Waymo in Portland | Hacker News Reader

Waymo in Portland

waymo.com

296 pointsxnx596 comments

For context, this is coming in as TriMet is laying off staff, reducing service frequency, eliminating bus lines, and cutting parts of light rail routes due to a $300M budget shortfall. The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month; TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners, so the budget is going to get worse before it gets better.

https://www.oregonlive.com/commuting/2026/04/trimet-official...

https://www.portlandmercury.com/news/trimets-present-crisis-...

At the same time, Portland's city council is debating whether to cap the cut of driver pay that rideshare companies take: https://www.opb.org/article/2026/04/13/uber-lyft-driver-pay-...

So at the same time that public transit is retreating and rideshare company labor overhead is threatening to increase, Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.

Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does, and also doesn't have human drivers who need to be paid subject to the laws of the city of Portland. But it doesn't actually matter all that much what is going on municipally in Portland at the moment - Waymo (or ideally, a wide variety of competing robotaxi services) should exist everywhere in the country and be as widely available as cars and roads themselves. And eventually this will happen; the concept that Waymo entering a new local market is a newsworthy event is a temporary state of affairs.

  Yup, it is genuinely convenient that Waymo doesn't rely on an unpopular payroll tax for funding while the bus system does

To be fair, it gets far more subsidies from the government in general by simple virtue of being a car, they're just A) longterm and thus assumed and B) less visible in general. So I'd say the connection between transit and controversial taxes is arbitrary, really--I'll grant you "convenient", but definitely not genuinely-so!

Portland car infrastructure in particular does get a little love from me just because of how damn impressive some of it is (namely the mountain passage to the west and the complex bridge interchanges on the east side) but it's still car infrastructure.

Road maintenance isn't a subsidy, it's a collective good that buses also benefit from along with many other types of human transport. This is separate from the cost to the government of running a bus system, which is exactly what large numbers of people really don't want to pay an additonal tax for and are therefore voting against.

If you only wanted to run buses, you would not build nearly as many roads as we do.

If the road is privatised by the virtue of it being mostly used by private companies like Waymo (in the future) then they can foot the bill for road construction and maintenance.

How does Waymo get subsidies? If I ride in Waymo, does that mean I get subsidies?

> by simple virtue of being a car

State and local governments spend a truly obscene amount of money building and repairing roads, and set aside a nauseating amount of publicly owned land to serve as roads, street parking, and parking lots. Those of us who don't frequently drive get some benefit from the roads, sure, because of the efficiencies of shops needing deliveries and whatnot, but not anything close to proportional to what drivers get out of it. And we accept this as the default way that things should be, whereas we assume that public transit needs to "pay for itself".

Yes. Roads are subsidized; the true cost of building and maintaining roads comes from general funds, not just from vehicle registrations and gas taxes (which of course Waymo doesn’t pay, being righteously electric).

So you pay Waymo, they pay a few hundred dollars a year per car in registration, and you benefit from billions of dollars a year in highway funds from both state and federal sources.

Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.

In 2025, TriMet had 262 million passenger miles at a system cost of $812 million, for a cost of $3.09 per passenger mile.[1] Fares covered 7.8% of their costs. The other 92.2% came from payroll taxes and federal grants.

For comparison, a Lyft or Uber in the same area would cost you $1-2 per mile. Obviously it's not feasible for all 200k daily riders to take Uber/Lyft, and the Uber/Lyft cost doesn't include externalities like extra traffic, but TriMet is very expensive per passenger mile.

1. https://trimet.org/about/pdf/trimetridership.pdf

This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles. This is because they can transport many more people for the same amount of space and energy. They also typically run on set tracks, which yields more efficiency gains.

The US is really, really bad at doing public transit. It doesn't help that everything is car centric, which makes public transit much harder.

For example, in your comment you're excluding road cost, but you're including the full system cost of transit. That's a car centric side effect, e.g. we take roads for granted. But the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking, etc.

The $812 million figure for 2025 did not include the cost to build the rail system. Nor did it include many other expenses. TriMet's expenditures for this year are $1.185 billion.[1]

If you divide passenger miles for TriMet busses (141,726,107) by the number of revenue miles (21,195,016), you get an average of 6.7 passengers per bus, or around 10% of available seats. For MAX (the train) you get an average of 27.4 passengers per train, or around 16% of available seats. In both cases that's seats, not total capacity including standing room. I realize it's important to provision the system for peak demand, but still this seems very wasteful.

And because road wear scales with the fourth power of axle loading, a bus will typically cause 1,000x more road damage than a car.[2] Assuming every car on the road has only one occupant, this means that, on average, a TriMet bus causes 150x more road wear per occupant. The main externality created by cars is traffic.

I agree with you that public transportation can work. It clearly does in many places. But Portland's public transportation is dysfunctional, and I don't see that changing any time soon. That's why substitutes (even partial substitutes like Waymo) are beneficial. The more options people have for getting around, the better off they'll be.

1. https://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2026-adopted-budget.pdf

2. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...

> This is an implementation problem, not a problem with the underlying concept.

I agree. The question remains - why do U.S. municipalities universally and repeatedly fail to successfully implement rapid transit at an efficient price point? Buses, trains, and subways in America have ever-growing budgets (both in absolute and per customer mile terms) with ever-declining quality of service. Just asking for more tax revenue again and again is not the solution.

> buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles

Assuming the transit is fully utilized and the car is mostly not. And maybe that's a good way to look at it. But in Portland the light rail is often well under capacity, and in that case a carpool likely wins on efficiency.

> the cost of cars also includes the cost of roads, the cost of land under those roads, the cost of parking

Partially. Those roads will have to exist even if we did not have personal cars.

Train-advocates being against self-driving cars will be recognized as being equivalent to environmentalists being against nuclear power. Fortunately, I don't expect train-advocates as being nearly as successful. Once someone has tried Waymo, there's no going back to the old ways.

Public transit is only efficient if people use it. If there’s only 1 person on the bus it is less efficient than a car.

Almost everyone drives so the government needs to pay for roads either way. Public transit on the other hand is easy to cut. What matters here is marginal costs of people using ride shares instead of public transit, not the full cost of driving that would need to be paid either way.

> Public transit like buses and lightrail are significantly more efficient per person than personal vehicles.

I would be interested to see a study on that. I see many buses driving around with zero or one passengers on them. If a bus is full, the efficiency would be off the charts. But for a city like Portland, that only happens during commute times. The rest of the time, the buses are driving around empty.

> in your comment you're excluding road cost

Partially not, as gas taxes cover part of it. I think gas and diesel taxes should cover the full cost of roads, which would help. Still doesn't mean transit should be run so inefficiently.

Oh wow I didn't know Uber solely relied on private roads, had their own DMV, or fleet of millions of cars; truly an innovative company that doesn't rely on public infrastructure!

try it again while calculating infrastructure and road costs for 262mm uber/lyft rides

Because roads are a shared resource used by everyone (even non car owners) Uber/Lyft's portion is small and covered by taxes they already pay.

What about infrastructure costs for lyft and uber?

Perhaps it isn’t expensive once you consider the peak load and externalities. How many new roads would you have to build to do that?

The cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases, like lower population density neighborhoods. It may save the public money to centralize transit on major corridors and then subsidize trips on Waymo in some areas and at some times.

how many people can fit in a bus compared to a car?

Doesn't matter if there's only four people willing to ride on a given schedule.

The OP you're responding suggested using Waymo's to help fill the buses, not get rid of buses.

"Centralize transit on major corridors" is about full buses. But transit agencies spend as much per hour on an empty bus as a full one. Transit agencies run empty buses on routes that are rarely full, and run vans and even microtransit that may just be a waste of money.

> cost of providing a bus exceeds the cost of operating a car in many cases

You can fit 40-50 people in your car?

This only works if the bus is popular. How often do buses in Portland have more than 5 people on them?

> Waymo is an expensive taxi service, not a solution to public transport.

Why not both?

The absolute biggest problems with mass transit in the US are the "first mile" and the "last mile".

If I wanted to take mass transit, I had to show up before 7:00 AM in order to park my car. Every single train after 7:00AM became useless to commuters. That's idiotic.

And then I needed a car at the destination station to drive to my workplace. So, a bunch of us had completely idle cars parked at the commuter station that we used roughly 15 minutes per day but needed parking at both the station AND the workplace--just to use the train. Good lord that is stupid.

Waymo at the right price solves a whole bunch of these issues. Suddenly utilization of your train can go up because you've decoupled train utilization from train station parking. In addition, train utilization isn't so dependent upon close distance to the station. Now, you can build a transit station and allow it to organically fill in instead of getting killed because it's an expensive money sink for 10+ years until housing builds around it. etc.

Sure, you should be able to take a bicycle from the station; that's not how the US is laid out so you have to deal with what you are stuck with today. Sadly, this isn't the old days where everybody works at the mill and dropping a station right there gets you 80% of the population; you have to put that station in and wait a decade while things adjust.

Waymo gets you across the interim while the mass transit convenience transitions from poor to something useful over multiple decades.

If it can deliver transit to the public at a reasonable price…

Even five dollars a ride would be twice the price. It's just not comparable.

How many tax dollars go into subsidizing a public transit ride? Varies from place to place but it's not insignificant.

At the margin, it substitutes for some trips.

If Portland is really forward-thinking, they would be smart to use this opportunity to jump to the next stage of public transport by focusing on flexible bus routes and Waymo/rideshare subsidies for the poor and disabled.

Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design. They're still cars, so they still contribute to traffic and increased pavement wear, and I cannot imagine they'd be cheaper at scale than buses for storage/maintenance/cleaning.

I spent ten years in the trenches of American urban design policy. The best we could do was lose very slightly less quickly. It's not changing. Trains are great, we should build more, and we probably should replace a lot of bus routes by subsidizing rides on Waymo and its ilk. It'll be cheaper and provide better service.

>Trains are great

I wonder how much that sentiment is that based on steampunk and 1880's nostalgia?

A well run public transit system should obviously be cheaper at scale than robotaxis, but the incentives for Waymo (or Uber, or Lyft, etc.) are very different than the city's incentives. It's very possible that in practice private companies can operate more cheaply at scale than buses because they have much higher incentives to reduce costs and increase efficiency.

well run public transit systems usually still lose money

and thats a policy decision rather than a commercial one

“Self driving cars aren't the next stage of public transport; they're a bandaid solution to American urban design.”

