Waymo Cuts Ties With Uber, Will Serve Riders Directly (yahoo.com) 21
Waymo plans to end its exclusive Uber robotaxi partnership in Austin and Atlanta in January 2028 and let customers hail its vehicles directly through the Waymo app. In an interview on The Circuit, Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana called the current Uber experience a "crapshoot" because riders aren't guaranteed a Waymo. Bloomberg reports: "In the early days, we would partner because we didn't have the scale, and in that partnering, it was a little bit of a crapshoot. Will I get a Waymo? Will I not get a Waymo?," Mawakana said in a wide-ranging interview on The Circuit with Emily Chang. She cited customers' growing demand for a consistent offering from a single app, especially from riders from San Francisco or other markets, where Waymo offers the self-driving service via its own consumer app that competes with Uber.
"It's important for us to have that relationship with the rider. We've gotten that feedback from the riders in those markets," Mawakana said. "And at the same time, learning and partnering with Uber has been a really important part of our journey," she added.
[...] The comments reflect Waymo's evolving relationship with the ride-hailing giant as the Alphabet unit trials different pathways to commercialize its capital-intensive autonomous technology. Waymo has leaned on partners like Uber and Lyft, as well as fleet management companies, to help operate its roughly 4,000 vehicles across the US. The company currently does more than 500,000 trips per week in 14 cities.
"It's important for us to have that relationship with the rider. We've gotten that feedback from the riders in those markets," Mawakana said. "And at the same time, learning and partnering with Uber has been a really important part of our journey," she added.
[...] The comments reflect Waymo's evolving relationship with the ride-hailing giant as the Alphabet unit trials different pathways to commercialize its capital-intensive autonomous technology. Waymo has leaned on partners like Uber and Lyft, as well as fleet management companies, to help operate its roughly 4,000 vehicles across the US. The company currently does more than 500,000 trips per week in 14 cities.
We need public transit (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:We need public transit (Score:4, Interesting)
San Francisco has a strong Waymo presence (I think we were the first market to get public access to them). But we also believe in public transit; in fact, the Bay Area just voted for two important transit measures that will increase costs to taxpayers and property owners, but are designed to make up for badly needed funding from the state and federal governments that just isn't forthcoming anymore. The alternative, we were told, was massive cuts to buses, light rail, and passenger rail across multiple cities and jurisdictions. I guess we decided that wasn't what we really wanted. But there's still room for Waymo, just like there used to be room for taxis.
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Even in cities with best-in-the-world transit like Taipei, Singapore, Hong Kong etc the need for taxis or similar isn't going away any time soon.
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You must live in a very dense city. In the rest of the US, cities are large and spread out. Houston, for example, requires two hours of driving in good traffic, to get from one side to the other. Using public transit, that same trip will take four hours.
Maybe you have all kinds of time on your hands to take the subway, or the train, or the bus, but some of us have other things to do with the hours in our day.
Re: We need public transit (Score:2)
Real countries have train systems that work.
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Or maybe, those countries are less than 1/10 the size of the US and don't have to build train systems that cross many thousands of miles / km.
Europeans have no concept of the scale of the US. Texas alone is 2x as big as Germany, 25% larger than France, 3x larger than the UK. And Texas covers only 7% of the land area of the US.
It's not as simple as you think, to take a system that works in Europe, and assume it will work (economically) in the US.
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Or maybe, those countries are less than 1/10 the size of the US and don't have to build train systems that cross many thousands of miles / km.
This has always been a stupid argument because nobody is expecting every square foot to be accessible by rail, and you're also shifting the goalposts from going across town to going across the country. Got any real arguments, kid?
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Nobody said anything about square feet. I talked about distances.
How would you define a "rail system that works"? It would be a rail system that is 1) reliable and 2) goes to the places people want to go. The larger the place, the more places people want to go, and the more expensive it is to build a rail system.
So let's apply this at the city level. Houston, Texas, has more land area than Brussels, Athens, Rome, and London combined. But its population is only 1/3 of the combined population of those cities.
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How would you define a "rail system that works"?
Like what we had before the car and oil companies bought them up, shut them down, and set the rail cars on fire so no one else could use them. You want us to believe you're knowledgeable about this subject, but don't even know about the history of functional public transportation in the USA? Run along now and bother someone else with your obstructionist ignorance.
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The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy was real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] but it was not as impactful as you make it out to be. It targeted streetcars, not rail. And its impact was not as large as the conspiracy theorists claim that it was. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/t... [cbsnews.com]
You should try getting your information from real sources, rather than from YouTube influencers.
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The General Motors Streetcar Conspiracy was real https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ [wikipedia.org]... but it was not as impactful as you make it out to be. It targeted streetcars, not rail.
It was both streetcars and rail lines. Thank you for proving your ignorance. Now fuck off, ignorant piece of shit obstructionist trying to portray himself as something else.
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Sure, rail was involved, but was not the primary target. It's right there in the Wikipedia article.
I see you didn't dispute that you got your information from YouTube, nor did you substantiate the size of the impact.
Guess what, we still have streetcars in the US. We have metro train and bus systems. They're just limited to the biggest cities, where these systems make sense. In Tulsa, Oklahoma and Shreveport, Louisiana, rail systems make no sense at all.
The Waymo Crapshoot (Score:2)
Does the Waymo app advise on what kind of car I can get, or is that a crapshoot?
If I hail a Waymo, can I know that I will be picked up by the modified Jaguar SUV [imgur.com], or the ridiculous Zeekr Ojia [imgur.com] nonsense?
And speaking of the Zeekr Ojai; it was my understanding that the U.S. has banned the importation of Chinese electric vehicles. So how is Google/Waymo able to order thousands of the Ojai when us plebs can't buy a Polestar or a BYD?
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it was my understanding that the U.S. has banned the importation of Chinese electric vehicles. So how is Google/Waymo able to order thousands of the Ojai when us plebs can't buy a Polestar or a BYD?
There are a number of exemptions for which you can apply. Any schmoe with the ducats can import a car of interest to collectors, for example. Corporations are the only important citizens in this country so of course theirs was granted.
I'd give it a thumbs up (Score:3)
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Johnny Cab (Score:1)