The title makes it sound like GA but it's still in testing
Overall though, I think I agree with you.
I didn't go to Logan a ton though.
I really had to read through it twice to make sure they were just talking about car taxis picking up travelers, rather than some kind of prototype pilotless commuter helicopter or something.
In fact, it's pretty routine. Don't have the source at hand, but somewhere around 1% of all landings (at airports with ILS) are autolands.
I think it was Boeing that even requires at least 1 autoland per plane every 30 days or so.
You can find videos of this on YouTube. Completely hands-off.
But two interesting data points from the Wikipedia article I linked are that the first aircraft certification for ILS Cat III was in 1968, and Cat IIIB in 1975.
And IIRC by the 1980s, autoland was already a pretty common feature.
This is a competence you do not want to lose.
It's also the case that you can have a whole approach setup in your flight computer and at the last minute the controller gives you a runway change. You could drop your head down and start typing a bunch info the FMC but you're generally better off just disabling auto pilot and manually making the adjustment.
ILS being under maintenance and unavailable for certain runways is also far from unusual.
And their cost relative to other operational costs is so low there isn't even any pushback on regulations regarding there being two of them.
RCO is very much "pushback on regulations".
Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.
I still believe that having an actual pilot inside the plane that care for his own life is not a bad idea vs someone remote feeling a bit disconnected with the reality of a crash.
I have no idea if that works but I thought you were making a good contribution to the conversation by proposing a potential solution to the exact problem everyone is talking about.
Category IIIC ILS (full auto-land) does exist but requires special equipment for both the aircraft and airport. Human pilots have to actively monitor the system and take back control if anything goes wrong (which does happen).
Garmin also has the Autonomí auto-land system for certain general aviation aircraft which can attempt to land at the closest suitable airport. But this is only used for single pilot operation in case the pilot becomes incapacitated. It isn't suitable for regular flights.
Obviously a droneliner would look very different from the jets that are common today.
Look up the Airbus ATTOL project's first automated takeoff a few years ago.
Also, there's virtually no automation when it comes to interacting with ATC.
I just followed what my CFI and Cessna's manual for the C172 said (which iirc was giving input to rotate at 55kts).
It's fun to see/feel planes do stuff "on their own" (eg making them oscillate, or level on their own, or feeling ground effect, or even your own wake on steep turns) but it's not something you'd want to rely on (maybe with the exception of ground effect on short field takeoffs, but I digress).
It wouldn't be that hard to fully automate a flight from gate to gate when everything works perfectly. But the various failure modes, human error like airport vehicles entering active runway, all that requires human backup. Self-driving car can just stop to the side of the road and turn on emergency lights if its engine fails, with a plane things get much more complicated.
Cars can drive around without needing to talk to other cars or controllers.
Check out the Cirrus Autoland feature in their aircraft. They are all small personal aircraft, but the tech is pretty cool. Will talk to ATC and fully auto-land for you in the event of an emergency where the pilot is incapacitated.
The less you can change about the product and environment, then automation run slower and less effectively.
Air liner operations could be automated, but the minimum equipment list would be more stringent, the destination airport would not be able to take any equipment out of service for maintenance, visibility minimums would increase, takeoff and landing operations would require more slack time.
Besides all of that, the owner of the airplane would still want to have some crew on board.
In short, it's not worth it yet.
===
There is also the paradox of automation: Automation generally makes the hard parts harder and the easy parts easier.
It's very cool stuff, technology wise, with potentially significant redesigns of cockpits, etc.
But the main thing is the plane basically needs to be able to operate just about entirely autonomously (especially during critical flight phases) in case the pilot is incapacitated.
In theory, once SPO is solved, autonomy is almost solved.
Cargo flights over oceans and (mostly) unpopulated areas might be a valid use case for SPO. Cargo pilots have always been considered somewhat expendable.
At the very least, I'd say it's at least two clean-sheet designs away (which I'd guesstimate at 30 years).
I'm a bit partial to it because I did a brief stint in the Airbus realm. Autonomy for airliners is an interesting set of challenges.
The point is you can't just "stop" a plane and wait for someone to figure things out (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9449023?hl=en). Whatever the difficulties in dealing with an abnormal situation in a car, it is strictly much more difficult to deal with them in a vehicle constantly fighting the homicidal urge to fall out of the sky.
Also constant urge to fall out of the sky is a helicopter. A plane generally wants to glide.
The easy part is that it largely keeps itself moving, and that you have a thousand times fewer obstacles to avoid.
Both situations are very hard, and both have very hard aspects that only apply to that situation but not the other one. The plane is not "strictly more difficult".
As a car, finding a safe place to stop in an emergency is over a lot faster than in an airplane, but it's far more dangerous per second and per meter.
Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.
Automatic lane keeping in a car requires cameras that software needs to then analyze to find the lines in the road in real time. But if you want a "set it and read a book for an hour", then you have to respond to other traffic. No longer just some simple PID controllers, the software now needs to plan and execute based on surrounding traffic.
Time will tell...
months?! :)
"The [German pilots'] union said it had carried out a survey of more than 900 pilots in recent weeks, which found that 93% of them admitted to napping during a flight in the past few months."
-The Guardian, "Almost all German pilots admit to napping during flights in union survey"; 2025-09-10
With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.
1d (train) - easy. just one lever
2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?
2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.
3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers
Automatic landings started in 1964. I think that it seems hard mostly because of how tightly regulated aviation is - modern technology could probably make things a lot better if people were more receptive to the idea of heavy automated aircraft over populated areas.
I doubt anyone has tested this in depth, but I'm not sure there are too many configurations of airplane these days where a human can safely land it and a computer can't. Maybe if a big chunk of wing or control surfaces were totally gone, but even a human pilot isn't getting 99% reliability in a situation like that.
In any case, I don't think that the first candidates for automation are gonna be passenger flights. It will probably be small cargo planes first - Cessna Caravans and other turboprop aircraft where the cost of paying pilots is roughly similar to the price of fuel.
3d, variant (orbital) - super hard, so hard that trajectory pre-calculations has to be performed
There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing.
Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo
In an automotive setting you can almost always safely decelerate to a full-stop, put on hazards and call it a fail. Good luck trying that in an aircraft over urban areas.
In contrast when shit goes wrong for a plane we've got a big problem. Just stopping will definitely kill everybody, even from a modest altitude at a very low speed suddenly plummeting to the ground will straight up kill you. So, we want to land, albeit maybe we have to "crash land" destroying the vehicle to perhaps save its occupants.
You can buy (and indeed to some extent you can even retro-fit) emergency auto-land for small planes. Once engaged, or if set to do so automatically upon pilot failure the plane will figure out where it is (using GPS), pick the emergency radio frequency and announce the problem and its intended solution (I am a machine. My human pilot is incapacitated. I intend to fly to X location and land there. I am not listening to you and cannot understand you) and then it will fly to a chosen place and attempt to properly land the aeroplane, broadcast on radio that this airfield is now closed (this aeroplane is parked on the landing strip so you can't use it!) and then switch off.
Maybe the pilot is still alive and human medics can rush them to hospital. Otherwise maybe there are passengers who have been saved. In any case at least the aeroplane is now on the ground where humans can easily take over e.g. moving the plane so the airfield can re-open.
[0] https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/01/waymo-san-francisco-cpuc-e...
I have a limited version of SuperCruise which means it operates hands-free on freeways but nowhere else. My wife's Equinox EV has the regular version, which operates on a lot of arterials near us and has more capabilities. The first time that the Equinox signaled, changed lanes to pass, signaled, then changed lanes back was shocking.
We moved to a small town and drive a lot more than we used to and I find that having those capabilities really helps relieve the stress.
I will say that I move to the center lane when going through a notorious set of curves on I-5 in Portland because my Bolt doesn't steer as smoothly as I'd like near the concrete barricades. I wanted SuperCruise because it has a fantastic safety record. There are lots of times it's not available but when it is, I have near-total confidence in it.
Other drivers aren't your only challenge out there.
People love crashing there.
If it would be "too much", then there's no reason why taxis (incl uber/lyft) wouldn't be too much today.
Direct competitors are uber and Lyft which they can undercut since they don’t pay drivers.
The people who want to take buses and trains will continue to do so although Waymo might sway some with their ease and if pricing is reasonable.
Bikes and e-scooters only get you so far. Last time I was in SF I didn’t see too many bikes but I saw a ton of e-scooters. Are you really taking an e-scooter further than a few blocks? And when it rains?
Self owned cars make sense for longer trips out of the city but parking is a pain and driving is stressful so this is an easy win for Waymo.
It’s cheaper now so they can take market share. And their cost will certainly be lower than Ubers so they can win the pricing battle. But long term monopoly gonna monopoly. Perfect pricing is a given with the wealth in SF and how many rides will be on a business CC.
I think if it's affordable then people will easily take that. instead of drinking and driving at night or other unsafe activities. if it's affordable then people can just take a waymo home and then back again to get their car when it's safe again.
-edit- multiple other comments apparently disagree with this. I'll defer to people who actually use them over the reporting. Odd that there is that disconnect though.
