Hacker News Reader

Comment by SenHeng | Hacker News Reader

I happened to drive past 2 of them in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago. One was making a left turn into an alley, another was on the otherwise of the road so I never got to see how they actually drove but I giddily squealed like a happy pig rolling in the mud WAYMO! as I tried explaining to my shocked wife wtf was going on. It's been so long since I've had this feel of wonder when seeing technology.

I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.

View on HN

I’m so glad to see someone excited about them, because this is how I felt when they first started to go live in San Francisco. Now I take them multiple times a week, and have been doing so for multiple years.

They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.

I live under the flight path for an airport, which should be kind of annoying. Instead I find it inspiring to hear the roar of the jets and see the small planes hurling through the air. We dreamed of the day for so long and now it is common!

Same. :)

The "humdrum" sound of industry.

Took a few last year on a trip to San Francisco and it felt like the future. It's not lost on me that enshittification will take its toll, the fleet will get nastier over time, prices will increase, etc. I'm also torn about more money being given to mega corporations. But purely from a service-enjoyment and technology-appreciation point of view it was amazing!

Is it that you feel it's amazing, because San Francisco never had the European-style, cheap and elegant taxi that gets you chaffeured around in a Mercedes E-class by a shirt-wearing, well-dressed person who helps you with your luggage? You can call them with an app.

For me, Waymos are a downgrade in the same way Uber was, too. I'm not even going to expand the conversation to German/Swiss/Dutch-style clean, fast and cheap public transportation. Waymo is basically good public transportation to places which don't have public transportation and don't want it. I have no doubt this comment won't really land with those who have not experienced the European-style taxis or public transportation.

I think the lack of any person involved is part of the appeal for a lot of people. The lower cost does also help, I think it will be interesting to see if the notional price advantage from the lack of driver will bear out over time, though.

As a European, I never had that either :-)

Though, if the point is that clean/fast/cheap public transportation is the dream, then I unreservedly agree.

Enshittification is only when there is a captive/sticky audience that has high switching costs. “Drive you from A to B” has no moat and they will continue to have to compete on merit and price. Here in Vegas there are 3, soon to be 4+, driverless taxi services currently operating.

Also, you can’t praise an amazing service that takes insane amounts of r&d money to bring to market in the same breath as complaining about giving money to massive corporations. No two guys in a garage are starting a self-driving car company or a supersonic jet company by themselves. Massive capital is required to launch satellites, build cars, build datacenters, etc.

>Enshittification is only when there is a captive/sticky audience that has high switching costs. “Drive you from A to B” has no moat and they will continue to have to compete on merit and price.

No, in this case enshittification will be driven by the cost of entry for a new player. That'll create enough of a capital cost hurdle to prevent a duopoly or triopoly-type situation from entering a natural state of complacency and degradation.

How many tens of millions would you be willing to spend to launch your own fleet of self-driving cars in a city (just one for that price! and that's with no R&D!) just because the Waymos are dirty, smelly, and noisy?

Not true. Enshittification also happens when they cut the quality of the service to improve their margins which they need to do for whatever reason (competition on price, profit improvements etc). Thats why the cheapest tier the quality of the vehicles will be worse and all services will run like that because that’s all you can achieve at that price point (unless they figure out how to have automated distributed cleaning stations and even then that’s tricky because the car is still out of commission and losing you money to get cleaned even if it’s only a minor detour).

Enshitification is just price conscious consumers willingly trading quality for price.

If it actually hurt companies they would stop doing it

Not necessarily. It also means segmenting the market to extreme lengths so that even a marginal increase in quality is combined with a significantly greater price. It’s about pushing the most price sensitive customers to have the worst quality while the less price insensitive you get a marginally better product for an outsized increase in cost.

I remain convinced that while value extraction is higher in this model, the world people generally want to live in is one where the ability of businesses to price discriminate in this way is not so unbridled.

Enshittification is generally an exploitation of market efficiencies in some form, be it lock-in effects or market dominance in an area with a high barrier to entry. It's an explicit goal of a lot of investment: pick one company in an area, invest so much money into it no-one else can compete, corner the market by offering a better product than anyone else, then once you own the market, turn up the price and turn down the quality to get as much money out of it before someone builds a competitor and your customers can leave.

The best examples of enshitification are in airlines and electronics. Those are highly competitive markets where manufacturers are free to charge high prices for high quality, but they realize customers won't buy it.

I started working at Google in 2008 and while walking to lunch one day saw some of the early self-driving cars in a parking lot, just sitting there idle. They had a funny mast that didn't look like street view and I distinctly remember thinking "wait, Google is working on self driving cars"?

