I don't know about other countries, but Spain will probably be one of the last ones to get it, thanks to the Uber-powerful (heh) taxi driver lobby

[0] https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/01/waymo-san-francisco-cpuc-e...

People love crashing there.

- No driver to pay. - Smaller simpler car. - Can drive 24h a day. - Needs much less parking space.

But fully realizing these benefits is probably a decade away.

Practically, travelers with heavy check-in bags prefer taxis. Public transit can't be the answer for everything.

Without heavy check-in, transit is a great choice. Alas, some problems remain. Many residents consider BART unsafe. Frequency is pathetic for a major subway line. BART is unusually expensive ($14! - 6$ + 6$ + 2$??) and last mile connectivity is bad.

On the topic of cost, other airports that are on the transit corridor (LaGuardia NYC, Boston Logan, Ronald Reagan Washington) cost $3-4 for the trip. EWR & JFK are more expensive, but they're often faster than taking a taxi which allows them to compete on pricing.

Both the Waymos and Teslas have that central display that shows you what the car sees (pedestrians, dogs, traffic cones, other cars, etc). The Waymo representation of the world reaches pretty far is is pretty much perfect from what I've seen. Meanwhile the Tesla one until recently had objects popping in and out.

Neither is perfect, of course; both will hesitate sometimes and creep along when (IMO) they should commit. But they're both still way better in that regard compared to the zoox autonomous cars I see in SF.

They might be close to a real robotaxi in some areas, but it's hard to say until they actually pull the trigger on removing any employees from the car.

Waymo getting into that space seems like a pretty big step up in market penetration.

Waymo (though a technical marvel) is a bandaid over our inability to build and maintain public infrastructure. Be sure to cherish what you’ve got.

-edit- multiple other comments apparently disagree with this. I'll defer to people who actually use them over the reporting. Odd that there is that disconnect though.

There's so much polarizing opinion on Tesla's offering and whether they'll get to Waymo's level sooner than later, but this seems like it's going to be or already is a huge issue for Waymo where they can't manufacture the vehicles fast enough to satisfy the demand as they expand both locally (because they capture more of the market) and into new geographies. Will they try and acquire a manufacturer? I don't think that's economically feasible for Waymo (Geely market cap is $25b, per Google snippet fwiw), and obviously being in the car business is different than autonomous, but I'm sure Google would bankroll a purchase if they thought it was the right growth strategy.

I guess Tesla, even if their autonomous is on par with Waymo tomorrow, also has to manufacture the fleet, but it seems extremely beneficial to have that capacity in house vs. relying on partners. Maybe I'm wrong and it's not that much of an advantage, but at first glance it would seem to be.

Tesla FSD makes driving 90% less taxing mentally. It does 99.9% of the driving perfectly. And its getting better. We are quickly approaching a situation where people who don't drive Teslas are like people who cut their grass with Sickle as compared to people who have driving lawn mowers

https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/advice/cars-that-are-alm...

Some months ago Waymo claimed to be providing 250,000 rides per week. If the fleet size was 2500 at the time, that would be 100 rides per vehicle per week.

If it would be "too much", then there's no reason why taxis (incl uber/lyft) wouldn't be too much today.

I think if it's affordable then people will easily take that. instead of drinking and driving at night or other unsafe activities. if it's affordable then people can just take a waymo home and then back again to get their car when it's safe again.

CMs like Magna have the flexibility to manufacture, at the low end, hundreds of vehicles, and at the high end thousands. I doubt Waymo will ever make their own vehicles. They are already working with Toyota on adapting Waymo technology to privately owned cars. That implies mass production. That would be a supply of vehicles that are probably simple to adapt to robotaxi use.

If you can restrict certain roads to autonomous cars (or heavily limit the number of non-autonomous cars) then you don't need to build as much bicycle infrastructure (a buffered lane is probably all you need, as opposed to bollards or true grade separation) and I can guarantee you more folks will feel comfortable riding bikes. This is aside from how frequently human-driven cars end up colliding with, damaging, or blocking non-grade-separated forms of transit.