That might be an unintentionally excellent analogy, because like a Band-Aid, self self driving cars have the potential to heal the urban environment. The widespread adoption of self driving cars doesn’t take cars off the road, but it does reduce the reliance on destination parking. Entire city car parks could be replaced with medium density residential, substantially increasing density and paving the way to walkable cities.

It's not a bandaid because American urban design isn't going to change substantially. I don't see American cities changing their mind on how they build and where they build.

They won't be better for maintenance but unless Portland can build the state capacity to fund public transport properly this is better than nothing. Plenty of developing countries rely on buses, jitneys, and low footprint vehicles like mopeds for traffic flow because they don't have the state capacity to enforce an urban framework conducive to public transit. Honestly many US states are the same.

> increased pavement wear

That's buses. Even more with electric buses. They are insanely subsidized by public. Robot taxis are vastly cheaper for everyone.

All they can do is to install more needle disposal bins and putting more narcan kit in the restrooms. I hate the direction Portland and more generally Oregon is going so much. It's always tax tax tax while everything is getting worse. Kotek needs to go.

Decriminalizing drugs without full legalization and regulation leads to that. Addicts can't buy drugs of known purity and dosage, and this is what happens.

Similar to alcohol prohibition and methanol poisoning.

I haven't been to Portland for years, but I remember it as being a transit-forward city, with several streetcar lines (one connected to an aerial tram), and decent light rail service covering much of the metro area.

It sounds like they're going to leave that behind, at least for the foreseeable future. A $300 million cut will probably lead to a death spiral in ridership.

i remember trying to use public transport to move around portland from my hotel in the convention center area to the downtown and after sundown it was practically impossible

> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month;

An alternative view of this is the majority of voters are expected to reject a tax increase in the upcoming elections, in a state that elects a supermajority of Democrat legislators.

https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Referendum_120,_Increase_to_G...

They aren't rejecting a tax increase. They are voting to give themselves a pay raise at the expense of infrastructure.

Do you live in Oregon? The recent vote was about rejecting the proposed payroll tax increase, which was massively unpopular. The vote was so overwhelming that Kotek attempted to yank that clause, so it can be tried another day.

People here keep asking why do tax payer needs to pay for incompetent politicians' mistakes. Then when Oregonians did something, the same people blamed them. Are you people high?

The wording below of the ballot question is clearly “rejecting a tax increase”.

> A "no" vote repeals five sections of HB 3991 related to tax and fee increases, including increases to the state's gas tax from $0.40 to $0.46, payroll tax for transportation from 0.1% to 0.2%, and vehicle registration and title fees, with revenue dedicated to the State Highway Fund for transportation funding.

> They are voting to give themselves a pay raise

A no vote would mean they earn the same they did before they vote. Earning the same is not a pay raise.

> Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.

No it didn’t. Bus rides cost $2.80 in Portland.

And in August, the bus line that serves my neighborhood completely goes away, and the next closest bus line with stops 2 miles away will end weekday service after 6:30 p.m. and weekend service altogether.

I don't give a fuck if it's free, if it's inaccessible. I'm not crossing SE Foster on a rainy evening to catch a bus that won't take me home afterward.

The bus system would almost certainly be better if it did cost a somewhat-significant amount of money, because one of the biggest problems with public transit in the US is marginalized people getting on public transit and acting in ways that are unpleasant and disruptive to everyone else using it (think about a homeless drug addict passing out on the bus while splayed across several seats; or a schizophrenic screaming incoherently at everyone nearby and threatening to kill them). Having a meaningful fare and consistently enforcing payment of that fare keeps these people off of transit and makes the experience of being in an enclosed space with strangers better for everyone else.

So use your car instead?

I see. You meant that Waymo showed up with a solution for you, specifically, not the city or the neighborhood that you live in.

> The cuts were exacerbated by state Republicans getting a proposed payroll tax repeal onto the ballot next month

Sorry to nitpick, but why is the next month's ballot (and in general the issues that have not been voted on yet) affecting current service?

> A scheduled increase to Oregon’s transportation taxes, including those that help fund TriMet, is on hold after an effort to repeal the hike secured enough signatures to send the issue to the ballot next month.

from the Oregonian article I linked

The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then.

> “The agency’s current position is that they have to cut service now to avoid worse cuts later, although worse cuts may be coming later anyway,” Walker wrote.

from the Mercury article I linked

>The service changes take affect in August, in large part because they can no longer expect the funding for them to exist by then.

I think a more plausible reason is, "withdraw the services now to get people who want that spending and that service irritated, and therefore more likely to get out and vote for it". Keeping service in place till the vote might supress the vote through complacency.

I'm not passing a value judgement on this top-down pressure on the electorate, governments should in theory be neutral and uphold current law, but governments are populated by politicians, and politicians who advocated this still want to advocate it and give it its best electoral chance. In a like "up is down" sense, people who favor cutting this government expenditure should favor the early cuts, they save money... of course, they don't, just sayin.

Two Santas but it's federa/state vs on a cyclic basis. Disgusting.

How far into the 'burbs do waymos usually extend? Will Beaverton/hillbsoro be part of the build?

Hard to know. The Waymo bay area service area is 60 miles long.

https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059119?hl=en#PHX

Oh wow that's a lot farther than I remember. I took a Waymo while in the Bay area a couple years ago, and I seem to remember the Waymo service area only going as far South as the I-280 and US-101 interchange?

Am I misremembering, or did they just drastically expand it?

I would not blame this on republicans; they don't hold a majority in the state senate, house, both senators and most house reps are democrats, and there isn't anywhere they hold meaningful power. Further they're opposed to doubling payroll taxes, the taxes are not raised yet.

Oregon, and Portland in particular, suffered a lot economically after covid due to overprotective laws banning operations. A lot of companies went out of business, people moved, and tax revenue plummeted. Growth since has been slow due to hostile laws. TriMet cuts are due to poor city and state management, which frankly doubling payroll tax would exacerbate.

> Waymo shows up with a convenient solution to both problems.

That's absurd. Waymo exacerbates the problem. It doesn't provide public transport.

You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet. You think Waymo is going to cost anything close to that?

> You get unlimited travel for $100/month on Trimet.

Only because the government is subsidizing 90% of TriMet's operating costs.

It might be interesting to see what sort of system Waymo could build with a similar subsidy... but that's never going to happen.

Waymo is subsidized. They operate vehicles without paying for the cost of the road, land, or surrounding parking.

That's like owning a train system and not paying for the tracks. Yeah... that's a huge part of it.

There's also indirect subsidies, for example the cost of land and housing. Cars are extremely space inefficient, so they encourage poor urban design that results in huge amounts of land wasted.

Well... the land and property that's left is then inflated in price. You could consider that cost difference as a subsidy to all drivers.

I'm sure that they'll just dodge regulations like every other Service as a Software company. Literally taking the money out of the City's hands and providing a slower, less safe, less equitable service. While taking profit too. Sheesh.

By every available measure, Waymo is safer and more equitable than cabs and rideshares. Waymos don't refuse service on skin color or disability. They don't have to stop every block along a fixed route like TriMet. And they're not profitable. So what's your actual beef, here?

I actually live in Portland, and Waymos are going to be a massive improvement over the chronically inattentive, unskilled drivers around here. Waymos aren't glued to their phones at intersections. That, alone, is 70% of all pedestrian crashes caused by human drivers in Portland.

>TriMet relies heavily on payroll taxes that are deeply unpopular among the self-employed and small business owners

just a point of clarification, the term "payroll taxes" refers to Social Security and Medicare taxes that are applied to your paycheck; you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those. Wage-earners do not pay them directly, but do collect the social security and Medicare benefits that they pay for later in life, so in that sense it's something of a deferred bonus to workers.

Everybody also pays income taxes which are a separate set of taxes, and they are equally hated by all.

"payroll taxes" are called that because they are applied to payrolls of people who pay payrolls. Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit.

> Payroll taxes would not pay for things like mass transit

In Oregon, TriMet is funded by a payroll tax: https://www.oregon.gov/dor/programs/businesses/pages/trimet-...

> The Oregon Department of Revenue administers tax programs for the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District (TriMet). Nearly every employer who pays wages for services performed in this district must pay transit payroll tax.

> The transit tax is imposed directly on the employer. The tax is figured only on the amount of gross payroll for services performed within the TriMet Transit District. This includes traveling sales representatives and employees working from home.

> you don't pay them, self-employed and employers pay those

If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes, the economic effect is the same. Who actually bears the burden of the tax ends up determined by the price elasticity of supply/demand in that labor market, and is not determined by who is on the hook for the literal payment.

>If a tax is a function of the worker's income, it doesn't really matter (except for nominal terms) whether the worker or employer pays the taxes,

yes, I took a lot of micro (and macro too for that matter) but if what you say were true, neither political party nor activists would go on and on about taxing "corporations". You should direct your comments toward the parties that do that. But of course, you would get downvoted because the parties that do that don't want to hear otherwise. That's what I was doing, trying to explain ecomonics in ways they'd be receptive to, because telling people how things work is always a good thing even if they are not ready to go all the way.

also, in terms of pure micro, indirectly taxing things is never as efficient as directly taxing them, which you are not accounting for. The inefficiency tax in the form of "lower overall employment" is not easily measured even though we know it's quite significant and as impactful as "well this tax averages out the same" when it's not the same.

Employers and employees split payroll taxes 50/50 by law. You definitely pay payroll taxes as an employee in the US.

If you are self-employed, you have to manually pay the tax because there's no employer wage to automatically deduct from.

A quick search could have resolved your confusion before commenting nonsense.

ah, good correction, that's why the self employed hate them, they have to pay both halves.

the main reason for the distaste is that self-employed people generally fall in the class of people who do a better job preparing for retirement, and the govt old age/retirement systems are not intelligently run, it's more like "money under the bed" that gets raided to pay the current generation of old people rather than being saved not saved for the future. That same money in a private insurance account would offer the better returns as investment accounts do.

the reason the retirement funds are set to go bankrupt is that there are a lot of baby boomers. This is not the baby boomers fault, when govt retirement programs were set up back in the depression era, it gave pension eligibility to people who had not paid into a retirement system, paid for by current workers, and that can kept getting kicked down the road. I don't think anybody wants to see penniless old people, they simply want a government that plans ahead and doesn't keep kicking the can down the road, and doesn't raid pension monies to use as "free money" to pay for other government pork.

The OTT payroll tax isn't that onerous really. (I say this as someone who pays them for our employees.)