I am not. They can alpha test elsewhere.

What metrics would you accept for you not to consider it an alpha test? Because they've been running in Phoenix, Az since April, 2017, and have been offering rides to the general public in San Francisco since June 2024. It doesn't handle Boston winters, it doesn't handle torrential rain, but it's a bit past "alpha" stage.

Alpha <- I should've put that in quotes, I suppose. My tolerance level is lower than yours, that's cool, but I am not getting into these things nor any robot drone choppers or planes. I can barely trust my HDA2 (ADAS) in my Ioniq 5 to not steer me into a rail guard.

Judging all self-driving tech by one brand is as ridiculous as judging all hamburgers by one from McDonalds. Hyundai's capability is years behind Tesla and Waymo because they started actual years later than the best.

Hey, I liked FSD quite a bit, but it was just 3 times. I am eyeing a Juniper Tesla Y after my Ioniq lease runs out and I'll happily pay the $100/m extra for FSD, but I am the fallback.

Waymo, I don't care how advanced it is, I am not getting into a 2K kg robot on public roads. Ironically, they are switching their fleet to the Ioniq 5 but what's under the hood must be completely different.

Burgers, not my thing, can't relate.

Yeah, because your Honda is totally using comparable technology. /s

Ioniq is not a Honda..

I do not drive a Honda. This was about something else.

They've been used in San Fran and LA and other large markets for years now. In what way are they still "alpha testing"?

Ok, v 0.85? Just the thought of testing these things on public roads, no matter when it happened, doesn't sit well with me in any way. I am not a Luddite, quite the opposite, there is just something off about the whole concept.

Can you talk about what, or is it just a feeling that you have?

Lizard-brain aversion/fear, and that these things' network will be hacked. I am not a lab rat.

Why do you find it so cool? Genuinely asking. I find this technology repulsive.

Saving lives is the main thing for me. Waymo at least seems to take safety fairly seriously, with data indicating they cause far fewer serious accidents than the average human driver.

Traffic fatalities are one of the top 3 causes of death for kids in the US (iirc it's right behind firearms).

Beyond children, more people in the US in general are killed by drivers/cars than firearms. In the 25-44 age bracket, it's the most probable cause of death IIRC.

And, as an avid pedestrian and cyclist (and as a driver), the more humans we get off the road, the better.

Do you feel the same when you see the level of automation in a modern factory? I doubt it.

In what world is the technology for an autonomous car “repulsive”?

It seems like you’re into using new technology like AI, based on the success you’ve had using it:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49162724 > I've recently been into AI and orchestration and have set up some pretty neat systems and side projects :)

Or maybe you think autonomous cars are as evil as AI:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49644738 > There is no room for nuance. AI is capitals access to our labour. It's evil. The end.

Your views on technology sure are interesting, to say the least.

I'm not them but I will answer from my viewpoint, as someone who has learned to appreciate the efficiency of AI coding.

First, my only interaction with a waymo was while driving in a low traffic location and it started with me having to be extra evasive with it's cautious style shifting into it deciding to pass me despite my safe but assertive driving normal stance.

Second, lots of people (myself included) remember the talk 5-7 years ago around autonomous cars and how the leaders of such companies were talking of futures where nobody (but the ultra rich, of course) would actually own a car and everyone would just use these autonomous car services.

Where that breaks down is how the surveillance state makes the average person worry how every trip could be tracked and used against them somehow or outright denied...

But also everyone sees how once vendors have a captive market they get squeezed.

I find the number of children killed by human drivers repulsive.

I would never trust the maker of these crappy software products with my life.

Why would you?

As a motorcyclist, I am confident that I'd rather trust software to drive near me than the median motorist. I've ridden in a Waymo and I've ridden in the back of countless rideshares driven by humans, and I've never had to complain that my Waymo was speeding or running stop signs.

I was in a Waymo in SF a year ago that ran a red light. But there were no cars or pedestrians or anything going the other way so it was a completely safe manoeuvre (akin to running a red light at 3am in a rural area).

I was surprised that it would do that.

Considering that there is pretty reliable evidence that Waymo is safer than the average human driver, that seems like a simply false characterization of the Waymo driver.

I’ve never ridden in one but if I get the chance I definitely will.

Waymo is a mostly seperate group of people from Google, to start with. What's more, on the whole I think the reason they've been winning the self-driving race is that they've actually taken the safety and reliability of the system very seriously, in comparison to a lot of their competitors. Waymo seems to be the only one that both has the necessary level of respect for the problem and the ability to execute on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com