That said, even if they were listening to you, there's a lot of things that are completely inconsequential from a perspective of an anonymous call center employee far away listening in on, that I probably wouldn't want to talk about in front of a taxi driver.
I imagine how nice it could (will?) be when you can hop into a self-driving car for a longer ride or even a road trip. I think you'll feel like it's an extension of your living room vs. being in a car.
We need to stop normalising mental diseases
It seems like a huge catastrophizing stretch to get there based solely on preferring to be in a Waymo rather than a taxi or Uber.
edit: grammar
But I was referring to the wanting the outside world to resemble your house and to have little interaction with humans. No, that's not normal, despite any sophistry or ad speak
- No driver to pay. - Smaller simpler car. - Can drive 24h a day. - Needs much less parking space.
But fully realizing these benefits is probably a decade away.
It’s waaaay mo’
Uber's NURO seems to be developing a vehicle with a similar form factor as seen on this page: https://www.nuro.ai/first-responders
EDIT: see comment below, uber does not own NURO
Certainly wouldn't apply to anywhere near where I currently live (then again, neither does Waymo).
Would work great in suburbs where a robot car could pull in front of home for a minute or two, your food will be bid to another customer if you don't pick it up in 5 minutes. maybe the little robots in NYC are better.
Now that tips are tax free, it's only a matter of time before some clever SV accountants figure out how make everything a tip.
(Also, arbitrarily reclassifying things as tips is hard, because legally 100% of tip revenue has to go to workers, not management, and certainly not the company's investors or coffers).
Tax-free tips paid to robots go to the hardworking AI engineers -> AI engineers voluntarily donate part of their tips to a 501(c)(3) that helps support struggling venture capitalists.
Something like that. We'll work it out the details once the right PAC donations are in place.
What likely happened now is that SFO got a kick up their backside from the Mayor after the press started asking why it was still dragging its feet, while SJC approved Waymo swiftly.
They should be able to get to SFO from Millbrae Ave and San Bruno Ave without getting on the highway proper, although it'll likely be a lot slower unless you're getting a ride from nearby. While SJC can serve downtown SJ and Santa Clara without getting on a highway.
Waymo getting into that space seems like a pretty big step up in market penetration.
There's so much polarizing opinion on Tesla's offering and whether they'll get to Waymo's level sooner than later, but this seems like it's going to be or already is a huge issue for Waymo where they can't manufacture the vehicles fast enough to satisfy the demand as they expand both locally (because they capture more of the market) and into new geographies. Will they try and acquire a manufacturer? I don't think that's economically feasible for Waymo (Geely market cap is $25b, per Google snippet fwiw), and obviously being in the car business is different than autonomous, but I'm sure Google would bankroll a purchase if they thought it was the right growth strategy.
I guess Tesla, even if their autonomous is on par with Waymo tomorrow, also has to manufacture the fleet, but it seems extremely beneficial to have that capacity in house vs. relying on partners. Maybe I'm wrong and it's not that much of an advantage, but at first glance it would seem to be.
CMs like Magna have the flexibility to manufacture, at the low end, hundreds of vehicles, and at the high end thousands. I doubt Waymo will ever make their own vehicles. They are already working with Toyota on adapting Waymo technology to privately owned cars. That implies mass production. That would be a supply of vehicles that are probably simple to adapt to robotaxi use.
I've seen them driving around SF as well, but they're not yet available here.
When they get clearance to drop people off at the main terminals, that will be more convenient. Pickup at the terminals is harder. There will be a need for a staging area somewhere in the parking structures.
Few major airports have Waymo at all. Phoenix has allowed pick-up at the airport for ages. (EDIT: Never mind.)
Waymo at airports could work really well with automatic dispatching. They already have an app running in the customer's phone. It should be aware of when someone with a reservation gets off an airplane, and how close they're getting to the pickup point. With good coordination, as the customer heads to the arrival lanes, a Waymo pulls out of short-term parking and heads for the meeting point.
A few more years, and humanoid robots will put the luggage in the trunk.
how good it compared to Tesla FSD/Robotaxi ???
Both the Waymos and Teslas have that central display that shows you what the car sees (pedestrians, dogs, traffic cones, other cars, etc). The Waymo representation of the world reaches pretty far is is pretty much perfect from what I've seen. Meanwhile the Tesla one until recently had objects popping in and out.
Neither is perfect, of course; both will hesitate sometimes and creep along when (IMO) they should commit. But they're both still way better in that regard compared to the zoox autonomous cars I see in SF.
Some months ago Waymo claimed to be providing 250,000 rides per week. If the fleet size was 2500 at the time, that would be 100 rides per vehicle per week.
They might be close to a real robotaxi in some areas, but it's hard to say until they actually pull the trigger on removing any employees from the car.
Tesla FSD makes driving 90% less taxing mentally. It does 99.9% of the driving perfectly. And its getting better. We are quickly approaching a situation where people who don't drive Teslas are like people who cut their grass with Sickle as compared to people who have driving lawn mowers
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/cars-that-are-alm...
I’d really like to see either a Waymo competitor emerge in Europe, or even Waymo themselves operating here. The regulatory environment is obviously more complex, but it’d be great if we didn’t end up years behind on something this transformative.
Oh wait, you thought those would be in the middle of nowhere? Nope.
https://www.karmactive.com/waymo-charging-noise-blasts-112-d...
These backup warning systems operate at approximately 1,000 Hz, producing sound levels between 97 and 112 decibels.
Santa Monica’s municipal code adds another layer of complexity, prescribing exterior noise limits of approximately 50 decibels during the day and 40 decibels at night.
The continuous operation—with vehicles reversing dozens of times hourly, including during late-night hours—continues to challenge community peace.
So, constant car screaming BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP I'M BACKING UP HERE right outside your residential window. Kinda sucks. A whole lot.
I suppose regulations don't care if you can see no one is behind you.
Moia (Volkswagen) in Hamburg https://www.moia.io/en
Mercedes autonomous driving https://group.mercedes-benz.com/innovations/product-innovati...
There's some self driving tech being developed in Europe, but AFAIK nothing is at the current deployment level of Zoox or Aurora, let alone Waymo.
Im happy to let Americans be the beta testers
In terms of having the industry? Absolutely. How many other areas of "tech" has Europe basically punted on and ceded to Americans? Currently there's some gnashing of teeth across the pond for how there's no real European equivalent to the big US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
MobilEye and Mercedes works on self-driving, so does BMW. It's probably not Waymo quality, but just because there aren't cars on the (wide and car friendly) roads doesn't mean nothing is happening.
Meanwhile Europe has solid infrastructure for electricity (esp France), ASML has no competition, Carl Zeizz is world leading in optics, there's probably a Leica LIDAR in the Waymo cars... I mean while we're throwing pies and bringing up other markets..
My old boss was working on a project with Leica where he was working with some partner on self-driving industrial machines, they we're using Leica gear for collosion avoidance and such.
Europe doesn't need self-driving cars, we have alternative modes of transportation. Where it's needed (mines and industry) it's already there. And whatever modern car you're driving here has ADAS which helps make driving comforable.
Yes, it's fine to give up the lead in any one subsector, but Europe is so far behind in tech industries in general. It's not just cloud services or self driving cars, look at SpaceX and Starlink: Europe has no equivalent to either, and is many years from gaining one (I'm aware of some plans, but they're far away from being able to actually launch, and some are dubious besides).
Both major smartphones OSes? Run by American companies. Major desktop OSes? Two by American companies, one originally started by a Finn, who still manages it...and he moved to Oregon.
But you don't have to take an American's word for it, just read Mario Draghi's report. The man loves Europe, deeply understands the European economy, and has a whole lot to say: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draghi_report
There's no denying America has done good in some industries, but when it comes at the cost of societies weak I can't help but think it doesn't matter.
SpaceX and Starklink aren't very important to me, I don't know who they're important for except Ukraine, boat and RV owners.
The report says we must invest in electricity infrastructure, well sure so the dude compares against China and USA at the same time? Crumbling infrastructure is the definition of USA 2025.
The cope is American Exceptionalism, we're doing just fine even though we're fighting a unprofitable proxy-war and missed all those b2c investments to leech off humanity.
There's no desktop OS from Finland, that's a kernel and yes he's now American as you guys usually were better at finding ways to turn good into profit.
We are not doing just fine. We have low economic growth. We are unable to beat off Russia's attack on Ukraine without American help. Germany has crumbling infrastructure just as much or more than America. We have not contributed seriously to any important innovation wave since before... 2000? The invention of the PC?
EU aren't able to fend off Russia because other countries can't participate properly in the war.
EU contributes significantly to very many important innovations, though you seem to have made up your mind.
I can't defend Germany for refusing nuclear in favor of Russian gas, but at the time it seemed to some like a good idea to strengthen relationships through trade and encourage democratization.
It's a damn shame that we're buying Russian gas, it's hilarious that I keep hearing about this from Americans but not Ukrainians.
I don't know about other countries, but Spain will probably be one of the last ones to get it, thanks to the Uber-powerful (heh) taxi driver lobby
I think you’ll see American and Chinese self-driving kit in Europe once it matures. It’s just easier to iterate at home, so while the technology advances that’s where it will be.
