Waymo’s service area where you can book a fare-paying, robotaxi ride is all of the City of San Francisco. (Blue Area on map at link) Seems like this is well ahead of Tesla.
intercst
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Tourists are on the lookout for Waymo’s turning into oncoming traffic, like the one at 1:00 into this video:
Universe: so sorry, your lane is occupied.
Waymo: no problem, I’ll just use this empty one instead.
That can’t be San Francisco. I don’t see any homeless people with tents all over the sidewalks. That is probably some nice place like St Louis Missouri.
Andy
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That is where the poor people make up most of the population.
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And coincidentally (or probably not, given some of my recent Google searches), the below article popped up on my News page discussing some of the “back office” stuff - particularly the remote operators - that Waymo has to have in place for that service to work:
You can get your tourist on in Austin, too.
And it says a real human backup has your back.
ralph
3 Likes
From the article:
{{ So Tesla hasn’t found a different, better way to bring driverless technology to market. Waymo is just so far ahead that it’s dealing with challenges Tesla hasn’t even started thinking about. Waymo is playing chess while Tesla is still playing checkers. }}
GM-Cruise had two employees for every vehicle operating as a robo-taxi when the California regulators shut them down. Waymo won’t disclose its employee/robo-taxi ratio, but I suspect it’s less than 2-to-1. Even when the Gov’t fully-licenses robo-taxis, I wouldn’t be surprised if you have one human monitoring ten robo-taxis, at least until everyone agrees it’s completely safe.
intercst
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Tesla doesn’t operate robotaxis, so what exactly are they way ahead of??? At the moment, Tesla only talks about robotaxis!
And even if you want to compare “self” driving. they are in entirely different universes. Waymo takes an existing vehicle and adds all sorts of sensors to it (which also makes it less aerodynamic and thus less efficient). Tesla builds vehicles from the ground up with any sensors as hidden as possible inside a decently aerodynamic shape. Waymo builds these on a one-off (under 100k) basis for a specific service. Tesla builds vehicles for the mass market in millions. Waymo builds vehicles that can cost $120k or even $180k all-in. Tesla builds vehicles that mostly cost about $40-60k. You can go buy a Tesla right now, but you can’t go buy a Waymo very easily.
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Waymo is “real world”. Tesla is outa this world–and going further out.
Exactly! There is big difference between talking about robo-taxis and actually operating them and working with the regulatory authorities to make it happen. I suspect Tesla and Elon Musk will have a lot to learn in this area.
intercst
2 Likes
intercst
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