond measure
A hypothetical applicable to every mode of transit, private and public.
> don't think this was even uttered by any of these companies
Things can be true without being in a corporate press release. (Also, you're the one who originally argued these services' "entire social context is 'never encounter another human as you go from A to B'." If not being in a press release is an argument against one, it 's an argument against the other.)
Though, in this case, it has been said: "Waymo gives you your own personal space to focus on more meaningful things" [1].
[1] https://waymo.com/rides/
> Nor to world hunger.
Ah, the good old ad absurdum.
These companies literally hail themselves as "future of transportation".
> A hypothetical applicable to every mode of transit, private and public.
These are private companies looking for profit. These are not hypotheticals given what is happening to other cars and car manufacturers.
> Also, you're the one who originally argued these services' "entire social context is 'never encounter another human as you go from A to B'."
These are literally robo taxis. A taxi is literally a car that is taking you from A to B. And they are also removing the driver from them. Oh, and don't forget the existing of things like Boring Co. which exists almost solely to undermine public transport.
Their intended future is nothing but endless roads with isolated vehicles going from A to B. There's no other "social context".
I like that, because it plays on the Latin "omnibus", which means "for everybody"
Will they also stop in front of my house? Or can they be summoned on demand?
I already commute by train. I’d like to have something more flexible.
You say this in jest, but Uber is trending towards this right now:
https://www.uber.com/us/en/ride/uberx-share/
Convergent Evolution happening in realtime- it's almost as if community pooled forms of transportation are the most efficient...
The route share option, which does sound like a minibus/dollar van, is interesting.
I've tried the current basic share option and it's not great, and I say that as someone who used pre-pandemic UberPool. You typically don't save much off a standard UberX ride, it's only available for exactly one person, the arrival estimates are wildly optimistic, and if the other rider isn't in the car they seem to never be ready when you get to their pickup location.
It's unfortunately, but the current pricing model seems to attract passengers who really don't want to be paying for an Uber but at least this way they can save a couple of bucks, which means they're typically in a stressful situation. Very different vibe from the old, social and wildly cheap UberPool, but that probably was never sustainable.
Putting aside their merit as urban transport, robotaxis can completely solve transportation in less dense areas, something no train can accomplish. It will be particularly valuable to the aging populations in a lot of small towns and rural areas.
Wework gigapod so you are always working in a mobile office. Realestate hack.
It’s a cute gimmick for tourists but it won’t contribute to public transportation.
The fact that there isn't a rail line from the airport to the strip is wild. It would simplify travel for tourists dramatically, and get a lot of hotel shuttles and taxis off the street. There's a reason why even cities with bad public transit usually have a line to the airport, and it's wild that Las Vegas doesn't have one.
"The strip" isn't one place. It's several miles long. It's not walkable for people with luggage. To do what you propose, you'd have to not just build it to the strip, but along the strip, which is a whole different problem. There's not a lot of space to build a rail line there. It would have to be a block or two away at best. And then, well, the stuff on the other side of the strip is now three blocks away. For people with luggage. In 105 degree heat in August, or in sandstorms, or sometimes in snow.
Las Vegas Boulevard is like 8 lanes wide. Get rid of two car lanes and now you have plenty of room for a rail line.
> and get a lot of hotel shuttles and taxis off the street.
No it wouldn't. Those hotel shuttles and taxies are ideal for anyone with luggage as you don't have to carry your own heavy bags with you. The train doesn't want those people slowing things down for everyone as they get all their bags on/off the train.
Airport lines are a good idea because many thousands of people work at airports and thus don't have luggage. They are also useful for travelers taking a short trip and thus don't have much packaged. However Vegas as a vacation destination is expected to have a lot of people with luggage and less people who are light travelers.
Once tourists drop their bags in their room they should be using transit for every trip until it is finally time to return to the airport.
I agree it's stupid. Relevant video on this:
https://youtu.be/-DAfmFdLIjo?si=wg8inSg84VvXFFLx
Never understood this take. Just because it doesn’t address the systemic inequities in society doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
It's really no more useful than a taxi. It's better (in my opinion) than a taxi and ride-share, but it's no more useful at all.
I'd argue that tourists are the main untapped market in terms of transportation on the strip. Workers and residents might already be familiar with the public transport that exists, but most visitors would probably rather get a private car at the exact time they need it (going to the exact place they want to go) rather than figure out the bus schedule. That's proven by the fact that lots of people grab Ubers/similar to get around there.
Of all the places to try a gimmick, Vegas is the right place.
> It’s a cute gimmick for tourists
Yes, that's why they call it the Las Vegas strip. It is an entire city literally designed for tourists.
You managed to come off as condescending, smug and a zealot in one sentence. Bravo. I imagine this stems from not meeting strong town criteria because you aren't forced to share a seat with a stranger or some similar nonsense
It's a cute comment for dunking, but it won't contribute to quality discourse on this website.
Better than a tax that will take you on long route to your destination to get more money out of you. I don’t know how many times that has happened to me in Vegas. Had one drive downtown when I was going from Aria to Mandalay.
Seems like they could be used together, like taking a taxi to an airport?