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AI Transportation

Are People Starting to Love Self-Driving Robotaxis? (marketplace.org) 105

Posted by EditorDavid from the carried-away dept.
"In a tiny handful of places..." Wired wrote last month, "you can find yourself flanked by taxis with no one in the drivers' seats." But they added that "Granted, practically everyone has been numbed by the hype cycle."

Wired's response? "[P]ile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi wherever it goes for a whole workday" to "study its movements, its relationship to life on the streets, its whole self-driving gestalt. We'll interview as many of its passengers as will speak to us, and observe it through the eyes of the kind of human driver it's designed to replace."

This week Wired senior editor John Gravios discussed the experience on the business-news radio show Marketplace (with Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal): Ryssdal: What kinds of reactions did you get from people once you track them down, what did they say about their experience in this driverless car?

Gravios:It was pretty uniform and impressive how much people just love it. They just like the experience of the drive, I guess it's a little bit less herky-jerky than a human driver, but I think a lot of it just comes down to people are just kind of relieved not to have to talk to somebody else, as as sad as that is...

Ryssdal: Tell me about Gabe, your Uber driver, and his thoughts on this whole thing, because that was super interesting.

Gravios: So Gabe, this is a guy whose labor is directly at stake. You know, he's a guy whose labor is going to be replaced by a Waymo. He's had 30 years of experience as a professional driver, first as a taxi driver. He even organized a taxi driver strike in the days before Uber. His first, I think his prejudice with Waymo is having shared the road with them sort of sporadically, he thought of them as kind of dopey, rule-following, frustrating vehicles to share the road with. But over the course of the day, he started to recognize that the Waymo was driving a lot like a taxi driver. The Waymo was doing things that were aggressive, that are exactly the kinds of things that a taxi driver is trained to be aggressive with and doing things that were cautious that are exactly the kinds of things that taxi drivers are trained to be cautious with.

Ryssdal: Can we talk unit economics here? According to the math from a study you guys' cite, Waymo is not making a whole lot of money per vehicle, right? And eventually they're going to scale, and it's going to work out, but for the moment, even though they've gotten 11 billion-something-dollars, they're not turning a whole lot of profit here.

Gravios: Yeah, that's a big question, and the math is, even that study, based on a lot of guesswork. It's really hard to say what the unit economics are. What we can say is that the ridership rates are going up so fast that that study is already well out of date. When we were doing our chase, I think the monthly ridership for Waymo was 100,000 rides a month. By October, it was already 150,000 rides a month. So, the economics are just shifting under our feet a lot.

Are People Starting to Love Self-Driving Robotaxis? More | Reply

Are People Starting to Love Self-Driving Robotaxis?

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  • Posted before (Score:3)

    by quonset ( 4839537 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @01:01PM (#65015037)

    But I was too stupid to check and the link didn't show. Here's your self-driving robotaxis in action [imgur.com].

  • Can't wait for them to be good (Score:4, Interesting)

    by godrik ( 1287354 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @01:03PM (#65015043)

    If it's safe, I can't wait to never drive again!

    • Re:Can't wait for them to be good (Score:4, Insightful)

      by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @01:14PM (#65015079)
      I'd prefer to live in a city where I can walk, bike, and take trains/transit (lovely trains!) safely. The availability of robostankers will be an excuse for cities and governments to disinvest in transit. Save! Save! SAVE OUR TRAINS!

      • Well, American cities aren't built like that usually. So that's not really an option for me in the shorter term.

        • NYC, Chicago, and a few other NE cities are the only places worthy of the name "city" in the US. Call me snob if you like.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by godrik ( 1287354 )

            Yeah, Americans like living in suburbia. It tends to make the population density too low for decent public transportation options to make sense. At least as soon as you leave the core of the city. This is how it is where I am. There is a dense inner city with ok public transport option. The public transit goes roughly in two axes into the suburbs. And everything else has essentially no acceptable coverage.