I've got to retract some shade I've thrown at Waymo when discussing Tesla FSD in the past.

Like others, my biggest objection with it was their approach to scaling. Tesla aimed for the vision-only general solution with FSD, while Waymo held strong to its LIDAR-first geofence strategy. I held this opinion before using Waymo, as it wasn't available in my city (Houston, TX).

I've used it several times after being invited into their Early Access earlier this month...and, wow, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Waymo drives incredibly well. Like, INCREDIBLY well. Tesla FSD v14 drives well too, but Waymo feels more confident in edge case situations (of which there are many in the city driving space) and, well, I can be on my laptop or whatever during the trip.

Ironically, Waymo pushed me towards using public transit in Houston, so it's incredibly sad to read that this expansion is happening as Portland's public transit system is getting defunded. The time and mental sanity I've gotten back from not driving has been immense and undeniable. (It's weird how "bus-pilled" I became after my first few Waymo trips given that I grew up in NYC taking the bus and subway all of the time.)

All that said, based on how slowly Tesla is scaling their (inexcusably much more nascent) Robotaxi offering, I don't think ANY of our cars are going to get "unsupervised" FSD with the hardware they were shipped with.

This type of mea culpa is exceedingly rare. Credit to you for updating your opinion when presented with evidence, and publically admitting so.

Thanks! It's quite unfortunate that Tesla was, indeed, yanking our chains this whole time. I've been on the FSD train since I bought our first one in 2020 and have been rooting hard for them.

If they were serious about being close to cracking FSD, they would double down on their auto business. Them killing their flagships (Model S/X) and investing their time on Optimus instead strongly suggests that they probably won't make it. (They did finally online their Semi production line, but I have my doubts on how well that will do.)

I've tried Tesla FSD a couple of times (free trial in our Model 3) and didn't like it (even though I'm an early adopter who is used to putting up with rough edges; my wife tried it once and wouldn't touch it again). It acted like a nervous new driver.

Portland is a tough place to drive, lots of edge cases, so a good test case for Waymo.

Having said that, as good as Waymo might be, I'm still concerned about the effect on public transport, which I use when I can. We're in the suburbs but it's good for getting downtown (no parking to worry about) and to the airport, which unlike many US cities is served by rail. We're don't live near a light rail station (wish there were more of them!) but we park and ride. I wish more people would do that, but Americans are obsessed with single car transport and the cities are designed for that.

It's good to hear that more people are realizing that Tesla is nowhere near where they claim to be.

For anobody observing it from the sidelines, it was obvious for the past 3 years at least, that Tesla will not achieve real unsupervised FSD with HW3, and now it's also obvious it will not be wiht HW4. It's also obvious they are very well aware of those facts, despite lying to investors and customers for the past 10 years.

I stanned for them so hard. Oh well; live and learn. It's still the best autonomous driving system that you can buy, though now that Hyundai onlined their Waymo production line, needing a car might be a thing of the past in a few years.

Maybe that's why they pivoted so hard into Optimus (at the cost of their auto division).

Emphasis on "can buy", because Chinese competitors like BYD's "God's Eye" (I presume it sounds better in the original Chinese) aren't available outside China.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/byd-launches-driver-assistance...

Can't vouch for its quality since it's notoriously difficult to get reliable safety data on Chinese self-driving, but I'm reasonably sure these are the first widely available consumer vehicles with LIDAR, which is already a massive improvement on Tesla's myopic camera-only insistence.

It would be a great thing if Tesla somehow pulled it off, but -short of a miracle breakthrough in AGI- it is not likely.

I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech, so I can drive it manually when I want/need (snowstorms, off-road), but I can also let it drive me across the country at night while I camp in the back. Would absolutely change the way we move across the US, especially if you have hobbies that involve a lot of gear and equipment.

At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.

I’m not saying cars shouldn’t ever exist. The ‘last mile problem’ is a thing, and proper self-driving cars could be good for part of that (especially after a train and bus if you have lots of stuff). But you want to sleep in a vehicle with lots of storage space while driving across the country? That’s called a train. Nothing new needed.

I looked at taking the train from my town to Glacier National Park along with my bike. The route goes from Portland and Seattle to Chicago, and has a stop at south glacier.

Step 1, get to the local train station in my town. There are 6 trains daily between me and Portland. Also, amtrak on the cross country trains requires the bikes to be in a box, in storage cars.

So I gotta get a large bike box, and get myself, my bike, the box, and some tools to break it down to our local amtrak station. Then partially dissasemble the bike, and box it. (of course, our train station has room in it for 5-10 people, and most sit outside, uncovered, which is fun in spring.)

Then, get to the main Portland Train station, with my bike box, and backpack with my stuff and tools. Wait up to 9 hours for the hawaitha train. (its often many hours late, and only leaves once per day).

Load Bike in cargo car, and then board train late at night.

Wake up around 5am, (or later, if train is behind schedule) and disembark at Glacier, re-assemble my bike. Figure out how to get it, and the box (i'll need it for the return trip) to a hotel or AirBnB.

For the return trip, its about the same, 1 daily westbound train, that is usually hours late, then hope you get to portland before the last train for the day leaves for my town, or else find a place to stay with a bike, backpack, and bike box in the sketchy area around the trainstation...

Or, hop in a car with a bike rack, and drive 10 hours. Which is easier, and MUCH cheaper if I split the cost of gas with someone else. So 2 extra travel days back for vacation, and much less stress.

> At least 80% of what you’re describing would be satisfied by trains and buses. It’s wild that Americans are so obsessed with self-driving cars while ignoring public transit that solves most of the problems. It’s reliable, more efficient, better for the environment, and less stressful for you.

As an American, it's far easier to imagine autonomous robot driven road trips than it is to imagine a government that is competent enough to build passenger rail networks.

I’m 99-100% a car user now after living in Portland, Seattle and Los Angeles. Here’s why - I gave up my car for a bike when I lived in Portland, however when people openly smoked fentanyl on the trains the train operators had to stop the train during my morning/afternoon commute for ~15 minutes (this happened often). Also the last straw for me was getting my place broken into and having my bike stolen. Therefore I moved to cars because I didn’t have to inhale secondhand fentanyl smoke or deal with unscheduled delays. As a man in Los Angeles I had to deal with a drunk man on a bus touching my thigh and hitting on me and people trying to sell me drugs/solicit me for money/phone calls/etc. As a regular hiker I’m also not sure public transit would service trailheads in the Cascades or the Sierra Nevadas. As for the environmental impact, I agree that trains or busses may sometimes be better for environment but we’re also approaching a future of self driving electric cars powered by nuclear and fusion plants providing clean energy, so I think this problem will likely go away. I welcome Waymo in Portland, I’m just concerned for the well being of the vehicles!

I appreciate what you're saying and am a big fan of long distance train and bus journeys myself and have done a lot of both, sleeping and not.

But one huge factor that you have to contend with is the randomness of the tragedy of the commons problem on public transport / shared transport. A train journey can be blissful to sleep on right until a loud group gets on and sits across from you and there's no seats available to move.

I think this is something that can't be overlooked, especially if you're talking about something like a short trip where if you don't sleep well en route, quite a large proportion of the trip time is going to be affected. Having a private vehicle where you can guarantee control of your environment is a really huge plus.

I am a huge proponent of increased public transit (I'm of the opinion that every city should have a massive congestion tax with large swaths only accessible on foot or by public transit), but trains and buses would be wildly inconvenient for what op is describing.

Trying to take something like a windsurf board on a train, and then having to navigate multiple train changes along with whatever other baggage you have makes it a non-starter.

The "last mile problem" you mention is unresolved when it comes to getting from the closest public transit stop to the actual destination (frequently in a park or even off road).

And finally, the final cost to the rider would be significantly higher, as sleeper trains are not cheap.

I think America could do quite well if it focused on public transit in and between densely populated areas. Fewer cars in cities could make for denser cities, which in turn could allow for even more public transit. But outside of population centers, America is much more spread out than Europe, meaning that trains are less economical, and often wouldn't get the ridership that would allow them to make sense.

I agree with you, however in the US the “last mile” is often the “last 50 miles” when goal is outdoor recreation.

People just do not understand how big and spread out the US is compared to other countries. "Last mile" dramatically underestimates how much heavy lifting the personal transportation part would need to do. More like "last 50 miles".

The European mind does not comprehend how big and sparsely populated the American West is. You can't even pitch a tent in most places in the Alps, and why would you, when you just stop at a hut that has a staff and you can get fed and sleep in bunks with 20 other people? Meanwhile I can drive to numerous places where there isn't a structure or even another person in a 20km radius. No one is going to run a train to a place like that.

there are effectively no passenger trains in America and effectively no political will to expand them. Busses take multiple times as long for the same trip compared to a car. This doesnt even get into the anti-social behavior present on both. Given these facts, it is not wild at all to prefer cars (self driving or not) vs alternate transportation methods

You're right, but in the US a government providing any sort of public service is an immediate target for the right (and an unfortunately significant portion of the "left"). We insist on paying more for less rather than ever allowing a poor person to benefit in a way they don't "deserve". So public transit hardly exists or is woefully inadequate in most places.

You are misunderstanding the nature of the problem. I like trains but they can't and don't address the issue the OP is raising. Even if the US already had public trains it still isn't a "last mile" problem. Especially in the western US, it is a "last hundred miles" problem.

No public transport system that remotely makes any kind of economic sense, either in terms of infrastructure or operational cost, can replace the established network topology that exists for cars in the US. The connectivity is much more like a mesh than a hub-and-spoke model. Even though the US has a strong regional jet system that connects arbitrary nodes in that graph it still doesn't entirely avoid the "last hundred miles" problem.

A lot of American long-distance travel is not between two big cities. Even in Europe, similar kinds of routes have no train service and limited bus service.

The sad truth is the USA spends ~$150B/year building and maintaining it's road network (to say nothing of the inflation-adjusted costs that went into its initial roll-out). Source: The US Fed tracks it directly - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS

That's a $41/month subscription every citizen's paying no matter what. When we're pulling cash on that volume from everyone's pockets to build lavish infrastructure literally up to people's doors (vastly more road square footage than housing+school square footage combined), of course folks are going to say "nothing compares" -- because nothing does compare. Which stinks (imagine if we'd focused a century of spending on rail at rates like that; damn), but it is what we have at the moment.

Its the ultra independence mindset. I don't think trains work for the commenter you talked to.