Waymo (though a technical marvel) is a bandaid over our inability to build and maintain public infrastructure. Be sure to cherish what you’ve got.
You must realize that, at some point, self-driving cars will be ubiquitous. Maybe not for 50 years, but they will be.
What you’re actually saying is “I’m virtue-signaling with Europe because that’s what the cool kids do”
I think self-driving cars may eventually become common in areas where cars are currently common. I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates, because it is simply a superior user experience for the majority of people when the government cares to invest in it. (Not to mention far cheaper and more egalitarian.)
I am conveying my lived experience in most European cities I've been to.
See, it’s super easy to be a jerk.
And the exact number wasn't the point. The percent of consumer vehicles on the road that are carrying a significant payload to/from home is pretty small. Especially areas where transit even halfway makes sense. What's your best estimate?
From Costco trips to babies to wagons, strollers, wheel chairs, hardware stores, bigger box purchases like a TV, out of town trips to visit friends, pet grooming, airport trips with luggage, it's hard for me to imagine a life without a car.
I know you can just say that I'm a product of my circumstances and culture and you don't need a car for any of that, or there are other ways to accomplish my goals, but I could say the same back to you. And the arrow of time seems to point to people everywhere moving in the direction of wanting personal mobility whether horses, bikes, or cars.
It's not all or nothing, but it seems to make sense to me to build around cars as a first class concern, in addition to other forms of transit. Some places in Europe obviously can't, for historical reasons, but I don't see that as a benefit per se, so much as something to have to work around.
Edit: I should add, I did live car free in Boston for 10 years and loved it and didn't really perceive any shortcomings at the time, and even hated having to buy a car when I moved. But now in my 40s with two young kids and a house and an elderly mother, it's an entirely different situation and I can't see how it would work. I would suggest if you're totally anti-car but only in your 20s or early 30s, your opinion might change as your circumstances do. I also lived for a year without a car in Singapore and that was tolerable in a way that wouldn't have been in most places, since it has some of the best public transit in the world, but even there cars are considered luxuries and it would have made things a little easier.
If you do that once a week, then you can use transit the other 90% of the time. If people use transit 90% of the time, then we can build smaller roads and de-prioritize cars. That's the argument here, that transit can dominate in co-existence with self-driving cars, not that we'd need to get rid of cars. And especially in the context of waymo there's no effect of "I'm already paying a ton of money to own and insure a car, I might as well use it every trip".
(And again, this is in moderately dense areas where transit works and you actually care about how many cars are on the road to begin with. And it doesn't have to be 90% in particular.)
This caveat destroys the rest of your points, as logical as they may seem.
Remember the original argument was "I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates" I'm taking that and strengthening it to a significant expansion of transit, but obviously not everywhere can do transit.
If the lanes on the road can fill up, you have enough traffic to sustain some busses.
In emptier areas that's a pretty different discussion, but importantly you still wouldn't need to design around cars. Slap in a very basic road and it'll handle all the cars fine.
No one was suggesting that.
> I can carry many items in its trunk, making it worthwhile to make multiple stops on my journey. Public transit is not meeting my use-cases.
Well the guy I was talking to was only worried about one or few trips per month, and we only need most people to use transit for the scenario to work.
Ergo, it's no surprise that people want to use them as often as possible. They want to recoup value from those fixed costs. It's simple economics.
> in the context of waymo there's no effect of "I'm already paying a ton of money to own and insure a car, I might as well use it every trip"
And Home Depot says otherwise. They have reported record profits year over year for the past two decades. Just because you don't use sod in your condo doesn't mean suburbanites don't need it for their homes.
A superior user experience is going exactly from where I am to where I want to be safely, quickly, and affordably. Self-driving cars are looking really good for those criteria.
In London, Paris, or St. Petersburg, I pay a few bucks to hop on a train that runs every few minutes and rapidly end up across town, roughly in the area I need to be. It's literally the cheapest and fastest way to get from point A to point B, not to mention tested at scale and thoroughly battle-hardened over the course of a century.
Not every city has this privilege, of course, but surface trams are 80% of the way there, especially if they have right-of-way. And they don't make pedestrians' lives a living hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNTg9EX7MLw
In the US, the unsubsidized price of a ticket is close to this amount.
> Waiting 10m+ for your ride and slowly sifting through traffic is quick?
In my city, it's difficult to pick any 2 points that are faster to get between by public transit vs. taxi.
Every city is different, but trains rarely make sense in the US (outside of NYC).
Right of way is the huge advantage of trains, it would be great if self-driving vehicles could have that same advantage.
This is why self-driving cars appeal to this crowd. You and i seem to be from a world where public infrastructure like clean, affordable transit is the goal. This raises the floor for everyone. Many here would rather think solely of their own comfort, which is fine, but despite repeatedly being told that they are short-sighted, they refuse to change.
In many regions of the U.S. people live too far apart, shops and businesses are zoned apart into wide spread business areas. Public transport won't provide a good experience.
In a notable part of European cities people live in denser quarters, where a "third place" is reachable in walking distance, some degree of shipping, doctor visits, work are close by. There public transport can fill the gaps for the remaining trips in an (space) efficient way. Self driving cars however would clog the area.
Adapting US settlement structure to allow public transport won't happen. However a self-driving car can turn the dial for individuals to move out of the urban European area into more rural areas. Question is how big that group is.
Subways don’t solve last-mile problems or trucking.
And it's not just the EU. I'm sure that e.g. China and Japan will continue to invest in their excellent public transit infrastructure even when there are more self-driving cars on the road.
Americans have this idea that transit is for poor people, which translates to "it's not important for transit to make money", which translates to "we need to make it illegal for transit to possibly try to make money", so there aren't even vending machines at the platforms. Whereas in Asia they do profitable land development at the transit stations.
Japan's private transit infrastructure is only private in high-very high density environments (inner-city) and subsidized in low-density environments (rural, cross-country). Ultimately private group transit requires population density above a certain threshold to be viable.
We don't have a last mile problem, we have legs for that.
Public infrastructure has high overhead costs, and low population density means there isn't enough ridership to make it viable.
And in any case, there's no reason that public transit needs to be self-funded. We don't expect the same of most of our other public services.
This is demonstrating my point about population density and transit.
There are many urban areas in the US with population density of 3,000/km2 or higher that do not have any public transit at all.
The US does not have many metro areas with population densities above 3,000/km2. And those that do, like Washington D.C, NYC, Boston, Chicago, do have metro systems.
American cities low density is a direct result of designing for car infrastructure over all else. And car infrastructure is far more expensive than other transportation, and since increased car infrastructure lowers density, it directly makes all other transportation more expensive and less viable.
Since cars are the most dangerous form of transport, for other drives but more so for cycles and pedestrians, it makes it less feasible to use them for your first-last mile. Then you add in that, as the roads grow and distances multiply, speeds are increased to attempt to compensate, multiplying the danger to anyone not in a car.
If you feel that way about transit you may not have tried a good transit option like Hong Kong MTR with 90 second headways and travel from and to substantially everywhere you want to be.
You see a robot driving around in a pile of trash.
I see a robot with nobody micromanaging him telling him how to live his life, etc, etc.
<we are not the same meme dot jpeg>
When you live and work in a city, they're much less practical.
This is the most "tell me you live in America without telling me you live in America" thing I've seen in a long time...
America basically the only place in the world where in its cities, trains and other public transport aren't a major part of people's lives. In other places (Seoul, Tokyo, many European cities, etc.), even people who own a car will sometimes commute via train due to the convenience.
Rail and other public transport in pretty much everywhere in the world are designed to serve commute first, tourist stuff second or third.
Public transport isn't just having some trains, or having only trains between major cities. It is designing whole commute routes from various urban and suburban areas to workplace. There needs to be regional and suburban links that arrive to metro and tram stations. Metro and tram have to operate very frequently to handle commuters. The frequency of the trains should adapt to the commuters in the morning and evening. They need to be convenient, clean and safe too.
Cities around the world are also much better balanced than NA ones. The workplaces and living areas are almost always mixed rather than having a "downtown" area where every office worker travels to. My area has many buildings with a supermarket, apartments and small offices in the same building. There are two car factories in the city next to one of the biggest urban parks.
I agree that European trains work very well for commuting to and from the center of big cities. That's where the jobs and tourist attractions are.
But to go between arbitrary places A and B is usually quite painful. Often the best way is to go to the center, and then from there to your destination.
When I moved to the US and got a car, it was an unreal feeling! I could quickly travel anywhere at anytime!! Practically it felt like my comfortable travel radius increased from 10km to 50km.
Would a Waymo that you don't have to store, park, fuel, or maintain have been restrictive?
So yes, they would be obnoxious at any significant quantity and also not really help with getting across the city since transit is pretty good
I'd easily take extra self-driving vehicles if it reduced human driven ones.
My contention is that in US cities the high cost of existing rail makes it uncompetitive for most uses, and there is no justification for building new rail.
I like Waymo a lot, but the USA desperately needs both transport modes. Don’t think it’s an either/or.
Trains to cover the longer distance and micro mobility options to get to exactly where you need to go
So when I have the option I'd rather take the train - of course I also drive a lot of places.