> It's just boring because self-driving is much easier when you build the road to support it instead of removing all constraints and adding GPUs, lidar sensors, cameras and an army of fall-back operators in overseas call centers.

I do bike advocacy so this kind of rhetorical gotcha can make me feel good and hit the upvote button but in reality city councils and other elected officials are mostly people skeptical of the benefits of bicycling, worried that buses/trains would place too high a tax burden on their constituents, or deep down convinced in their lizard brain that Americans are too carpilled to ever do anything else. If you can change this by running for your local council, do it!

Don't get me wrong, we need more bike infrastructure and we needed it yesterday. But anything helps. I'd love to see certain corridors of SF be restricted to transit, autonomous vehicle, and cyclist usage only. Market is already only for transit and cyclists so there's precedent.

- The trains often aren't running (and there may not be the volume of passengers to justify running them)

- The road are empty so traffic isn't really an issue

No idea if these are first-order effects in practice.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38973404

Other drivers aren't your only challenge out there.

Overall though, I think I agree with you.

Direct competitors are uber and Lyft which they can undercut since they don’t pay drivers.

The people who want to take buses and trains will continue to do so although Waymo might sway some with their ease and if pricing is reasonable.

Bikes and e-scooters only get you so far. Last time I was in SF I didn’t see too many bikes but I saw a ton of e-scooters. Are you really taking an e-scooter further than a few blocks? And when it rains?

Self owned cars make sense for longer trips out of the city but parking is a pain and driving is stressful so this is an easy win for Waymo.

It’s cheaper now so they can take market share. And their cost will certainly be lower than Ubers so they can win the pricing battle. But long term monopoly gonna monopoly. Perfect pricing is a given with the wealth in SF and how many rides will be on a business CC.

I've seen them driving around SF as well, but they're not yet available here.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tesla-robotaxi/id6744257048

Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B using a self driving car service, will reduce the number of people who own a car and thus the number of car trips.

Trains are all very well but they've been around nearly 200 years and have yet to bring on a traffic free utopia.

1) Being driven around is the best transportation mode for most of the US. It's very comfortable, private, fast, and point-to-point. It stops working well at very high density, but that level of density is only seen in a few places in the US. I'd like more people to live in dense areas but for the foreseeable future self-driving vehicles are going to be the best solution for most trips in the US.

2) At very high densities it's true that cars can move fewer people per hour per 10-foot lane than other modes and so you run into congestion. But that's measured with the current vehicle fleet and human drivers. With high autonomous vehicle penetration you could implement congestion pricing that encourages high throughput vehicle design. That means private vehicles that are much much smaller (think Isetta-like design) that can follow at very short distances. Along with the elimination of on-street parking we could see a many-fold increase in road throughput.

3) At even higher density levels the same congestion pricing mechanism would encourage people to use microbuses that would operate similarly to Uber Pool. Compared to today's busses they would have equal or greater throughput, be point-to-point or nearly point-to-point, dynamically routed, cheaper to operate and faster.

4) At the very highest density levels it's true that nothing can match the throughput of the subway. As others have mentioned, AVs are a great way to connect people to the subway. Many trips intersect with the highest density urban core for only a fraction of the journey. More people would take the subway if they knew they could get to and from the stations easily and quickly. AVs let you mix-and-match transport modes more easily.

Cities should start engaging with vehicle manufacturers to start getting these high density vehicle designs worked on and figure out the congestion pricing mechanism to properly incentive their rollout.

There's some self driving tech being developed in Europe, but AFAIK nothing is at the current deployment level of Zoox or Aurora, let alone Waymo.

Considering tourism and people living just outside service areas who see them but don't get to use them (which includes me sadly) I would not be surprised if 10% of population had seen at least one.

>pilots of self-driving taxi- and bus-like services will be brought forward by a year to spring 2026, attracting investment and making the UK one of the world leaders in this technology

Waymo at airports could work really well with automatic dispatching. They already have an app running in the customer's phone. It should be aware of when someone with a reservation gets off an airplane, and how close they're getting to the pickup point. With good coordination, as the customer heads to the arrival lanes, a Waymo pulls out of short-term parking and heads for the meeting point.

