Beginning fully autonomous operations with the 6th-generation Waymo driver

From an execution standpoint you can't work on experimental mobility due to path dependence. How are they going to convince municipal governments to open golf cart lanes? That would require solving two problems (autonomy and overcoming path dependence), and solving just one is hard enough. Once they saturate the market as it is with autonomous driving, then everything will change and opportunities to experiment will open up.

Neal Stephenson wrote a short essay on path dependence that I really like-- https://slate.com/technology/2011/02/space-stasis-what-the-s....

Plenty of people have voiced much larger visions, for decades. There was a spate of futurists in the 80s, Waymo itself, and others like Dave Ferguson of Nuro. But autonomous vehicles have been an incredibly volatile industry. Anyone shooting for the moon (that's not seemingly immune to market pressures) has had those grand visions beaten down by the whiplash of funding. Companies have responded by focusing on those those first, real steps to demonstrate the "easy" stuff. The experimental stuff will come later when they're looking for ways to expand and investor money is more confident in the technology's future.

Tesla never had lidar so they didn't abandon it.

Also, Tesla started FSD in 2016. The very core of their strategy was (and is) to sell $40k car with hardware capable of running FSD.

Cameras are super cheap, FSD chip is reasonably inexpensive. Lidar is not. Maybe today the cost isn't completely prohibitive (I think it still is, because you need multiple lidars) but it certainly was for the first 8 years of FSD program.

Tesla just didn't have the luxury of adding $50k to the cost of the car for the hardware, the way Waymo did. And they didn't have sugar daddy (Google) willing to burn several billions a year for many years.

So the Waymo approach was not an option for Tesla.

And given that in Austin they just reached parity with Waymo (i.e. completely unsupervised robotaxi service), they are not doing badly.

Google Fiber was struggling for a while because cable companies are in bed with power companies and wouldn't let them run fiber through their easement areas. In fact, even cities couldn't run their own fiber.

What you envision might happen in 2100+

the biggest buyer of robotics is the military and i really hope waymo stays out of that

Have you seen the Zoox vehicles? They're what you want.

http://zoox.com

Still too big tho maybe. What about a Segway-sized vehicle, or even smaller.

It's tough in the US because the one thing we have already going for us is a massive and comprehensive road network. Waymo et al are leaning heavily into the existing infrastructure, which is the right move given the inability of the US to execute major changes to infrastructure these days. Compare that to China, where infrastructure is being actively upgraded to accommodate autonomous vehicles. As nice as the Chinese approach sounds, it's probably a lot less exportable than the 'take the roads as they are' approach of Waymo.

> Tesla's choice to abandon lidar will be one of the biggest oof in business history.

Why? They have started unsupervised taxi rides in Austin. One of their goals was affordability, and their cars are massively more affordable.

It seems tough culturally.

If you look at it from an outside point of view, right now Tesla is worth $1.6T, Waymo is worth $130B, and GM is worth $72B. If Cruise were actually a third viable competitor in this race, it would probably be worth more than the rest of GM. Self-driving is just a far more valuable business than car-making.

So from that point of view it would make sense to say, don't worry about the rest of GM too much, you should be willing to sacrifice all of that to increase the changes of making Cruise work.

It's hard to change the culture at a place like GM though. Does the GM CEO really want to take a huge amount of risk? Would they be willing to take a 50-50 shot where they either 10x the company's value or lose it all? Or would they prefer to pay a few billion dollars to avoid that risk.

Pushing Dan Ammann out was a bad idea. I personally like the original set up at the time. Kyle as the CTO and Dan as the CEO. Kyle was great as an internal CEO, he was calling most of the internal shots anyway. The accident would have played out very differently if Dan Ammann was the CEO IMO.

(Also former Cruise employee)

As an outsider I assumed it took GM a substantial investment just to realize how far out of their depth they were. It made sense to cut their losses once they figured this out.

Having experience and capability to manufacturer cars has approximately zero benefit to create a self-driving software/sensor stack. It would make more sense for Adobe to create a self-driving car than GM.

I liked my one and ride in Cruise however the problem I had was it took 10 minutes or so for my car to depart.

Car arrives. I get in. The car is sitting there getting ready to depart but not moving. After a few minutes I hit the button to call support. Someone tells me it's about ready to go. Ten minutes later it starts leaving.

I have no idea why it took so long to start but it wasn't a great experience.

If you (or anyone else from Cruise) can explain what was going on, that would settle the difference in experience to me.

This is a business with winner-take-all characteristics. Cruise was unlikely to leapfrog Waymo. So it makes the case for continuing to throw money at this very unconvincing.

Cruise was always destined to be "like Waymo, but worse". Tesla, on the other hand, is taking a very different path than Waymo, they have a chance at beating Waymo at their own game and even if they don't beat Waymo, they can be a winner in some specific niche. (For the record, I'm a fan of Waymo.)

Maybe I'm giving GM too much credit, but it seems to me that GM acquired the technology with the intention to bring it into their vehicles as driver assistance, not autonomous driving. They were pretty candid about not wanting to operate taxis. Cruise itself was embroiled in investigations and was prohibited from operating in SF and voluntarily ceased operations in other markets, which basically made it a target, and since GM had already dumped a few billion into it, it probably made sense to at least get unencumbered rights to the tech.

Cruise was actually just about to return to market after the October incident [1]. We had reached efficacy on all (much harder) internal safety benchmarks showing the car had significantly improved.