            I could bike to work, it is only 6 miles away. But taking public transportation there would require me

            • The nice thing about NYC is that it has train lines running out to suburbia, even at a distance of 75-100 miles (LIRR). I hope we don't lose this due to self-driving cars.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by PCM2 ( 4486 )

                You won't. Self-driving cars are just taxis, and they're priced like taxis. If you think that'll change, remember all the times they told us the price of CDs would go down to the level of LPs and cassettes once enough people bought them. (It never happened.) For NYC commuters, trains will remain the only logical option. Rich NYC commuters will probably continue to prefer a luxury car service with a driver.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Jeremi ( 14640 )

                  If you think that'll change, remember all the times they told us the price of CDs would go down to the level of LPs and cassettes once enough people bought them. (It never happened.)

                  ... of course, what eventually did happen is that streaming media came along, and now you can stream all the music you like for much less than the cost of either CDs, LPs, or cassettes.

                  Perhaps it is Uber/Lyft that are the "CDs" of your analogy, and self-driving cars are the "streaming media"?

      • Re:Can't wait for them to be good (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Geoffrey.landis ( 926948 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @02:10PM (#65015197) Homepage

        I'd prefer to live in a city where I can walk, bike, and take trains/transit (lovely trains!) safely. The availability of robostankers will be an excuse for cities and governments to disinvest in transit. Save! Save! SAVE OUR TRAINS!

        The opposite is true. Taxis are an essential component of making a car-free city.

        In a walkable city, taxis are a great solution for those intermittent times when you do need to go a place not accessible by public transport, or accessible only with difficulty.

        In a city designed around cars, taxis aren't really necessary. Since it would cost too much to take a taxi for every trip, everybody has a car.

      • I'd prefer to live in a city where I can walk, bike, and take trains/transit (lovely trains!) safely. The availability of robostankers will be an excuse for cities and governments to disinvest in transit. Save! Save! SAVE OUR TRAINS!

        Why can't the two modes coexist? I have lived in a large city where I, and most other people ther, used only transit. Because of the local culture, transit there was well-organized and totally safe. In that city, every subway and train station was surrounded by a dense "walkshed" of shops, offices and apartments. The transit had come first, and teh city grew up around it.

        There are only a few American cities where transit got started early enough for the city to be organized around it: New York, Chicago, Por

        • You mean "there are only a few American cities, and the rest of it isn't worthy of the name."

          • So youâ(TM)re just going to âoeno true Scotsmanâ anything that doesnâ(TM)t fit the urban design that you want, stick your head in the sand, and crap on everyone who finds practical solutions to real needs?

            Individual/small-group on-demand transit is a valuable ingredient in an overall urban recipe, especially when these cities (and, yes, theyâ(TM)re cities) were started before mass transit was a foreseeable reality. Robotaxis en masse actually represent a mechanism that could satisf

            • Electric TRAINS (lovely trains) that don't need ecotoxic batteries since they can be powered from overhead wires or third rail are better. Yes, people should be forced to walk unless they're crippled. You mention Valencia Street, I mention Broadway or 14th Street in NYC, neither of which are dead. Save our lovely trains.

      • I'd prefer to live in a city where I can walk, bike, and take trains/transit (lovely trains!) safely.

        Walk and/or bike? Sure, maybe, depending on why I'm out and about. But my experience is that even in cities with great subways (e.g. NYC, London), I think taking an inexpensive taxi would be faster and more convenient than train.

        Most of my experience is in Boston, where I lived for six years. Boston has a halfway decent mass transit system. I started driving the moment I could, regardless of the reputation of Boston drivers. it was just faster and more convenient than taking busses or the T, even when you f

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

          But my experience is that even in cities with great subways (e.g. NYC, London), I think taking an inexpensive taxi would be faster and more convenient than train

          I live in London and you are mistaken. Some times and some places? Sure. But inexpensive cabs are subject to traffic and unlike the more expensive black cabs, can't use the taxi-only modal filters. No crossing London Bridge between 7 and 7 for you, Uber passenger.

