Waymo is quietly turning robotaxis from a tech demo into infrastructure. 500,000 paid rides a week, roughly 4,000 cars and 15 US cities is no longer a cute experiment. The interesting part: 80% of the fleet is still concentrated in California and Texas. Scale first where density works, then expand. Tesla has a real race on its hands.

Not really a race. Waymo uses LIDAR, RADAR, and cameras. Last I checked Tesla only uses cameras.

Especially not a race when Waymos decide to descend upon a random cul-de-sac and gridlock themselves. :)

Which is probably mostly fine in sunny weather. But fuck if FSD hasn’t scared the fuck out of me when you get weather that obstructs cameras.

I heard that the Sun doesn’t light things up good enough at night. I heard that it is dark at night. Probably mostly stupid rumors, but lidars/etc wouldn’t harm anyway.

teslas has the ability to lock onto children and increase the speed.

Tesla got some strong orphan crushing game

Underrated feature. Some might also say underutilized

They had to roll that back after the cars kept targeting their petulant child of a CEO

I’d pay extra for that version.

probably identifies non- white afrikaaners.

Scale first where density works, then expand. Tesla has a real race on its hands.

Forgot for a second that I wasn’t on linkedin. Who the fuck talks like this?

Lol Tesla isnt even in the race, Waymo are kicking their ass.

Last mile work is great but fuck big tech, AI and surveillance

Yeah on the one hand, eliminating human drivers is great. On the other, Google.

I’m wondering when we’ll see statistics on if these things are actually safer than human drivers. Anecdotally they’ve already almost hit me a couple times, when I was on foot and driving my own car. But I’m also a cynic, I’m not convinced these things will ever be bettet than human drivers.

I dont think we are there yet. It will be good in that people require personalisable last mile transport for trips home from pubs or grocery store where time,safety and precision are vital.

That said public transport needs to meet it.

Well, according to them we already have them: waymo.com/safety/impact/

There are some limited third-party studies also supporting this but to be fair I think there’s still more needed for independent verification. Of course, it also matters what exactly we consider safer, it is entirely possible that they could be the cause of more minor damage while also preventing deaths that would occur with humans at the controls.

Mobile CCTV patrol system getting bigger

With the suite of sensors onboard this is the ideal mobile surviellance platform.

Cameras, Lidar creating a 3D map, EM sensors, likely microphones. All circulating all day long under the guise of providing a service that no one needs or asked for while claiming a safety record that is great until it is not.

Google paved the way with this idea when they created streetview maps 15+ years ago…which just so happened to be mapping wifi APs which is totally a necessary part of providing streetviews.

How much money are they making?

Waymo than they should.

ಠ_ಠ

No cab

Still losing money. about $2B a quarter.

Morons love to talk about robotaxis, autonomous bullshit but the reality is these companies are pissing money.

The economics really aren’t there for chatbots. They don’t scale well. Each additional user costs more money than they generate in revenue. But automated taxis? That’s a different story. Currently Waymo has to go through the laborious process of creating intricate 3D maps of the cities and places its vehicles will operate in. But that mapping cost is fixed, regardless of the number of taxis driving in that city. And a lot of R&D has gone into everything. But the R&D costs are the same whether we’re talking one taxi or a million.

Robotaxis have very different economics than AI chatbots. They actually have very real economies of scale. Plus while their self-driving vehicles currently cost about $150k, that cost is only going to go down with time. And compared to the cost of a human driver? It’s hard to see how they won’t end up profitable eventually.

I’ve never been in one of those corporate controlled rolling cages, and hope ti never be.

I took a ride in Atlanta last April. I enjoyed it.