A few more years, and humanoid robots will put the luggage in the trunk.

Few major airports have Waymo at all. Phoenix has allowed pick-up at the airport for ages. (EDIT: Never mind.)

If Waymo is a rounding error to GOOG, it's basically a rounding error to Tesla's implied valuation.

So what is Tesla valued in then?

Clearly not car sales, profit, and especially growth in either of those segments.

xAI is supposed to be where all the AI is.

Where is it?

Meanwhile, for Waymo, a good chunk of it is profit (after the fixed cost of the vehicle, of course).

There's a reason the majority of accidents occur during take off and landing.

Spend some time listening: https://www.liveatc.net/search/?icao=ksfo

With a car if the engine fails you just pull over. With an airliner it's not so simple. As a result the training for a pilot is much longer than for a bus driver say.

So people will be willing to drive further for cheaper rent, or the self driving car might add a couple extra miles to park somewhere cheaper, so overall congestion would get worse.

Cars will always have a purpose. But if you go to somewhere like The Netherlands, they are much less relied upon - it's more about delivery vans than getting individuals to places.

If public transportation just encourages people to move to the suburbs and commute in every day you've actually just displaced the problem.

So when I have the option I'd rather take the train - of course I also drive a lot of places.

Trains to cover the longer distance and micro mobility options to get to exactly where you need to go

Because of decades to centuries of investment, holistic planning and expertise, we have one of the best networks in terms of quality, punctuality and density.

It's a plant the trees for future generations kind of deal, especially in Switzerland, because large, "flashy" projects are rare compared to to the more continuous and steady improvements, due to how funding and planning are set up.

And with that you can build a system where most places, including 50 people mountain villages are well connected.

I can go from Genf to a tiny village deep in the Eastern mountains with 4-6h. I can make that journey with no planning ahead what so ever.

Cars are actually restrictive. What if you want to have a drink? What if you are in a place that is different from your car? What if you are old or disabled? What if you are a tourist? What if you are not allowed to drive because of a traffic violation? And there are also these people called 'kids'. When I was 15 I went from Switzerland to Czechia with the train, no problem.

True freedom is to have a good public transit and potentially car as an option.

Also a lot of UK driving requires communication with other drivers (letting people out, etc.) in a way that US roads don't. I'm not sure how driverless cars can handle that.

I really wish we could get them, because they're great. But I'd say we're talking 10 years behind the US simply because of the extra engineering challenge.

Are they also planning on completely overhauling their economy and tax system to attract the engineers required to make this happen?

What likely happened now is that SFO got a kick up their backside from the Mayor after the press started asking why it was still dragging its feet, while SJC approved Waymo swiftly.

They should be able to get to SFO from Millbrae Ave and San Bruno Ave without getting on the highway proper, although it'll likely be a lot slower unless you're getting a ride from nearby. While SJC can serve downtown SJ and Santa Clara without getting on a highway.

In the Netherlands this is already sometimes possible if your work is close to a train station while your house is too and you don’t need to switch trains. It’s a boon to be honest.

My favorite is the train from Amsterdam to Berlin.

Of course, if you carpool then you can do this too. One time I rode in a car as a passenger from Berlin to Prague while working the whole time. When we were there, we went to a DnB festival and we got back on the weekend.

Hybrid working is awesome :)

And self-driving cars could make it more awesome

Its a real and verifiable threat to their core business. Much larger rev than waymo (current and future).

That's way mo' information than needed thanks.

But seriously. I wonder why they have a designated pickup point if it would make sense to spread the cars out to alleviate traffic bottlenecks.

I have a limited version of SuperCruise which means it operates hands-free on freeways but nowhere else. My wife's Equinox EV has the regular version, which operates on a lot of arterials near us and has more capabilities. The first time that the Equinox signaled, changed lanes to pass, signaled, then changed lanes back was shocking.