          I've also driven a fair bit in London. You'd be mad to do it when you don't have to, bu

        • I don't want convenience. I want connection. Taking the subway is FUN! Self driving isolation pods sound like a HELL of loneliness. Save our lovely trains!
          • Subways are a disease vector. In Kyoto, half the city gets sick at the same time because they all travel together.

          • I don't want convenience. I want connection. Taking the subway is FUN! Self driving isolation pods sound like a HELL of loneliness. Save our lovely trains!

            Please tell me you're not the weirdo who talks to strangers on the subway. Or who has loud phone conversations on speakerphone.

            Snark aside, I'm glad you enjoy the subway experience. Knock yer socks off. I, too, enjoy taking a subway every now and again for the adventure of it. And if it was the cheapest and/or fastest way for me to get from point A to point B, I'd definitely use it.

            Just don't expect any of the rest of us to concur there's intrinsic value to having subways and don't expect the rest of us to

            • Why have Americans become so 'fraidy-catted (mraaaaaaaaaaaaaaoooow) about talking to strangers unless it's pre-planned from an app. Then we complain about an epidemic of loneliness.

              I don't really talk much on the subway, but I've had some amazing conversations with strangers on commuter rail (LIRR/MNRR/NJT) as well as intercity (Amtrak in US and PKP in Poland). Often those strangers were Europeans ... they tend to be less stuck up about talking to strangers than 'merkins who were raised on "stranger dange

      • Robotaxis, just like ubers, will increase traffic on the roads, consume more fuel than normal commuting, and further undermine mass transit options.

    • I drive across state - close to 1000 miles round trip - to deliver product almost once a week, and I would be giddy as a school boy if I could punch in the final destination, and hit "Go," and let it do its thing. Especially in crappy weather.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by antdude ( 79039 )

      I'm waiting for KITT!

    • You say that now, but pretty soon you'll be complaining about having to wait in line to grab a robotaxi, 20 minute waiting in the suburbs, surge pricing, and areas not being served at all. You'll buy food at the supermarket and the taxi won't have enough room for all your bags. You won't be able to go to 3 different stores and leave stuff inside the taxi while you shop for 5 hours and go to the cinema.There will be a smell and broken air conditioning.
  • If the negation of the need to pay the driver resuklts in a lover fare for mee I'm all for it
    • Problem is that it will also kill transit (save our lovely trains) and all of its pro-social aspects. You can't see an impromptu music or dance performance in a robotic isolation stinkpod like you can in a subway station or NYC subway train. I'll miss that if the US loses public transit :(
      • Why do you think that robotaxies are going to replace subways and/or commuter trains? For that matter, won't robots replace the drivers on city buses?

  • No (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Berkyjay ( 1225604 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @01:07PM (#65015059)

    We will eventually come to regret letting this tech come to fruition. The tech companies that control it aren't our friends and they aren't looking to improve safety or any other nonsense they spout.

  • I loved the robotaxi in the original "Total Recall" movie with Arnold.

  • Call me. Call me when Waymo shows a profit, including amortization of all capital expenses and R&D.

    • It's not about actual profitability. It's about the illusion of potential future profitability, which drives stock prices. It sucks, but if you want high ROI in the modern market, early investment in obvious future financial failures is often a way to profit. Those fellas know what they're doing. You can't make up for losses on volume alone, and even future volume is uncertain, as Chinese or other competition can overtake in a heartbeat (I mean, in a free market it could). Nobody invests like that without k

  • I love trains. (Score:2, Redundant)

    by b0s0z0ku ( 752509 )

    I love transit. Trains, trams, and buses. I also love walking and cycling. I'm afraid that ubiquitous robostinkenwagens will take away those "traditional city" options since there won't be as much of an incentive to maintain transit and maintain human-scale infrastructure.