GM pulled the rug on us a day or two before announcing. The current Cruise CEO wasn't aware at all either. I have my own conspiracies of why GM did this, but GM also has a long history of fumbling the ball.

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/nhtsa-robotaxi-cru...

[2] https://www.theautopian.com/here-are-five-times-gm-developed...!

We should not forget this is the same company that had an amazing lead on everyone in the electric car market 3 decades ago with the EV1. See "Who Killed the Electric Car [0]

[0] https://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

One of my good friends was a driver for Cruise (he sit in the cars while they drove and made tons of notes about the behavior)

He said they were pretty awful and would constantly mess up.

It seems the time car companies thought more than 4 years ahead was in 2007 and that culture was swiftly removed from the industry out of the economic shock that occurred shortly after.

You can tell they're enjoying their job.

I loved it.

Probably to try to assuage people who already saw this story circulating: https://www.autoblog.com/news/waymo-uses-remote-workers-in-t...

> They have been fully autonomous for many years.

In this very thread plenty of people are saying that what Tesla are doing now in Austin is NOT fully autonomous, but you assert Waymo doing the same for many years is?

Waymo had remote operators who could take over when needed for a long time.

Ultimately there will have to be some sort of new models regardless, given the vast majority of the fleet is Jaguar I-Paces, a car which ended production with no successor in 2024. Waymo bought the final 2000 cars to come off the line.

The latter.

They appear to be distinguished externally by the vehicle model and new sensor design. Currently, the production fleet in Phoenix and elsewhere consists of the Jaguar I-PACE.

The sixth generation would have been in testing phases -- closed tracks, simulations, and supervised driving. Now they're deploying on the Waymo Ojai (Zeekr) and Hyundai's IONIQ 5.

This is way more fun than I ever had in my Corolla.

From the company who got the world "go-goo"ing like infants, I, for one, can't wait to say "O HAI" to my new ride, or "Isn't it IONIQ, don't you think?"

I hope this prods Tesla to up their game. I love my Teslas but if Waymo’s approach is shown to be truly better then I’d happily switch to a car that used their tech. For now I have no choice but to stick with the self-driving that’s available for personal cars. Hopefully Waymo works on licensing their tech for other manufacturers and expanding their geographical coverage.

You mean double parking waiting for passengers? Its a taxi, so I doubt it.

Maybe there's a way to tell Waymo that they keep using an illegal no stopping zone?

Are they parking illegally and blocking traffic? The Waymo cars that I've seen parked on the side of city streets have been out of the traffic lanes but maybe I missed something.

Maybe the menace is the drivers. That's indisputable when you look at injuries per mile.

A safety driver is a driver that needs to stay focused on the vehicle's movements 100% of the time, to intervene if the autonomous system fails and starts to become unsafe. This is not what Waymo uses. The autonomous system is trusted with safety, the remote agents are there to resolve cases where the autonomous system cannot proceed (or, more precisely, is not allowed to proceed out of an abundance of caution) without some extra guidance. Whether Waymo's business model makes sense primarily depends on how often these agents need to intervene (unlike safety drivers where you need one safety driver per vehicle and you're just running an expensive taxi).

Waymo is absolutely delighting in their luck that Elon is so stubborn that he has kept Tesla from being anywhere close to catching up.

I've long expected Waymo's approach to prevail simply because - aside from whether vision-only proves good enough to some standard - it will be easy to lobby for regulations that favor the more conservative approach.

But I also don't think we can take anything from what Waymo claims about the feasibility of vision-only.

There aren't remote "drivers" in the Philippines, that's not how Fleet Response works. You can see how it works here if you're curious: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response but the TLDR is that they give the Waymo driver options in confusing situations (things like, you can go use this driveway on the side to pass this blocked traffic).

I don't even know what areas of the United States I would consider "walkable". I live in San Francisco, don't own a car, we have "pretty good" public transit, and it's still absolutely miserable getting around. It takes me 40 minutes to go from Outer Sunset to downtown by muni. There are many locations in this city that I can physically jog to faster than public transit.

I can appreciate this technology might negatively impact other countries more heavily, but, for me, it's easily the most exciting tech I interact with and I'm rooting for it whole-heartedly. I'm at around 1000 miles logged on Waymo and am part of their beta tester program for freeway usage.

I also think that post-Covid remote work has probably damaged incentives for increasing the density of cities more so than anything autonomous vehicles will do. San Francisco is actively cutting bus routes, bus density, and threatening to significantly cut BART stops due to budget constraints and reduction in ridership.

It's odd because I do get where you're coming from, and I feel like I should be your target audience, but, for me, the ship sailed so long ago that I struggle to relate to your position.

If self driving cars replace humans, I can safely bike on the road again, not having to worry about some exhausted soccer-parent scrolling tiktok on their phone in their minivan as they use me as a speed bump. Also as a parent/part time family taxi driver, I wouldlove to get back the ~10 hours a week I spend staring at the road. Kids will be driven by waymo to Karate, Soccer, Violin lessons etc. I am ready for this future.

Are you implying that stopping Waymo will make auto companies more likely to endorse walkable areas?

Disagree. A city is walkable because it is dense: daily destinations like your grocery store is close enough to walk to. But density implies congestion for cars because if everyone is in a car the roads will be too congested. This happens regardless of whether we have a human driver driving the car alone, or a human sitting inside a Waymo as a passenger. Congestion happens either way. Waymo does not solve the congestion problem, and therefore will not have any affect on the walkability of cities.