Oh the horror, you might have to walk a couple of minutes (probably less time wasted than circling around to find a parking spot, and then walking from it to your destination).
> at a time that is probably not exactly when you wanted to arrive
Yeah, no. Trains in properly developed networks are extremely frequent. At the off-peakest of off-peak (Sunday late evening), the RER near me is every 15 minutes. During peak hours it's every 5 mins.
Because of decades to centuries of investment, holistic planning and expertise, we have one of the best networks in terms of quality, punctuality and density.
It's a plant the trees for future generations kind of deal, especially in Switzerland, because large, "flashy" projects are rare compared to to the more continuous and steady improvements, due to how funding and planning are set up.
And with that you can build a system where most places, including 50 people mountain villages are well connected.
I can go from Genf to a tiny village deep in the Eastern mountains with 4-6h. I can make that journey with no planning ahead what so ever.
Cars are actually restrictive. What if you want to have a drink? What if you are in a place that is different from your car? What if you are old or disabled? What if you are a tourist? What if you are not allowed to drive because of a traffic violation? And there are also these people called 'kids'. When I was 15 I went from Switzerland to Czechia with the train, no problem.
True freedom is to have a good public transit and potentially car as an option.
Well, I'm in Europe and it ain't here. Waymo can't get here fast enough.
Trains are all very well but they've been around nearly 200 years and have yet to bring on a traffic free utopia.
The question is how shitty it would be if they also had everyone on them who's currently on public transit.
So basically, it is a traffic-free panacea for everyone who chooses to use it. It's not a goal of trains to eliminate traffic for everyone who insists on driving.
https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/indu...
For another example, can you imagine trains replacing school buses in a large, rural school district? Sometimes (not always), buses are better than trains.
See also: LA
Neither roads or train tracks solve the traffic problem.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...
Now imagine if all those commuters were in cars.
If public transportation just encourages people to move to the suburbs and commute in every day you've actually just displaced the problem.
This is a silly expectation to have. As long as there are roads for cars people will put cars on them.
Trains solve traffic for the people who get on them, not for drivers. The more people taking the train, the fewer people impacted by the traffic.
(Zermatt pics https://www.traveladventuregurus.com/zermatt)
The total number of permits seems to be around 500 in a town of 5k permanent residents. And the population grows to 30k or 40k during the peak tourist season.
One day, cheap automated electric self driving taxis will cover cities, thats unavoidable I think, but we are not there yet.
Cars will always have a purpose. But if you go to somewhere like The Netherlands, they are much less relied upon - it's more about delivery vans than getting individuals to places.
Self driving cars might not solve traffic problems but they could greatly reduce them. Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.
This has not been my experience since moving to Manhattan last January. Subways, alone, close the gap between regional rail and most destinations astoundingly well. I haven't yet needed to use a bus (but they seem abundant, too), and I haven't even thought of taking a taxi yet.
Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.
Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.
https://cwhong.carto.com/viz/6dfca01c-47e5-11e6-9fd3-0ee66e2...
Weasel words are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. There is a persistent last mile issue even in NYC, even in Manhattan. You're right that in Manhattan most people can use the subway as a last mile solution. However that map hasn't changed much in quite a while. The subway deserts that exist (in Manhattan and the other boroughs) aren't going away anytime soon because building new subways is eyewateringly expensive.
The inflexibility means that even when the subway is a viable last mile solution it may not be the appropriate one. For instance I had to go from Ridgewood to JFK a few years back. I was maybe a five minute walk from the subway. But were I to take the subway from one end of Queens to the other I would've had to go all the way to Midtown and transfer to LIRR.
Hell I've generally had to rely on buses for last mile connectivity even in London which certainly doesn't suffer from a lack of subway service.
> Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.
How would that make those problems go away? It could probably slightly alleviate them in marginal cases, but any given road has a finite throughput limitation, and once it is reached, it wouldn't matter even if every robo-driver were perfectly synchronized.
Self-driving cars may help with the actual weakness of transit, which is the long tail of trips. Trips on routes with too few passengers to justify good transit service, and with the trips too long for the last-mile solutions.
I'm not saying self driving cars are the solution, but they are a piece of the solution.
With furniture, you usually pay for delivery. Especially because the furniture store probably doesn't have the items you bought on site anyway.
Cars are a piece of the transportation puzzle, but groceries and babies aren't why they're needed.
If people aren’t spending $12k a year[1] to own a car, paying $50-150 to have a large piece of furniture delivered isn’t a big deal.
When there is well maintained, pedestrian friendly infrastructure, instead of a tiny uneven sidewalk inches away from 45 mph traffic, pushing your baby stroller home is not an issue.
[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-cost-owning-and-operatin...
And how do you get to the train when it's too far to walk and you're not a cyclist?
Slightly more realistic: enough people can and do cycle or walk to the train that pressure is relieved on the roads for those who cannot cycle or walk.
You get the bus, or you cycle, which is a life skill any able-bodied adult should have, not limited to cyclists. Of course not everyone is capable of cycling, but not everyone is capable of driving either.
It’s certainly not a replacement for mass transit. US is sparsely populated compared to Europe and mass transit don’t work as well in the suburbia. That said, I do see many transit oriented development in SF Bay Area where high density buildings are being built near transit stations.
1) Being driven around is the best transportation mode for most of the US. It's very comfortable, private, fast, and point-to-point. It stops working well at very high density, but that level of density is only seen in a few places in the US. I'd like more people to live in dense areas but for the foreseeable future self-driving vehicles are going to be the best solution for most trips in the US.
2) At very high densities it's true that cars can move fewer people per hour per 10-foot lane than other modes and so you run into congestion. But that's measured with the current vehicle fleet and human drivers. With high autonomous vehicle penetration you could implement congestion pricing that encourages high throughput vehicle design. That means private vehicles that are much much smaller (think Isetta-like design) that can follow at very short distances. Along with the elimination of on-street parking we could see a many-fold increase in road throughput.
3) At even higher density levels the same congestion pricing mechanism would encourage people to use microbuses that would operate similarly to Uber Pool. Compared to today's busses they would have equal or greater throughput, be point-to-point or nearly point-to-point, dynamically routed, cheaper to operate and faster.
4) At the very highest density levels it's true that nothing can match the throughput of the subway. As others have mentioned, AVs are a great way to connect people to the subway. Many trips intersect with the highest density urban core for only a fraction of the journey. More people would take the subway if they knew they could get to and from the stations easily and quickly. AVs let you mix-and-match transport modes more easily.
Cities should start engaging with vehicle manufacturers to start getting these high density vehicle designs worked on and figure out the congestion pricing mechanism to properly incentive their rollout.
As someone who took the N across San Francisco every day for 5+ years: Yes, you would. Imagine a 5 mile journey taking 50 minutes. Even if you can nap or listen to a podcast, it's still a waste of time.
If you can restrict certain roads to autonomous cars (or heavily limit the number of non-autonomous cars) then you don't need to build as much bicycle infrastructure (a buffered lane is probably all you need, as opposed to bollards or true grade separation) and I can guarantee you more folks will feel comfortable riding bikes. This is aside from how frequently human-driven cars end up colliding with, damaging, or blocking non-grade-separated forms of transit.
> It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.
I do bike advocacy so this kind of rhetorical gotcha can make me feel good and hit the upvote button but in reality city councils and other elected officials are mostly people skeptical of the benefits of bicycling, worried that buses/trains would place too high a tax burden on their constituents, or deep down convinced in their lizard brain that Americans are too carpilled to ever do anything else. If you can change this by running for your local council, do it!
Don't get me wrong, we need more bike infrastructure and we needed it yesterday. But anything helps. I'd love to see certain corridors of SF be restricted to transit, autonomous vehicle, and cyclist usage only. Market is already only for transit and cyclists so there's precedent.
I live in Switzerland, the place for trains, efficiency and its small and dense, an ideal situation right. Tons of people use trains every day, tons of people also bike for closer distances in good warmish weather but still highways are chock full and getting fuller every year. Public transport for out-of-city commuters is simply slower, often much slower.
This morning I was considering taking a motorbike to a train station that is 5km away, then 40 mins trains and 10 minute walk to work. I took the car instead for a change, I was faster despite having to cross the very center of bottlenecked and car-hostile big city (Geneva) in top rush hour. 65 mins door-to-door via public transport vs 45 in car. That's one way, meaning 40 minutes of my private life daily saved that I can spend ie with my kids and not staring in the phone or out of window.
Normally I take the motorbike if weather permits, if not I take the public bus to the train, adding additional 15 minutes each way. That sucks pretty badly. I doubt other countries have this figured out better, and not everybody can or wants to live in city centers, especially when raising small kids. We did it for 10 years, had a work commute of 5mins via escooter, but I rather have current commute and live and raise kids in small commune next to wild forest and vineyards than that.
All above is usually much worse in many parts of US.
Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B using a self driving car service, will reduce the number of people who own a car and thus the number of car trips.
So people will be willing to drive further for cheaper rent, or the self driving car might add a couple extra miles to park somewhere cheaper, so overall congestion would get worse.