We moved to a small town and drive a lot more than we used to and I find that having those capabilities really helps relieve the stress.

I will say that I move to the center lane when going through a notorious set of curves on I-5 in Portland because my Bolt doesn't steer as smoothly as I'd like near the concrete barricades. I wanted SuperCruise because it has a fantastic safety record. There are lots of times it's not available but when it is, I have near-total confidence in it.

https://www.tesla.com/robotaxi

https://x.com/agarwal/status/1966365908085125384

Oh the horror, you might have to walk a couple of minutes (probably less time wasted than circling around to find a parking spot, and then walking from it to your destination).

> at a time that is probably not exactly when you wanted to arrive

Yeah, no. Trains in properly developed networks are extremely frequent. At the off-peakest of off-peak (Sunday late evening), the RER near me is every 15 minutes. During peak hours it's every 5 mins.

Now that tips are tax free, it's only a matter of time before some clever SV accountants figure out how make everything a tip.

https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/delivery-driver-secured...

Flying is obviously much harder than driving, but it's a sort of harder that is generally more amenable to automation, though I still think pilots are a good idea because when it goes wrong it goes wrong much worse.

Currently we rely very much on the problem solving abilities of human pilots to deal with troublesome situations. Autopilot will disengage in many scenarios.

1d (train) - easy. just one lever

2d (car) - hard. super hard. why is it so crowded? who thought this was a good idea? you let teenagers do this?

2.5d (plane at takeoff or landing) - almost as hard as car. fewer pedestrians.

3d (plane flying) - easy even with all those extra levers

But this assumes the need for a car, but cars are one form of transport. A more wholistic look at transportation with be “Reducing the (perceived) need to buy a car, e.g. by making it easy, cheap and reliable to get from A to B.” If you have more services within walking distance, it reduces your need for a car. If there is lots of bike infrastructure, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent trains, it reduces your need for a car. If there are reliable frequent bus services and bus lanes to get around traffic, it reduces your need for a car.

On the other hand, if there are more cars then you need, at minimum if we imagine self-driving cars, more road capacity. But realistically more roads and more parking. More space for roads is less space for the actual places people want to go, pushing those things farther apart. Being farther apart reduces the number of places you can get to by walking or biking, which means you are more likely to need a car, which means more cars, which means more roads, which means less space for the actual places people want to go, repeat. Cars are basically the worst option in terms of infrastructure cost, land usage per person, personal cost to use/operate, deaths and injuries, etc.

The question is how shitty it would be if they also had everyone on them who's currently on public transit.

So basically, it is a traffic-free panacea for everyone who chooses to use it. It's not a goal of trains to eliminate traffic for everyone who insists on driving.

https://www.tomtom.com/newsroom/explainers-and-insights/indu...

This is a silly expectation to have. As long as there are roads for cars people will put cars on them.

Trains solve traffic for the people who get on them, not for drivers. The more people taking the train, the fewer people impacted by the traffic.

If you feel that way about transit you may not have tried a good transit option like Hong Kong MTR with 90 second headways and travel from and to substantially everywhere you want to be.

Im happy to let Americans be the beta testers

So its not even about willingness to pay more

Gig drivers are cooked

I would need to see Waymo be able to handle something like Southeast Michigan before I could even get comfortable with trusting it to get me ubered t/o from home for maintaining the vehicle I need to commute when I can take a remote day or two...

And then also delivering that for a good cost.

I put it that way because, I do tip Uber drivers well (unless they cray cray) and they would need to properly 'undercut' uber with whatever model they serve up in more complex areas.

There is no downside to having someone drive you Uber has homogenised the experience.

Not having to pay drivers is an enormous source of profit.

There are large swaths of people that accept headlines as fact and/or cannot or will not grapple with nuance and complexity (“I think Elon’s a jerk and he is a formidable engineer.”) Perhaps it’s a sign of these polarized times, or, as I believe, people have always been like this. We just have more time and resources to dedicate to outrage and flamewarring than we did in the past.

Known nickname or typo?

