>Luckily, no one was hurt.

It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.

A human driver, mowed down and killed a family of four in my city [1]. They got six days in jail. With this context, what level of punitive laws are you think for autonomous car companies? Humans drive through these situations too [3].

When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.

[1]:https://abc7news.com/post/80-year-old-san-francisco-driver-k...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLLkGaKX7NI

[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8gMd9XZJyg

Did you want the cops to arrest the car?

> Local cops said there are no laws to charge a driverless car with a crime.

This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.

Super weird! I've been using Waymo's regularly for 3 years now, couple of times a week and this has never happened.

There's something about the Uber-hailed Waymos that makes them so much worse than regular Waymos IMO.

Did it think it needed to take a very out of the way route?

The perfect driving equivalent of AI slop

I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.

They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.

It's not just you. My family gets around on foot, bike and transit, but occasionally we find the most practical way to get somewhere we want to go is by car. Having more options to get a ride is very welcome.

From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.

There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.

Describing Montreal as "sheer chaos" only makes sense in the north American context. Karachi and other such cities are actually chaos.

I was thinking this too - my guess is the cars simply wouldn't offer rides on days with really poor conditions.

Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.

They've been mapping, or whatever they do, Pittsburgh for almost a year now, and it was pretty funny watching the cars navigate around massive snow piles last winter. Curious to see how the rollout goes here. <Insert popcorn emoji.>

Pothole observed. Diverting around pothole -

pothole observed. Diverting a-

pothole observed. d-

pothole.

po-

They have a limited presence in New Orleans, mostly rolling around the French Quarter and Uptown. The roads look bombed out in parts of Uptown, maybe not the absolute worst anywhere but it's close.

on the other hand, montreal doesn't allow right on red, and instead has an extremely strongly planned traffic grid including priority right turns. Not much ambiguity in the prescribed traffic patterns.

>> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.

Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.

Denver just launched ahead of a supposed "Super El Nino" winter. We'll see what happens.

> Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos.

The ultimate test would be Cairo or Mumbai or Lagos :-)

They handle school buses which have a similar mechanism, so I would hope it's already a solved problem.

London too, I believe.

I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)

Canada has two official languages: Canadian English and Canadian French. This satisfies both the English-speaking population and the French-speaking population. As a result, signs, plaques, and public articles are posted with both the Canadian English version as well as the Canadian French version.

A legally required one, natch.

Bike lines don't send Canadian money to a startup in the USA so I guess bike lines don't have financial means to lobby the government.

I'd rather not have any roads people can walk.

Fair, but I would take Waymos over Rob Ford being allowed to drive any day. As a bicycle commuter I find that Waymos are quite pleasant to share the road with. They generally try to avoid hitting me. Never had a Waymo swerve into my lane, or try to sideswipe me, or accelerate to cut me off to make a right turn, or make overt death treats because "roads are for cars".

I'm sure disabled or elderly people would agree with you.

I'd 100% rather bike around a Waymo than a human driver.

It'd be good to have more bike lanes, and waymo-type transport being used as a part of a public transport ecosystem rather than just pure taxi.

both?

both!

Please, not this shit again.

Ford is already removing bike lanes.

Tax dollars to put in bike lanes, and then tax dollars to remove them.

You can see their planned locations on the map here https://waymo.com/

Includes St Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Minneapolis etc.

Do you know any women who have had drivers act inappropriately towards them? Or drivers who pretend the meter is broken and try to charge more?

There are lots of reasons somebody might prefer a driverless car and lots of reasons somebody might prefer a human driver. Why not have a choice?

What does a 1-driver taxi compared to a 2-drivers taxi offer apart from fewer taxi-driver jobs? They can't inherently shorten journeys or avoid surface disruption, we already have taxi services in most cities. This just removes a human job and that's the progress.

Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?

The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.

30-35% of the cost of running a city bus is the driver.

Imagine what cities could do with 50% higher bus frequency or more bus routes.

A more uniform experience across taxi rides.

I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.

But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.

Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.

HackerNews is a bubble in itself. Most people here cannot relate to a person who drives a cab for a living and is having a real tangbile crisis seeing how these tech companies are eating up their livelihood. Switching jobs for a taxi driver is not the same as switching jobs or career as a software coolie.

No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.

[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/23/cruise-waymo-spent-million...

New York is still holding on but I dont know how long it can. https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-new-york-city-political-ro...

- frees up people to do more important things than drive you around.

- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.

- obeys traffic rules

Safety. Waymos are safer for passengers and pedestrians than human-driven cars.

> What does robotaxi offer apart from less taxi-driver jobs?

One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.

IMO it's a safer and more comfortable passenger experience

It obeys the rules of the road and kills many fewer people - 0 killed in 250M miles. Driving a machine is something people are not good enough at frankly.

Road safety. Personal safety. A consistent experience.

Of the robotaxis in Austin, I've only used Waymo, but have used it fairly extensively. So far I have noticed:

- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,

- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,

- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),

- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,

- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,

- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.

There are three major disadvantages right now:

- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,

- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,

- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.

I'd rather we left that car dependency enabler to the yanks thank you very much

Google already has quite a large office in Toronto.

Maybe we'll end up cancelling whatever contract Waymo got and give them a secret payout amount like we did for Starlink.

So your response to asocial, xenophobic politicians is give them what they want?

"I will show that America first President who wants to fracture global trade...by arguing for fracturing global trade."

That gen pops tune changed with the political climate just like big corp previously going on about left wing shit is stunning

Ya'll are just LARPing what you watch on TV and read online

>hostile orange individual

Orange guy may make news, but Canada has greater problems from within.

As a driver in places where it snows... I'm curious about how it will handle:

1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.

2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.

3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)

4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")

5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).

---

Tangent for the "how do you handle lanes when you can't see any" ... old school approach: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/833362

> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.

https://ahmct.ucdavis.edu/advanced-snow-plow

When all an account posts is claims of first-hand experience with various unrelated technologies, the strategy becomes a bit too obvious: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=hncbw02z5a&next=5009...

True. But don't most people drive in the tracks of the car ahead? I know when it snows people sometimes make a three-lane highway into a two-way "rut railway" road, and make do.

I worked on perception systems five years ago and we had de-noising algorithms that are much better now. We would never have dared to drive in obscured lanes, but I assume Waymo’s high resolution maps and sensor fusion are extremely good, but yeah, are the vehicles going to plow through the unofficial lanes?

They've been doing test runs here in Minneapolis for more than a year. You're right that it's a challenge, but I bet they'll do fine after a couple years of refinement.

I have zero idea about lidar operational capabilities, but can you heat them to stop snow and ice from piling up?

that's in the FAQ. They say they have sensor cleaning tech. But they aren't launching until 2028 so 2 winters of testing should tell.

They linked to https://waymo.com/blog/2025/10/creating-an-all-weather-drive... discussing the snow mitigations all the way from software down to the built-in heaters on the sensors.

That's one of the reasons lidar will prove to be a dead end for this application. It's a temporary enabling technology on the path to the simpler multiple camera based solution.

It’s doing Manhattan, it’ll be fine.

A lot of women want it along with the ability to order Uber/Lyft from women drivers only.