    This might be the future, and it's fucking heinous ... 1950s autopia on steroids:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • just wait for an min ride change of $3-$5 to cross the street. As they wall off the road so it's better for self driving cars and they did not build any under / over passes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

      robostinkenwagens

      Nobody is going to be doing buses, so you're safe.

      • Bus drivers cost more than taxi drivers, so automating buses is still a thing that's going to happen. Also, self-driving systems cost money, and are a smaller percentage of the purchase price of a bus than of a car (the bus costs roughly five to ten times as much as the car does) so they will be an easier sell for buses than for cars once they work well.

        There's more units and less risk per unit involved in cars than in buses, which is why we're seeing them automated first. But the self-driving buses are com

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by djgl ( 6202552 )
          We need robotaxis in rural areas where you can currently count the number of buses per day on one hand and need 20 minutes by car to reach the next supermarket. But of course they are targeting the densely populated areas first to maximize profit.

          • I would say the solution in those areas is self-driving minivans. They can pick up multiple commuters or a family. But yes, that's definitely a place where they could actually be useful.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Cyberax ( 705495 )

          Bus drivers cost more than taxi drivers, so automating buses is still a thing that's going to happen.

          Buses make no sense when drivers are essentially free, except in very niche edge-cases like getting people to/from sporting arenas. It's much more efficient to have vans that seat maybe 4-6 people instead of full-blown buses.

          • Buses make no sense when drivers are essentially free

            What?

            Go look at bus driver salaries, then add 40-50% of typical overhead like contributions and insurance. Then compare to the price of the bus over a five year period.

          • I misread your comment, sorry.

            Drivers are not essentially free. That equipment will cost money. Eventually it won't cost so much and then yeah:

            I have made your same argument but there will still be a time where it makes sense. Also, I don't think the efficiency works out like you think it does, but maybe it does with EVs? I haven't compared MPGe of EV buses and vans. But if you compare MPG of ICEVs then the 40 pass transit bus can get 8-9 MPG while the 11 pass van gets 25... Transit buses are unibody and ma

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by Cyberax ( 705495 )
              Equipment is probably going down to $10k within a few years. It's estimated to be at $40k now.

              Buses are _really_ bad. Like super bad. The average bus load in the US is around 15 people, so even from the raw emissions standpoint, an individual EV is about on par with an electric bus (never mind a diesel bus).

              But wait, there's more. The most polluting part of the bus is not even the engine, it's the driver. Humans have a _huge_ CO2 footprint, and you need at least 2 drivers for each bus to cover most of t

              • The human's CO2 emissions are not counted as part of the corporation's emissions, so they have no motivation to reduce them.

                The current self driving systems are inadequate to the job of operating buses, and it's not clear that any amount of training will make them good enough for that purpose. It's one thing when a car drags a pedestrian, it's another thing when a bus does it and then runs over them with five-plus tons at one corner.

                • Re: (Score:2)

                  by Cyberax ( 705495 )

                  The current self driving systems are inadequate to the job of operating buses

                  Why? Waymo is already testing vans. And they are operating SUVs in SF just fine for actual paying customers. And we won't _need_ buses anyway, they suck.

                  • Because there is money to be made selling buses. Because there are kickbacks to be gotten by buying them. Because the gears of government grind slowly and we have inertia towards buses.

  • Betteridge says... (Score:3)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @01:30PM (#65015119)
    ... Well, you all know what he says by now.
  • Taxi drivers aren't the only ones at risk; cities where taxi numbers are limited by the number of medallions would see medallions become worthless as well. Unless, of course, the taxi mafia forces Waymo et. al. to have a medallion. The bright side is Waymo won't refuse a ride or destination, and not stop picking up close to shift change.

    • The bright side is Waymo won't refuse a ride or destination

      Are you kidding? They will process their collected data, figure out where it's unprofitable to serve because they are most likely to lose vehicles or have them vandalized there, and they will stop going there.

      • The bright side is Waymo won't refuse a ride or destination

        Are you kidding? They will process their collected data, figure out where it's unprofitable to serve because they are most likely to lose vehicles or have them vandalized there, and they will stop going there.