I want to move on my schedule and convenience, I don't want to have to warp my day to day around someone else's departure schedule.

I'd love for you to come along with me on a ski mountaineering trip to the eastern Sierra. It's a mountain range larger than Switzerland with basically one interstate highway to access and no roads that cross through in the winter. Very few year-round towns, and nearly zero services outside of those towns. This ain't the alps - there are no huts, no gondolas, no nothing. If you want to access it, you have to walk/ski your way there. That often means long drives (50-100+ miles), camping in your car, and bringing everything you need to survive with you.

I love the confidence with which you give your answer though! Europeans famously underestimate the American West, which is why they often get into serious trouble (or die[1]) at alarming rates out here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Valley_Germans

Public transit in America presents a much higher chance of encountering dangerous people than a private car. Until those people are permanently, irrevocably, and definitively locked up, it would not matter off public transit were free, or even paid users to use it, it will not be a serious option. Nobody in my family is allowed to use public transit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Debrina_Kawam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Iryna_Zarutska

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/nypd-men-pushed-subway-...

So, let's say you take public transport from SF to Yosemite/Los Angeles. Now, how do I cover the last mile (or even multiple points)? Take more public transport? Hitchhike?

The reason long-distance public transport works well in Europe is that there is good local public transport in both the source and the destination cities. When that does not exist, you are better off driving.

sometimes we do this thing where we pretend rail is super efficient, whereas in reality it's often more expensive than basically any other option, even in countries that do it well (e.g. Switzerland,Japan)

I love rail but it is a convenience / luxury mode in many cases, and should be complimentary to car travel, not replace it.

Connecting two Waymo geos with a train would be an interesting company idea. You could lease freight track the way Amtrak already does it in the American West but try to negotiate a contact more favorable than Amtrak's. You could try to work with Waymo to work on bundles.

Amtrak could do the same thing but because of how Amtrak is organized in not sure that it would be possible. Most of the current Waymo geos are not connected by Amtrak directly and require transfers.

In the US it's often not the last mile, but the last 10 or 100 miles. I'm saying this as someone enjoying fantastic public transport in Budapest.

The scenario is a cross-country trip in an electric car. What actual, specific advantage does a train or bus offer in this scenario? What problem does it solve better?

It's an electric car, so carbon emissions are low.

Most of the route will be in rural areas in the middle of the night, so the impact on traffic will be minimal.

As for the cost to build and maintain the roads, they are already needed so rural areas are accessible. Wear and tear on roads and bridges isn't much of an issue since heavy vehicles like trucks cause massively disproportionate damage[1]. (A bus might actually be worse than the equivalent number of cars in this respect.)

---

[1] See https://blog.ucs.org/dave-cooke/trucks-cause-the-lions-share... . Some studies show that damage varies with the fourth power of axle weight.

I can't take my dog on pretty much any public transit or most ride shares. More than 20% of Americans have dogs.

Unfortunately, until something big happens in the US, autonomous vehicles will be more accessible to working class americans than good and reliable mass transit, especially outside of major population centers.

Public transit only works if you live in the densest of the dense part of a city. If you live out in Beaverton or Gresham these bus lines lose money hand over fist, not to mention farther-flung places.

In my experience, night trains with private cabins are fan service for rail fans, environmentalists and/or masochists, not real transport options.

One of the famous sleeper trains in Europe (Nightjet Vienna-Amsterdam) is often booked out weeks (sometimes months) in advance, costs as much as a plane ticket + hotel room or more, and you have a decent chance of being told (as you show up in the evening) that unfortunately one car is missing tonight and you have the option of a full refund (screwing up your entire trip and having to book a last minute plane ticket), or you can take a 50% refund on your 255 EUR sleeping ticket and spend the night sitting in the shared seating part on a seat that would have regularly cost 35 EUR. This was something that on some routes was happening routinely for over a year [1].

The night train from Switzerland to Malmö was cancelled (after tickets had already been sold) because the Swiss government decided to not subsidize it.

Trains like this offer zero flexibility (you have to book a specific train weeks in advance), go where they go which is a very limited route network, and even in Europe with all the environmentalists, rail networks, shorter distances, and massive government subsidies, they don't seem to be able to run them very frequently or on many routes.

Calling them equivalent or a replacement for self-driving cars (which would take the passenger where they want, when they want) is disingenuous and isn't going to magically convince people.

[1] https://www.srf.ch/sendungen/kassensturz-espresso/espresso/f...

It's a train or bus that is exclusively yours, goes exactly where you want it to go, when you want to go. Sounds objectively better than a train to me.

Enough with this public transport bullshit. We live in very spread out suburbs where you need to drive to everything and everyone has big backyards because we like it that way. Most people here don’t want to live in a tiny coop sharing walls with neighbors on all sides and live the vast majority of our lives in a 15 min public transport bubble. Further, having a train line is borderline not feasible the way the vast majority of the US lives. There is no way having a train station with even a 30 minute walking distance is feasible or even desirable. I also don’t want to get into public transport with a whole bunch of other people no matter how nice it is. It’s not going to be able to compete with a self driving EV of my own that I charge with my solar panels for free.

That being said I’m in full support of metros for large cities and high speed rail between major cities but it’s hard to beat a domestic airline you can show up for an hour before it leaves at an airport and gets you there 10x faster for anything other than the shortest trips.

It would also be satisfied by magic flying carpets. Between flying carpets, functional public transport, and self-driving cars, only one of these three things is not utter fantasy in the near-ish future in the United States.

I fucking love trains.

That would be something being asleep and waking up to a car crash

reminds me of an old joke:

"When I go I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather. Not screaming and afraid like the passengers in his car"

I want this as well. Hopefully my Cybertruck will get unsupervised driving someday, but until then, it's the closest thing to the dream of electric off-roading, self-driving vehicle with huge cargo capacity. I've already stopped driving myself around 98% of the time, according to my FSD stats.

Why did you buy a Cybertruck?

Snowstorms are probably when I’d most want self driving. Back in February driving from Tahoe to SF, they closed the road, not because of conditions, but because too many impatient drivers spun out. I trust Waymo to go the recommended speed and not get impatient.

Its not always about speed, This winter I was on interstate 93 in a 4WD with winter tyres. I was doing 25-35mph because the roads weren't treated. I still spun out, like many others. The road was an ice rink.

Humans and Control System Models need feedback to operate, and worse still... when any input into the vehicle's controls produce zero results, you will spin out.

My concern with a model in these conditions is that it wouldn't recoginize the fact that other cars were in the ditch and that it should probably slow down

I drove up there in the AM Thursday, Feb 18th, during the snowstorm, about an hour before they closed the pass for the rest of the day.

You couldn't see anything. As soon as there wasn't a car 20 yards in front of you, it was a complete whiteout. Ice built up on the wiper as quickly as you could possibly reach out of your window and clear it. Radar would probably be nice, but I don't think it'd be enough to keep driving. The cameras and lidar would be an absolute wreck.

I'm sure we'll get there eventually, but that is really the final frontier for AI driving I think. Waymos aren't even allowed to drive in a snowstorm right now. I suspect that you'll be dealing with Caltrans closing the pass for the rest of your life.

In a Canadian context, on a two lane highway, sometimes doing the absolutely safe/totally cautious speed in a moderate snowstorm will result in a very large collection of vehicles behind you, with angry drivers. In particular if the persons collecting behind you are some combination of not very risk averse, commute on the same road every day, and are very confident in themselves because they have dedicated winter purpose studded snow/ice tires on.

Even if you also have good winter tires on, if your level of "caution" could be best measured as normal to high, sometimes it's a judgment call on when you want to pull off to the shoulder for 45 seconds to let a bunch of vehicles behind you pass. I'm not sure this is something any automated driver has been configured for. Or just generally to deal with driving when the road condition could best be described as "two only partially visible ruts in the snow where the tires of previous vehicles have driven, with snow in the centre".

Same thing in somewhere with a climate like upper Michigan or in Maine.

The entire city shuts down and loses their mind with just a millimeter or two of snow here. Last time we got 0.25 of an inch there were ~9 accidents within a 2-mile span on the highway in the morning, and we just ended up shutting the highway down for the day.

I love Waymo in other cities, but it'd be especially helpful here during the 1 day every other year that we actually get any snow ... if we ever get snow here again.

After skiing in Utah, I wonder why the driving conditions around Tahoe get so bad. In comparison, for most places around Salt Lake/Park City, you never need chains or 4-wheel drive.

Yes. The longer-term possible second-order effects are going to be wild. Easier t o get to wilderness? Awesome!, but also crowding like you've never seen (but maybe also more small parks because there will be a glut of unused parking).

I don't see why one of those second-order effects wouldn't be the death of car ownership, with everyone using a rideshare service instead. Hell, that's the business model for Waymo and almost everyone other than Tesla in the autonomous-vehicle industry. It just doesn't make sense to own your own vehicle, use it for ~2 hours/day, and have to worry about parking/storing/fueling/maintaining it when you could have a service do all of that for you. Plus self-driving cars fix several issues with human rideshares, eg. you can drive it out to the boonies without worrying about how it's going to get back; you don't need to worry about getting assaulted by the robot driver; when they wait for you you only need to pay the opportunity cost of another ride rather than the opportunity cost of the driver's time. It's feasible to take a Waymo out to a state park, though you wouldn't usually do that with an Uber.

The second-order effects of that could be pretty wild. If people stopped owning their own cars, we wouldn't need houses with garages and driveways. It'd favor dense development with loading zones rather than parking spaces. It'd also be a big boon for EV adoption since the cars are all owned by one corporate owner and all go home to a centralized depot to charge at night rather than needing to retrofit EV chargers onto everyone's living situation. (Indeed, Waymo runs an all-electric fleet.). There'd be a premium on very reliable powertrains, since the cars might easily put 60-70K miles/year on them instead of the 10-15K that is typical of passenger vehicles. I dunno why Waymo went with Jaguar instead of Toyota, but perhaps "EV" is the explanation. Cars would wear out in 3-5 years instead of lasting for 15-20, and so you'd always have the latest hardware and technology on the car.

All the money we spend on traffic enforcement would become pointless, with audits of the software becoming a more effective use of dollars instead. But that blows a hole in many small local PD's budgets, many of which use speeding and parking tickets to raise revenue. Municipalities would likely find themselves powerless at regulating Big Self-Driving Rideshares.