But this assumes the need for a car, but cars are one form of transport. A more wholistic look at transportation with be “Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B.” If you have more services within walking distance, it reduces your need for a car. If there is lots of bike infrastructure, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent trains, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent bus services and bus lanes to get around traffic, it reduces your need for a car.
On the other hand, if there are more cars then you need, at minimum if we imagine self-driving cars, more road capacity. But realistically more roads and more parking. More space for roads is less space for the actual places people want to go, pushing those things farther apart. Being farther apart reduces the number of places you can get to by walking or biking, which means you are more likely to need a car, which means more cars, which means more roads, which means less space for the actual places people want to go, repeat. Cars are basically the worst option in terms of infrastructure cost, land usage per person, personal cost to use/operate, deaths and injuries, etc.
If you need a car on at least a weekly basis, you're probably going to have your own car either way (unless the self driving car services are really good and cheap).
But even if all everyday trips don't require a car, it's very likely there will be some exceptions. And those can make or break this. If getting a car for that occasion requires hours of overhead (e.g. getting to a pick up/drop off point), is sufficiently inflexible (cars not reliably available on short notice), or prohibitively expensive (e.g. per-km charges on car sharing cars that make a couple longer day trips per year more expensive than just getting a cheap car), people who otherwise could do without a car will consider getting one.
OTOH, if the alternative is really good, people who occasionally need a car might use a service rather than owning a car, which means usage-based cost i.e. a much bigger incentive to pick alternatives. If they have been pushed to own a car, the fixed costs are a sunk cost and the marginal cost of taking car can easily be cheaper than public transit.
40% of US households have two cars, and more than 20% have three or more [1]. As a two-car household that was able to go down to one after moving to where I could bike to work, I would say your assumption is too binary.
[1] https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter8/urban-trans...
There's a risk that robotaxis could become too cheap and people use them for point-to-point transportation because it's faster. This could be mitigated through taxes on robotaxis (with incentives to connect people to transit) and/or car usage in general, or maybe using robo-buses to provide a middle ground between personal convenience and system efficiency.
A robot cook, however, __would__ solve a practical problem for me.
Anyway, this whole approach is not even solving first-world problems (many families struggle to pay for a car), but it's solving the upper-1% of first-world problems, maybe. Except those people can afford to pay drivers who are now out of a job. So yes, what is this even solving??
Cars as a shared service (shuttles, Uber, Waymo) absolutely solve traffic compared to personal vehicles. Shared cars have much higher utilization and require a lot less space.
I agree that trains are a fantastic way to move large groups of people, but a world with more shared cars (which may be brought about faster with Waymo) is a good thing for most cities.
- The trains often aren't running (and there may not be the volume of passengers to justify running them)
- The road are empty so traffic isn't really an issue
Considering tourism and people living just outside service areas who see them but don't get to use them (which includes me sadly) I would not be surprised if 10% of population had seen at least one.
Surely you're describing metro areas? There's no way those five cities add up to 34 million people within city limits, given that none of them have 6 million people.
The MSAs added up to 27 million based on the 2020 census, so "close enough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area
That said, Waymo's service areas are nowhere close to covering the full MSAs: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en
- SF doesn't cover East Bay (two thirds of the MSA by population).
- Silicon Valley doesn't cover San Jose, and barely reaches into Sunnyvale (basically just covering the Google Moffett Park office buildings).
- The Phoenix area is missing most of the densest parts of Phoenix itself, as well as anything north / west of the city.
- Los Angeles doesn't even come close to covering the city, much less the rest of LA County or any of Orange County. (Maybe 2-3 million out of 13, from just eyeballing the region.)
On Uber (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16011725?hl=en) there's also Atlanta (which looks like it actually has very nice coverage, other than the western half of the city) and Austin (again focused on downtown / commercial districts) which help drive up the numbers.
The population that's had opportunity to see Waymo in the wild is probably higher because they're testing in quite a few cities now (a sibling commenter mentions NYC, for instance).
Europe could do the same but they have other priorities.
>pilots of self-driving taxi- and bus-like services will be brought forward by a year to spring 2026, attracting investment and making the UK one of the world leaders in this technology
Also a lot of UK driving requires communication with other drivers (letting people out, etc.) in a way that US roads don't. I'm not sure how driverless cars can handle that.
I really wish we could get them, because they're great. But I'd say we're talking 10 years behind the US simply because of the extra engineering challenge.
Are they also planning on completely overhauling their economy and tax system to attract the engineers required to make this happen?
Because they are.
Across Europe you can randomly encounter a major town with a taxi cartel still blocking rideshares, as if its 2012
It's not just driverless cars either - delivery drones (e.g. in China), a lot of health tech (as they have more check-ups in the USA), Starlink, Neuralink, a space programme, etc.
But I guess in SF they can take a taxi that might be a little cheaper because the company operating it is fine with losing 100s of millions a year.
My personal use of a car has declined pretty dramatically the past few years. Trains are pretty good here in the UK.
Even if they were the only one, it would be odd to classify autonomous rideshare as a distinct market given they compete directly with other vehicle for hire services where they have nothing close to monopoly-like power.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/delivery-driver-secured...
Goes to show empty promises and fraudulent showmanship sell better than actual working products that people use.
Most very rich people just sit and roll in their money in the finance markets like scrooge mcduck.
But… I think the performance in the whitehouse was performative nonesense.
What a waste of everyone’s time for the sake of appearances.
More building things, less dancing please Elon.
Perhaps that's simply the price of achievement, but Showman is apt
There are large swaths of people that accept headlines as fact and/or cannot or will not grapple with nuance and complexity (“I think Elon’s a jerk and he is a formidable engineer.”) Perhaps it’s a sign of these polarized times, or, as I believe, people have always been like this. We just have more time and resources to dedicate to outrage and flamewarring than we did in the past.
But since romantism we have built this image of the genius as necessarily abusive.
I’m sure abusive genius are very visible (by definition?) and that abusive people tend to monopolize more ressources too. (Like these tenured professors that use their students to advance their own career)
The forcing function is having so much responsibility and stress from running so many companies. You have no extra bandwidth for anything. All your time is spent.
So maybe look at comparable people with insane schedules/workloads/very high pressure situations.
The Boring Company is an obvious bust. So is the Hyperloop. Neuralink is another likely bust. Tesla solar is going nowhere. The Cybertruck is a millstone around Tesla's neck. Etc, etc.
Says who? I've tried it and the capabilities are amazing. If you told me 10 years ago that I would be able to buy this in 2025 I wouldn't have believed you.
But when I bought it, Elon was promoting hiring out your car as a FSD level 5 taxi when you weren't using it. If I regularly took my hands off the steering wheel and went for a snooze (if that was possible, which it isn't because they would be sued within an inch of their life), I'd be dead by now.
I think it was an engineer with found wealth starting to do stuff with it.
but nowadays I think he has evolved into something different, maybe some of it from the wild public feedback loop, some of it because some of the things he cares about are going wildly wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...
https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/editorials/article26445107...
Furthermore, Elon Musk doesn't say that the Hyperloop "was a conspiracy designed to sabotage high speed rail." He is quoted in his biography as saying that he hates high speed rail, doesn't want them to build it, and thinks it's a waste of money. He also says that he had no intention of leading the effort to build Hyperloop himself, where he's directly quoted as saying, "Down the road, I might fund or advise on a Hyperloop project, but right now I can't take my eye off the ball at either SpaceX or Tesla." The biographer speculates that this means it was a cynical ploy to get HSR cancelled, and I don't think it's unreasonable to infer this, but one could just as easily infer that Elon really did want the California legislature to build something akin to a Hyperloop instead.
There's no debating that Elon hates public transit, he'll tell you himself[1]. You don't have to spread misinformation to make that point
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
And the tweet below makes me question a lot about him. Doesn't sound like a genius to me.
"Lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention. If lidars/radars disagree with cameras, which one wins?
This sensor ambiguity causes increased, not decreased, risk. That’s why Waymos can’t drive on highways.
We turned off the radars in Teslas to increase safety. Cameras ftw."
More info on autopilot deaths (59 including 2 FSD):
Waymo’s had one fatality (other driver was at fault), but that’s not normalized by miles driven.
^^^ (they are)
> SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a self-sustaining colony on Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX 2nd paragraph
If the answer is no, then clearly the catalyst was Elon taking over
That's a 34x divide. At full scale that's something like 30% of Teslas having an intervention every day.
Teslas is also much cheaper, and easier to scale. Tesla has better growth potential even if their tech is less impressive.
Even worse (for Tesla) is that if they do try an make their non-FSD tech do FSD, and it decks little jimmy because the flashlight in his hand looked like a far off street light, Tesla is liable to face a knee-jerk federal law mandating lidar. And just like that the dream is dead.
This forces Tesla to be extremely paranoid, as it's one visual mistake away from being told to use lidar.
I’m not even sure that Waymo number is still correct. They’re doing hundreds of thousands of paid rides per week, with no one in the front seat, so not sure what an “intervention” even means at that point. Maybe where the passenger needed help and called support? That’s 1000x better than needing to grab the wheel because your Tesla was about to drive into oncoming traffic or run over a kid in a wheelchair.
Also philosophically I don’t see how a big neural network will create such evasive maneuvers, unless you try to create such scenarios in a simulator and collect evasive data. Seems prohibitively expensive to do so in the real world.
