alt Hacker NewsThe way this has apparently been handled saddens me. I worked for Cruise, a Waymo competitor. A Cruise vehicle famously had a very unfortunate accident and Cruise government relations employees famously tried to cover up the worst details when reporting it to the CA DMV. Of course the cover-up was discovered and guess what? Cruise lost their license and not long after lost all their funding and shut down.
Self driving cars are a new technology that makes a lot of people nervous. For it to succeed those nerves need to be acknowledged and settled. This is life and death for the business and technology!
Also, Waymo's customers (and really all of us sharing the road with them) are very much providing Waymo a huge service as early beta testers. They need to be treated extremely well right now. It is not the time for Waymo to be trying to keep things quiet, dismissing concerns, and making half assed restitution for problems. Again, This is life and death for the technology and your company, Waymo! Every bit as important as the engineering work you are doing. Please don't screw this up
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Cruise was legendary, awesome bunch of people. I remember finding out how you guys had an angel syndicate and speaking to a few guys, hope you all are onto bigger and better things
Waymo has been "scaling up".
In the earliest days the lost and found was 7 days a week with highly permissive hours for a manned desk at the depot.
Then one day it became weekdays-only, but with a still large window.
Then one day the window for pick up got broken up into a few smaller windows throughout the day.
Now with the larger Bay Area expansion they did switch to automated lockers, but if you're unfortunate enough in SF specifically, your belongings now end up in a locker an hour away from from the city...
It is also literally insanely hostile for Waymo to respond like this.
The parent company, Alphabet, is valued over four trillion dollars.
The proper response would have been: "oh, terribly sorry for the inconvenience, we'll immediately turn it around, wait there".
If that was somehow actually possible, the next response should have been: "Oh, sorry that is impossible because of [actual reason X], we are terribly sorry for the inconvenience, where are you going to be staying, we'll immediately pack and ship it all to you FedEx".
Instead, they do this petty crap.
I'm no lawyer, but as soon as someone takes off with my stuff, that sounds like theft. Sure, I willingly put it in the trunk, but it was on a contract that they would deliver me and my luggage to the destination. Refusing to allow me to retrieve it, then requiring me to come get it is just outrageous.
At the very least, instead of offering the rider two rides to come fetch his stuff that they drove off with, would be to deliver it to his home at a time convenient to him.
This tells me the company is run by a bunch of greedy losers. Not anyone with whom I might want to associate or do business.
Really disappointing
>keep things quiet, dismissing concerns, and making half assed restitution for problems
That is exactly the Tesla strategy, and it seems to work well for them. Though Waymo doesn't have a daily PR disaster to distract like Musk.