The third-order effects are interesting as well. Once all cars on the road are self-driving, why not have them draft each other and physically link up to improve power efficiency and safety? You might even call such an arrangement a "train", blurring the line between road and rail transportation. But then, if you've got docking and linkage mechanisms, why not put the boundary between the electronics & powertrain and the passenger compartment, like the Rivian "skateboard" platform? You could return to private ownership of the passenger compartment - where, after all, some people like to store all their junk - and then have the rideshare own only the means of locomotion. Then you could extend this to other forms of locomotion like elevators, airplanes and ferries, so that your passenger compartment could just drop down an elevator shoot, onto a waiting self-driving car, which links up with others to become a train, takes you to the airport where you're loaded onto a plane without ever having to board, and then your pod deplanes and a self-driving car takes you straight to your hotel, where you now have transportation to wherever you want to go.

The future looks an awful lot like intermodal containers for people.

> something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech

So a Tesla?

Off-roading aspirations and 3rd row legroom (S1) seem to be major differentiators from Rivian.

As for autonomy, Waymos have LIDARs which at least provides more redundancy.

I see these as different design tradeoffs so no judgment implied.

I bought a 2018 Model 3 that was later upgrade with HW3. I paid about $10K extra for the full auto-pilot. Elon back then said that eventually the car will come pick me up from the airport. That was a nice dream. Nearly 10 years later, my Tesla still cannot do that.

$10K for full autopilot on Tesla in 2018 was essentially a fraud. I have since then learned not to trust anything Elon says.

Waymo uses Lidar and radar as well as cameras and so is fundamentally superior to Tesla's camera only approach.

I, independently, made almost exactly the same comment before seeing yours lol. I already do 20+ hour cross-country trips in my Y without a break to sleep, which is only possible because I'm not meaningfully fatigued driving. it's still technically supervised but I think that's beyond the point OP is making

Yea. With a huge 100 kWh battery and a removable range extender for those extra-long trips :) Plus that battery (and range extender) can also provide power and heating when parked.

That's kind of a beautiful vision

> I've determined that my ultimate dream car would be something like a Rivian but with Waymo tech

So a Tesla? I think your dream is pretty common, since they make the most popular vehicle in the world

It will be amazing if they get self-driving working. Currently, you can't even sit in the back seat.

So you want a cyber truck but you have Elon Derangement syndrome?

If they don't show up as green Subaru Outbacks with a bunch of bumper stickers on the back they'll stick out like a sore thumb.

Perhaps they can disguise the LIDAR beacon inside an IR-transparent Thule roof box.

I think they also have a blue 2007 Prius model.

If the back window can be smashed in, that would also fit Portland aesthetics.

A Waymo was recently stuck on some light rail tracks in Phoenix this year [1]. Portland has a rather diverse bunch of streetcars and trams concentrated in its downtown core. Hopefully they don't get stuck on the tracks or block the trams.

[1] https://www.azfamily.com/2026/01/08/waymo-passenger-flees-af...

Well, that's the hope, but the bar is pretty low. Portlanders constantly block streetcars, usually by doing a shite job of parallel parking.

From the article it doesn't sound like it was physically stuck as much as it's maps might not have been updated with the latest addition of that light rail and/or it was confused by the ongoing construction.

Definitely a big concern, but given the number of times in my lifespan that I've seen pictures or video of human-driven vehicles that have got stuck on railroad crossings (or just straight up drunk people trying to drive linearly down a railroad track)...

I would be curious to compare stats of 100,000 hours of human drivers getting stuck on grade crossings or doing something dumb, such as trying to drive around crossing barrier arms, vs 100,000 hours of automated driving. I would bet the automated driver does a lot better.

I recently saw a video from (I think not Phoenix) of 3 waymos that were next to each other blocking traffic in an intersection, refusing to move, because they were facing a traffic signal intersection where the signals had reverted to blinking red mode. Humans who paid attention when learning to drive will understand this means the intersection has reverted to a 4-way-stop due to the traffic signal failure.

The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.

> The problem is that multiple red lights were blinking in view of the waymos not in sequence with each other, so the waymos interpreted it as a alternating-blinking red railroad signal crossing, and all of them refused to proceed, even when it was their "turn" in a 4-way-stop arrangement.

What's the hot fix for this? Are they just stuck until a tech can physically go out and reset and move them? Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?

Silly stuff like this happens all the time even with human drivers, I feel like the important piece when hearing that the technology encountered an issue is how long did it take to resolve?

This is the right way to look at it. For autonomous fleets, there are typically tiers of intervention, starting with a simple remote check - "can I drive through this?" type confirmation, to much more detailed remote instructions that are slower to give, to getting someone from operations out (or in an emergency first responders) to manually move the car. One reason why you might want to keep traditional controls in the vehicle for the near term.

It's a big operations challenge, and hope Waymo (and everyone else TBH) get it smoother and smoother.

> Or can someone in a office somewhere remotely get alerted, look at the video feed/data, and override it with instruction on how to proceed?

For Waymo, it's this one.

> or just straight up drunk people

Waymo. Slightly better than an irresponsible alcoholic. As long as the maps are up to date.

I wonder if at some point we'll see a hockey stick adoption of self-driving cars. For now every new city is worth a blog post, eventually they'll allow intercity drives. Will international adoption take off? Will I be able to use it on a country road to visit my family in 10 years?

If Waymo's announcements come to reality, that is happening this year. Phoenix entered full service in 2020, then San Francisco and Los Angeles in 2024, and Austin and Georgia in 2025 (in partnership with Uber). But this year they are planning on rolling out in 13 cities! Miami and Orlando are already in full service. Nashville, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio are running invite-only service. Tampa, New Orleans, Minneapolis are in testing. San Diego, Detroit, Las Vegas and D.C. have been announced to launch this year, but haven't started testing yet. And that is on top of eight other cities that they are already testing in, but don't have timelines for offering full service.

That is already a huge jump from two cities a year.

The DC rollout is mired in regulatory red tape and is most likely dead until the mayoral election goes through, and if the new mayor is anti-Waymo unlikely to go through in the near future.

You can definitely see a bit of a hockey stick forming in Waymo's reported rides per week. Nice chart in this article. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/27/waymo-skyrocketing-ridersh...

The inflection point will be cities building infrastructure and passing laws supporting self driving. Then it will hockey stick.

> eventually they'll allow intercity drives

You can drive, on the highway, from San Francisco to San Jose, two cities that are about 50 miles apart.

I suppose you mean something more "road trip-y"? Interstate, not intercity?

Waymo and Baidu are the only big players and both are working on launching in foreign markets for the first time this year, in addition to big expansions in their home markets. But country roads are not on the agenda. I predict an eventual public-private partnership to bring AVs to rural areas. It would be a cost-effective way to support the healthcare of ageing rural populations who are facing hospital closures.

I'd assume so. Even the city launches are extremely limited to a section of the overall metro area that one would consider necessary for full local service. They are dropping a lot of seeds and then will allow them to grow. While it seems very slow, I have always enjoyed watching Google's taxi service GTM approach much more than I did watching Uber's.

It will mirror the chart of Gs subcontractors in India / Phils

Stiff competition for humans, especially drivers outside the top quartile or so. Waymo appears to its passengers to drive much more competently than certainly any sub-average rideshare driver.

Although I like jobs for humans, I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities. Want to find a way for offline vehicles that can go 65MPH to remain legal though. Without Flock every block either unless we (in USA) forget what the whole USA thing’s about.

Edit: @Waymo would LOVE to see an industry-leading privacy pledge so good the EFF slaps their logo on it (even caveated), also your engineers are amazing

Waymo undoubtedly drives better than your average rideshare driver - I have taken dozens of Waymos in SF and the experience is unmatched. Also no chance of being harassed by the driver, which is a big plus.

This. Also Waymo can be surprisingly aggressive in SF, lane cutting and speeding up when yellow light is on and whatnot. It really feels like being driven by an emotionless highly competent driver, which is exactly what I want. The only gripe I have with it is about dropping off, I can't tell it to move forward a couple of feet to avoid a puddle or to make it easier for me to unload the luggage ...

Pick-up, drop off, and routing remain a challenge for Waymo. I hate having to walk a few minutes to get to the Waymo. Not that big a deal usually, but it became a problem when I was on crutches after spraining my ankle. Same for drop-offs, with the caveat that a human driver is going to see that I'm being dropped off in a bad neighborhood and not have me walk a couple blocks and is going to drop me off right outside my destination. Finally, routing. Waymo's take the weirdest routes sometimes. There was one trip I'd swear the Waymo Driver was the digital equivalent of drunk, the route it took was so convoluted. Which is kind of interesting. It means the system can reroute on the fly based on traffic conditions elsewhere and avoid getting jammed up. It's like when Google maps has you take a weird route to somewhere you're familiar, and then you look at traffic and there's an accident it's taking you around. Still a bad experience when a 10 minute ride turns into a 20 minute ride because the Waymo decides to go a weird way.

I report these issues in the app whenever I do take a Waymo, so hopefully they'll get better.

The one to ride is Zoox though. They have limited deployment but their vehicles have no steering wheel, it's like a gondola ride to your destination.

The one feature that Waymo has over other rideshare apps is that the cars presumably actually show up.

With all other apps, it feels like 50% of drivers just sit there waiting for you to cancel. I can't rule out that it's a bug with the app not showing updated locations in some cases (I've had an Uber show up even though the web app showed it three traffic lights away), but "actually gets me where I need to go in a timely manner" is a key feature and when "RIDE AVAILABLE, 3 MINUTES" turns into 7 minutes as soon as the app is done searching for a driver, and that turns into you having to cancel 5 minutes in and try again, the platform becomes useless.

Waymo cancels cars when they are unable to get to you in a reasonable time. The service will not resend a car automatically, so the user needs to babysit the app until they’re actually in the car. I’ve seen this twice in the last week. In Phoenix and SF we have preferred ride share or taxi when the car showing up is important, like getting to a medical appointment on time.

Yes exactly. I loved that when i opened up the app to go some where the first thing I saw before I even put in where I'm going, was how long until ill be picked up. the cars don't care about the trips, not trying to tip/ride max.

> I hope these aren’t all just set on fire because there is promise in reducing fatalities.

Doesn't matter.

At this point, if the US doesn't lead, China will.

They have a massive population imbalance that they can only crawl out of with automation. Someone is going to have to drive around all those seniors. Once it's a proven model, it'll spread to the rest of the world.

Ironically, Uber used the same tactics to replace taxis with rideshare:

(Taxis/rideshares) are dangerous, drivers harass you, etc. Ours are so amazing, people love them.

