Can any of those companies catch up on self-driving faster than Waymo can pivot to their niche? Cruise seemed to be a distant second, but did themselves in with an attempted cover-up.

There are several “last meters” delivery robots developed.

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.

Tiny catapults. It's the only correct answer.

Sadly, this would still be an improvement on many smaller delivery services that especially Amazon is fond of using.

The slaves obviously.

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).

It might be like that if a Tesla Robo taxi could actually operate like a Waymo

I'd still choose Waymo if it was 100% more than Uber, the experience is so much better and I feel so much safer.

> 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)

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...

That TC article doesn't substantiate its overly broad claim. "People" aren't paying more, in general, across its US markets; it only shows that a subset of its customers in what is already the top-5 most expensive cities (SF) in the world are prepared, and at that, only 10-27% are prepared to pay significantly more ($5-10). Still fewer than the 40% who would pay “the same or less.”

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.

The words women and woman appear exactly once each on this thread. If there's one thing tech product management needs, it is to ask a woman. This is the most obvious blind spot in tech.