You don't live in a Waymo city, so I understand. A lot of people who don't live in a Waymo city don't really get it.
Waymo is a completely different product than FSD. It's a robot that comes and drives you from point A to point B. You can do whatever you want while it's driving, such as take a nap or work on your laptop.
That is false. No Tesla is capable of full self-driving.
Mandatory supervision by a human on the driver’s seat is not full self-driving, no matter how much Elon insists on calling it that.
This is a huge jump, possibly still 5+ years away.
Ummm.
I wouldn't not be surprised if they figure out some very narrow way to have no safety driver in the car (1:1 remote ops?) by the end of the year.
Ignore his predictions and just... look at whether or not the Tesla FSD team is making progress.
I'm seriously baffled by this comment. How can Elons comments not be relevant? How are you proposing we assess the progress of the FSD team? And why should the assessment be different to the last 5 years where FSD was supposedly ready (according to someone with intimate insight into the work of the FSD team) by the end of the year?
...any metric you want? Miles driven under FSD. Miles driven without intervention. Miles driven without accident. Anecdata from friends of yours who own a Tesla. Whether or not a partially supervised pilot program has been launched in some cities.
If Elon Musk said in 1999 "I think we will achieve self-driving next year", that also has no bearing on whether or not self-driving is achieved in 2025 (in either the positive or negative direction). It only means that Elon Musk's "predictions" can't be trusted as an accurate harbinger of success. Which is precisely why you look beyond his words and at the reality on the ground, which strongly indicates Tesla has made a huge amount of progress in the last 10 years, and could be very close to having unsupervised robotaxi service in various jurisdictions.
If we talk about anecdotal evidence then I know people who are deeply familiar with the topic (working of self driving technology at other manufacturers) and they say fully self driving is still many years away for all manufacturers. Moreover the general industry sentiment is that Tesla is behind now and that more sensors then just cameras are needed.
But instead I should believe the Tesla fan boys who just like Musk have been raving about the amazing progress and telling me that FSD is just around the corner for years.
Sure, if you pretend that highway lane-keeping and universal A-to-B navigation are the same thing.
"What competitors say" is quite possibly the worst anecdata you could find as a broad rule, no? There is a wide gap between that and "Tesla fan boys".
Is it fully self-driving, like Waymo? If not, then I'd lump it in with anything else that isn't fully self-driving. Either I can safely and legally nap while commuting or I cannot. Something that requires me to actively supervise the car and intervene as necessary is not self-driving, it is drive assist.
> "What competitors say" is quite possibly the worst anecdata you could find as a broad rule, no?
The post you're responding to is not simply repeating what competitors say, it is speaking of using data to avoid trusting what anybody says. Thus, this isn't a fair comparison. It should also be noted that you yourself suggested that the poster use anecdata.
That said, what tesla says about themselves is even worse than what tesla competitors say, if only because tesla is infamously untrustworthy, and their competitors are not.
But again: don't listen to what tesla et al say they will someday do, compare the data for tesla's drive assist vs tesla competitors' drive assist.
- No, Teslas are not fully self-driving like Waymo. Alas, Waymo isn't the only competitor. The parent comment I replied to was lumping all driving assist together, as if Ford BlueCruise, which is highway-only driving, is comparable to current iterations of Tesla FSD, which has the capability to take you from point A to point B without a geofence ("universal A-to-B navigation") and with zero driver intervention required. That includes the ability to handle traffic lights, stop signs, roundabouts, pedestrians and cyclists, etc. Basically none of the other driver assists claim that capability (besides Waymo), and Waymo very notably has not allowed their cars to drive on highways in the majority of jurisdictions in which they operate (I believe LA is the only highway driving being done at the moment for Waymo). Tesla FSD however remains unreliable, which is why they haven't launched a full driverless service like Waymo, but Tesla FSD has more (unreliable) capabilities than any of their competitors, Waymo included. Reliability is super important though, which is why I'd say Waymo is clearly ahead.
- Not all anecdotal evidence is created equal. I suggested a specific type of anecdata – asking a friend (read: someone you trust who you think has broadly good judgement) who actually has a Tesla with the FSD package a question like "have you seen significant improvement in the self-driving capabilities of this car?" or "have you had any drives where your Tesla took your from home to where you needed to go, with zero interventions on your part?". Asking a GM employee "is your competitor doing a better job than you" is a very different type of anecdata and not something I personally would rely on. Mind you, I think asking a friend about their personal experience isn't great either, and that the other measures I suggested are much better, but it is still much better than "competitors say".
You're saying "as if X is comparable" as if it is not comparable, but I and the other poster are saying it is comparable.
> ...which has the capability to take you from point A to point B without a geofence ("universal A-to-B navigation") and with zero driver intervention required.
Tesla "FSD" can absolutely, categorically, not do that. It requires the driver to constantly pay attention, to supervise, to mind the car, and importantly, to intervene when "FSD" fails. As I understand it, tesla will literally ban you from the "FSD" feature if you actually use it as FSD (hands off wheel, etc).
> Tesla FSD has more (unreliable) capabilities than any of their competitors
Unless it can actually fully self-drive (read: not require anything from the passenger), that just makes it a slightly more glorified lane assist, in my eyes.
> I suggested a specific type of anecdata
The request was over-specified: A tesla owner is far less likely to provide accurate, unbiased anecdata than an employee of a competitor, so I can see why the other poster volunteered the latter -- it is much better than "tesla owner says".
Tesla FSD absolutely, categorically, can do that, assuming we agree that "intervention" means "take over for the car". Teslas are driving people from their starting point to their destination without any driver intervention, every single day. Are you being willfully obtuse when it comes to the distinction I am making between capability and consistency? Yes, you need to have both for a robotaxi service or to call the vehicle truly "driverless". If you don't have that reliability/consistency, it is indeed reckless to not have someone in the driver's seat.
If you really can't see the distinction, your eyes are blind. It's the difference between being driven by a toddler and by your alcoholic uncle. Your uncle has the capability, but he is frequently drunk so you wouldn't trust him to be your chauffeur. A toddler doesn't have the capability in the first place. Sober up your uncle though and the world is your oyster. But the toddler needs to do a lot of growing before it'll get you anywhere.
> A tesla owner is far less likely to provide accurate, unbiased anecdata than an employee of a competitor, so I can see why the other poster volunteered the latter
This is silly. I wouldn't apply that standard to anything else, and I doubt you would either. Who would you trust more to give you honest feedback about a Vitamix blender – your friend with good judgement who owns one, or an employee at KitchenAid?
> assuming we agree that "intervention" means "take over for the car"
I don't think that's a safe assumption. If something requires my full attention and body movement for the entire drive, I would not consider that FSD.
> This is silly. I wouldn't apply that standard to anything else, and I doubt you would either. Who would you trust more to give you honest feedback about a Vitamix blender – your friend with good judgement who owns one, or an employee at KitchenAid?
Assuming good faith here, that you genuinely aren't aware of this, but I regret to inform you that the biased fanaticism of tesla owners is unmatched by nearly any other car company (maybe ferrari is a rival there), or indeed nearly any company at all. Thus, given 2 people, one a tesla owner, the other an owner of a tesla competitor, the latter is more likely to be an unbiased source on teslas or vehicles in general than the former. I thought the last paragraph of my previous post explained this, but here we are, so I'll explain better next time.
- Saying "these are not comparable" is not colloquially the same as saying "these things are literally incomparable". Everything is of course comparable. But you should actually compare them if you want to play this game. Explain to me how the systems are in the same league – you have yet to do so. Instead, you keep repeating they are comparable as if that is all you need to do. If it helps, I will rephrase to say "these things are not equivalent", so that you can stop making what is apparently just a semantic argument. In fact, I did do that in a previous comment, when I said "X and Y are not the same", and that is clearly the point I have been making this whole time (clear to anyone not acting in bad faith).
- "one other commenter agrees with me, therefore you are clearly wrong, not because I've made a coherent argument, or because you are factually wrong, but because one person (might) agree with me". Hahaha, nice one. I needed a good chuckle.
- being ready and paying attention are not what it means to intervene. That is why there are phrases like "be ready to intervene". Once again you seem to be trying to make a pointless semantic argument (and the semantics aren't even on your side). I'm happy to use whatever word you want to describe the behavior of "not moving the wheel or pressing the brake/accelerator pedal". Intervene is a great word to use here and what everyone else uses, but if you are struggling with it we can use whatever word you want, because word choice is besides the point.
- Tesla FSD is a product name. You continuing to put it in scare quotes serves little purpose besides making you type more characters and apparently confusing yourself. I've already agreed that a system which requires you to pay attention and be ready to intervene is not driverless. That was never a point I was making. Me using the name of the product is not some sneaky attempt to pretend they have achieved autonomy. It is just a product name.
- As far as I can remember, I didn't say "some random Tesla owner". I also didn't say "ask someone holding a bunch of TSLA calls". You can just say you don't have any friends who own a Tesla – no need to go around in circles and/or pretend I was saying something that I wasn't.