The reality is that I have zero problems with rideshares (or taxis, when I'm someplace that still has them). Being a social animal like other Homo sapiens, interacting is a positive but drivers have no problem giving me peace. I'd much rather have the intelligence and flexibility of a human who can communicate, adapt, and solve problems.

> your engineers are amazing

They say the same about you!

Mm, suppose I might indeed prefer the top ~tenth of drivers (or more) on many occasions… recommendations from a screen aren’t the same. Been fun chatting with drivers since the early days for sure, when it was all new-exciting-rideshare talk

Def interesting seeing complaints about drivers not showing since early days Uber pax (in SF) loved getting rides to outer neighborhoods without needing to lie about their destination.

Offline/human-operated/assisted vehicles could remain in the competitive mix to ensure we don’t get screwed again.

Final thing “They say the same about you!” Still don’t get it hehe

Are Waymos cheaper than hiring a person?

Waymo inflates their prices to be above that of Uber/Lyft because they don't have enough vehicles to meet demand. But their operating costs / mile are lower than that of Uber/Lyft. I'd estimate their internal cost per mile is approx. half that of Uber/Lyft. They pocket the rest because they need to recoup decades of expensive R&D.

There is also no reason to compete with Uber/Lyft on price because they are just leaving money on the table. When Waymo first launched, we saw them try to undercut (Waymo was about 20% cheaper than Uber/Lyft) but now it's about 20% more expensive. People are willing to pay extra for Waymo, so why would they charge less?

The margin on each Waymo ride is currently very, very high. I don't expect Waymo to cut prices until real competition arrives.

It's not clear to me if their costs are lower yet. Waymo's vehicles are rather expensive (estimates for their newer Zeekrs are around $75k each), and they need to pay some number of remote monitors for exceptional situations (as noticed during the recent blackout in San Francisco). They also have to collect tons of data to build & maintain high resolution 3D maps of the areas they operate in. And they have to pay engineers to improve the self-driving software.

Waymo passed 200 million driverless miles in February. If we optimistically assume they're up to 300 million miles now, and every mile was paid for at $10 per mile, that's $3 billion in revenue since they launched. In that same time, Waymo has gotten $27 billion in funding. Of course they haven't spent anywhere close to that amount, and they are optimizing for faster rollout rather than profitability, but the finances aren't as gleaming as one might expect.

I'm sure Waymo will figure out ways to reduce their costs over time, but right now I think they're charging pretty close to what they need to break even.

We're looking at different metrics, you're analyzing the average total cost, while I'm analyzing the marginal cost. Waymo has enormous fixed costs like you mentioned, mapping cities and paying engineers are not cheap, which need to be amortized over a massive self-driving fleet. But those are fixed costs which don't increase with fleet size. Waymo currently operates only ~3000 vehicles, which is not enough to amortize those fixed costs into overall profitability.

What matters most are marginal costs (i.e. how much does it cost for Waymo to add 1 more ride). Looking at marginal costs, Waymo takes in more money than it spends on each ride, so projecting outwards when Waymo operates a large enough fleet, Waymo will be profitable.

Uber/Lyft run enormous fleets of ~2 million vehicles in the US, and that's how they are able to maintain profitability. They can spread their engineering and management expenses over millions of rides.

---

Doing my own math, the marginal costs for Waymo are:

Revenue: Each Waymo vehicle brings in ~$50/hour

Expenses: Waymo must pay for

* Assume the cost of a vehicle is $100k

* Amortized depreciation of the car (assume vehicles need to be fully replaced after ~250,000 miles, vehicles average 25 miles / hour, vehicles need to be fully replaced after 10,000 hours, cost is $10/hour)

* Maintenance (Assume the total cost of maintenance is an additional 25% of the vehicle price, vehicle price is $100k and vehicle lasts 10,000 hours, cost is $2.5/hour). This is likely an underestimate, I didn't model the cost of a mechanic, so this could be as high as $5-7/hour.

* Support (assume 1 support agent can support 10 vehicles, Philippine support agent costs $10/hour, so amortized $1/hour per vehicle)

* Cleaning (needed daily, costs $1/hour per vehicle)

* Datacenter compute for vehicle coordination ($0.50/hour per vehicle)

* Electricity (Assume $2/hour)

10 + 2.5 + 1 + 1 + 0.5 + 2 = $17/hour to operate a Waymo.

In conclusion, the marginal costs for Waymo is very profitable.

Is it known that Waymo operating costs are lower?

In San Francisco, it has to be. Because of prop 22, Uber/Lyft must compensate drivers a minimum of $22.40/hr, plus $0.36/mile for vehicle expenses. Waymo doesn't have this cost, so it's effectively ~$25/hr cheaper to operate than Uber/Lyft.

I looked up the numbers - the estimated Uber/Lyft cost per mile in SF is ~$4.50/mi, and Waymo is trending around $1.40/mi (estimated 2025 number).

> 20% more expensive.

Or less depending on how you tip.

It's hard to measure "cheaper" as an end user consumer, the price you pay for the service, because it's very likely they're operating at a loss to gain market share and growth.

Exact same reason why Uber and Lyft were considerably cheaper than taxis in many big cities when they first launched (eg: Lyft in Seattle in 2013/2014), running at a loss, and the pricing has now incrementally grown to become the same as, or even more expensive than traditional meter taxis in some places.

Great point

IIRC, in SF they're slightly more expensive before tip, but having ridden in them in SF, LA, and AZ I've always felt they were cheaper. Over the long run, they will probably end up being cheaper from the wholesale perspective since eventually the parts and technology cost will come down with time and scale while human wages will continue to rise.

That said, it doesn't really matter if they're cheaper as long as they're comparable.

The cars are newer and nicer (for now), they're almost always cleaner since they can rotating one car out for cleaning doesn't mean the driver is losing earnings, they're better drivers than the average ride-share driver, you don't feel the need to tip, and I've multiple of my friends who are women call out that they feel safer in them because there's no risk of the driver being creepy (or worse).

I don't think Waymo is trying to win on price right now. I think as long as they just stay somewhat competitive on that front the other benefits will continue to draw in customers.

Alphabet/Google/Waymo is a technology business, with emphasis on business. They're not running a charity. They're in it to make money. If it's a $20 Uber ride to somewhere, they're not going to leave money on the table and charge $10 because they don't have a driver to pay. They're going to charge $22 for the premium experience because they know people will pay that.

Of course, but I never claimed that they would do that. At some point though other autonomous services will enter the market and Waymo will have to compete with them on price. Even if that doesn't happen (which seems incredibly unlikely), they're still competing against public transit and people driving themselves (or privately owned self driving cars). Not having to pay a driver means the floor where they can make a profit is lower.

If we're in a world where human driven Uber's are $30, you're right that Waymo probably won't charge $20 just to be nice, even if it only costs them $10. They might charge $20 though if their data shows that it would 10x the number of riders or if they're also competing with another autonomous taxi company.

That sounds right. Passenger pays for lower risk, etc. The market sees the company making $2 extra and a competitor will see if they can do it for just $1 extra.

(nobody would confuse me with an economist!)

Depends on the region, I think. Lyft and Uber partner with them in certain cities, so you transparently are charged the same as a similar ride with a human driver. It's only a better experience than a human driver, though, in my view. No chance of yapping, more privacy, no chance of your driver being a psycho, cars are better maintained.

If a waymo costs $200k (car+sensors+install labor) and drives 200k miles, then amortizing up-front costs alone are about $1/mile. We don't really know what the TCO of a waymo is, and it's possible it could go down with economies of scale. Rideshare drivers can get paid $1-2/mile although it varies a lot.

That's just the current cost. The long term cost structure should be based on cars that come out of the factory with all the right stuff pre-installed. There's a BOM for some extra components; many of which you might already find in some cars. Otherwise it's just another EV. So, long term the extra cost per mile relative to a driver driving the same car should be cents rather than dollars per mile. And of course if there is no driver, some components like manual controls, dashboards, mirrors, etc. actually become redundant as well. So the total BOM might actually be lower long term.

The driver cost is of course the big saving. And they need breaks as well and don't drive 24x7. A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.

Mostly what Waymo is doing currently with customized vehicles is not actually super scalable. But it helps at their relatively small current scale. You wouldn't design a custom vehicle + factory for their current growth rate. That becomes more interesting when they start scaling beyond tens of thousands of new vehicles per year. They are probably in the lower thousands currently.

I think they raised close to 20-30B so far. They say they are doing 500K rides per week. At 15$ per ride that adds up to ~390M/year. That's revenue, not profit. But if they could 100x that by rolling out to more and more cities and larger and larger areas, it's going to add up to annual revenues that add up to more than what they raised. That's not going to happen overnight, obviously. But they seem on a path where they are scaling, optimizing, reducing their cost, and growing.

The risks here are mainly that they won't have the market to themselves. Others are doing robo taxi's too and if any of them starts scaling faster and cheaper, Waymo could hit some growth issues. Also, with multiple companies competing, prices per ride would eventually go down. The next five years are going to be interesting.

> A robo taxi only has down time when there are no rides, or for charging and maintenance/cleaning.

It's wierd to see this fantasy of machines on HN, of all places - that they have no downtime, no additional costs - it's only a savings from employing people), and (not said here) they don't make mistakes.

Lots of machines have far more downtime and cost than people. Many have more maintenance hours than operating hours.

During peak hours Waymo is more expensive than standard uber/lyft - I don't pay attention to black/premium pricing. Off-peak the price can be comparable. I mainly check because my wife prefers it.

Sometimes cheaper, [nearly] always better.

Rideshare drivers can speed

Is that supposed to be good?

YES!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fm567YGy5c

once we've refactored humans out of driving, the speed limits can go way up

I don't think so.

Engineers design a road for 55. Police say make it 40 for $$ and pretext. Public says make it 60. Karen says make it 30. Politician says they don't care as long as Karen stops screeching, the public doesn't hate them and the police doesn't hate them. End result ->45

Refactoring the humans out would only change a couple of the less influential inputs to that equation. It might actually make it way worse if the public loses interest.

> Engineers design a road for 55.

Not always.

I think a lot of time, speed limits are set based on the expected amount of traffic, not the curvature or the road. For example, I-5 in the Portland area south of the OR-217 interchange has extremely gentle curves. You could take them at 100 mph and not risk losing grip.

