alt Hacker NewsLearning to live with Waymos
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You can tell that this piece is written by someone who visited San Francisco to sit in a Waymo and then extrapolated how weird it must be for people who see them every day. In reality after the initial shock wears off these cars are just a normal, boring part of the road. Seeing them drive around town is the same as seeing any other kind of taxi. I find that the strongest opinions about Waymos come from people who live in cities where they don't operate.
I used Waymo several times while in Nashville this summer. Fantastic experience. I'll choose Waymo over a human-driven vehicle everytime I have the choice.
As a tourist in SF about two weeks ago I experienced a bit of superhuman driving from a Waymo. On one of these 30-degree downhill slopes, a long truck was stopped in the middle of the road and to its right and slightly ahead was a parked car. The space between these two was just about right so that a 45-degree-turned Waymo car would barely fit with less than an inch space on either side. This is exactly what it did, without much hesitation. As a human driver, I would have stopped, tried to squeeze back up and find another way, or stop and try to locate the truck driver and ask them to move.
Waymo does a full stop before making a right turn. I hate how people make blind right turns even though it is the pedestrian's right-of-way. The auto industry has a firm hold on US/Canada such that we will never have a city design that encourages being car-free. But Waymos do follow the city driving rules much better than fallible humans.
I just love getting a full body lidar scan by a random corporation while I’m walking down the sidewalk in my neighborhood!
I can’t possibly imagine any bad stuff happening as a result of petabytes of frequent high resolution data being constantly captured in our communities!
Definitely no privacy concerns there, we love IoT connected sensors on all our vehicles! It’s not like anyone has ever used these incidental surveillance systems to target critical infrastructure or assassinate targets before, that would be crazy making. Anyway, I’m glad that Waymo constantly surveils it’s occupants too and snitches to the cops, that’s super chill.
Waymo’s feel so so so much safer when walking and biking around. They actually give you priority.
It continues to bewilder me how wildly different some people's experiences with Waymo are than mine.
My very first time getting a Waymo, as soon as it got going it immediately tried to make a left turn out of a right lane. Then it decided to go 15mph down a 3-lane wide road with a 45mph speed limit for several miles. No warning beeps or anything, it just decided to do that for some reason.
I waited a few months before trying it again. This time I took it to the airport. It worked great... until it got to the airport and caused a traffic jam because it couldn't figure out how to complete a lane change in traffic. Embarrassing, for me and the car.
Waymo is bound to capture the imaginations of people who haven't seen these things before. They certainly made me smile the first time I saw one at the beginning of this year. But god help you if you actually use one.
>Human drivers make human mistakes, and robot drivers make robot ones.
This sums up a lot of what life is like these days alongside AI.
Visited Atlanta last July. First time in Waymos. Now I can’t wait for this to become a reality in Brasília too, where I live.
I don't use Waymo anymore because it has decided that my street is busy (it isn't) and so picks up at the parking lot across the street from me instead. Which is disappointing. (This is despite filing multiple feedback reports for the issue.)
Funnily I kept reading the link as "Learning to live without Waymos" until I actually was about to actually click it. (Yes, I live in San Francisco.)
I wish I could be excited about Waymos, but knowing how these things go, I have a strong feeling this will turn into something dystopian. My guess is a future where cars are much more expensive and you never get to actually own them. Couldn’t we just invest in better public transit and make it harder to get and keep a drivers license?
I love taking Waymo but you have to compare the travel times.
Sometimes it will be like 45 minutes to go somewhere 15 min away because it won’t take any highways.
The thing I unexpectedly like most about using Waymo is not having a stranger inserted into your conversation.
Every time I've taken a taxi in a group, the conversation ends when we get in and the driver is suddenly a part of our conversation. It's weird to have them sit there listening to your discussion but not participating, and it would be weird for them to participate. Inevitably the conversation turns to the mundane, questions about whether it's a busy day, how often do you drive in this part of town, etc.
I got a Waymo with friends and the conversation never missed a beat as we got into the car, rode for 15 minutes, and got out.
I feel like the article is trying really hard to be cynical about one of the few technologies that is just totally an improvement in my life. I don't even really ride cabs very often (basically the airport is the only place and Waymos don't go there). But I do bike and bus into work and frankly the Waymos are just considerate to bicycles and pedestrians. I never have a sense of danger in the crosswalk with them. No risk of getting cut off. None of the borderline psychotic behavior I have personally seen from motorists. The author of the piece even admits that she totaled a car. Which is not exactly uncommon since cars are dangerous. The upsides just so heavily outweigh the bad here.