Which can be bad - I often find it easier to just pay for a few minutes parking on dropoff/pickup.

I didn't go to Logan a ton though.

You must realize that, at some point, self-driving cars will be ubiquitous. Maybe not for 50 years, but they will be.

What you’re actually saying is “I’m virtue-signaling with Europe because that’s what the cool kids do”

Subways don’t solve last-mile problems or trucking.

Public infrastructure has high overhead costs, and low population density means there isn't enough ridership to make it viable.

Self driving cars might not solve traffic problems but they could greatly reduce them. Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.

If you need a car on at least a weekly basis, you're probably going to have your own car either way (unless the self driving car services are really good and cheap).

But even if all everyday trips don't require a car, it's very likely there will be some exceptions. And those can make or break this. If getting a car for that occasion requires hours of overhead (e.g. getting to a pick up/drop off point), is sufficiently inflexible (cars not reliably available on short notice), or prohibitively expensive (e.g. per-km charges on car sharing cars that make a couple longer day trips per year more expensive than just getting a cheap car), people who otherwise could do without a car will consider getting one.

OTOH, if the alternative is really good, people who occasionally need a car might use a service rather than owning a car, which means usage-based cost i.e. a much bigger incentive to pick alternatives. If they have been pushed to own a car, the fixed costs are a sunk cost and the marginal cost of taking car can easily be cheaper than public transit.

For another example, can you imagine trains replacing school buses in a large, rural school district? Sometimes (not always), buses are better than trains.

See also: LA

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F2...

Now imagine if all those commuters were in cars.

You see a robot driving around in a pile of trash.

I see a robot with nobody micromanaging him telling him how to live his life, etc, etc.

<we are not the same meme dot jpeg>

(Also, arbitrarily reclassifying things as tips is hard, because legally 100% of tip revenue has to go to workers, not management, and certainly not the company's investors or coffers).

ILS being under maintenance and unavailable for certain runways is also far from unusual.

Automatic landings started in 1964. I think that it seems hard mostly because of how tightly regulated aviation is - modern technology could probably make things a lot better if people were more receptive to the idea of heavy automated aircraft over populated areas.

3d, variant (orbital) - super hard, so hard that trajectory pre-calculations has to be performed

In fact, it's pretty routine. Don't have the source at hand, but somewhere around 1% of all landings (at airports with ILS) are autolands.

I think it was Boeing that even requires at least 1 autoland per plane every 30 days or so.

You can find videos of this on YouTube. Completely hands-off.

(Zermatt pics https://www.traveladventuregurus.com/zermatt)

Would a Waymo that you don't have to store, park, fuel, or maintain have been restrictive?

When you live and work in a city, they're much less practical.

Neither roads or train tracks solve the traffic problem.

There's a risk that robotaxis could become too cheap and people use them for point-to-point transportation because it's faster. This could be mitigated through taxes on robotaxis (with incentives to connect people to transit) and/or car usage in general, or maybe using robo-buses to provide a middle ground between personal convenience and system efficiency.

Surely you're describing metro areas? There's no way those five cities add up to 34 million people within city limits, given that none of them have 6 million people.

The MSAs added up to 27 million based on the 2020 census, so "close enough". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_statistical_area

That said, Waymo's service areas are nowhere close to covering the full MSAs: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en

- SF doesn't cover East Bay (two thirds of the MSA by population).

- Silicon Valley doesn't cover San Jose, and barely reaches into Sunnyvale (basically just covering the Google Moffett Park office buildings).

- The Phoenix area is missing most of the densest parts of Phoenix itself, as well as anything north / west of the city.

- Los Angeles doesn't even come close to covering the city, much less the rest of LA County or any of Orange County. (Maybe 2-3 million out of 13, from just eyeballing the region.)

On Uber (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/16011725?hl=en) there's also Atlanta (which looks like it actually has very nice coverage, other than the western half of the city) and Austin (again focused on downtown / commercial districts) which help drive up the numbers.