In short, your opinions have been heard, and so have the opinions of the other person you were responding to, and having heard both, I judge that the other poster's are more convincing than yours. You are, of course, free to re-re-re-assert your opinions even more assertively, but that tactic is, to say the least, unconvincing, and asserting that everyone who disagrees with you must have no friends with a tesla does not help your case either.
I agree, but this is how taxis/Ubers work.
It's like what 6-7 years since the goal was "end of the year".
- You're uncritically parroting the notoriously untrustworthy talking points of a notoriously untrustworthy company, and HN posters expect more critical thought in comments.
- You're redirecting to some rumored "goal" rather than a realistic prediction, which was the topic, and HN posters liked the topic.
- HN posters may think that your vested interest in tesla behooves you to think more critically than the average person on matters involving tesla, rather than less, to overcome any implicit bias you might have.
- I have a goal of end-of-month, so that means I'll have it even sooner than tesla, right? This is how many view the claim by tesla, except I, a random person, literally have less of a reputation for dissembling and failure to deliver than tesla does.
They literally moved that monitor to the driver's seat! Progress, indeed.
Google makes around $300B a year. Uber's entire business makes around $50B and that took a decade. Waymo would have to become a major business to move Alphabet's stock price in the near term.
Considering Waymo is very likely losing money, experiment very slowly with scaling up, and still raising billions in private capital outside Google... idk. Doesn't seem as simple as buy $goog in 2025.
Otherwise I agree Tesla is a bit of a meme stock.
Now compare to how much money the average person spends on driving per year.
If Waymo winds up running half the market in autonomous transportation over the next several decades, it'll make search look like peanuts in comparison.
Google made ~$265B from its ads last year.
The global driving market.
When these are ubiquitous enough, the vast majority of people who currently own cars won't need to. It'll be so much cheaper and easier to use rideshare.
If I lived in a city and garaging a car were inconvenient/expensive? Maybe. But that's not me or a lot of other people.
But if it's half the price over the course of a year? And you can summon it in advance cheaply? And it basically never takes more than 5 min to arrive anyways, since they're everywhere?
You might decide it's worth it to keep the stuff you really need in a messenger bag or backpack or something, the way people in NYC do. And maybe roof racks don't matter if you can just summon a second autonomous van behind you to hold whatever you were going to put on your roof.
Obviously if you're a contractor or something you'll need your own vehicle. But the point is that for most people, sure they can't keep stuff in their trunk all the time, but that's a happy tradeoff if the total cost of driving is 50% less.
The winner in self driving will likely be enabled by extreme vertical integration - you want to be building your own cars, cleaning your own cars, repairing your own cars, and so on.
The average American spends something like $12,500 in car+taxi/rideshare per year. Suppose with Waymo that goes down to $7,000 and it's 20% profit. That's $1,400/person in profit per year.
Obviously it gets much more complicated -- the profit margin depends on whether there are serious competitors to Waymo and how much Waymo's head start matters. Waymo will bring costs down further with shared vans and buses on demand. Profitability will rise with video ads in vehicles that you pay not to see. And so forth.
But autonomous rideshare is going to be larger than search any way you look at it. Profits won't be as high as search, but the barriers to entry are so high that profits will be high for a long time.
I also think you're overestimating the impact of things like ads, buses, etc. The second Waymos become less pleasant than any remotely comparably priced option, they will lose customers.
And yes I assume Waymo will have high profit margins for an extended period of time because they have such a massive head start, and for a long time will be competing primarily against rideshare with human drivers, so won't be pushed below that. Their marginal costs will be much cheaper than that, not having to pay drivers. Hence 20% is not unreasonable.
Then, even in the long term, the economies of scale they develop and network effects will continue to give them a significant advantage. Not 20% margins, but way more than 1%. Especially as they start to vertically integrate the hardware at some point.
Waymo is currently charging substantially more than Lyft/Uber and is not profitable. Human drivers can taxi in anything with 4 wheels and a hood, and its 100% their responsibility to take care of their vehicle, fuel it, clean it, and so on. Each Waymo currently costs ~$200,000 and is going to have a proportionally higher maintenance costs, and all of those costs must be covered by Google. So their costs are far higher than you're ballparking.
As for competition - Tesla has already launched a live robotaxi trial in Austin, so it's already here.
In any case, the overall point is the same -- it's a vastly larger market than Search. And what Waymo currently charges, and the current cost of their cars, is irrelevant. Waymo's business model isn't based on the economics this year or next year. It's based on the economics ten and twenty years from now, when costs have fallen dramatically as they switch to cheaper models and gain massive economies of scale.
As for Tesla, it's hard to take seriously given all the promises it's made and completely failed to deliver on. Their trial currently has a safety human in a front seat and is limited to a tiny group of testers. It's so many years behind Waymo already, and it's unclear if the technological approach it's taking will ever be able to catch up or meet minimal safety requirements.
[1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/total-co...
Does autonomy make so much difference? Uber drivers are not well paid, and the Waymo sensor suite is very expensive today.
How many people would pay for such a luxury car? With the US population aging and public transit non-existent in most places, Waymo probably has a market for cars.
That’s probably $1000-2000 per car, or about a penny a mile.
I’m not sure how much a few lidars will cost at scale. The compute board is a few hundred. Modern cars already have plenty of cameras.
All that matters at this point is how much money they'll lose/earn in the future. There are no shortage of investors willing to put money into this effort, and they're growing exponentially, so there won't be any pressure for them to turn overall profitable for several more years.
If Waymo is at breakeven including capex, opex, and overhead, operations logistics becomes the limiting factor. While Alphabet is capable of investing more money into Waymo, I think they've reached the tipping point. If you see Waymo expansion accelerate, bet on that tipping point having been reached.
Waymo's older than Uber, but they hold many key patents by this point. Now that they've started running a taxi service, it seems straightforwards to scale up, assuming that is the business they want to be in. Then it's just a matter of charging more than it costs to run the service, and wait.
Growth tells you the eventual profits will be bigger. Leadership and moat gives certainty that the company will actually get the profits for the market they grew.
In the Netherlands this is already sometimes possible if your work is close to a train station while your house is too and you don’t need to switch trains. It’s a boon to be honest.
My favorite is the train from Amsterdam to Berlin.
Of course, if you carpool then you can do this too. One time I rode in a car as a passenger from Berlin to Prague while working the whole time. When we were there, we went to a DnB festival and we got back on the weekend.
Hybrid working is awesome :)
And self-driving cars could make it more awesome
So its not even about willingness to pay more
Gig drivers are cooked
If Waymo can drop its price by 50%, it could steal a lot of demand from normal cars and transit, but that doesn't seem like it's even on the conversation right now.
PS nice name.
They don't need to "catch up" to Waymo, because of the niche.
https://bigrigs.com.au/2024/04/18/driverless-trucks-trial-be...
2 trucks?! I suppose that's the minimum number required to make your pluralization correct.
I will stand on my earlier statement regarding this particular outfit: they'll need to catch up because Waymo started class 8 variants in 2021 https://waymo.com/blog/search/?t=Waymo%20Via
And Volvo rolled a class 8 as well.
One promising self driving truck startup, Aurora, was forced to put a safety driver back in the driver's seat after testing in May.
Lo and behold:
>A six-month trial of driverless trucks on public Victorian roads has been put on hold just hours before it was meant to begin after the transport union labelled it “shambolic” and “sneaky”
> "the futures of our truck drivers are jeopardised due to this poorly executed plan."
> “It’s unacceptable that these trials are being pushed by corporations that continue to disadvantage our hard-working mums and dads that work day in, day out to carry Victorians.”
Now this sounds far more like the Australia I know.
Looks like the entire trial was scrapped due to union pressure and never resumed. Same reason we can't even have Driver-Only Operation on NSW trains, despite specifically purchasing DOO trains that operate safely worldwide.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2024/-shambolic---victorian-dr...
Cruise was nixed by GM execs, whom I believe were looking for whatever excuse they could find to shut the operation down. They simply couldn't afford to stay in the game for the long haul. Cruise was under pressure to appear more capable than they were, and they took risks.
Waymo is distinguished in that it doesn't need to pander to nervous investors to keep getting money. The company is Sergei and Larry's baby. Google's founders will ensure that Waymo is patronized until it can stand on it's own.
Cruise's self driving license was suspended because humans displayed poor judgement by omitting from the official report details of their stopped car dragging a knocked-down accident victim under the car for dozens of feet. They took "risks" alright, and their harebrained cover-up was discovered by chance by the oversight body.
I believe any driver who covers up the details of injuries in an accident permanently lose their license, because they'll definitely do it again. What good is a self-driving subsidiary that can't operate on public roads?
Comma.ai is probably the purchase I'm most happy with this year (to be fair though, I buy a lot of crap off Temu). Drives are now just "get on the freeway, and just chill." Pay enough attention because it's not collected to GPS and just in case something goes wrong. So to be clear, Comma.ai is not autonomous driving, it's classified as an ADAS, advanced driving assistance program. It just makes driving suck that much less, especially in stop and go traffic, for $1,000, and compatible with recent vehicles that have built-in lane guidance features. Waymo's got to be light years ahead of them, given how much money they've spent, so it's my belief that Waymo's taking it very slow and cautious, and that their technology is much more advanced than we've been told.