        Yea, they'll be able to completely eliminate service in some areas; although I was being sarcastic in response to the observation that Waymo behaves like a cab driver...

    • I thought Uber already wrecked the medallion system.

      • I thought Uber already wrecked the medallion system.

        Yea, so much the city stepped in to try to save the system by renegotiating loan terms with some lenders. There is still a lot of money to be lost if medallions keep dropping in value; and recovering anything from a cab driver whose biggest asset was the medallion will be tough. Of course, the city is on the hook for a good bit of that debt if drivers default. If Waymo can finally kill the medallion it will be interesting to see what happens to yellow cabs in the city. Maybe Waymo can just paint their ca

  • and within the next 5-10 years they're all going to be unemployable.

    Not unemployed, unemployable. Taxi/Uber is one of the bottom rungs of our society. The folks aren't going to be finding much if anything in the way of jobs.

    Oh, and don't forget all the other professional drivers that can be replaced, like part runners.

    But I'm sure it's fine. It's not like we live in a country where it's extremely easy to get firearms and that encourages solving problems with violence...
    • There will be a whole crew of waymo cleaners needed to be hired, along refueling attendants So there will be new jobs ...
      • you're gonna replace 50-60 hours a week of work with a clean up job that gets done once or twice a week and takes 30 minutes and a refueling that gets done every 2-3 days and takes 10 minutes?

        You should go back to school for a degree in mathematics. You're gonna need it when your job gets automated...
    • You've been one of the loudest voices against these jobs and the so-called gig economy in general. You and everyone else that were pussing and moaning about how Uber, Lyft, et al. exploited these workers should be glad that those companies won't be able to take advantage of these poor drivers any longer and that they'll all have to get real jobs now.

      I'm not particularly worried. The government can always put down any dissent just like they did when all of the telephone switchboard operators who were laid
      • The fact that I support minimum wage protections and general worker protections in unionization for those workers doesn't mean I'm not worried about the consequences of them losing what little are wretched civilization lets them have. Those two things are not contradictory and you're conflating them for the express purpose of disingenuously attacking the points I made because you don't have a good answer for them.

        Ignoring the fact that we have more guns than people and it's basically impossible to disar

    • Good. Jobs that can be automated, should and must be automated. There is no sense in keeping warm bums in seats doing jobs a machine can do.

  • 3..2..1.. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by OpenSourced ( 323149 ) on Sunday December 15, 2024 @02:25PM (#65015229) Journal

    The countdown begins now to the moment when humans will be forbidden to drive, as it would be considered unacceptably dangerous.

    • Hopefully we'll be hit with a massive geomagnetic storm or North Korea will deploy EMP weapons before we get to that point :)
    • My uncle has a country place no one knows about. He says it used to be a farm before the Motor Law.
    • It won't happen anytime soon in the states. But I wonder who will do it first? I could pretty easily see manual driving banned in London, they love to do stuff like that.

    • It won't be necessary to forbid human driving, it'll just get factored into insurance rates. Which will de facto ban people from manual driving most of the time, as it'll be unaffordable outside of the wealthy driving their classic car collection or something. It'll also encourage rapid adoption, as with EVs in particular insurance rates are a large part of the cost of ownership... an extremely low rate if you use self driving could mitigate that.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by CityZen ( 464761 )

      It won't be explicitly forbidden. Rather, you can drive, but the car can decide to override you at any point.
      Cars without computer control will become rare luxury items, and new cars will require compute control.

    • Iâ(TM)m all in. People are absolute morons on the highway around here and I canâ(TM)t wait for the day when a huge fleet of cars can just zipper merge and I donâ(TM)t have to worry for my safety multiple times a day on the way to work.

  • "Pile a few of us into an old-fashioned, human-piloted hired car, then follow a single Waymo robotaxi

    Jump in a taxi and tell the driver to "Follow that cab! There's an extra fin in it if you beat the lights." Some TV tropes will never die.

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