Comments

• By willio58 2025-11-220:1410 reply

  I didn’t think I’d be so pro Waymo but anecdotally I had a fantastic experience with one recently.

  I was at a music show very late ~1-2am in SF and walked out to grab an uber to the airbnb I was staying at. I kept getting assigned an uber, then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes, mind you I even resorted to calling Lyfts at the same time and nothing bit. Then I say screw it and download Waymo. 1 minute and it’s accepted my ride, and I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot. 3 minutes and it picks me up. The car is clean, quiet, I can play my own music in it via Spotify, and it’s driving honestly more safely than some uber drivers I’ve had in SF. It’s one of the few things where the end result actually lives up to the promise from a tech company.

  By krat0sprakhar 2025-11-220:294 reply

  > then I’d wait 10 minutes, then they’d cancel. Rinse and repeat for 30 minutes,

  This is such a common problem in SF (esp in odd times / from the airport). Waymo has been a lifesaver in these situations.

  By m-ee 2025-11-220:421 reply

  Used to happen to me constantly trying to go across the bay bridge in either direction when I lived in Oakland. I didn’t even mind the cancelations so much but the worst was when they would try and hide around the block, close enough to say they’ve “arrived” to try to get me marked as a no show and pocket the fee.

  By virtue3 2025-11-220:51

  They have a cancellation rate metric on their end that they are trying to avoid.

  I have similar problems when I dated someone across the bridge.

  They also lose a ton of money leaving SF at prime time / etc.

  By astrange 2025-11-220:50

  I once got stuck at the vista point at the north end of Golden Gate, because it turns out it's nearly impossible to approach from the Marin side even though that's closer. So like ~4 drivers in a row tried, got lost on the way and canceled.

  By tudelo 2025-11-220:323 reply

  I don't know what it is but in basically every major airport I have struggled to get an uber/lyft. I expect at minimum one cancellation...

  By decimalenough 2025-11-221:171 reply

  In many cities this is solved with the "Uber rank" system, where you simply get in the first car in line, give the driver a code, and then it loads up your journey. Fast and avoids any hassles with drivers rejecting your destination.

  By wffurr 2025-11-221:57

  Oh they reinvented taxi stands. The code for a pre programmed destination in the app is actually a nice touch.

  By wffurr 2025-11-221:55

  Trying to find a specific ride hail driver at the airport seems like a huge waste of time. Just go to the taxi stand.

  By wtfwhateven 2025-11-221:00

  Same. I assume it depends on the destination

  Person wants to go somewhat far from airport? That's more time on this single ride and less time pocketing peak demand money

  By enraged_camel 2025-11-221:531 reply

  Ironically it is the very problem taxis had that allowed Uber and Lyft to grow in popularity. Funny how that works!

  By Analemma_ 2025-11-222:101 reply

  Yeah, drivers want to maximize their hourly revenue, and this is frequently at odds with the wants of passengers. For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow, but that's all over now that they're public, and the classic misaligned incentives between drivers and passengers are back in play.

  The cars are increasingly beat-up too, another thing we incorrectly believed was Uber being fundamentally different from and better than yellow cabs.

  By dmix 2025-11-222:291 reply

  > For a while, VC subsidies meant Uber and Lyft could pretend they were fundamentally different somehow

  You must have very rosy glasses because calling a tired/rude Taxi operator at 1am and not knowing whether your cab was coming in 5 or 20min was a major drag, so you always had to plan for 20min+ and sit patiently without social media to fill the void.

  Having 2 ubers cancel before you get a 3rd commitment, within a short time frame, and only at the airport or a busy concert isn't that bad at all. Modern entitlement IMO

  > The cars are increasingly beat-up too

  Regular taxis never had an anonymous review system and they often just bought old police cars, used by 2 drivers across 2 day/night shifts . Good chance the night driver drank on the job too

  Uber requires them to have a newish car which in my experience is usually a decent hybrid. A big improvement IMO (although I do love old crown Vic's from back in the pre Uber days).

  If anything the biggest issue is Uber not strictly enforcing reuse of other authorized drivers accounts, usually by immigrants without official company clearance

  By squeaky-clean 2025-11-223:21

  I frequently have to wait 20-30 minutes for an Uber or Lyft pickup at my apartment in south Brooklyn. I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm usually going somewhere like Bay Ridge if I'm ordering an Uber and not somewhere popular. If it's after 1am I just open both Lyft and Uber and book both because at least one of them will just park the car and not come and wait out the timer before it assigns a new driver. I wish the situation is them just canceling, but drivers get penalized for that but apparently don't get penalized for parking at a gas station waiting for you to cancel and pay the fee or sit out the 10 minutes.

  One time the guy was just 3 blocks away so I walked to where his icon was, found the car, and banged on his window.

  During a weekend trip to Orlando trying to get from our hotel to Disney it took 6 drivers until someone finally came to pick us up.

