I didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently.

I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.

The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers.

If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.

This is super awesome but to set expectations it appears that Waymo is quite limited by fleet capacity in all of its current operating zones, so as a practical matter it may be months or years before it operates in all these areas.

If you're interested in this stuff I highly recommend this podcast, not affiliated with it I genuinely think it's a great source to hear about the behind the scenes of fleet operations to meet demand: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/

(Edit) I prefer using the apple podcast app, here's a direct link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id177...

I rode in one of these in Phoenix in June, loved the experience! Had to go to a pharmacy so purposely picked one a half hour across the city so I could just watch the car perform. Felt like the future (though it did glitch once). Made a sudden turn off the road into a parking lot, did a lap of the outside of the parking lot, and exited back onto the same road to continue on. Must have thought something was blocking the road and made a detour around it? Other than that it seemed pretty flawless.

I'm so excited how much of Southern California is opened - Waymo LAX to SD after midnight (there's no trains or buses from 12 to 6)!!

Looking forward to the highway expansion next. I had to get from mountain view to san francisco yesterday, and waymo was _able_ to do this trip, it was going to take several hours and get routed up el camino real the whole way. Luckily I was standing very close to a caltrain station when I needed the ride, so i just caltrained, and then waymo'd from the SF station to where i needed to be.

I’m looking forward to the day when the cost of taking one of these falls to somewhere 20% above the cost of fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle, making it incredibly cheap to take a ride anywhere you’d reasonably want to be driven to.

Waymo has so far been awesome, can't imagine choosing an Uber/Lyft over a Waymo when both are available options. I wonder how much they are bottlenecked by vehicle production though.

So when will they be available for commercial rides? Can't wait to waymo from SF to Berkeley!

Was curious on the Zeekr RT. Interesting to see it’s owned by Geely.

https://www.motortrend.com/news/waymo-zeekr-rt-autonomous-ev...

The map area for the Southern California service area is absolutely massive.

Without traffic, at highway speeds, it would take you almost four hours to travel from the North end to the South end.

I believe that in 20 years there will be cities (probably not in America) where all cars are autonomous. There will be no red lights, no parking lots, less congestion, fewer accidents.

First used Waymo in Phoenix. It was a decent experience. The funny thing was watching it handle parallel parking. I mentioned it to the wife - self driving with parkinsons.

This last weekend, we were in the city (San Francisco) and literally drove by a Waymo trying to park and the wife started laughing - "you are right".

This is so cool to see. Saw tons of Waymo in LA/Santa Monica area when I was there in October. Very excited to see them expand basically all through SoCal!

No santa cruz eh?

This gives me hope that once I'm too old to drive, this tech will reach my, very distant from the US west coast, corner of the world.

And if not Waymo and its car, then perhaps autonomous buses. There's already a shortage of bus drivers in my city and it's not getting any smaller.

My general experience with Waymos and safety is that while they are generally quite safe and communicative drivers (They have a pedestrian yeild indicator that should be required by law) they tend to create safety issues because people drive stupidly around them. A lot of SF drivers seem to see them, think I know better, and then proceed to do something dumb.

I'm not really sure how to fix this problem.

Also if any Waymo engineers are reading this please make the pedestrian yeild indicator icon visible on the front of the LIDAR. In narrow streets the front is much more visible to pedestrians than the sides as the LIDAR is pretty far back on the car.

What is the dark spot on the maps? Was that the current and then the less dark is the expansion?

Do the driving tests cover what you're supposed to do if you hit a Waymo or one hits you? I assume the cops are instructed just to ignore them?

why is there an approved map? like i get having a pilot somewhere but once that goes well (and we're way past that point), why isn't it just blanket approval everywhere. Why would one county be allowed waymos but not another.

I get that they might not be approved in the high sierras but just make that a deny list not allow list. Or even just deny the specific conditions you're worried about (snow).

It's been a long time coming, but Waymo is doing it. Waymo is scaleable and on the march! They've been announcing plans to roll out in new cities every month or 2 all year, and by the end of 2026 they'll be testing or offering the public rides over 30 metropolitan areas.

I'm most curious to see how they do in the winter city of Minneapolis over the next several months.

“Map increase?” Is that hackernewsish for “larger area”?

It's disappointing that where I live is politically difficult and waymo won't come anytime soon.

Whoah, Waymo would be able to take one from Mountain View to Napa. (I get why Cupertino is excluded. But. Oof. Come on.)

Personally, I can’t wait to be killed by a cold, uncaring robot. Let’s goooo