The population that's had opportunity to see Waymo in the wild is probably higher because they're testing in quite a few cities now (a sibling commenter mentions NYC, for instance).

https://newsroom.aaa.com/2025/02/aaa-fear-in-self-driving-ve...

Tax-free tips paid to robots go to the hardworking AI engineers -> AI engineers voluntarily donate part of their tips to a 501(c)(3) that helps support struggling venture capitalists.

Something like that. We'll work it out the details once the right PAC donations are in place.

Automatic lane keeping in a car requires cameras that software needs to then analyze to find the lines in the road in real time. But if you want a "set it and read a book for an hour", then you have to respond to other traffic. No longer just some simple PID controllers, the software now needs to plan and execute based on surrounding traffic.

American cities low density is a direct result of designing for car infrastructure over all else. And car infrastructure is far more expensive than other transportation, and since increased car infrastructure lowers density, it directly makes all other transportation more expensive and less viable.

Since cars are the most dangerous form of transport, for other drives but more so for cycles and pedestrians, it makes it less feasible to use them for your first-last mile. Then you add in that, as the roads grow and distances multiply, speeds are increased to attempt to compensate, multiplying the danger to anyone not in a car.

We don't have a last mile problem, we have legs for that.

This is a competence you do not want to lose.

It's also the case that you can have a whole approach setup in your flight computer and at the last minute the controller gives you a runway change. You could drop your head down and start typing a bunch info the FMC but you're generally better off just disabling auto pilot and manually making the adjustment.

This is the most "tell me you live in America without telling me you live in America" thing I've seen in a long time...

America basically the only place in the world where in its cities, trains and other public transport aren't a major part of people's lives. In other places (Seoul, Tokyo, many European cities, etc.), even people who own a car will sometimes commute via train due to the convenience.

In contrast when shit goes wrong for a plane we've got a big problem. Just stopping will definitely kill everybody, even from a modest altitude at a very low speed suddenly plummeting to the ground will straight up kill you. So, we want to land, albeit maybe we have to "crash land" destroying the vehicle to perhaps save its occupants.

You can buy (and indeed to some extent you can even retro-fit) emergency auto-land for small planes. Once engaged, or if set to do so automatically upon pilot failure the plane will figure out where it is (using GPS), pick the emergency radio frequency and announce the problem and its intended solution (I am a machine. My human pilot is incapacitated. I intend to fly to X location and land there. I am not listening to you and cannot understand you) and then it will fly to a chosen place and attempt to properly land the aeroplane, broadcast on radio that this airfield is now closed (this aeroplane is parked on the landing strip so you can't use it!) and then switch off.

Maybe the pilot is still alive and human medics can rush them to hospital. Otherwise maybe there are passengers who have been saved. In any case at least the aeroplane is now on the ground where humans can easily take over e.g. moving the plane so the airfield can re-open.

Waymo works in SF Chinatown btw, which is probably the most complicated locality in its driving zone.

But in the long term I think the point of waymo is that it'll be cheaper: no need to pay the driver if there isn't one!

but the companies that own them will or their insurance carriers.

> SpaceX was founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a vision of decreasing the costs of space launches, paving the way to a self-sustaining colony on Mars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX 2nd paragraph

On the flip side, there are airports like Cleveland where people just park their car at arrivals and disappear for 20 minutes.

That said, even if they were listening to you, there's a lot of things that are completely inconsequential from a perspective of an anonymous call center employee far away listening in on, that I probably wouldn't want to talk about in front of a taxi driver.

I think self-driving cars may eventually become common in areas where cars are currently common. I think public transit will continue to dominate in parts of the world where it currently dominates, because it is simply a superior user experience for the majority of people when the government cares to invest in it. (Not to mention far cheaper and more egalitarian.)

I am conveying my lived experience in most European cities I've been to.

And it's not just the EU. I'm sure that e.g. China and Japan will continue to invest in their excellent public transit infrastructure even when there are more self-driving cars on the road.

months?! :)

"The [German pilots'] union said it had carried out a survey of more than 900 pilots in recent weeks, which found that 93% of them admitted to napping during a flight in the past few months."