  At least the price is given ahead of time and paid through the app. I once had a cab driver charge my card for $300 when I was borderline blackout drunk in Miami Beach trying to get back to mainland Miami. Didn't use the card reader in the cab either, he used something like a Square reader on his phone. Not exactly sure which one, I didn't piece together what he was doing was fishy until the next afternoon when some blurry memories started coming back and I called my bank.

  By bitpush 2025-11-220:20

  Curious why didn't you try Waymo until then? Was it just that it never had a reason to, or was something holding you back?

  From my experience, lot of people actively seek out Waymo if it is available.

  By davidw 2025-11-220:43

  I took one in SF on a rainy, dark night when I was visiting a year ago. I was pretty impressed. That's not an easy city to navigate even on a sunny day and it did fine.

  By Neywiny 2025-11-222:27

  Seeing a lot of people confused on why drivers do this. What I was told after it happened to me is that I was getting an Uber at the busiest time of the week (Friday afternoon) and going a few miles (I lived near an airport at the time). Others were going much further, so drivers wanted those. But they can't deny the ride, that dings their account. So they do that garbage to annoy everybody instead. Meaning, maybe, your ride just wasn't worth it for them. Robots don't have salaries but also Waymo I guess has no systematic issue that causes such a mess in the first place

  By ohyoutravel 2025-11-222:032 reply

  This is what radicalized me. “Uber is 4 minutes away” so I call them, and it tells me it’s trying to find drivers for the next 6-8 minutes, then a driver is selected and they are 11 minutes away, then they sit at their location for 4-5 minutes, then they start moving toward me, then they’re 5 minutes away and cancel and uber changes to finding me a ride. Infuriating.

  By xtracto 2025-11-223:42

  And that happens everywhere and with every ride app. Here in Mexico we have DiDi and Uber and we have the same crap. It's human nature.

  That's why taking a Waymo in LA left me without words... like traveling 10 years in the future. And you dont have to deal with all that crap.

  I hope Waymo squashes all the competition.

  BTW after getting back from LA I increased my GOOG position. Waymo is so groundbreaking and it is THERE.

  By mat_b 2025-11-223:27

  Same here. This is the exact reason why I will use Waymo before Uber now. I wanted to support human drivers but they let me down too often. I pick robots now.

  By mlmonkey 2025-11-221:451 reply

  I once had a Waymo cancel on me too! I was pretty bummed: dang, let down by a robotaxi too?!?!? To be fair, it has happened only once.

  By Ferret7446 2025-11-222:36

  Maybe the last rider puked in it or something?

  By kilroy123 2025-11-220:51

  The same exact thing happened to me last time I was in San Fran. I wanted uber because it was cheaper. Ended up taking a Waymo for more because no one else would take me.

  By poszlem 2025-11-220:274 reply

  Not saying this HAS to happen. But I remember when Ubers were clean, quiet, cheap too. I think you are just looking at a product before the enshittification, when they still have to pretend they care about your comfort.

  By davidw 2025-11-220:432 reply

  I wonder what the non-subsidized price of a Waymo ride would be.

  By whatshisface 2025-11-220:50

  Lower prices for recommended destinations, ads played during trip, LLM engages the customer.

  By tonyhart7 2025-11-222:01

  earlier price is steep because they still have huge RnD cost but if we scale that to one planet, it would been cheaper in the long run

  By conradev 2025-11-221:02

  You're not allowed to smoke cigarettes in a Waymo, whereas UberX drivers are allowed to, I believe, off the clock.

  I do worry in general about what the enshittification of Waymo will look like, though.

  By Rodeoclash 2025-11-220:302 reply

  It will undoubtedly get enshittifed in its own way, probably higher prices, but at least it will be reliable when booked. Ubers seem to be a crap shoot these days if they're actually going to come and get you.

  By Analemma_ 2025-11-222:15

  I can't guarantee that Waymo won't be enshittified, but one fundamental difference with Uber is that Waymo doesn't need to compete in the labor market for drivers. When the low end of the labor market got red hot in 2023-24, that's when Uber prices climbed rapidly because drivers had other options; Waymo won't have this problem. It won't be affected by other things like ever-rising health care costs or local regulations guaranteeing driver wage floors either.

  By virtue3 2025-11-220:521 reply

  the same exact problems we had with Taxis. Sigh.

  By foooorsyth 2025-11-222:32

  Had so many Boston cabs not show up for rides to the airport growing up. Uber was such a breath of fresh air…until it wasn’t anymore.

  By sneak 2025-11-220:382 reply

  Uber, when it was launched, was limos only, and would come (with ETA) when cabs would not. It was expensive.

  The story they told is that they were unable to get a ride. That’s not enshittification, that’s simply scammers on the platform not doing their job.

  That won’t happen with robots.

  They might raise the prices, or clean the cars less frequently, but if it shows up and runs the program, it won’t ever get worse than that.

