I am also not looking forward to the system transitioning from "big experiment, burn money to make it good" to "established business unit, tweak it to death for incrementally more money / personal promotion." We're still in the honeymoon period and I very much expect to hate Waymo in 10 or 15 years when they reach a steady state.

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jamilton 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What levers are there, really? Waymo has a monopoly and it seems like they will for a while, so they have a lot of power, but all I really see them doing is making it expensive. Anything that makes the experience worse takes away from their ability to take market share away from Uber/Lyft.

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gfody 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

enshitification should be a new certainty along with death and taxes

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Animats 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That worries me.

Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance. Yet there's nothing like the FAA to enforce a minimum equipment list, maintenance intervals, or signoffs by approved mechanics.

Is there a scratch or chip in the scanner dome? Are both the primary and backup steering actuators working? Is there any damage to the vehicle fender sensors? Is dispatch allowed with some redundant components not working? If so, for how long?

Here's the FAA's Minimum Equipment List for single-engine aircraft.[1] For each item, you can see if it has to be working to take off, and, if not, how long is allowed to fix it. There's nothing like that for self-driving land vehicles.

What's the fleet going to look like at 8 years of wear and tear?

[1] https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/MMEL_SE_Rev_2_Draft....

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jfoster 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Self-driving vehicles need aircraft-type maintenance.

That's a hyperbolic false equivalence.

Aircraft typically carry hundreds of people and can crash to the ground. As long as a self-driving car can detect when it is degraded, it can just stop with the blinkers on. Usually with 0 - 2 people inside.

	▲	Animats 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The question is how broken can a car be when dispatched. What's the safe floor? See the other article today about a Tesla getting into an accident because of undetected sensor degradation.

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bombcar 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s just death and taxes combined.