Yet the limit is 55 mph anyways because that area is expected to have considerable traffic, with traffic merging on and off. The limit is kept low to keep collision speeds low.

But if every car was autonomous, that wouldn't be necessary. Autonomous cars can be far more cooperative than human drivers, even without inter-car communication. It's 4 lanes wide. We could let that left lane go 90 mph for the cars that don't need to be exiting any time soon, while the right lane travels slower because cars are either merging on or off. Human drivers suck at this kind of arrangement because we have slow-pokes that think "The limit is just a limit, I don't have to go that fast" and go 5 under the limit in whatever lane they feel like, combined with others that think being overtaken is a personal insult, people that think their lane is a birthright and don't let people merge ("I have to tailgate or else people get in front of me!"), and other toxic human behaviors.

Take the human out of the equation, and we can easily go faster than 55.

Might increase as trust grows.

Can’t stop until cross traffic can simultaneously use intersections all at 100 miles an hour with inches to spare

At minimum increased to what they would be

if driving was a privilege

and not treated as a de facto right,

only withheld as a last-resort due to the curse it can be in the US.

Theoretically, fully automated driving doesn't require traffic signals, as much lighting, guard rails, lane width, rumble strips, reflectors, signage, etc.

I don't see why you should prefer jobs for humans. If a robot can do a job as well better and more cheapy than a human, it should, and that goes trebly for any sort of safety-focused job. The right fix is eliminating the need for make-work and not creating more unnecessary jobs.

That is, of course, tremendously challenging. It's impractical to look at a job performed by millions and just saying "well fix capitalism" when eliminating the jobs. But it's still the right solution. There shouldn't be gas station attendants, there shouldn't be redundant bureaucratic figuers and managers, and, when possible, there shouldn't be millions of paid car drivers.

>prefer

Ehh, I’ll stick with the original:

“I like jobs for humans”

Perhaps other pathways to income/wealth accumulation & fulfillment are even better! As it stands I think we could read it as “I like humans“.

This is exciting! I wonder how they determine which cities are next in line? Probably regulation and governance?

Multiple factors: market viability, climate compatibility, capacity, and definitely regulatory factors. Currently DC, NYC, Boston and Chicago are all being slowed down by anti-Waymo groups like Uber drivers and public-transit lobbyists.

Waymo is a sort of public transit. It's just an vastly more inefficient than any other form of public transit, but an order of magnitude more efficient than private passenger cars.

I think Baltimore soon. Seen them testing around the city.

Wouldn't Baltimore be the first Waymo market that actually gets snow? I don't think they've cracked driving in a real Midwest/northeast winter.

They’re being tested in Philly right now too

If it's the latter then Portland makes little sense. There are no regulations allowing it and the bill to enable it is still in motion at the state level (and not a slam dunk).

https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2026/04/self-driving-car...

> Hannah Schafer, communications director for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said Waymo is welcome to map out the city streets.

> “All they’re doing right now is basically taking pictures. Taking pictures in the right of way, anyone is allowed to do that. That’s not something that we regulate,” Schafer said.

> However, she said the city would regulate the testing and driving of autonomous cars.

> “No one can drive driverless vehicles in Portland without a permit,” Schafer said. “That is not allowed.”

...

> Portland fought vigorously with Uber over the terms of its local arrival a decade ago and a battle is already brewing over Waymo. Portland council member Mitch Green staked out his opposition in January, telling constituents on Bluesky, “You should know I don’t support that.”

...

> Oregon legislators considered a bill earlier this year that would have set statewide rules for self-driving cars, and would have prohibited local governments from imposing blanket prohibitions on autonomous vehicles. The bill died in committee following opposition from local governments.

I just wish the US would build trains. All I want.

Are trains really less expensive and more efficient than busses? One additional stop to Vancouver WA on the Max train is 22 million a year in operating cost. https://www.columbian.com/news/2024/dec/11/it-seems-so-outra...

You can drive a lot of busses for 22 million a year.

I use the train a lot in Portland and I would not endorse something so expensive.

Yes, trains are much more efficient than busses.

You need density for trains, but Portlanders think it is a war crime to ask you to work from an office or tear down a dead mall to build housing, so…

Portlanders do not think this. Survey people in Portland and you'll find they want trains as well. NIMBYs don't and NIMBYs make up the majority of people who actually have the time and wealth to go to city meetings.

I heard people in the kitchen at work whining about the loss of Lloyd center (dead mall) which is set to be replaced by 5,000 housing units.

But you didn't join the conversation, just listened from a distance and made assumptions?

You can want trains while simultaneously detesting all of the conditions that make trains viable. Just like you can want to drive to work every day and also want to never be in traffic. NIMBYism has nothing to do with being averse to working downtown or tearing down a mall (a radically YIMBY position regarding dead malls).

I don't know many if any YIMBYs who are opposed to density. I know people who are opposed to density being seen as only apartments and condos.

Why would anyone take a Waymo when you can ride the Trimet MAX for $2.50?

I rode the MAX when living there for a few years. I vividly recall screaming drugged out homeless riders being a regular feature. The last time I rode, a year ago, there was someone in the throes of the fent-bends in my section, who smelled like he was dying (he well may have been).

These incidents haven't made me fear, because I am a relatively big and tall male, but they _definitely_ will for others. And even then, they aren't pleasant.

You simply don't run into those things often on trains/subways in Europe (I lived in Spain for a year and traveled extensively in Europe during that time, and on other europe trips prior). So fix those issues, and then I am sure people will want to ride the rails.

The NYT reported recently that the rollout of more impermeable ticket gates have noticeably reduced the proportion of unstable people on the subway.

Not everyone who fare evades is unstable, obviously, but the article suggested that a high proportion of the unstable were fare evaders, so their reduction was an unexpected corollary benefit of the new gates. (I assume this would conceptually clash with the effort to make public transport free.)

Curious to hear from anyone with recent NY subway experience with thoughts to share on this.

Any form of station-side ticket gate would be a complete and utter non-starter for the MAX - half of the stations are practically rural.

I'm a MAX apologist, but you're right. It sucks. I live on the yellow line, and I estimate that there's a visibly (or audibly, or orfactorily) unstable person on the train 50% of the time. I'll ride the train by myself sometimes, but always avoid it with friends or family because it's gotten embarrassing at this point.

Those are separate problems

The solution is to get MORE people onto the trains, not fewer.

Has it been shown that screaming drugged out homeless riders avoid the presence of crowds? Is there any physical mechanism where having more people on the trains leads to Daniel-Penny-like suppression of drugged out homeless riders? Or does "getting more people onto the trains" just mean removing their options until they are forced to ignore the drugged out homeless riders?

As a solution, "get MORE people onto the trains" seems less optimal than "get fewer drugged out homeless riders onto the trains".

Why are you advocating people murder mentally ill people? Daniel Penny is a murderer and violent criminal piece of shit. Why are you advocating for violence? You are a sick person. Please stop commenting.

> As a solution, "get MORE people onto the trains" seems less optimal than "get fewer drugged out homeless riders onto the trains".

You dont have to do one thing. It’s not an either or. You’re statements are coming off as mentally ill and illogical. Should we send Daniel Penny after you?

Safety in numbers. There's a reason there's not an issue during the day and during heavy commute hours.

The MAX is nice, and cheap. But it doesn’t run everywhere. I would take the MAX over Waymo, but Waymo over the bus.

Because MAX is on rails it can and does come to a complete halt for indefinite periods of time whenever some jackass in an Escalade parks it on the track. I know this firsthand and I only lived in Portland for one month.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the Portland streetcar? Max does not have nearly the same issues.

MAX has dedicated right-of-way outside the city centers, but in the cities it shares city streets. Tourists drive / stop-at-lights in the dedicated lanes a lot.

Streetcar is more susceptible to being stopped because someone parked over the white line, but with 20 minute headways it takes longer to cause a problem.

Being slow and inconvenient would be the main reasons. Less exposure to communicable diseases and other unpleasantness are secondary reasons.

How would you know what diseases the previous passenger had?

I got strep from a dude coughing on MAX without a mask. Of course the one day I forget mine.

Correction: it's $2.80, capped at $5.60 for a day-pass. (Still $100 for a monthly pass, though.)

I wonder how long Google will continue to subsidize this at a substantial loss? Estimated $30–40 billion spent in the last decade that only really pays off if they dominate the market.

Waymo now generates more than $350M in annual recurring revenue, says https://ideas.darden.virginia.edu/waymo-fully-autonomous-fut..., and quotes $130-150k per car.

So one year of revenue buys ~2500 cars at those prices, which is roughly the size of their fleet (~3000 according to Wikipedia). It seems plausible that newer cars will be cheaper as designs get optimized, economies of scale hit and what used to be really expensive cutting-edge hardware becomes commoditized and goes down in cost over time.

They certainly also need support including contractors that assist cars that get need human input, maintenance etc. and the electricity for the cars isn't free either, but just based on these numbers, it sounds like they are likely close to being profitable if you ignore R&D.

If you assume $10 a ride, and a car giving 3 rides an hour for 12 hours a day, that's $360 in revenue per car per day, close to the $320 you'd get from $350M/3000/365. That means each car pays for itself in about a year (ignoring all other costs, of course).

Based on this and the assumption that cars last for more than 2 years, I'd guess that Waymo is only "unprofitable" (not sure how this works in accounting terms) due to ongoing R&D and expansions and there really isn't much more to "subsidize".

How is the revenue recurring? They offer a subscription?

I don't believe Google breaks it down but everyone assumes Waymo accounts for roughly 50% of $7.52B in "other bets" losses. And that's just 2025, losses in Q4 2025 are almost 2x Q4 2024. Cost factors are improving but they continue to shovel money into the R&D furnace.

Are they losing money on a per-ride basis? I assumed they had large R&D costs, but that each ride would be near break even.

I bet they've hit operating breakeven a couple years ago. If they hadn't they wouldn't have been expanding. Expanding while you have an operating loss means the loss would be expanding alongside the service. I'm not seeing that in the numbers.

They have the money to do so, and investors are aware that it is a long term play. Waymo is already dominating the market for all intents and purposes.

I don't think Waymo needs to dominate the market to succeed. They just need to scale up (time)x(number of vehicles) enough to amortize the R&D costs of the self driving capability. Paying a driver is a big chunk of a taxi/Uber's costs, so eliminating that leaves a lot of room to maneuver.

It's the Uber model. Operate at a subsidized low price, create stickiness, push out the previous generation, enshittify and raise the price, $$$.