-The Guardian, "Almost all German pilots admit to napping during flights in union survey"; 2025-09-10

And in any case, there's no reason that public transit needs to be self-funded. We don't expect the same of most of our other public services.

And their cost relative to other operational costs is so low there isn't even any pushback on regulations regarding there being two of them.

Category IIIC ILS (full auto-land) does exist but requires special equipment for both the aircraft and airport. Human pilots have to actively monitor the system and take back control if anything goes wrong (which does happen).

Garmin also has the Autonomí auto-land system for certain general aviation aircraft which can attempt to land at the closest suitable airport. But this is only used for single pilot operation in case the pilot becomes incapacitated. It isn't suitable for regular flights.

The total number of permits seems to be around 500 in a town of 5k permanent residents. And the population grows to 30k or 40k during the peak tourist season.

So yes, they would be obnoxious at any significant quantity and also not really help with getting across the city since transit is pretty good

Rail and other public transport in pretty much everywhere in the world are designed to serve commute first, tourist stuff second or third.

Public transport isn't just having some trains, or having only trains between major cities. It is designing whole commute routes from various urban and suburban areas to workplace. There needs to be regional and suburban links that arrive to metro and tram stations. Metro and tram have to operate very frequently to handle commuters. The frequency of the trains should adapt to the commuters in the morning and evening. They need to be convenient, clean and safe too.

Cities around the world are also much better balanced than NA ones. The workplaces and living areas are almost always mixed rather than having a "downtown" area where every office worker travels to. My area has many buildings with a supermarket, apartments and small offices in the same building. There are two car factories in the city next to one of the biggest urban parks.

In terms of having the industry? Absolutely. How many other areas of "tech" has Europe basically punted on and ceded to Americans? Currently there's some gnashing of teeth across the pond for how there's no real European equivalent to the big US cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).

I had one rapidly cycle their prius between 50 and 70 on the freeway because regenerative brakes save gas (I felt carsick for hours after arriving at my destination), and another actually get an angry mob to tap on the windows and berate their driving. (The mob was justified.)

Since then, I’ve given up on using them whenever possible.

Waymo may end up being great business. But it is unlikely to exceed what search is/was. For that reason, press X to doubt GP's claim that Alphabet is undervalued. "IT'S PRICED IN" [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/eberem/ever...

It could be a big business. In fact, I hope it is. Lives will be saved. But there is still a lot to be worked out, and the margins will never be as sweet as those of search.

All that matters at this point is how much money they'll lose/earn in the future. There are no shortage of investors willing to put money into this effort, and they're growing exponentially, so there won't be any pressure for them to turn overall profitable for several more years.

Now compare to how much money the average person spends on driving per year.

If Waymo winds up running half the market in autonomous transportation over the next several decades, it'll make search look like peanuts in comparison.

Waymo's older than Uber, but they hold many key patents by this point. Now that they've started running a taxi service, it seems straightforwards to scale up, assuming that is the business they want to be in. Then it's just a matter of charging more than it costs to run the service, and wait.

How many people would pay for such a luxury car? With the US population aging and public transit non-existent in most places, Waymo probably has a market for cars.

The Boring Company is an obvious bust. So is the Hyperloop. Neuralink is another likely bust. Tesla solar is going nowhere. The Cybertruck is a millstone around Tesla's neck. Etc, etc.

If the answer is no, then clearly the catalyst was Elon taking over

RCO is very much "pushback on regulations".

I doubt anyone has tested this in depth, but I'm not sure there are too many configurations of airplane these days where a human can safely land it and a computer can't. Maybe if a big chunk of wing or control surfaces were totally gone, but even a human pilot isn't getting 99% reliability in a situation like that.

In any case, I don't think that the first candidates for automation are gonna be passenger flights. It will probably be small cargo planes first - Cessna Caravans and other turboprop aircraft where the cost of paying pilots is roughly similar to the price of fuel.

But two interesting data points from the Wikipedia article I linked are that the first aircraft certification for ILS Cat III was in 1968, and Cat IIIB in 1975.