  By astrange 2025-11-220:51

  Uber still is like that if you choose that option. It just defaults to UberX because that's cheaper. I dunno, I've never been in a dirty Uber/Lyft.

  But yes, I originally switched to them because Bay Area cabs just will not pick you up if they don't feel like it.

  By explodes 2025-11-220:45

  In-Ride Ads coming soon to a car ride near you

  By gcheong 2025-11-220:341 reply

  "I know it’s not going to cancel because it’s a robot"

  I won't be at all surprised when they start calculating their profits in real-time, if they aren't already, and cancelling or delaying trips that are deemed unprofitable in the moment. They are robots after all.

  By bryanlarsen 2025-11-220:431 reply

  Waymo already does that through its surge pricing mechanism and limited availability of cars at busy times. And if they really don't want to serve you they'd just not let you book.

  By maxerickson 2025-11-220:50

  No 3rd party arbitrage, much reduced pressure to accept fares they don't want (there's probably still some).

  By JuniperMesos 2025-11-222:231 reply

  If you're playing it via Spotify, it's not your music, it's Spotify's. Waymo is cool technology but I am disappointed at how the app requires a Google account plus access to google play services on an Android phone, and how the streaming music feature requires some kind of protocol that only Spotify and some proprietary Google music app support. All of my music is stored on a personal server that I stream to my phone via Jellyfin, and this does not work in a Waymo.

  By wilg 2025-11-222:24

  It's not your music unless you own the copyright, even if its on a disc or drive.

• By arjie 2025-11-220:072 reply

  The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers.

  If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.

  By BurningFrog 2025-11-220:142 reply

  Maybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...

  By aetherson 2025-11-221:45

  I enjoy my trips to Japan as much as the next guy, but the idea that Japan is a model of great governance is at the very best arguable.

  By piva00 2025-11-220:292 reply

  Also, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.

  By astrange 2025-11-220:551 reply

  Japan Rail is public-private and many of the other train lines are fully private. "Public" is kind of an empty distinction here, Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

  But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc.

  (It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)

  By arjie 2025-11-221:06

  > Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

  Huh, funny. This model actually explains American behavior to me greatly. Now I understand why the emphasis on transit in the US is primarily on cost and shelter rather than on quality of service. I always thought it seemed odd that they'd emphasize making things that are not useful free rather than making them as costly as is required to make them useful.

  But I was modeling 'useful' as optimal transportation across fare-classes. They are modeling 'useful' as 'compassion to the less well-off'. This also explains opposition to HOT lanes and so on.

  By gretch 2025-11-221:43

  Maybe, but Tokyo, despite being literally tokyo with tokyo's politicians and tokyo's transit system has allowed Waymo to come in: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-japan/

  So I guess it's still pretty valuable

  By jerlam 2025-11-220:302 reply

  I don't see any reason that individual Bay Area cities cannot pass laws against Waymo operating there. Why they would do so is a different matter. I'm hopeful though.

  By arjie 2025-11-220:35

  I suspect the reason is that California cities do not, in fact, have control over this aspect of regulation. I won't claim to be a policy expert, but the failed SB-915[0] seems to imply that this is the case. SB-915 was a proposed bill to allow cities to permit or regulate AVs. It seems reasonable that if a law was attempted to be passed to permit cities to regulate AVs and the bill fails even after modification that it was the case that cities were previously unable to regulate AVs and cities remain unable to regulate AVs. Absent greater knowledge on the subject, that is.

  0: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

  By polishTar 2025-11-221:112 reply

  Municipalities are generally preempted from regulating matters of statewide concern. In CA, the state decided to have the CA DMV regulate operational safety and the CPUC regulate the commercial service. Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.

  By philistine 2025-11-223:42

  > Individual cities are prevented from enacting local laws that encroach upon state authority.

  It's simpler than that; cities are wholly created and controlled by the State. California could one day decide to close all the cities and centralize and it would be 100% legal. States delegate their authority to cities.

  By jeffbee 2025-11-221:24

  The bar for "statewide concern" is also extremely low. It basically includes whatever the state government choose to pay attention to.

• By kfarr 2025-11-220:162 reply

  This is super awesome but to set expectations it appears that Waymo is quite limited by fleet capacity in all of its current operating zones, so as a practical matter it may be months or years before it operates in all these areas.

  If you're interested in this stuff I highly recommend this podcast, not affiliated with it I genuinely think it's a great source to hear about the behind the scenes of fleet operations to meet demand: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/autonomy-markets/

  (Edit) I prefer using the apple podcast app, here's a direct link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/autonomy-markets/id177...

  By hackernewds 2025-11-222:24

  The bigger blocker isn't the technology or the fleet. It's commercial viability and Luddite and populist politicians.

  By jeffbee 2025-11-221:25

  Their ground ops contractor Transdev has been hiring recently in Sacramento so if any new territory is coming soon, I expect it to be Sacramento.