It's covering significant areas of 3 major metros, and the core of one minor, with testing deployments in several other major metros. Considering the top 10 metros are >70% of the US ridehail market, that seems like a long way beyond "non-existent" coverage nationally.
You’re narrowing the market for self-driving to the ridehail market in the top 10 US metros. That’s kinda moving the goal posts, my friend, and completely ignoring the promises made by self-driving companies.
The promise has been that self-driving would replace driving in general because it’d be safer, more economical, etc. The promise has been that you’d be able to send your autonomous car from city to city without a driver present, possibly to pick up your child from school, and bring them back home.
In that sense, yes, Waymo is nonexistent. As the article author points out, lifetime miles for “self-driving” vehicles (70M) accounts for less than 1% of daily driving miles in the US (9B).
Even if we suspend that perspective, and look at the ride-hailing market, in 2018 Uber/Lyft accounted for ~1-2% of miles driven in the top 10 US metros. [1] So, Waymo is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world.
Self-driving isn’t “here” in any meaningful sense and it won’t be in the near-term. If it were, we’d see Alphabet pouring much more of its war chest into Waymo to capture what stands to be a multi-trillion dollar market. But they’re not, so clearly they see the same risks that Brooks is highlighting.
There are, optimistically, significantly less than 10k Waymos operating today. There are a bit less than 300M registered vehicles in the US.
If the entire US automotive production were devoted solely to Waymos, it'd still take years to produce enough vehicles to drive any meaningful percentage of the daily road miles in the US.
I think that's a bit of a silly standard to set for hopefully obvious reasons.
> ..is a tiny part of a tiny market in a single nation in the world.
Calculator was a small device that was made in one tiny market in one nation in the world. Now we all got a couple of hardware ones in our desk drawers, and a couple software ones on each smartphone.
If a driving car can perform 'well' (Your Definition May Vary - YDMV) in NY/Chicago/etc. then it can perform equally 'well' in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, etc. It's just that EU has stricter rules/regulations while US is more relaxed (thus innovation happens 'there' and not 'here' in the EU).
When 'you guys' (US) nail self-driving, it will only be a matter of time til we (EU) allow it to cross the pond. I see this as a hockey-stick graph. We are still on the eraser/blade phase.
if you had read the F-ing article, which you clearly did not, you would see that you are committing the sin of exponentiation: assuming that all tech advances exponentially because microprocessor development did (for awhile).
Development of this technology appears to be logarithmic, not exponential.
He's committing the "sin" of monotonicity, not exponentiation. You could quibble about whether progress is currently exponential, but Waymo has started limited deployments in 2-3 cities in 2024 and wide deployments in at least SF (its second city after Phoenix). I don't think you can reasonably say its progress is logarithmic at this point - maybe linear or quadratic.
Speaking for one of those metro areas I'm familiar with: maybe in SF city limits specifically (where they still are half the Uber's share), but that's 10% of the population of the Bay Area metro. I'm very much looking forward to the day when I can take a robo cab from where I live near Google to the airport - preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates - but today it's just not present in the lives of about 95+% of Bay Area residents.
> preferably, much cheaper than today's absurd Uber rates
I just want to highlight that the only mechanism by which this eventually produces cheaper rates is by removing having to pay a human driver.
I’m not one to forestall technological progress, but there are a huge number of people already living on the margins who will lose one of their few remaining options for income as this expands. AI will inevitably create jobs, but it’s hard to see how it will—in the short term at least—do anything to help the enormous numbers of people who are going to be put out of work.
I’m not saying we should stop the inevitable forward march of technology. But at the same time it’s hard for me to “very much look forward to” the flip side of being able to take robocabs everywhere.
People living on the margins is fundamentally a social problem, and we all know how amenable those are to technical solutions.
Let's say AV development stops tomorrow though. Is continuing to grind workers down under the boot of the gig economy really a preferred solution here or just a way to avoid the difficult political discussion we need to have either way?
I'm not sure how I could have been more clear that I'm not suggesting we stop development on robotaxis or anything related to AI.
All I'm asking is that we take a moment to reflect on the people who won't be winners. Which is going to be a hell of a lot of people. And right now there is absolutely zero plan for what to do when these folks have one of the few remaining opportunities taken away from them.
As awful as the gig economy has been it's better than the "no economy" we're about to drive them to.
This is orthogonal. You're living in a society with no social safety net, one which leaves people with minimal options, and you're arguing for keeping at least those minimal options. Yes, that's better than nothing, but there are much better solutions.
The US is one of the richest countries in the world, with all that wealth going to a few people. "Give everyone else a few scraps too!" is better than having nothing, but redistributing the wealth is better.
But this is the society we live in now. We don’t live in one where we take care of those whose jobs have been displaced.
I wish we did. But we don’t. So it’s hard for me to feel quite as excited these days for the next thing that will make the world worse for so many people, even if it is a technological marvel.
Just between trucking and rideshare drivers we’re talking over 10 million people. Maybe this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and finally gets us to take better care of our neighbors.
Yeah but it doesn't work to on the one hand campaign for not taking rideshare jobs away from people on an online forum, and on the other say "that's the society we live in now". If you're going to be defeatist, just accept those jobs might go away. If not, campaign for wealth redistribution and social safety nets.
Public transit has a fundamentally local impact. It takes away some jobs but also provides a lot of jobs for a wide variety of skills and skill levels. It simultaneously provides an enormous number of benefits to nearby populations, including increased safety and reduced traffic.
Self-driving cars will be disruptive globally. So far they primarily drive employment in a small set of the technology industry. Yes, there are manufacturing jobs involved but those are overwhelmingly going to be jobs that were already building human-operated vehicles. Self-driving cars will save many lives. But not as many as public transit does (proportionally per user) And it is blindingly obvious they will make traffic worse.
Waymo's current operational area in the bay runs from Sunnyvale to fisherman's wharf. I don't know how many people that is, but I'm pretty comfortable calling it a big chunk of the bay.
They don't run to SFO because SF hasn't approved them for airport service.
I just opened the Waymo app and its service certainly doesn't extend to Sunnyvale. I just recently had an experience where I got a Waymo to drive me to a Caltrain station so I can actually get to Sunnyvale.
The public area is SF to Daly City. The employee-only area runs down the rest of the peninsula. Both of them together are the operational area.
Waymo's app only shows the areas accessible to you. Different users can have different accessible areas, though in the Bay area it's currently just the two divisions I'm aware of.
Why would you consider the employee-only area? For that categorization to exist it must mean it's either unreliable for customers or too expensive cause there's too much human drivers on the loop. Either way it would not be considered as an area served by self driving, imo.
There are alternative possibilities, like "we don't have enough vehicles to serve this area appropriately" or "we don't have statistical power to ensure this area meets safety standards even though it looks fine", and "there are missing features (like freeways) that would make public service uncompetitive in this area" to simply "the CPUC hasn't approved a fare area expansion".
It's an area they're operating legally, so it's part of their operational area. It's not part of their public service area, which I'd call that instead.
I wish! In Palo Alto the cars have been driving around for more than a decade and you still can't hail one. Lately I see them much less often than I used to, actually. I don't think occasional internal-only testing qualifies as "operational".