And IIRC by the 1980s, autoland was already a pretty common feature.

I agree that European trains work very well for commuting to and from the center of big cities. That's where the jobs and tourist attractions are.

But to go between arbitrary places A and B is usually quite painful. Often the best way is to go to the center, and then from there to your destination.

When I moved to the US and got a car, it was an unreal feeling! I could quickly travel anywhere at anytime!! Practically it felt like my comfortable travel radius increased from 10km to 50km.

> Problems like traffic waves and gridlock go away when all cars are driving themselves.

How would that make those problems go away? It could probably slightly alleviate them in marginal cases, but any given road has a finite throughput limitation, and once it is reached, it wouldn't matter even if every robo-driver were perfectly synchronized.

In many regions of the U.S. people live too far apart, shops and businesses are zoned apart into wide spread business areas. Public transport won't provide a good experience.

In a notable part of European cities people live in denser quarters, where a "third place" is reachable in walking distance, some degree of shipping, doctor visits, work are close by. There public transport can fill the gaps for the remaining trips in an (space) efficient way. Self driving cars however would clog the area.

Adapting US settlement structure to allow public transport won't happen. However a self-driving car can turn the dial for individuals to move out of the urban European area into more rural areas. Question is how big that group is.

I imagine how nice it could (will?) be when you can hop into a self-driving car for a longer ride or even a road trip. I think you'll feel like it's an extension of your living room vs. being in a car.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1240754657263144960

Would work great in suburbs where a robot car could pull in front of home for a minute or two, your food will be bid to another customer if you don't pick it up in 5 minutes. maybe the little robots in NYC are better.

I still believe that having an actual pilot inside the plane that care for his own life is not a bad idea vs someone remote feeling a bit disconnected with the reality of a crash.

One day, cheap automated electric self driving taxis will cover cities, thats unavoidable I think, but we are not there yet.

I'd easily take extra self-driving vehicles if it reduced human driven ones.

On topic, Waymo is clearly a first mover in self-driving, having the first legal commercial services.

But, being the first mover is usually more of a disadvantage than an advantage, IMHO.

Self-driving cars may help with the actual weakness of transit, which is the long tail of trips. Trips on routes with too few passengers to justify good transit service, and with the trips too long for the last-mile solutions.

This has not been my experience since moving to Manhattan last January. Subways, alone, close the gap between regional rail and most destinations astoundingly well. I haven't yet needed to use a bus (but they seem abundant, too), and I haven't even thought of taking a taxi yet.

Here, robust transit has solved the last mile problem for most people.

A superior user experience is going exactly from where I am to where I want to be safely, quickly, and affordably. Self-driving cars are looking really good for those criteria.

Americans have this idea that transit is for poor people, which translates to "it's not important for transit to make money", which translates to "we need to make it illegal for transit to possibly try to make money", so there aren't even vending machines at the platforms. Whereas in Asia they do profitable land development at the transit stations.

This is demonstrating my point about population density and transit.

Uber's CEO compared it to Marriot, people come in to run the hotels in the local region, but they actually don't own the hotels. It's like hired managers who take a cut.

It also makes sense to have people with local experience run them in each local region. But those businesses still involve margins and expenses that have to make sense.

I have no idea if that works but I thought you were making a good contribution to the conversation by proposing a potential solution to the exact problem everyone is talking about.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8

We need to stop normalising mental diseases

Time will tell...

Uber's NURO seems to be developing a vehicle with a similar form factor as seen on this page: https://www.nuro.ai/first-responders

EDIT: see comment below, uber does not own NURO

Japan's private transit infrastructure is only private in high-very high density environments (inner-city) and subsidized in low-density environments (rural, cross-country). Ultimately private group transit requires population density above a certain threshold to be viable.

If Waymo can drop its price by 50%, it could steal a lot of demand from normal cars and transit, but that doesn't seem like it's even on the conversation right now.

Certainly wouldn't apply to anywhere near where I currently live (then again, neither does Waymo).

Obviously a droneliner would look very different from the jets that are common today.