But to be serious, there may be a way of doing it, it just seems very far off unless you're talking about Amazon hub or something like that, where it would be more feasible (but still difficult to achieve).
Short range drones are being used in Australia.
And I heard of at least one company working with apartment architects to standardize a “port” on the building exterior to which a truck/robot would connect to “inject” packages to the inside.
Last I read (late 2023 IIRC) these were being cancelled in various areas, if not everywhere? People in neighborhoods were getting annoyed by the noise of drones buzzing overhead.
Sadly, this would still be an improvement on many smaller delivery services that especially Amazon is fond of using.
There is no downside to having someone drive you Uber has homogenised the experience.
Quoting: "Perhaps even more striking is how people answered a question about whether they would be willing to pay more for a Waymo. Nearly 40% said they’d pay “the same or less.” But 16.3% said they’d pay less than $5 more per ride. Another 10.1% said they’d pay up to $5 more per ride. And 16.3% said they’d pay up to $10 more per ride."
There are going to be lots of causal factors: number of rider(s), time of day, safety, gender, wait time, price estimate, predictable arrival. Let's see an apples-to-apples comparison/regression breaking out each.
But in the long term I think the point of waymo is that it'll be cheaper: no need to pay the driver if there isn't one!
I had one rapidly cycle their prius between 50 and 70 on the freeway because regenerative brakes save gas (I felt carsick for hours after arriving at my destination), and another actually get an angry mob to tap on the windows and berate their driving. (The mob was justified.)
Since then, I’ve given up on using them whenever possible.
Weird take to me, unless you were on a lot of hills; at least in my Maverick [0] 55-65 is 'ideal' MPG range for long trips, going between speeds tends to trip things up and actually -avoid- the weird 'battery has enough juice where we just kinda lug the engine' mode.
Doing regenerative 'braking' compared to using physical brakes, absolutely can give energy for momentum/acceleration and save on the physical brakes wear and tear, OTOH any normal cyclist would say it's better to 'maintain' a given output power vs allowing deceleration and then going back up to speed.
As for why, well I'm not a physics person, but in general it's that you are having to overcome the rotational mass/etc of the wheels (i.e. tires, axles, etc), and no regenerative braking within the current laws of physics will make slowing down and speeding back up more efficient, at least on a flat road.
[0] - OK It ain't quite a prius but it works fairly close aside from overall drag...
Regenerative braking has < 100% round trip efficiency, so repeatedly speeding up and slowing down hurts gas mileage.
The driver thought it had > 100% efficiency. If that were the case, then the car would be a perpetual motion machine, and they’d save a ton on gas.
https://newsroom.aaa.com/2025/02/aaa-fear-in-self-driving-ve...
I would need to see Waymo be able to handle something like Southeast Michigan before I could even get comfortable with trusting it to get me ubered t/o from home for maintaining the vehicle I need to commute when I can take a remote day or two...
And then also delivering that for a good cost.
I put it that way because, I do tip Uber drivers well (unless they cray cray) and they would need to properly 'undercut' uber with whatever model they serve up in more complex areas.
Waymo works in SF Chinatown btw, which is probably the most complicated locality in its driving zone.
but the companies that own them will or their insurance carriers.
Waymo may end up being great business. But it is unlikely to exceed what search is/was. For that reason, press X to doubt GP's claim that Alphabet is undervalued. "IT'S PRICED IN" [1]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/ever...
Not having to pay drivers is an enormous source of profit.
It could be a big business. In fact, I hope it is. Lives will be saved. But there is still a lot to be worked out, and the margins will never be as sweet as those of search.
If Waymo is a rounding error to GOOG, it's basically a rounding error to Tesla's implied valuation.
So what is Tesla valued in then?
Clearly not car sales, profit, and especially growth in either of those segments.
xAI is supposed to be where all the AI is.
Where is it?
Meanwhile, for Waymo, a good chunk of it is profit (after the fixed cost of the vehicle, of course).
The most important thing for Waymo is scaling up production of LIDAR and maintaining them efficiently. They will have a massive fleet running very sophisticated radar+computers. That's a huge logistical investment when it's a million cars. Those sensors will break or be damaged.
Uber's CEO compared it to Marriot, people come in to run the hotels in the local region, but they actually don't own the hotels. It's like hired managers who take a cut.
It also makes sense to have people with local experience run them in each local region. But those businesses still involve margins and expenses that have to make sense.
On topic, Waymo is clearly a first mover in self-driving, having the first legal commercial services.
But, being the first mover is usually more of a disadvantage than an advantage, IMHO.
Its a real and verifiable threat to their core business. Much larger rev than waymo (current and future).
Tesla is clearly a meme stock though, and an example of how the market can say irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
It needs to beat Sp500 to be considered right.
A better approach is to look at the full range of your bets and try and decide if the betting strategy was good. But that gets difficult when you consider outcomes are linked through wider economic trends.
And only last week did they even open up the waitlist to non-influencers.
The day this news was released, Elon released the video of him talking to the Optimus bot to overshadow the news. Showman gonna showman.
If I create a shuttle bus service for my neighborhood and call it the "Space Shuttle", I am not operating a space shuttle.
If you get a great deal on your house and then massively overpay for some avocados, the latter's going to barely move your overall wealth.
That’s the optimistic bull case. It’s not impossible.
Tesla will be able to scale Robotaxi much quicker than Waymo can scale.
https://abc.xyz/investor/sec-filings/quarterly-filings/2025/
Tesla still has no autonomous vehicle that customers can actually buy, let alone rent back for taxi service. So any "strategy" remains entirely hypothetical.
Not only that, but also they could probably raise 10 times that much by creating new shares and selling them (if they had a plausible story to tell investors as to why the money would be well spent).
But instead they made an ideological stand on cameras only, and they’re helmed by an unhinged drug addict who lies constantly, to the point many who once would have loved to buy an actual self-driving Tesla now won’t touch them with a ten-foot pole, even if they do someday deliver an L4 experience.
I really, really hope Waymo licenses their tech. I think that would stomp Tesla into the ground once and for all.
SpaceX has landed orbital boosters 500 times, and STILL no one else has done it.
Teslas drive millions of miles autonomously (yes supervised, but still) every day.
You can't even type a response without containig your political/social bias on anything related to Musk.
It doesn't appear Tesla can achieve level 3 autonomy given Musk's ideological opposition to lidar. Without lidar, the AI has to be 100% accurate, and it's not and won't be for the foreseeable future.
As they say in Maine, "You can't get there from here."
I trust Karpathy when it comes to lidar vs vision. Do you shoot lasers out of your head to drive?
Anyway, time will tell. I think in 2 years or less, Tesla will be absolutely dominant in autonomous ridesharing in the US.
Congrats to the Waymo team, I’m sure this was a huge milestone internally.
I've been wondering for a while why Waymo can't offer a semi-managed solution to SFO to dynamically manage load, have just the right volume of cars inbound, maximize parking utilization, etc. with all of the nice intelligence that an app-based system would enable.
It feels like you should be able to have a buffer of cars waiting right at the curbside, and automatically refill that buffer on short notice depending on observed or predicted demand.
Compare that to the mess that is Uber pickups at JFK, where you have big delays _and_ very poor traffic controls in and out of the pickup zones.
Uber could in theory do all those same things too, right?
No idea if these are first-order effects in practice.
Practically, travelers with heavy check-in bags prefer taxis. Public transit can't be the answer for everything.
Without heavy check-in, transit is a great choice. Alas, some problems remain. Many residents consider BART unsafe. Frequency is pathetic for a major subway line. BART is unusually expensive ($14! - 6$ + 6$ + 2$??) and last mile connectivity is bad.
On the topic of cost, other airports that are on the transit corridor (LaGuardia NYC, Boston Logan, Ronald Reagan Washington) cost $3-4 for the trip. EWR & JFK are more expensive, but they're often faster than taking a taxi which allows them to compete on pricing.
ajmurmann•4mo ago
rconti•4mo ago
ajmurmann•4mo ago
owlninja•4mo ago
Known nickname or typo?
SirFatty•4mo ago
ajmurmann•4mo ago
blindriver•4mo ago
apwell23•4mo ago
buckle8017•4mo ago
It really likes to change random words to inappropriate things.
But I guess that's the people who are typing on phones a lot are typing about.
ghurtado•4mo ago
pryelluw•4mo ago
bombcar•4mo ago
Which can be bad - I often find it easier to just pay for a few minutes parking on dropoff/pickup.
smelendez•4mo ago
bombcar•4mo ago
rconti•4mo ago
So it's not really a regionalism, but I also don't think it's super common.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_and_ride?utm_source=chatg...
rconti•4mo ago
On the flip side, there are airports like Cleveland where people just park their car at arrivals and disappear for 20 minutes.
whycome•4mo ago
That's way mo' information than needed thanks.
But seriously. I wonder why they have a designated pickup point if it would make sense to spread the cars out to alleviate traffic bottlenecks.
ghurtado•4mo ago
kotaKat•4mo ago
https://www.avisbudgetgroup.com/avis-budget-group-announces-...
(Dallas, but they do this in other cities, too.)