Thank goodness that Waymo has no plans to use the cameras recording you in the car for targeted ads.

I will feel so secure and private being recorded at all angles in a car I don't own and can't sue.

"Waymo: ‘no plans’ to use in-car camera data for targeted ads"

(https://www.theverge.com/news/644770/waymo-interior-camera-a...)

How about a Waymo competitor that uses nonporous, impervious materials for the interior, and automatically sanitizes itself in between passengers? You pay with Monero and logs are only kept long enough to solve any murders you might've committed, and for the next rider to report if you still managed to mess something up.

OK there might be some problems with this idea. But if I'm paying with credit card and it's attached to my name, they should be able to rely on the next passenger to report if I've damaged the car, right, and they could stop recording me?

Heck they could provide a camera with a physical cover that makes a 90 decibel sound when it opens, and it could check the car in between riders. "promise no peeping" definitely not good enough when minor physical hardware privacy measures are so inexpensive.

> I will feel so secure and private being recorded at all angles in a car I don't own and can't sue.

This is even worse in an Uber where the drivers can put cameras anywhere and do anything with the recordings.

I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues. They have your whole travel data, your face, your voice, "private" conversations.

And the people in the Philippines who can intervene in the "self" driving can comment on your bodily features if bored.

> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.

I think a lot of people are starting to realize that despite years of doom-and-gloom finger wagging about privacy, their lives have never actually been negatively impacted by the horrors of targeted ads and, if anything, are materially improved (free internet search engines, free email, free social networks, and so on).

It recently became very real for a lot of people. The US government is buying that harmless advertising data to target, locate, and arrest/deport people. If I was an immigrant of any legal status, I would now absolutely think twice about providing a real name or address to any online service. Any benign good-faith "its only for ads" argument has been destroyed within the last year. GrapheneOS/Librem/Pursim should start advertising heavily in immigrant communities.

This also intertwines with the coordinated ID push for many social media networks. It builds an effective framework to target anyone. Trump casually designates people "terrorists" already.

> your voice, "private" conversations.

Waymo microphones are only activated when you contact support.

truly not trying to be snarky here but i don't understand why you would place this level of trust in an Alphabet Inc brand.

Of all the organizations with access to my data (e.g. ISP, social networks, cellphone service provider, current US government, etc.), I absolutely trust Google the most.

Do you think Google is lying about the microphone?

> I also don't understand why people aren't more upset about the privacy issues.

Because nobody is forcing you to take a Waymo? I dont think it is as hard to understand.

Its like saying "You dont understand why people arent more upset about spicy food because your stomach cant handle it.."

Are they sure? Portland is a special kind of crazy. I can say this cuz I’m a native now living in Berlin. locals are going to trash the cars and do all sorts of damage.

I'm a little sad to see this because I'm moving northward to Seattle next month, I've lived in Portland proper for over 16 years, and Seattle doesn't have Waymo yet. Great timing lol.

Portland will probably be a great testing ground for them because generally speaking you have a lot of tech curious and tech averse people here living together. When we got electric scooters there were both tons of people using them and a lot of people throwing them in the Willamette. Pretty big artistic community that doesn't look kindly on AI right now. This has no real bearing on Waymo's success, but I'll be interested to see how they navigate the PR part of it.

They announced back in September that they’re coming to Seattle. https://www.king5.com/article/traffic/traffic-news/autonomou...

Waymo has already been mapping Seattle for months. I don’t see customers in Portland having access before Seattle.

God willing. Unfortunately Seattle has a recent history of award-winning marksmanship when it comes to turning its own feet into Swiss cheese. A few years ago we passed a brilliant gig worker minimum wage law which:

1. Caused rideshare pricing to skyrocket, resulting in

2. way fewer people taking rideshare trips, so

3. drivers end up making less than before, and

4. when you do take one, 95% of the time the driver pulls up two blocks away and plays chicken with you to capitalize on the minimum wage amount while doing the least and incurring the least miles on their car.

Handshakes all around. I'm sure we have the most brilliant minds at work figuring out how to kneecap Waymo as much as possible so we can maintain this standard of service.

I live in Portland. Took an Uber to the airport early in the morning. The driver was extremely reckless. Nearly wrecked several times. This has never happened before. We reported him. But, yeah, looking forward to using Waymo.

I wonder how large the footprint will be. I live in the greater Portland area, but not in the city proper. There are definitely situations where Waymo would be great, but my guess is that they won't start off serving my specific area.

Apparently Waymo hasn't yet received a permit from the city of Portland, so whether they actually operate there remains TBD.

Surprised Portland is allowing Waymo in, considering that they have a decent public transport system (judging by US standards, not European standards), with light rail.

Public transport ridership took a massive hit with the pandemic and never fully recovered.

Waymo does not solve a public transport problem. I don't mind that it takes money from Uber, Lyft, etc., but the damage it also transfers income from human taxi drivers (what little they can salvage from Uber, Lyft) to a large corporation.

I see it as a net negative for society, not a net positive.

So, these streets are so tiny and pedestrians are used to just walking out on crosswalks because most people stop at crosswalks

That seems like a dream environment for these cars. They are very good about waiting for humans to cross. To be honest, a Waymo at the front in an intersection means that it's going to be much more relaxing as a pedestrian or bicyclist crossing. This is especially true in intersections with a no-right-on-red where Waymos will obey but human drivers in San Francisco rarely do.

Every town says the exact same thing when Waymo shows up, and it's never true. There's nothing unique about Portland drivers, streets, sidewalks, or pedestrians.

I feel like I've lived in enough places and they're pretty small relatively speaking but whatever, seems like we'll see how it actually plays out.

I'm not saying it's going to randomly speed up to 80mph and crash into a building and explode. Just that I'll finally have a chance to witness those hilarious videos in person

This is a false blanket statement. Portland has very short (walkable) blocks, many one way streets, and it is true that most often than not cars actively stop for pedestrians to cross the street

None of those things are unique to Portland. Waymo already operates in San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia.

Oh man... this will be so awesome as a pedestrian/cyclist. When I see a Waymo coming, I can actually have some reasonable expectation that it will stop for me!

Waymo has no problem navigating the narrow streets of SF.

One of my friends talks about this skate park on Stevenson st, which is a cobblestone road in San Francisco. It's ostensibly a two way road, but with street parking, it isn't really. Or rather, in order for two full sized cars to fit, one of the cars has to go up on the curb. Waymo's don't seem capable of doing this (yet, on that street), and jam up that road whenever there's traffic on it. Waymo's has problems with that narrow SF street and any amount of traffic on it.

wonder if these will end up in the willamette too https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019/06/divers-pull-11-e-sco...

The dream of the 90s is alive I take it

They didn't mention it was Oregon. Maybe they're rolling out to Portland, Maine?

There are definitely hints that it is Oregon on the page.

Haha. Somehow I mistook this to be related to Wayland.

Seems like a hostile market for Waymo. Many Portlanders despise tech giants and are strongly anti-car & anti-AI, far more than SF. Not to mention Portland's political / governance / people problems already inclines the population to anger.

If Waymo is still operating there by the end 2027 I’ll eat my hat.

How long does Waymo generally take to map and otherwise get ready for a new city rollout (permits, etc.)? I guess I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't even started offering rides in 2027.

No idea. I would just assume whatever they’re doing there gets shouted down in short order by the locals who are known for being kind hearted, incredibly naive, and violent.

Nice, looking forward to all the, ahem, creative protest to be done on the robocars if they ever do show up here. heh

okay so now imagine Portland with transportation budget cuts and no Waymo

like, do you guys hear yourself? these are unrelated things, cities are always grappling with stuff like this, and at this point in history Waymo is expanding to all cities and will opportunistically prioritize some cities over another while continuing their total rollout

Personally never happier to have left Portland than right this moment.

Why? Are fearing the inevitable torching of one of these or fooling yourself into believing that waymo wont take over the world?

The same Waymo that says that they don't give a shit that they're stopping in bike lanes because their selfish passengers pay for it? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912645

Good luck to Portland getting fucked by Waymo.

Human drivers (especially Uber/DoorDash drivers) stop in bike lanes all the time without repercussion. Pointing the finger at Waymo for this doesn't negate the larger problem of it not being enforced by local traffic enforcement.

I've personally reported a taxi driver for parking in a bike lane, and I hope he lost his cab license for it because it was really egregious. PBOT actually asked me for official testimony.

I feel like this post and most (if not all these comments) are an ad.

My personal enthusiasm can come off this way, but I'm excited for it as a cyclist, someone whose brother was killed by a driver, and general cutting edge technology hobbyist.

Same here, as someone who doesn't drive much, and is generally a "vulnerable road user". I've seen Waymos drive. When they screw up, it's by stopping dead under an abundance of caution. They never speed. They can spot a ped or cyclist from blocks away. Every time I take an Uber home, the driver is guaranteed to drive 40+ on the 20mph road in front of my house while blasting through crosswalks with people waiting to cross. The data is not really in yet (still not enough miles to really say if they are safer), but they pass the eye test.

The rain will be a real test though!

> the driver is guaranteed to drive 40+ on the 20mph road in front of my house while blasting through crosswalks with people waiting to cross

...while high on marijuana and watching TikTok

> The rain will be a real test though!

Maybe, between the fog of San Francisco and the downpours of Miami, they Waymo Driver is very experienced.

People are interested as its a sci-fi promise long hoped to be filled. It is the first step to alot of other changes that will happen as higher majority of vehicles on the road transition to actual full self driving.

Self driving cars are such a huge quality of life improvement that people would advertise it for free.

I would rank it up there with mobile broadband and smartphones in terms of influence.

The amount of trips I would suddenly be interested in taking would skyrocket.

A population with more spirit to resist than SF. I wonder if they bring out the traffic cones.

What will they tell the unemployed drivers? "Coal miners need to code" doesn't work any more. Become a data thief/labeler perhaps?

I wonder what percentage of people in Portland are resistors. Do they outnumber the homeless?

> Portland has always been a pioneer in urban design, balancing its independent spirit with a deep commitment to sustainable, forward-thinking living.

People should research the racist history of American cities before publishing broad, vapid, and likely LLM-generated statements like this.

If you're going to say a place has "always been a pioneer in urban design", you should take the time to acknowledge that Portland's early urban-design efforts were deeply racist and explicitly segregated.

https://www.portland.gov/bps/planning/adap/history-racist-pl...

https://habitatportlandregion.org/the-early-history-of-portl...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com